Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800. By Erik R. Seeman

Abstract

Erik R. Seeman, associate professor of history at State University of New York, Buffalo, has spent a good deal of time examining the ways of dying practiced by North American Indians, Africans, and Europeans as they interacted with one another in the “New World.” Accordingly, his research covers the late fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century in colonial America. Not only does his Death in the New World focus on ways of dying but so does his more recent book, The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead. Moreover, these two books, as well as his earlier book, Pious Persuasions, all demonstrate his keen interest in the relationship between doctrine and belief, on the one hand, and ritual and religious practice, on the other. Five hundred years ago, Seeman tells us, when European and foreign peoples encountered one another in the “New World,” they were curious about one another's ways of dying. In order to understand a strange society's “ways of living,” it was necessary to observe their “ways of dying.” With this observation, Seeman begins his Death in the New World, suggests the scope of his study, and orients his meticulously researched book. He uses the term deathways (a more extensive term than “ways of dying”) to signify “deathbed scenes, corpse preparation, burial practices, funerals, mourning, and commemoration,” by which a people “discerned clues about how unfamiliar peoples conceptualized the afterlife and the supernatural, how they honored elites, what they considered to be the proper relation between parents and children, and many other crucial beliefs and practices” (1). If we seek to understand deeply the cross-cultural encounters in the “New World,” Seeman argues, the deathways of the peoples concerned provide us with rich material that is almost without parallel. Deathways offers this window into understanding because every population group in the Americas, first, deals with death as an ever-present reality; second, possesses a religious system that provides an explanation of death and the afterlife; third, was captivated by the outsiders' deathways; and finally, left a material record of their own deathways. To approach his task, Seeman makes ample use of work from several fields of historical scholarship and frames his examination of the encounter of distinct peoples along the lines of similarity and difference, cultural parallels, and syncretism, all of which makes for an instructive read.