(gentle piano music)
- [Announcer] We are the paradoxical ape.
Bipedal,
naked,
large-brained.
Long the master of fire,
tools, and language.
But still trying to understand ourselves.
Aware that death is inevitable.
Yet filled with optimism.
We grow up slowly.
We hand down knowledge.
We empathize and deceive.
We shape the future
from our shared understanding of the past.
CARTA brings together experts
from diverse disciplines
to exchange insights on who
we are and how we got here.
An exploration made possible
by the generosity of humans like you.
(energetic electronic music)
- So yes, I'm gonna talk to you,
primarily I'm gonna start with
a discussion about what fear is,
because my views on this have
crystallized in recent years.
And if you know anything about what I do,
you probably don't really know what I do,
because it's been misrepresented
quite a bit over the years.
So, fear, I think most of us will agree,
is an awareness that there's
a threat to well-being
that's present or imminent.
And this can be in the form
of these kinds of
biological or social cues
that have the potential to cause us harm.
And when we encounter these
kinds of threatening events,
a lot of things happen
in our brains and bodies
that some of them are
recognizable by others.
And that's how we judge someone else
as being fearful or anxious.
But others are more internal,
and we can only judge in ourselves
in terms of body responses.
Of course, we can
measure these objectively
if we hook a person up
to some sort of physiological recording.
But the most important part of fear
is the internal awareness
that you're in danger.
Now, the traditional view
of how this comes about,
and I'm partly responsible for this,
is that this part of the
brain called the amygdala,
which you heard about a bit
earlier, is a fear center.
That is a view that is
widely cast in the culture
and in the scientific circles as well.
The idea is that the
threat in the outside world
is processed by sensory systems.
That reaches the amygdala.
It arouses the state of fear.
And fear causes these behavioral
and physiological responses.
Now, when I talked about fear
as being involved in the amygdala,
which I've done for almost 30 years now,
the idea was that what
the amygdala was doing
was processing implicitly,
or non-consciously, threats,
and that the conscious experience of fear
was coming about through
a different mechanism,
which I proposed was in the neocortex.
And I'll describe that a bit later.
But what carried forth in the
scientific and lay culture
is that I said that
fear is in the amygdala.
And I think that this is wrong.
And that's what I want to help clarify
as we move forward today.
So, what's wrong with the idea?
Well, the idea is based on
two kinds of observations.
One is that when a person or an animal
has some problem with their amygdala,
they no longer respond to threats
in a way that you can measure,
like behaviorally or physiologically.
And secondly, when an animal or a human
is exposed to a threat, activity
increases in the amygdala.
So these two things kind of suggest
that the amygdala is processing threats.
And that has led to the conclusion
that the amygdala is the source of fear.
But that I link is a leap
that's too far to make.
So why is that a leap that's too far?
Well, behavioral and
physiological responses
don't always correlate
with subjectively-reported
experiences of fear.
Medications that are used
to treat fear and anxiety
are more likely to change
behavioral responses
like avoidance or timidity
and physiological
responses like hyperarousal
than the subjective feeling of fear.
And, as a result of point two there,
all of the major drug companies
are pulling out of the anti-fear,
anti-anxiety medication business,
because they view the results of efforts
to develop new and better
treatments as a failure.
They don't consider a reduction
in behavior and physiology a success,
because the patient doesn't
feel less fearful or anxious.
So the therapist is disappointed.
The patient is disappointed.
And the drug companies are disappointed.
(audience laughs)
So, number three.
Threats elicit amygdala activity
in behavioral and physiological responses
in the absence of subjective awareness
that the stimulus exists,
as in Nick Humphrey's famous
blindsight situations.
In humans rather than monkeys, though.
And without any feeling of fear.
So this can be done through
studies of blindsight,
but also through studies
of so-called subliminal
presentations of stimuli,
where stimuli are presented very briefly
or masked by some other kind of stimulus.
The stimulus is present.
It's a threat.
The person doesn't feel fear.
And yet the amygdala is still activated,
and the responses are still expressed.
Fear is not the cause of those responses.
And finally, damage to
the amygdala in a human
eliminates the behavioral
and physiological responses,
but not subjective feelings of fear.
So all of this to me suggests
that fear is not coming
out of the amygdala,
but someplace else.
So, we'll put an X through
this fear circuit view.
And first we want to redefine
what the amygdala does.
I think one way to describe it
that is semantically more neutral
and doesn't imply that fear is emerging,
bubbling up out of the amygdala,
is to simply call it a
defensive survival circuit.
Every animal has to detect
and respond to danger,
as we heard about birds being able
to detect and respond to danger.
And I was happy to hear that
fear didn't come up there.
It was described as responses
to danger and threat.
So every animal from a worm to a human
has to be able to detect
and respond to danger
in order to stay alive.
Even bacterial cells have to
detect and respond to danger.
So detecting, responding to danger
has nothing to do with psychology.
It's there to keep the organism alive.
And if you have some kind of psychology
because of the kind of brain you have,
then you become aware
that you're in danger
and you experience fear.
So, threats activate a
defensive survival circuit
that non-consciously
controls defensive responses.
And humans have inherited
this defensive survival
circuit from animals,
but not the conscious experience of fear.
So, if the amygdala is
not the source of fear,
how does it come about?
I have to say,
it comes about like any
other conscious experience.
Now, we might argue about
how that comes about.
And there are some experts in the room
that may not agree with me.
But my own position is that,
once we understand consciousness,
we'll get an understanding
of emotions for free.
(audience laughs)
So, my shot at it is something like this,
which is an idea that really started
when I was doing split-brain
work in the 1970s
as a graduate student.
And I won't go into that.
But the idea is that,
and I proposed this model in 1984,
before I did any research on fear itself.
But the basic idea is that the
threat comes into the brain
and it's processed through
different kinds of channels.
There are connections from sensory systems
into this defensive survival circuit
that control these behavioral
and physiological responses,
and then two cortical areas
where you have processes like
attention and working memory
that can put things together
and hold them in mind.
And one of the things that can
be added into working memory
is the fact that this defensive
survival circuit is active
and that you're getting feedback
from the body and so forth.
And all of this kind of
coalesces in the mind
to make fear a cognitive event,
not an innate feeling inherited
from animal ancestors.
So, I'm not saying
that animals have no
conscious experiences,
no subjective experiences
of fear or anxiety
or anything like that.
But if they do, they're
probably very different
from the kinds of experiences we have.
Well, so why is this
kind of theory needed?
For one reason,
fear doesn't have an exclusive
contract with the amygdala,
which is generally thought to be
a kind of predatory defense system.
We can be afraid.
We can have fear from starvation,
dehydration, hypothermia,
reproductive isolation,
each of which depends on
other survival circuits.
So the key is not that
the amygdala is activated,
but that you have some kind of activity
that threatens your existence
or potentially causes you harm.
So what we feel depends
on what kinds of signals
are being processed in working memory,
including signals from survival circuits,
but other signals as well.
So, rather than having a
kind of subcortical circuit,
one for each kind of basic emotion,
I propose that the cortical cognitive
higher-order representation of information
accounts for emotional and
non-emotional experiences
in one kind of basic system.
And I won't have time to
go into any of the evidence
for all of this right now,
but I'd like to make
analogize it by explaining
how you make soup, which you all know.
You take water, onions, garlic, carrots,
all kinds of ingredients,
put them into the pot.
And none of these are soup ingredients.
They're things that exist in nature
that when combined in a
certain way make soup.
And I think emotions
are like this as well.
We have lots of things in our brain
that are there for various reasons,
like sensory processing,
survival circuits,
brain arousal, body feedback,
attention, semantic
memory, episodic memory,
implicit fear schema, monitoring,
awareness that you are in
danger, interpretation.
Most of these have nothing
to do with fear or emotion.
They're simply things that exist
to allow you to accomplish other goals.
So when you put them
together in a particular way,
fear is what results.
Now, this kind of re-schematizes all this.
On the left side of the diagram,
we have things that would be contributing
to regular, old conscious
experience, non-emotional states.
And on the right side,
there are ingredients
that begin to tilt it in a
kind of emotional direction.
And you can see the survival
circuit multiplicity there
that can generate activity
that will help tilt it
in one way or the other.
But there are a couple of
important things on this
I want to point out.
On the two sides of the
vertical line there,
self schema and emotion schema.
I think these are both very important.
Unless you have an awareness
that the danger is happening to you,
there's no fear or any
other kind of emotion.
In order to be emotional,
you have to realize that it's you
that is experiencing the situation.
A threat might cause you to
respond in a certain way,
but if you don't know that
it's happening to you,
you're not afraid.
Now, you might say,
"Well, I can be afraid or
worried about my children
"if I see them in danger."
But your children are, in
effect, part of who you are.
As are the, William James says,
"A man's yacht is part of who he is."
(audience laughs)
So, I think, I would be very
unhappy if I lost my guitar,
because it is such an
important part of who I am.
So I think self schema are very important,
but also emotion schema.
As the child begins to grow
up and experience the world
and come across dangerous situations,
they're told what danger is.
They may experience danger themselves.
They observe it on TV and in movies.
They build up these schemas
about what danger is
and when fear occurs
so that when you have
these kinds of schema,
it's very easy to pattern
complete the entire representation
of what fear is with just a
few, or maybe even one, element.
If a threat is present,
you're probably moving
towards a cognitive pattern completion
that the situation is one in
which you're feeling fear.
Add in the fact that
escape is not possible
and that your heart is
beating fast and so forth,
and bingo you've got the whole closed up.
So, the idea that emotions are
cognitively assembled states
made by the information
available to working memory
is related to Levi-Strauss's
notion of bricolage.
In French, this means
to put things together
from items that happen to be available.
He emphasized the importance
of the individual,
the bricoleur,
and the social context in
the construction process.
Others note that maybe
persons, objects, contexts,
the sequence and fabric of everyday life
are the medium through which
emotions come into being,
a day-to-day kind of emotional bricolage.
In the brain, working
memory can be thought of
as the bricoleur,
and the content of emotional
consciousness as the bricolage.
So, if emotions are
cognitive events in circuits
that differ in significant ways
in humans and other animals,
including other primates,
then emotions we experience,
including emotions related to death,
may be unique and unparalleled
in the animal kingdom.
Add language and culture
to the emotional equation,
and the case strengthens.
So, animals may have
subjective experiences
but can't have the kinds
of experiences we have.
Or at least that's how I think about it.
So, second part of my title is
Is Fear of Death a Fear?
Fear, formally defined, is the awareness
that a threat to your
well-being is present.
Anxiety is the expectation or worry
that your well-being may be
compromised in the future.
Many situations described as
fears are really anxieties.
But fear and anxiety are
really conjoined twins.
Even in a clear case of bodily threat,
fear quickly morphs into
worry about the future.
A snake at your feet causes you to freeze
and feel fear of bodily harm.
But that's soon complemented,
if not overtaken,
by worries about what will
happen if you're bitten.
Will you die?
Will you get to the
emergency room in time?
Will they have antidote and so forth?
And death is always in the future,
so it's a worry, or an
anxiety, rather than a fear.
Fear and anxiety are products
of the same cortical system
in my theory.
But different subcortical
circuits are part
of what makes fear and anxiety different.
Specifically, subcortical circuits
underlying the processing and
control of bodily responses
related to immediate or certain threats
versus future and uncertain
threats are different.
In the case of the
immediately present threat,
the amygdala is very important.
In the case of a future
threat, an area called
the bed nucleus of the stria
terminalis is important.
Now, the bed nucleus
has become for anxiety
what the amygdala is for fear.
It's been viewed as the source of anxiety.
But it's not.
Like the amygdala, it detects
and responds to threats,
in this case, threats in the future.
Fear and anxiety are the
cognitive interpretation
that these things are happening.
So, why does it matter
what we call these things?
First of all,
why does it matter what
we call fear and anxiety?
Why can't we just use one word
or maybe just even use
them interchangeably?
For one reason, the
problems that afflict people
that have these conditions
need to be treated differently
if the threat is a worry about the future
as opposed to a kind of oversensitivity
to immediately present stimuli.
But in the case of fear of
death, or anxiety about death,
the imprecision in scientific terminology,
while a constant problem,
it can easily be avoided by
being clear about the language.
So, in treating someone, say,
who is obsessed with death,
or in designing treatments
that might help people
who are at the end of life
and needing to not be
quite as anxious about it,
thinking of these things
in terms of what's going on in the brain
can actually be more constructive
than simply assuming that it
all happens in the same way.
And that's my two cents
about fear of death.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
- Well, thank you very much.
And I'd like to thank the organizers
and say how glad I am to be here
and participating in this
very interesting symposium,
and indeed to have the opportunity
of discussing together a problem
which we all, sooner or later,
will have to come to terms with.
And that is indeed an interesting point.
So I'd like to start with
just a couple of quotations.
This from Wittgenstein.
And it makes an important point, I think,
that we are talking of death,
but death is a concept.
Obviously, there are individual deaths,
or there are dead bodies, dead people,
that we may or may not
come into contact with.
But death is a concept.
And, as humans, we may in the modern world
not witness many deaths.
But from the earliest times,
homonins and humans have experienced
the deaths of relatives.
So the condition of being dead
will have been a familiar concept,
at least as soon as human
language could find a word for it,
namely the adjective "dead".
But I think it is
crucial to the discussion
to realize that without
the concept of death
and, indeed, without a language
which could find a word for it,
then it's not possible to
communicate about death.
And it's not possible to have
a shared concept of death.
And so, the awareness of death
as a general phenomenon is very much,
and when that came to be
in evolutionary terms,
is very much associated with the question
of when human language emerged
in a sufficiently sophisticated form
that one could have an
abstract noun, "death",
or an abstract adjective, "dead",
which could give a word to the concept.
And so I suspect that
when we're discussing
when did the awareness of death
become a reality for humankind,
the answer is when
language had been developed
to find a word for it.
It's worth mentioning also,
it's interesting perhaps,
that Epicurus had
a similar concept to Wittgenstein's,
and a couple of thousand years earlier.
But, as archeologists, we don't
encounter death very often.
And indeed we don't even
encounter dead bodies very often.
As archeologists, we more
often encounter burials.
That is to say,
dead persons that have
been inhumed deliberately.
And it's unusual for archeologists
to discover dead people.
And so it's worth looking,
reminding ourselves,
of these extraordinary
images of moments of death
found at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
And the archeologists who found cavities
in the volcanic ash
and poured plaster of
Paris into these cavities
were able to get these
extraordinary images
of death, if you like,
of the moment of death
of a kind which is exceedingly unusual
in archeological terms.
The business of burial is
often very much associated,
or at any rate in later times,
with notions of what is to follow,
whether or not there is an afterlife.
And that is why I've
given my talk the title
of the Archeology of Immortality.
And this slide is from the
Capuchin Cemetery in Palermo.
And of course the Capuchin
monks were very much aware
that there would be a day of resurrection.
And so this is now the
Capuchin Cemetery in Rome,
where we see these
extraordinarily elaborate
and sometimes very decorative figurations,
which I think to us today,
to most of us today,
perhaps because we don't very often
see skeletons or dead bodies.
In the modern world,
that's in the mortuary,
which we don't visit.
And it's in the cemetery, but
you don't see the dead body
in most Christian burials,
and indeed in many faiths,
so that we are very much
insulated from death.
And these are perhaps rather
shocking images for us.
And we find the apparent frivolity
which you encounter in the Capuchin Chapel
perhaps a little unseemly.
But it's worth remembering,
and I think we should pause and recognize,
that we live in the Americas
or in Europe or in western Asia,
in a society today dominated
by two or perhaps three religions,
which hold that the supreme
deity, God or Allah,
promises that life after
death will be the destiny
for those who believe.
And so I take you to the Sistine Chapel
to Michelangelo's Last Judgment.
And there will be many people here today
who follow some version
of the Christian faith
so well expressed by Michelangelo
for the Church of Rome
in his vision of the Last Judgment,
where the blessed and
the damned are judged
on the basis of their conduct during life
and sent accordingly to
their ultimate destinations,
their two ultimate destinations.
And it is a convention
in the scientific world,
which is particularly
inappropriate for this occasion,
that we don't discuss faith very much.
Maybe there are symposia on faith,
but they tend to, or they can, degenerate
into alternative expressions
of personal faith.
And so it's an irony really
that we are here today
discussing awareness of death,
but the belief systems
which determine to some extent
what a number of us will feel about death
are not openly expressed.
And I think that's worth saying,
because underlying all the discussions
is that some of us here are believers,
perhaps of those two or three religions
which predominate in the western world.
And others of us are not believers
and are agnotics or atheists
and, therefore, inevitably have
a very different approach to death.
And many agnostics or
atheists will not believe
in the existence of the
human being after death,
although of course some may.
And obviously I don't have time
to talk about the Buddhist
faith on this occasion.
So I move right on to the
earliest accumulations
of human bones, which may
or may not be burials.
This is the Sima de los Huesos in Spain,
which is early hominins,
early Neanderthals probably,
around 400,000 years ago,
which were tipped into
these pits, these caves,
and presumably deliberately so,
though that is not certain.
But they don't really constitute burials
in a deliberate sense.
And the first human burials
are archaic hominins.
This is from Skhul in Jordan.
And that is something
like 100,000 years ago.
These are archaic hominins,
of humans,
following the slide we saw
in the last presentation,
who have left Africa.
And with these burials, we do
find sometimes other objects,
sometimes a bone signifying meat.
Not a human bone, but a bone of mutton
or something like that.
And so, that is certainly
a deliberate burial,
which is certainly signifying
awareness of death.
You can't come about
having a deliberate burial
without some awareness of death.
But it doesn't necessarily
signify an afterlife.
And this is one of the first
sites in European Romania
where we find deliberate burials.
You do, of course, have
Neanderthal burials,
for instance at the Shanidar Cave,
something like 40 or
more thousand years ago.
But it's not until the
upper Paleolithic period,
until the arrival of
Homo sapiens in Europe
that we find deliberate
burials of this kind,
this very striking body
inhumed with a headdress,
which comes from the site of Sunghir.
And this is another such burial.
This is around 28,000 years ago in Russia.
But, although it's impressive,
it's important to understand
that it's clearly recognizing death.
It's a formal burial, but
not yet in a cemetery.
It's a formal burial,
and so that indicates something,
but not necessarily a suggestion
of awareness in the afterlife.
This is a similar burial from
the site of Arene Candide
in northern Italy.
And here now is one of
the first cemeteries,
a number of burials grouped together.
And you find these at the
very dawn of sedentism,
just before the
domestication of agriculture
is fully achieved in the Natufian period
in Palestine and in western
Asia around 12,000 BC.
And here is another of these sites
where we find a cemetery.
And clearly a cemetery is a
different response to death.
It's a place specifically chosen
for the formal disposal of the dead.
And here is another such example
from an early site in
Jordan about 15,000 BC.
And it's at Jericho in the
pre-pottery Neolithic A period
that you find these
remarkable plastered skulls.
And these are one of
the most striking finds
that one has where death
is being responded to.
And it's possible that this relates
to a belief in the afterlife.
But it's also just as possible
that it relates to a belief
in the significance of the ancestors.
Whether or not the ancestors are presumed
to be still living in some sense,
it is the ancestors who
give often one's right
to inhabit the land, the territory
which one inhabits today.
And so this, moving on very
rapidly to northern Europe,
to the Orkney Islands,
this is a site I excavated myself,
of Quanterness in Orkney, where
you see a constructed tomb,
a very handsomely constructed tomb.
Here is a reconstruction of it.
And this is a place of collective burial.
And collective burial
is another phenomenon
where the bones or the
bodies of a community
are together buried.
And that is an important point.
It is when you come to ranked societies
that you find burials
with very strikingly wealthy grave goods.
And here is one of the jade
burials of the Liangzhu culture
around 3,300 BC in China.
And here is another of these jade burials
of the same period, also in China.
And there's something special
about the material of jade,
just as there is special
about the material gold,
which one finds here in the
earliest occurrence of gold
in the world at Varna,
something like 4,500 BC.
And the inclusion of these materials
doesn't necessarily indicate
a belief in the afterlife.
But there is with the
purity and survival of gold
and the purity and survival of jade
something which certainly in later times
is associated with immortality.
And I think there's a
possibility that this is the time
that immortality first enters
the archeological record,
as it were, in these rich burials.
This is another burial
from Varna in Bulgaria
around 4,500 BC.
But it is with the
arrival of state societies
and with the arrival
of a belief in deities,
in transcendent deities,
that you certainly find
a systematic belief
in the afterlife.
And deities, of course,
are by definition immortal.
And you find deities in
the archeological record,
it may be argued,
for the first time in state
societies such as ancient Egypt.
So here you see the pyramids.
Here you see the
wonderful gold sarcophagus
from the tomb of Tutankhamun.
And we know a great deal
about Egyptian beliefs.
And here from the Book of the Dead
is the weighing of the soul of
the deceased in the balance.
And if the soul of the deceased
was sufficiently free from sin
as to be sufficiently light in weight,
then the deceased would be accepted
into a favorable afterlife.
And so, it's in China, again,
with the Shang dynasty,
that you find these
enormously rich burials
and with the first bronzes in China.
And these are of great abundance.
And it's also in Meso-America
that with the development
of state society,
for instance with the Maya,
that you find very elaborate burials,
which do clearly involve
the belief of an afterlife,
at least for the ruler.
And this is the Tomb of the
Inscriptions at Palenque.
And here is the wonderful tomb slab
of the deceased person of Pakal.
And here is Pakal himself
being taken down into the underworld.
This is around 603 before the Common Era.
And here is the contents of his tomb,
including this wonderful jade mask.
And there is the jade mask.
And it's interesting to compare
that with the jade masks,
which in China are used
to surround the body
of the deceased person.
That was Liu Sheng.
And this is the burial
suit of Princess Dou Wan,
who was buried around 113,
or died 113 before the Common Era.
In Europe, it's the necropoles,
the cities of the dead,
of the Etruscans which give
the most wonderful example.
Here is Cerveteri.
Here is the Sarcophagus of
the Spouses from Cerveteri.
And it's there that we find
the wonderful painted tombs.
Here is the Tomb of the Leopards.
And this is a funeral banquet,
or certainly a banquet.
The deceased person reclining
with relatives and friends
and being served on as Roman
banquets were transacted.
And here is a very beautiful wall painting
from the Tomb of the Baron around 500 BC.
And this too is Tarquinia around 500 BC
from the Tomb of the Baron.
And here is one of the
most delightful depictions
of music and dance from the ancient world,
likewise of that period.
And so we obviously find
in the ancient world
wonderful representations.
Here is the goddess Athena in mourning
at the grave stele of a deceased youth.
And here is one of the
most delightful series
of paintings of deceased persons,
which you find on the mummy
coverings in the Fayum.
And they have a wonderful vivacity,
but they're commemorating
a deceased person
for whom a belief in the afterlife
was probably a doctrinal reality.
And then you have the grandiose.
This is from the Tomb of Mausolus,
from whom we have the term mausoleum,
meaning a grandiloquent
commemorative tomb usually.
And this is the funeral
effigy of Mausolus,
which is now in the British Museum.
And here is a reconstruction
of the Tomb of Mausolus
as it would have been in western Anatolia,
Halicarnassus in Anatolia.
And here in Rome
is the great monumental tomb of Hadrian,
which is today the Castel San Angelo.
And here is a reconstruction
of how it may have looked.
And this is obviously the
notion of death of an emperor
as a significant event.
And of course the emperors
of Rome were deified.
And so, on their death it was presumed
that they went on to live an eternal life.
Indeed, the later emperors
were already regarded as
divine before their death,
so there was not trouble about that.
And here is Hadrian indeed.
And so, just to come to the conclusion,
obviously we continue
to use grave monuments
as a suitable locus for
celebrating the dead.
And this is the tomb
of Giuliano de' Medici
from the Medici Chapel in Florence.
This is again Michelangelo,
Michelangelo now as sculptor
rather than as painter.
And here, as you'll
recognize, is the Kremlin.
And here in similar guise is Lenin,
still immortalized and embalmed.
As you'll remember, Stalin was
put beside him for a while,
but then perhaps was simply interred
very wisely subsequently.
But Lenin still continues to rule supreme.
And my last image is from the Taj Mahal,
this lovely memorial
to the bride of the shah,
dating from the 17th century AD.
So, some notions of
immortality do continue.
But, of course,
immortality is usually
part of a belief system,
which involves, in the
modern world certainly,
a faith, whether it's Christian or Muslim,
or indeed Buddhist faith.
But I haven't had time to
discuss the Buddhist notion
of transubstantiation,
how the soul can move from
one individual on death
to another individual.
And that of course is a
different concept of immortality.
But, as I said right at the beginning,
I think the awareness
of death simply depends
on having a word for death.
And I would say that when
we developed as humans
an awareness of death as a concept
must be very much when we
developed the linguistic capacity.
And that linguistic capacity
is usually associated
with our own species Homo sapiens,
as indeed was very well
documented by the last speaker
with his map
of the Out of Africa
expansion of our species
something like 60,000 years ago.
So that, I think, gives
a very brief synopsis
of the concept of
immortality for humankind.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)
- So, before I start, let me
explain the general approach
that I'm taking to the theme
of this symposium today.
As an anthropologist,
my first port of call
for addressing any
question about human beings
has to be the place where
I've done field work.
This is because, while all
human beings are confronted
by the same fundamental questions
and approach them through the
same fundamental capacities
that are afforded by
their minds and bodies,
they always bring to the
task of framing the questions
and finding the answers
tools that are specific
to the historical and cultural context
in which they live and die.
And to talk sensibly
about the human beings,
their questions and answers,
one has to know this context well.
So, let me take you to Betania,
a small fishing village on
the west coast of Madagascar.
The inhabitants are fishing folk
who describe themselves as
Vezo, People of the Sea.
This is where I've done field work
on and off for the past 30 years.
During this time, I've
seen babies being born,
children grow into adults,
adults age into wise elders,
and lots of people of all ages die
and been buried in the village cemetery.
In Betania, when someone dies,
the whole village springs into action.
Depending on the age and
the status of the deceased,
the funerary proceedings last
between one and four days.
Each day, villagers are expected to attend
two communal meals and a vigil.
As you can imagine, organizing such events
is a huge undertaking
for the bereaved family.
And while a few individuals are in charge
of preparing the corpse
and of dealing with the deceased's
closest and most distressed relatives,
the vast majority of family members
will be busy dealing with other things.
Their first task is to
formally announce the death
to everyone who has a right to be told.
A young boy is sent to all
the households in the village.
All the youths are dispatched
to more distant locations.
A text is delivered to the radio station
in the nearest town,
a text which announces who has died
and lists all the names of the all people
the death has been announced to.
Meanwhile, money is urgently
collected from family members.
The money is needed to buy
the vast quantities of rice
and meat for the communal meals
and the rum and coffee for the vigils.
It is important that the
crowds are not let down,
for example, by serving them
beans or fish instead of meat,
or by running out of rum
halfway through the night.
(audience laughs)
It is shameful, mahamenatse,
to fail to pull it off,
not only because this shows
that the most immediate family
doesn't have the necessary resources,
but also, and perhaps most importantly,
because it shows that they
don't have enough relations
willing to help them out.
In fact, everyone in attendance
is supposed to make a
monetary contribution.
As the crowds assemble, the
elders of the bereaved family
set themselves up in one of their houses.
There, they receive representatives
of each of the village households
and those visitors who have
come from further afield.
After a certain amount of
highly-formalized exchanges,
the visitors produce an envelope
while insisting that it's
nothing big, just a little thing.
The envelope is accepted by the elders,
who insist that it's not
small but a big thing.
After some more back and
forth, the visitors leave,
the envelope is opened, the money counted,
and the amount carefully written
down in a special notebook.
The visitors will have
done the same at their end,
consulting their notebooks
to find out how much the head received
from the bereaved family
last time they themselves had the funeral
(audience laughs)
and noting down the amounts
they're now contributing.
In this way, over time, people ensure
that they reciprocate the
contributions they have received,
thus maintaining good
relations and not losing face.
This kind of reciprocation
doesn't always work,
but it's always closely monitored.
Such and such a family has
brought less than expected.
Is it because they're really struggling,
or because they're trying to slight us?
Another family has brought much more.
Are they just being generous,
or are they testing us to see
whether we can match their
contribution in the future?
Now, the reason I am
mentioning all of this,
the announcing, the
collecting, the giving,
the receiving, the writing down,
is that these are the activities
that dominate the funeral.
Of course, funerals wouldn't
happen if there was no death.
But the point I wish to stress
is that for the vast majority of people,
the deceased is actually quite peripheral
(audience laughs)
to their experience and preoccupations.
The same applies to their
emotional experience.
Of course, there are close family members
who are highly distressed
and grief-stricken.
But for most participants,
funerals elicit rather different emotions,
ranging from plain boredom to
alcohol-induced exhilaration
to sexual arousal.
This last one applies especially to youths
who find in funerals
the welcome opportunity
to meet visitors from distant villages,
who, with any luck, are not
genealogically related to them
and are thus permissible sexual partners.
Indeed, it's well known that
many long-lasting marriages
started at the edges of a vigil.
(audience laughs)
Now, to put all this into context,
consider that, save for
the crowds that gather
for the much rarer construction of tombs,
events which are planned in
advance and are announced
and therefore are better attended,
funerals are the largest
gatherings of people
that villagers participate in.
And they're events which give
them a firsthand experience
of the large-scale social
system to which they belong.
Here are these hundreds of other people.
And here we are,
my parents, my children,
my siblings, my in-laws,
just one node of this
vast network of relations.
And while funerals give people a snapshot
of the existing social landscape,
they're also occasions for acting on it
and changing its shape.
For example, by extending or withdrawing
the announcement of the death.
By succeeding or failing
to put on a good funeral.
By giving a small or a large
or a balanced contribution.
And most literally, by having sex,
which has the potential of
adding new life to the mix.
You will have noticed
that quite deliberately
I've led you away from the deceased
and the raw emotions that surround death.
I've done so to dispel the
common-sense assumption
that funerals are centrally
about death and grief
and to stress the point
that they are instead
largely about the gathering of crowds,
the expectations and
obligations that people have,
the appraisal and manipulation
of the social relations
in which they live.
Still, there is a dead body
at the center of it all,
a body that is fast decomposing
and that sooner or later must
be removed from the village,
taken to the cemetery,
and placed inside a tomb,
one of the many large enclosures
that are scattered around the sand dunes.
Once the body is buried,
an elder gives an explanatory speech
informing the other dead
of what has just happened.
He will then state that
the deceased has arrived
at the place where he is, plasy misy azy,
that nothing more is left to be done,
and that the crowd should
now disperse and go home.
The place where he or she is
is a misleadingly simple expression,
which in fact captures key aspects
of the existential transformation
brought about by death.
First note that this is not an expression
that is used to refer to the
journeys of living people.
Living people arrive here and there.
But they don't arrive at
the place where they are.
This makes sense,
because living people
are always on the move.
They leave, they arrive,
and then they move on.
Dead people, by contrast,
arrive inside their tombs,
and there they stay.
Second, the expression
draws attention to the fact
that the deceased arrives
at that specific place.
This tomb, not another one.
The choice of tomb is a
highly contentious affair.
This is because,
as people often told me
by way of explanation,
we can't cut up corpses into pieces.
In other words, the
deceased cannot be buried
in more than one tomb.
In theory, the choice of burial
is determined by strict rules,
which say that children's
bones belong to their mother,
unless the father acquires
them through ritual means.
In practice, lots of other factors
can feed into the final decision.
But the point is that,
when the decision is made, it is final.
The other point I want
to get across is this.
By placing the dead in
the place where they are,
the living create a radically
different social system
to the one they experience
when they are alive.
A system that lacks movement.
The dead arrive once and for all.
A system that is not open to negotiation.
The dead are either here or there.
A system of social relations
that are no longer a work in progress.
The dead are no longer
susceptible to the vagaries
of personal success and
failures, likes and dislikes,
distance and proximity, and so on.
From this perspective, it's
not surprising that the tombs,
which create these
alternative social systems,
are the most solid and lasting
structures that people build.
They used to be made of hard wood.
But once cement became
available in the '60s,
it soon became the material of choice,
because, as people say,
it's harder, more durable, unmovable.
Given the eerie stillness of corpses,
it's also not surprising that humans,
not just in Madagascar,
imagine the transition from life to death
as one that turns the movement
of life into immobility
and that removes the deceased
from the give and take
of human interactions, as we've just seen.
But humans, not just in Madagascar,
seem also prone to imagine something
a little more paradoxical,
namely that the social
systems created through death
are long lasting,
that they transcend the now on,
now off temporality of life.
For this to happen, however,
something has to give.
To put it in the most general terms,
the complexity of life has to be reduced.
The make up of the living person
has to be stripped down to its core.
Its essence has to be distilled
out of its many entanglements.
Only when this happens can
people begin to imagine
that the present is just
a replica of the past
and that the future will
be replica of the present.
In other words, they can
begin to imagine a system
that defies the passage of time.
I'm getting ahead of myself here,
so let me give you a couple of examples
to illustrate where I'm actually heading.
First, to the Veso.
The living, people say, have at least
eight ancestral lines of descent,
those of their eight great-grandparents.
In fact, they would have more
if they could remember them.
This means that in life,
each person is made up
of at least eight known ancestral parts,
which are unique to that person,
because only that person
and her full siblings
share that exact combination
of ancestral sources.
And so when that person dies,
that unique combination
also comes to an end.
But now imagine that
when that person dies,
she's buried inside a tomb
which contains only individuals
who share one of her eight
ancestral lines of descent.
In being placed there,
all of these individuals
had seven of their ancestral
lines stripped away,
thus being reduced to that
one that they have in common.
And so instead of being
unique combinations
that are here today and gone tomorrow,
they all become a replica of one another,
a continuation of that
one line of ancestry.
And so, in and through that,
people begin to imagine
a social grouping, what Veso
call one kind of people,
and anthropologists call
a unilineal descent group,
which has continuity through time.
Let me briefly turn to another example
to explain why death in particular
is such a powerful moment
for imagining this type of continuity.
For this I draw on the work
of anthropologist Martha Macintyre,
who has worked on the island of Tubetube,
one of the many islands
in the Massim region
of Papua New Guinea.
Here, as in many other
places in this region,
the social groupings
that last through time
are named matrilineages,
each made up of all the people
who can trace descent through
women to same female forebear.
People here have a folk
theory of the human body,
which says that bones are
made up of mother's milk,
which in turn is passed
from mother to daughter
down the generations.
The bones, in other words,
are quintessentially maternal substance,
which is sourced all the way up
to that founding female forebear.
This means that, quite literally,
the members of the matrilineage
share the exact same bones.
When it comes to bones,
they are one kind of people.
Each person just a replica
of one another through time.
But you can see the
problem with this idea.
Living people, kicking,
screaming, crawling babies
are not made of just bones.
To be viable persons, they
also need blood and flesh.
This soft and wobbly stuff,
the folk theory goes,
comes from the father.
And because one's father belongs
to a different matrilineage
from that of one's mother,
the marriage would
otherwise be incestuous,
the living person can only
ever be a mixed-up person,
an idiosyncratic combination
of these maternal bones
and those paternal blood and flesh.
A combination which,
like the eight ancestral
sources of the Veso,
is here today and gone tomorrow.
However, death resolves the problem.
Quite literally, the
process of decomposition
gets rid of the paternal stuff,
leaving just the maternal bones.
In addition, funerals consist
of complex transactions
in which goods that
represent flesh and blood
are sent back to the family
of the father of the deceased,
which originally
contributed to the person.
In this way, funerals are
thought to de-conceive the person
who has just died.
As a result of all this,
the people of Tubetube come to imagine
the essence of their matrilineage,
the bones in their pure
and unadulterated form,
as lasting through time,
originating in the ancestral
past and ready to be passed on
to the next generation.
This, then, is why death
is a source of celebration.
Sure, people are born,
reproduce, age, and die.
As individuals, they're here
today and gone tomorrow.
But death lends itself,
aided by a lot of ritual
and imaginative work,
to the creations of
systems of social relations
between the dead and the living,
between the living and the unborn,
which are long-lasting,
defy the passage of time,
and transcend death itself.
Let me conclude with a reflection
on the contemporary relevance
of what I've presented you today,
drawing on material from some
very far-off lands and people.
The reflection is that there
is an obvious dark side
to the celebration,
a dark side which my Veso friends,
I just state this without
having time to explain,
have found ways of overcoming.
But others have not.
The dark side is that, as
you might have noticed,
the process of creating
long-lasting social systems
based on kinds of people
that are nicely sorted
into separate tombs,
or based on the recovery
of pure and pristine bones,
gives rise to a kind of
essentialist thinking
that can very quickly
turn into ethnic hatred,
parochial nationalism,
and racial discrimination.
So that instead of building
walls around the dead,
we find walls sprouting up everywhere
to divide people who are believed
to be essentially like us
from people who are believed
to be essentially different from us.
And when this happens,
the celebration is over.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)
(energetic electronic music)
