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After the reception, the two secretly take their leave and depart for a honeymoon. The marriage ceremony has lasted for part of a single day, but it has been a day filled with sentiment and feeling. Death, too, continues to issue a ceremonial call. The dead person has been embalmed, prepared, and dressed for final disposal by a professional mortician. He is viewed at a wake at which mourners, friends and relatives renew old relationships. It is a time for reminiscence, for recounting the past for tears and for grief. A clergyman performs a funeral service. he reviews the life of the individual, of his place in the lives of the others, and of his past gifts to the living. Blessings are intoned, and prayers for the repose of the soul uttered. A motorized procession in a rented limousine carries the corpse to the cemetery. Sometimes the procession passes by the house of the dead man for the last time before proceeding to the cemetery. At the grave, the clergyman recites more prayers. Before the coffin is lowered, members of the family strew flowers on the coffin. After the service, the procession returns, and mourners, friends and neighbors partake of a communal repast. Although we continue to fulfill our obligations when death strikes, our involvement is short-lived unless we are mourners. When the funeral service is over, the ritual support ends and the bereaved are left to their private agonies. Kimball laments that people have to accomplish their transitions alone with private symbols. Once the funeral is over, the guests leave. They no longer care to dwell upon death. While we are not indifferent to death, as some charge, neither do we invest ourselves so deeply as in the past. By distancing early from the mourners, we banish the memory of the dead, adding to the burden of the bereaved. What effect this shrinking commitment will have on us as people remains to be seen. Perhaps a greater danger lies in our indifference to life. An inability or an unwillingness to resolve problems of mass starvation, malnutrition and inadequate health care all over the world will test our minds, wills, and souls in the years to come. Violence and war, the proliferation of weapons of destruction, of megaton bombs and Saturday night specials promises a future of blood and misery. Wallace predicts the eventual displacement of supernaturalism by a new, nontheistic, ethical theology which centers on man during his stay on earth. Ritual will not disappear, but will be transformed toward the secular. What is needed is to orient this ritual around an ideology which reasserts the value of human life. FOOTNOTES 1. “Collective Representations of Death” is one of the two Hertz essays in Death and the Right Hand. In “The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand,” Hertz attributes the primacy of the right hand to social cause. 2. Fossil skulls of Peking Man were found in Choukoutien, badly shattered and fragmented. Some scholars suppose these were the results of cannibalistic behavior. Shapiro denies this allegation. He ascribes the broken and fragmented bones to crushing by rocks and layers of debris which fell on the bones from the ceilings of caves (Shapiro: 84-85). 3. The spearmasters are a hereditary clan of priests among the Kinka of the Sudan. Ritual murder of these spearmasters constitutes the central rite of Kinka religion (Douglas:209) 4. Super Bowl Sunday is a probable future addition to the lexicon of American English. There it will join Easter Sunday and Palm Sunday as very special days. REFERENCES CITED Cohen, Ronald 1967 The Kanuri of Bornu. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Diamond, Stanley 1974 In search of the Primitive. New Brunswick: Transaction Books. Douglas, Mary 1966 Purity and Danger. Baltimore: Penguin Books. Faron, Louis C. 1967 “Death and Fer The research includes an overview of the environmental impacts of burial and cremation practices and the benefits of green burials. Additionally, the study investigates why green burial has not been more widely implemented and offers insight to increase the adoption of this alternative within the United States. A mixed-methods approach of individual interviews and a survey with consumers was utilized. The goals were to identify the awareness, perceptions, attitudes, and reported behaviors of adult consumers regarding their knowledge of green and traditional funeral practices and to gain an understanding of decision making when dealing with death. Interview findings indicate that there was little to no awareness of green burials. However, exposure to the concept raised interest. Additionally, findings indicated that in the face of grief and loss, the environmental impact of traditional practices of burial and cremation was not considered. A positive finding supporting the adoption of green burials was confirmed by survey respondents universally reporting that they would consider a green burial after exposure to the concept. Together, these findings suggest that raising awareness and educating consumers of this alternative to traditional methods could lead to increased adoption of green burials within the United States. GREEN BURIAL: THE LAST FOOTPRINT 6 Acknowledgments “Always believe that the impossible is possible.” – Selena Quintanilla Never in a million years would I have thought that I would have completed and earned a Master’s degree in my life. Getting my education
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