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leyna819 's review for:
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death
by Caitlin Doughty
My anthropologist training loved every second of this. Humans needs rituals for life's milestones; why are our Western death rituals so cold and distant, particularly when they weren't always like that?
I would agree with Doughty that we can probably blame it mostly on capitalism and the "funeral industry", but I think there's also some cause to be attributed to the religious changes in our society and culture. While religion definitely impacted some of the rituals we used before, many of us (myself included) don't belong to a particular religion - what rituals are we going to choose to replace the religious rituals of our ancestors?
Doughty provided plenty of examples of other cultures and their rituals, and while we shouldn't take over one wholemeal, there's aspects of each that are worth considering. We may not copy the rituals of an Indonesian tribe, but we can learn from their care and consideration for their dead.
I love a book that leaves me with a lot to think about!
I would agree with Doughty that we can probably blame it mostly on capitalism and the "funeral industry", but I think there's also some cause to be attributed to the religious changes in our society and culture. While religion definitely impacted some of the rituals we used before, many of us (myself included) don't belong to a particular religion - what rituals are we going to choose to replace the religious rituals of our ancestors?
Doughty provided plenty of examples of other cultures and their rituals, and while we shouldn't take over one wholemeal, there's aspects of each that are worth considering. We may not copy the rituals of an Indonesian tribe, but we can learn from their care and consideration for their dead.
I love a book that leaves me with a lot to think about!