ABSTRACT
This passage was written in 1907, in Hertz’ celebrated Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death to use the title of the 1960 English translation. Here, encapsulated in this passage, we find the familiar elements of human mortuary activity that seem familiar to us and that separate us from the rest of the animal world. There are a number of elements to this: a soul; a special language with which we refer to death and its social context; the concept of another world that we cannot see or do not experience directly; forefathers who still possess social agency despite being biologically dead; care and concerns for the correct burial of the dead; obligations of a moral nature that require and define action; and special duties that modify the usual patterns of life as formal responses to death, held for certain periods, all pertaining to a collective representation. There should be no doubt that several of these elements are symbolic in nature, that is, they refer to and express shared concepts. In this case these concepts straddle the real and imaginary world, and reflect the perpetuation of complex cosmological beliefs mediated through society and its social agents.
