Interesting rituals for the benefit of the living In doing so she expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity and reveals unexpected possibilities for our own death rituals. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to inspiring death-care innovators, participates in powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in the West and explores new spaces for mourning - including a futuristic glowing-Buddha columbarium in Japan, a candlelit Mexican cemetery and America's only open-air pyre. She meets Bolivian ñatitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls) and introduces us to the Japanese ritual of kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved ones' bones from cremation ashes. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body. In From Here to Eternity, she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |