Death, ritual and faith: rhetoric of funeral rites. Davis D.

The rituals and texts, with which people of different cultures are trying to reconcile with the idea of ​​death, were also interested in the classics of social sciences - E. Taylor, E. Durkheim, B. Malinovsky. To date, the disciplinary boundaries of Death Studies have become much wider, and this area of ​​humanitarian research claims the status of one of the most popular and actively developing. The book of an anthropologist and theologian Douglas Davis is a review of work that can serve as an excellent introduction into this scientific tradition.

Davis relies on the concept of “words against death”, which considers funeral rituals as a person’s answer to the most frightening aspect of his own nature, an attempt to adapt to him and even overcoming it. From this position, the scientist considers a large range of issues, which includes human reactions to the loss of loved ones and the theory of grief, near -death experiences and symbolic death, the history of cremation and the attitude of it in different cultures, the death of pets and death on the Internet, new types of environmental burials And Cryonika.

Douglas Davis - Professor of Religious Science and Director of the Center for Research of Death and Life of the Dama University, Great Britain.