1991 No. 1 CONTENTS - Institute of Social and Cultural ...

108 Dirk Verboven
expression of the social order and determines the importance and the impact of the
ritual. The pollution emanating from the dead body is a consequence of the
gradual elimination of the deceased as a social individual. This elimination
seriously disturbs the relationships between the living, in the sense that they are
also in a transitional phase that gives rise to a redefmition of the social relationships
(for example, the wife becomes a widow, the oldest son becomes head of the
family, and so on). These general aspects (three phases, gradual uncoupling of
body and soul) still constitute the basis of anthropological interpretation. In
addition, funerary rituals have other marked characteristics: the prominence of the
integratory rituals (third phase), their strong processual structuring, and the mutual
interdependence between the various factors involved, to which I now turn.
In funerary rituals, the emphasis is unmistakably on the aggregation of the
deceased to the ancestral world. This was already noticed by Van Gennep (1969:
209-10). Secondly, the transition of the deceased is not realized through one ritual
performance, but through a complex ritual cycle. The strong proliferation of the
liminal period (the mourning), gives rise to a long interval between the actual,
physical death and the fmal integration. Although this is true for other rites of
passage too, they never seem as marked as in the case of funerary rituals. The
difficulty of the transition, and the strong ambiguity vis-a-vis the corpse can partly
account for this state of affairs. While other rites of passage establish the
individual as a whole in a new status, the 'goal' of funerary rituals is precisely the
de-structuring of this unity. The individual is split into separate entities that are
symbolically irreconcilable and hence require separate ritual handling. On the one
hand, the physical body, impure, dangerous, and contagious, has to be discarded;
on the other, the spiritual principles, also dangerous but at the same time
beneficial, have to be (re)integrated into the 'hereafter'. The gradual separation
of body and soul has, in addition, strong repercussions on the position of the close
kin, who remain in mourning as long as the transition and the separation is not
completed. This already shows how the situation of~ and the attitude towards, the
three funerary 'protagonists'-the mourners, the body, and the soul-are strongly
interdependent. Hertz (1907: 73-4, 82) especially stressed this third property of
funerary rituals.
After the fruitful period of theory-formation by members of the Annee school,
there were many substantive contributions to a general theory of funerary ritual.
Till late in the 19508, anthropology was stuck in an atheoretical and cultural
relativistic period, from which it escaped only fairly recently with the rising
interest--especially in France-in thanatology. Nowadays, we can speak of an
'anthropology of death' (Bloch and Parry 1982; Huntington and Metcalf 1979),
which is mainly an attempt to bring about a synthesis of the more sociologically
inspired tradition of Hertz and Van Gennep with the symbolical tradition that
dominated anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s.