In Social bonds with the dead: how funerals transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by Katsumi Shumane, it is said, “Evolutionary thanology includes the study of necrophoresis—the removal of dead individuals by the living among social insects. In human societies, ‘necrophoresis’ is performed via the funeral ceremony.” A funeral, according to Oxford English Dictionary, is “the final disposition of a corpse, such as a burial or cremation with the attendant observances.”

 

As the ultimate rite of passage, death is a global anthropological eventuality. We all face death regardless of color, class, creed or national origin, and death has been a global phenomenon from the origin of humanity. Corpse burial customs are an ancient observance dating back over 300,000 years to the Paleolithic Period. 

 

In terms of mortuary practice, the earliest morticians were carpenters who crafted caskets for the dead. According to Lewis R. Binford, in Mortuary Practices: Their Study and their Potential, the tombstone was elaborated on by Frazier who in 1886 elaborated “that all mortuary ritual was motivated by fear of the deceased’s ghost-soul, and was an attempt on the part of of the living to control the actions of the ghosts of the dead. For instance, he stated that: heavy stones were piled on his grave to keep him down, on the principle of “sit tibi terra gravis.” This is the origin of funeral cairns and tombstones [1886:65].

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In African Cultural Concept of Death and the Idea of Advance Care Directive, Rabi Ekore and Bolatito Lanre -Abass affirmed the ethnographic and eternal nature of African funerals. “According to the African belief system, life does not end with death, but continues in another realm,” which affirms life after death as an immortal event.

 

Depending on the decedent, death is often economically, emotionally, socially and spiritually disruptive. In

Death and Dying in the History of Africa Since 1800*, Rebekah Lee and Megan Vaughan shed light on African death and dying as an anthropologically disruptive phenomenon.

 

Although the anthropological literature is too vast to discuss here comprehensively, several elements of that scholarship are relevant to our understanding of African ‘ways of dying’.Footnote 10 Of importance is the view that, in ‘traditional’ societies, death introduces forces of physical, spiritual and social rupture. In order to heal these ruptures and ensure the renewal and continuity of life, two transitions must take place. The first is that the deceased must move from a state of impurity or contagion to a state of ritual purity and harmony with the spirit world. This transition can be guided by the living, through close attention to the ritual preparation and interment of the body. Secondly, as Van Gennep has argued, societal disintegration occasioned by a death has to be repaired through its own transitional process. Through funerary and mourning rituals, survivors are re-integrated back into the community and group-solidarity preserved.Footnote 11 Both transitions are related to each other, and death rituals often serve simultaneously to guide the deceased and the living safely into a beneficial and life-giving balance with each other. But this structuralist account of death rituals, whilst revealing, also disguises huge variations, and has a tendency to represent the production of social meaning around death as an unproblematic process, one devoid of emotion or dissension.Footnote 12

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In Funeral As Ritual: An Analysis Of Me'en Mortuary Rites (Southwest Etillopia) J. Abbink(*) points out funeral rituals share commonalities as well as diverge trans-culturally.

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The trans-cultural comparison of funeral rituals shows that there are many similarities in the rites of death and burial, partly correlated with the mode of subsistence, rules of property transmission, or in general with the social relations of production of a society. On this infrastructural basis, burial ceremonies across cultures have been ritually elaborated as 'celebrations of death' with their own specific form and pattern of meaning. As such, they are 'total social facts' (as defined by Marcel Mauss in his Essaz" sur le Don (1923--24): systematic, integrated social phenomena with a sociological, historical and physio-psychological dimension. They are embodied in the experience of members of a society in an individual and collective sense.

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The Me'en Burial Rite

 

Burial among the Me'en is, as in most other societies, the 'final rite of passage' in a person's life: the transition from life to the empirically unknown " realm of decay and dark- ness" (as Me'en often say). The Me'en view on death is as follows: the body consists of two entities: flesh (acuk) and the 'life-essence' or 'soul' (shun). They have to be separated after death. Burial is the series of acts that guarantees the proper transfer of the shun to the realm of Tuma as well as the appeasement of the k'alua or lineage spirit (in a sense, the collective spirit of the du'ut ancestors). A proper burial is therefore the responsibility of all du'ut members and cannot be done hastily and poorly, because - as informants time and again stressed - the welfare and internal peace of the du'ut will be affected if proper care is not taken. The period between death and actual interring is also a typical 'liminal' period (Abbink, p. 225).

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Funerals in Africa; explorations of a social phenomenon / edited by Michael Jindra and Joël Norte contrasts the difference between Western and African deaths and funeral rituals. “Whereas in the West death is normally a private and family affair, in Africa funerals are often the central life cycle event, unparalleled in cost and importance, for which families harness vast amounts of resources to host lavish events for multitudes of people with ramifications well beyond the event.”   

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In Funeral Rites Reformation for Any African Ethnic…, Johnson Nganga Mbugua and Mary N. Getui collaboratively speak to the negative impact of costly funeral rituals in Africa. “Current rites are complicated, time-consuming, expensive, and are leaving most families and their neighbors impoverished.” They have been extremely commercialized and a large number of Africans do not have resources to bury their dead the “modern” way.

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The Christian funeral ritual and burial service or committal of the corpse is an interdisciplinary event that weds the theological with the sociological in which the living celebrate the soul the dead returning to the God who gave it. As a socio-spiritual or sacred event that has it’s biblical precedent in Jewish history and shares the view of immortality. In Jewish Mourning Rituals: Understanding in Treatment, Julia Hilliard elaborates on Jewish mourning. “Judaism has several labels and therefore can have varying views, especially about death, the dying process, and the afterlife [1-3].” 

 

Be that as it may, many of the Jewish patriarchs deaths and funeral rituals were highly chronicled and celebrated. However, the most chronicled and celebrated Jewish burial was that of Jesus Christ. We have no knowledge of Christ’s homegoing service because the Holy Bible is silent on his eulogistic service, if any. Yet, the Holy Bible speaks volumes about his burial on Good Friday in Joseph of Aramathea’s tomb and his resurrection on Resurrection Sunday three days later.

 

In Behold the Lamb of God, An Easter Celebration, Richard Neitzel and others observed that an incredible assertion was made by The Lost Tomb of Jesus. It claims to have found the lost tomb of Jesus and “the ossuary or bone box, that held Jesus’s bones—a direct contradiction to the story preserved in the four Gospels that Jesus had indeed risen from the grave.”

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In his anthropological approach to the study of religion, Durkheim2 stressed that social and communal functions are the heart of religious practices. Durkheim3 was of the opinion that societies required a kind of religion to bind them together, according to The Living Dead: Anthropological Interpretation of Rites of Passage in Umuahia and Emure Ekiti by Oladosu O. Adebolu.

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In Death (2018), by Bob Simpson we are reminded “The essential Durkheimian point in Hertz’s analysis is that society is transcendent and, whilst an individual death is often portrayed as a dangerous tear in the ordered fabric of society, it is one that its members can repair.” For Christians, despite the death dimension of our lives, our socio-spiritual repair comes through the holy trinity, the God who loves us, John 3:16), Christ Jesus who came that we might have life (John 10:10) and who died for us and his Holy Spirit who comforts and keeps us (John 14), empowers us to be purposeful (Acts 2), and bestows the gifts of the Spirit (I Cor. 12).

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Despite those who choose to be cremated and engage in memorial services, millions more choose to honor their dead through the traditional Christian funeral with an eye the burial of Christ in a tomb with the hope of immortality.

 

The Christian funeral ritual has a minimum of seven functions. 

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• The funeral functions as a catharsis, an opportunity to mourn the dead and express grief and pain. 

• Funerals provide closure, allowing loved ones to say goodbye and transition to life after their loved ones.

• Funerals celebrate life through expressions of remembrance. 

• Funerals provide spiritual and comfort to the emotionally distraught through words of comfort read, sung, written, prayed and preached. 

• Funerals are a cautionary tale that life is not a continuum but a cursory affair, that life at best is fleeting because it disconnected, cut off and we eschatologically fly away.

• Funerals include committal services that commit our bodies to the ground and our spirits to the God.

• Finally, funerals serve as a communiqué of our unapologetic ascension characteristic of a body-soul dichotomy. The Apostle Paul made this plain saying “We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.” (2nd Corinthians 5:8).

 

Reverend Dr. A. Carl Prince