ABSTRACT
Death has occupied anthropological thinking from the discipline's nineteenth-century origin, and one key theoretical factor has concerned the different emphases given to social and to psychological dimensions of life. Durkheim's contribution to the study of death lay firmly in his data-informed sociological study Suicide, which created a set of ideal-types, or characteristic forms, of suicide depending upon the strength or weakness of the bond between individual and society. Marcel Mauss not only collaborated with Henri Hubert in a book on sacrifice which offers its own view of death, and published his own influential study of gift theory, but he also wrote some brief research-style notes on death that include a focus on how people may die 'because they know or believe that they are going to die'. Metcalf and Huntington are contemporary anthropologists notable for their use of Hertz and for their own descriptive and analytical studies of some later twentieth-century funerary rites in the United States.
