ABSTRACT
Multiple forms of correspondence and relation are established at various levels among the significative structures and fields pertaining to the human body, the life milieu and social reality. These links reveal a will to maintain a form of equivalence or equilibrium among these associated fields. Funerary rites offer a privileged opportunity for remobilising ties that have been in part undone by a death. The effects of a death can be felt at all levels. They are countered primarily by focusing attention, on the one hand, to the boundaries and openings belonging to the surrounding space and the human body, and on the other, to the dialectic of contamination through death as well as of repulsion of this contamination away from the group of survivors. Dying constitutes the dissolution of the social person, and as such it endangers both the nuclear family and the domestic unit.
