La mort, une mutation sociale

Abstract

Death is never just the end of life. All the cultures, when faced with death, have to confront an ambiguous situation : the dead person, although already absent, is still present and funeral rituals are not just made to decently part with a corpse. Being dead most probably comes close to a state, but from a cultural point of view the issue is to define a status. If the funeral stages a passage, it is because the dead person has to find a place outside the world of the living. That differentiation and that separation are essential. A cultural process has to lay out the transition — among other functions, rituality has to set a transitional passage — and, in doing so, to ensure the necessary separation (against the madness of undifferentiation) with the person who is no more. That is to say to arrange the distant placement of a close relative who is no longer close, and who is no longer a loved-one. We have to do with and against what 'remains' in which we confuse the person and that body which has suddenly become the dead person.