I don\u2019t believe any one of you would like to live in a room with a murdered man in the cupboard, however well preserved chemically \u2013 even with a sunflower growing out of the top of his head. – John Ruskin<\/p>\n
Recently, Dan Sperber alerted us to ancedotal observations of grieving in non-human animals (see blog here<\/a> – by the way, \u201canecdotal\u201d is not derogatory here – our observations of grieving in humans are anecdotal too). Are the dead chimp\u2019s compagnons as baffled and shaken by their friend and relative\u2019s death as we would be?<\/p>\n We do not know.<\/p>\n In any case, bereavement in humans is difficult enough to describe and explain. This is an important topic for cognition and culture for many reasons – because it is of obvious interest to all human beings, because it is universal, because it is seemingly framed in such different ways in different places, and because the psychology is not well understood so far.<\/p>\n This used to be a topos for cultural anthropologists, who charted the many similarities in beliefs about death, and even more strikingly, the similarities in people\u2019s ritualization of behaviour around death.<\/p>\n The tradition of condidering the relevant psychological and social dynamics runs from Robert Hertz [1], to a collection edited by Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry [2]. As with other important topics to do with cognition and recurrent features of human cultures, this was then more or less abandoned by mainstream cultural anthropologists.<\/p>\n There is no general human response to death, or mortality, as such. Indeed, our reactions vary from great pleasure (at an enemy\u2019s demise in battle, at a prey\u2019s final throes) to polite indifference (when reading most obituaries in the papers) to excruciating psychic pain (at the loss of a loved one). Evolutionary considerations would concur that there is no reason we should react to all mortality in the same way, since not all instances of death affect our fitness in the same way. We and other predators should derive positive rewards from our prey\u2019s death, but we and other social animals should experience an ally\u2019s death as a personal loss, which is indeed what we call it.<\/p>\n All this is fine, but probably not sufficient to explain the specific processes engaged in bereavement. To cultural anthropologists, the main question is, Why do people tend to engage in ritualized behavior following the death of a group member? People do all sorts of amazing things with corpses, and generally do them in a socially acquired, normative manner. For early sociologists like Hertz, this was because the loss affected \u201cthe group\u201d and therefore had to be handled though \u201ccollective representations\u201d. Burials were a rite of passage to turn corpses into ancestors. But we do not believe in group intentionality or collective representations anymore, and the rite of passage is no explanation, since it itself is what we should try to explain. By the same token, let\u2019s don\u2019t say that these ritualized sequences provide solace or closure – these are question-begging labels, not proper explanations. What makes prescriptions of ritualized behavior attention-grabbing and compelling in these particular circumstances?<\/p>\n There is no straightforward answer to this, which is not too surprising as we have only a very rudimentary understanding of ritualized behavior in general (see this<\/a> for a general survey and reasons why most anthropological \u201ctheories of ritual\u201d are unsatisfactory). Moreover, we know surprisingly little about the cognitive processes triggered by the death of a friend or relative or acquaintance. Elsewhere I speculated that such events may throw a spanner in the works of our evolved cognitive systems. The main idea was this. The animacy components of death are early developed and result, as Clark Barrett demonstrated<\/a>, from our understanding of predator-prey interaction. Most preschoolers find death unproblematic, if framed as the result of predation. In this sense our animacy systems have no trouble inferring that the corpse has no thoughts or sensations, does not move by itself, does not require food, and that these are permanent states. However, it is also clear that our social interaction systems (however many and different they are) are not hindered by physical constraints. We have rich and complex social interaction with imaginary friends, absent lovers, fictional characters or historical heroes, and some people add imagined agents like spirits and gods to the list. Part of the oddity and fascination of corpses – note that ritualized behaviors are overwhelmingly about what to do with the corpse – may stem from this strange situation in which different mental systems produce incompatible assumptions about the same object. In this sense a corpse would seem to constitute a rare case of a genuinely counter-intuitive physical object, about which different systems undermine each other\u2019s assumptions. But this is just speculation.<\/p>\n