Death, Ritual, and Faith. The Rhetoric of Funeral Rites

Rituals and texts through which people from different cultures try to come to terms with the idea of death have intrigued classical social scientists - E. Tylor, E. Durkheim, B. Malinowski. To date, the disciplinary boundaries of death studies have expanded significantly, and this field of humanities research aspires to be one of the most popular and actively developing. The book by anthropologist and theologian Douglas Davies is a comprehensive work that serves as an excellent introduction to this scientific tradition. Davies relies on the concept of "the word against death," which views funeral rituals as a human response to the most frightening aspect of one's nature, an attempt to adapt to it and even overcome it. From this perspective, the scholar examines a wide range of issues, including human reactions to the loss of loved ones and theories of grief, near-death experiences and symbolic death, the history of cremation and attitudes towards it in different cultures, the death of pets, and death on the Internet, new types of ecological burials and cryonics. Douglas Davies is a professor of religious studies and director of the Center for Death and Life Studies at Durham University, UK.