From the Archives: A study of cross-cultural attitudes toward mortality can help young people accept death as a part of life.
Back in February, on a chilly, windy afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a group of college students and I stood face-to-face with three ash-covered cremation furnaces at Mount Auburn Cemetery, the oldest garden cemetery in the United States. As we squeezed into the crematory, one of the students asked Joe—the no-nonsense custodian—whether we could peek inside one of the furnaces. “Not right now,” Joe said, shaking his head. “There’s someone in there.
In order to break through the silence and avoidance that shape contemporary American attitudes toward death, we must teach young people different ways to engage with the end of life. Rather than shield them from the specter of mortality, we need to give them the space and tools to explore their own relationship to it.As an anthropologist, I study death and dying from a cross-cultural perspective, and I wanted to create a course that would allow students to interact with these topics firsthand.
Among a group of people in West Papua, Indonesia, known as the Korowai, death and dying are frequently subjects of everyday conversation. People “often speak spontaneously of themselves as being in the process of dying,” notes anthropologist Rupert Stasch in Society of Others: Kinship and Mourning in a West Papuan Place. “Aged men, if they are awake before dawn, often sing softly about their upcoming deaths.
At the end of the course in May, as we reflected on the semester, one student hesitantly raised her hand. “My grandfather actually passed away over spring break,” she began. Twenty-two pairs of eyes darted in her direction. “This class really helped me grieve and process his death; I guess I have come to see death as more natural.”
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