ABSTRACT
The subject of death has a perennial attraction for the human mind.1 There is no known society, historical or contemporary, that has not ritualized death, made it a subject of mythology and folklore, speculated on its origins and its finality and tried to contain its disruptive effect on meaning in human life. No wonder philosophers have characterized human societies as communities in the face of death and described social reality as constantly threatened by lurking irrealities.2 In the anthropological and sociological traditions, Durkheim (1947) gave special importance to piacular rituals as providing the means for healing the wound inflicted upon a community by the death of one of its members. Malinowski (1948) characterized death as the final and supreme crisis of life and found in it an important source of religion. Nozick summarized the problem posed by death in the following words: ‘Granting that life ending in death is in tension, at least with our existence having meaning, we have not yet isolated why this is so.’ (Nozick 1981:581).
