The digital double burial: resurrecting Hertz in the digital age

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This article is intended as a comparative, yet speculative exercise. It seeks to consider how Robert Hertz’s 1907 analysis of the double burial in Dayak society might be used to integrate and guide studies of death in the contemporary American digital age. Over the last decade, scholars have begun to explore how experiences of loss, mourning and memorialisation are changing in the digital age. These inquiries, however, have rarely been situated within the classical anthropological literature on death and mortuary ritual. In revisiting Hertz’s essay, my goal is to not only propose some future directions for anthropological research, but also to suggest that in the digital age American ways of mourning the dead might be increasingly similar to those of the Dayak. That is, I want to consider the possibility that we might be witnessing the emergence of the digital double burial.