Robert Hertz’s seminal essay and mortuary rites in the Pacific region

Abstract

This special issue emerged from a session, entitled ‘Spiritual material: Objects and change in mortuary ritual,’ that Pierre Lemonnier and I organized at the conference of the European Society for Oceanists (ESfO) in Marseille in June 2005. In this session we explored the link between the spiritual and the material in mortuary ritual in the Pacific region. Inspired by the French anthropologist Robert Hertz (18811915), who in his 1907 essay on secondary funerals demonstrated a correspondence between the decay of the corpse and the fate of the soul, we focused on artifacts other than the human body. We returned to the basic tenet of his theory that ‘‘to make a material object or living being pass from this world to the next, to free or create the soul, it must be destroyed. [...] As the visible object vanishes it is reconstructed in the beyond, transformed to a greater or lesser degree’’ (Hertz, 1960: 46). There are cases in which the deceased’s intimate possessions are destroyed, but also instances in which objects of the dead are kept as relics or heirlooms. Why? In line with Hertz’s argument we might make a distinction here between flesh-type and bonetype of objects. The latter seem to mediate the relationship between the living and the dead. They remain intact like the corpse’s dry bones. The other objects, being destroyed, resemble the vanishing flesh, seemingly considered one with the imagery of the physical body or inseparable from the deceased in one way or another. The connection between the spiritual (as expressed in verbal formulations or otherwise) and the material was further examined by looking at change in mortuary ritual: do changes in people’s notions of an otherworldly spiritual existence coincide with changes in the material aspects of mortuary ritual? And finally, why is it that people tend to adhere most strongly to their mortuary rituals, while paradoxically at an early stage introduced goods often become items of mortuary exchange? Throughout the session there were lively discussions that showed the actuality of Hertz’s insights. A vivid demonstration of a bone-type of object was given at the end of the conference when a Tikopian fish-hook ornament associated with Sir Raymond Firth was handed down to Maurice Godelier, who in turn contemplated about the passing on of this heirloom of the anthropological tribe. Here, however, we consider Hertz’s 1907 essay an ‘‘enigmatic gift,’’ still valuable in the twenty-first century. The issue commemorates the centennial of the publication of Hertz’s seminal essay ‘Contribution a une Etude sur la Representation Collective de la Mort.’ The essay first appeared in L’Annee sociologique (vol. 10, pp. 48-137) in 1907. Translated into English by Rodney and Claudia Needham ¢ and entitled ‘A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death,’ it came out together with another essay in the book Death and the Right Hand in 1960. In the same year Arnold van Gennep’s 1909 book Les Rites de Passage was published in an English translation. Both works would have an impact on the understanding of ritual in the Englishspeaking world. Hertz’s essay already contained the idea of rites of passage, and Hertz thus pre-