I'm interested in culturally diverse ways of burying the dead.?

Question

In the Philippines they have hanging coffins, in Africa there is a tribe that buries their dead in a cave and puts lifesize dolls on a balcony surrounding the cave. Different, beautiful, strange...tell me what you've heard of.

Answer 1

I like the idea of burning the body in the open at the end of the funeral service, like they do (or did) in India.

It seems much more efficient to me.

Answer 2

Cremation is strange to many Africans.  But if you want something really different from Western practice, read about death rituals of the Toraja from Tana Toraja in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia.  They believe that death is a long process and what we consider a dead body, they consider to be an ill person who needs special care.  For this reason, they keep the body in their house for weeks, months, or even years.  They talk to it, feed it, bathe it, etc.  They live with it until they believe it is no longer sick and actually has died.

Answer 3

The drama begins to unfold with the arrival of the corpse at the mortuary. Alas, poor Yorick! How surprised he would be to see how his counterpart of today is whisked off to a funeral parlor and is in short order sprayed, sliced, pierced, pickled, trussed, trimmed, creamed, waxed, painted, rouged, and neatly dressed-transformed from a common corpse into a Beautiful Memory Picture. This process is known in the trade as embalming and restorative art, and is so universally employed in the United States and Canada that the funeral director does it routinely, without consulting corpse or kin. He regards as eccentric those few who are hardy enough to suggest that it might be dispensed with. Yet no law requires embalming, no religious doctrine commends it, nor is it dictated by considerations of health, sanitation, or even of personal daintiness. In no part of the world but in Northern America is it widely used. The purpose of embalming is to make the corpse presentable for viewing in a suitably costly container; and here too the funeral director routinely, without first consulting the family, prepares the body for public display.

An English woman living in San Francisco described her reaction in a letter to the writer:

"I myself have attended only one funeral here-that of an elderly fellow worker of mine. After the service I could not understand why everyone was walking towards the coffin (sorry, I mean casket), but thought I had better follow the crowd. It shook me rigid to get there and find the casket open and poor old Oscar lying there in his brown tweed suit, wearing a suntan makeup and just the wrong shade of lipstick. If I had not been extremely fond of the old boy, I have a horrible feeling that I might have giggled. Then and there I decided that I could never face another American funeral-even dead."

Answer 4

Here is an interesting one.  In certain migrating Eskimo colonies, the dead or dying are simply left in an ice hut, bid adieu by their families and left behind, with the hut being their tomb.

Answer 5

In America, they buy a casket, place the corpse in it, close it, dig a hole, place the casket in the hole and cover the casket with the dirt.  Kind of weird, huh?

Answer 6

The Parsi leave their dead out for the vultures to eat. It's believed that the vultures take their souls to the sky. Of course with all the pesticide use, the vultures are dying off, which is creating some real troubles.

The Yanamamo cremate their dead and drink the ashes, which can make them pretty sick.

Some Asian tribes bury their dead in a sitting position and dig them up periodically. When the bones are clean, they will dig them all up and have a reburial ceremony.

Traditional Chinese burials follow the tenets of Feng Shui, which means specific environmental conditions must be followed. A Feng Shui master can be hired to decide the best configuration, and each burial is different. More recently, due to space constraints, a lot of people are cremating and using columbaria.

The Southern Uplands culture region of the US has a very specific cult of piety, which requires all vegetation be scraped completely clear, the graves to be mounded and an odd assortment of grave offerings to be placed over the grave. You'll see couches, toys, mason jars, reading glasses, books, tables, just about anything and everything.

The Navajo believe that the spirit of the deceased is evil and must be avoided at all costs. So there or often individual burials in the middle of nowhere, with a large rock, pole or even the saddle of the deceased marking the grave so it can be seen from a long distance and be avoided. If someone died in a building, that building is abandoned or torn down. It's believed that the evil spirit will be trapped there. Many Navajo are actually buried by Mormons in a Mormon cemetery. The relatives will tell the local Mormons that their relative converted so they don't have to bury them.

Two great books on burials in the US are Terry Jordan's 1982 Texas graveyards, and Bunnen's 1991 Scoring in heaven: gravestones and cemetery art of the American Sunbelt states. The first gives a detailed analysis of 20 years of cemetery studies in Texas, and Bunnen's work is a compilation of photographs that are quite interesting.

Answer 7

I heard about some cultures burying their dead in cliffs.  The higher one climbs up a cliff to bury their dead the more esteemed the dead is.

http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/...

Answer 8

"...when a viking died, he was buried w/ all of his armour and his horse just in case he met with battle on the other side.



...sometimes the Japanese would kill the wives and animals for the newly deceased. It was so the dead wouldn't be lonely.

...the English would kill a person and bury them in a newly appointed graveyard to watch over it.

...in some countries, if a child died, a dog would be buried with it. Reason: a dog can always find its way home.

...pirates would kill a member of their clan and bury them with their treasure so others pirates and sailors wouldn't beable to get to it. The ghost was supposed to ward off the living.

...ancient Egyptians would turn their dead in circles to confuse them so they would not return to the living"

Answer 9

I know this guy named Norman who left Mom in her favorite rocking chair for years after she died, even talking to her from time to time.

Answer 10

wierd