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"Forbidden" or "inverted death" is shaped to the materialistic concerns of the age: the
ultimate evidence of failure of technological and medical progress, death in the most
advanced societies of the west is tabooed as much as feared. Thus, while each of these
attitudes appears to have prevailed at a particular time in western history, Aries insists
Ihal they are essentially a-chronic, and often coexist within one particular place, time,
and even individual. 1
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2.2. Funeral Rites as Social Therapy
A historical perspective on death-related behaviour in the west has mapped oul four
attitudes prevailing at distinct times. Next to these definite mutations, the anthropological,
sociological, and ethnologicallitemtures attest to the existence of a recurrent panern, or a
universal idea underlying and motivating funeral practices, whether it be in western
advanced societies or sub-tropical primitive cultures, the Middle Ages or the presell!.
Arnold van Gel1l1ep has elucidated the dynamic functioning of "rites of passage," including
death. 2 He proposes that all rites have a threefold structure consisting of three major
phases: separation (detachment from an earlier state), transition (an intermediary and
therefore ambiguous state of passage), and incorporation (a new stable state marking the
completion of this passage). In all rites, and funerals in particular, the transitional phase is
of central import: this is the most critical stage of the three for the subject then lies in a state
of "betwixt and between" synomymous with symbolic "danger" and "impurity."3 This
position makes him ritually unclean, and dangerous to his environment because its
ambiguity contradicts the cherished principles and categories of his group. Mary Douglas
explains:
Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one
state nor the next. It is undefinable. The person who must pass from one
to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger
is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status,
segregates him for a time and then publicly declares his entry to his new
status. 4
I A detailed synopsis of each of these "altitudes" introduces the following respectIve
sectiolls.
2 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites 0/ Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizebom and Gabrielle L. Caffee
(1909; Chicago: Chicago UP, 1960).
3For an introduction to these concepts, see Mary Douglas, Purity anti Danger: An Analysis
0/ the Concepts 0/ Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966) aud Turner, '''Belwillt
and Between': The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage," The Forest oj Symbols: Aspects 0/
Ntlembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967) 93-111.
4 M. Douglas, Purity 96.