Death and the History of Islam in Highland Aceh

Abstract

Perhaps everywhere, death carries with it certain moral, aesthetie, and sociological imperatives: the soul must be cared for, the body must be buried, the social order must be reaffirmed. 1 Robert Hertz, in his essay on death of 1907, linked these three imperatives together in a strikingly effective model of death as passage, both spiritual and corporeal. Hertz drew primarily from Indonesian materials; Arnold Van Gennep, in an essay published two years later, incorporated Hertz' insights into a general theory of rites of passage. Hertz' conception of death has been particularly fruitful for students of Indonesia and other, related societies, as illustrated by its central theoretical position in two recent studies of mortuary ritual, .