How the Other Half Dies

FUNERAL CUSTOMS THE WORLD OVER (973 pp.)--Robert Habenstein and William Lamers--Bulfin Printers ($12).

Man is a funereal animal. For reasons best known to his witch doctors (sometimes also called head shrinkers) he often shows less interest in the living than he does in the dead. In this ponderous but morbidly fascinating volume--a sequel to that unintentionally hilarious masterpiece of exequial scholarship, The History of American Funeral Directing (TIME, Oct.

24, 1955)--Sociologist Robert Habenstein and Historian William Lamers have attempted to describe for U.S. readers how the other half dies.

In most parts of the world, the authors report, death gives warning of its approach. Boards creak, bushes rustle, dogs howl. In Poland, according to one old superstition, when a man discovers a white spot underneath the nail of the little finger, left hand, he knows he's had it. When death is near, most societies require the presence of close relatives and a religious functionary. In Tibet, a lama must be there to pluck a hair of the dying man's head so that the soul can escape through the root-hole. In Turkey, a hoca (holy man) wets the dying man's throat with water--if a soul gets too thirsty as it climbs the hill of eternity, it will surely sell itself to the Devil for a cooling drink, In Yucatan, on the other hand, the Chan Kom tribesmen beat the dying with a rope and urge them to get on with it.

Prayer by the Squirt. When life is gone, mourning begins. Its variations are endless. Until recently, the Dakota Indians slashed themselves with knives, sometimes even killed themselves in transports of bereavement. The Ovimbundu simply wear a leather thong on the left wrist.

When a king dies, the Buganda of Uganda raditionally slaughter all his wives--along with hundreds of ordinary tribesmen--to keep the old boy company. Poles abstain from sewing, for fear of pricking the soul of the departed. Many Jews, after the death of a close relative, abstain from sexual intercourse for seven days.

Mongols abstain from marrying for three years. Moslems may call in a professional prayer artist, who prays into an airtight goatskin until he has blown it squeaky-full of airy prayer, which he sells at so much a squirt.

In the midst of such goings on, the body is prepared for burial. In many societies the big toes of the corpse, or sometimes the ankles, are tied together, usually in order to keep the spirit of the dead from wandering around the house. Mongols anoint the forehead of the corpse with butter and then place a yellow willow leaf upon the same spot 72 times. The Buganda remove the intestines from the body, wash them in a kind of beer and save the beer, which is then imbibed by the dead man's widows. In most societies some sort of death dress is provided, but seldom, except in the most primitive tribes, and in the U.S., is the face of the corpse painted to drive away the "evil spirits"--namely, the fears of the living in the presence of the dead.

Dead Man's Door. The celebration of the funeral usually begins with some sort of dance, drama or procession. The Dahomeans of West Africa dance with the corpse before they throw it in the grave.

In Panama, the Cuna Indians recite from memory a 20-hour epic. In Umbria, Italy, when the funeral procession begins, the corpse leaves the house by the "dead man's door," a special exit never used for other purposes. In Bali, as in Burma, some of the floats and effigies paraded to the burning ground are so huge that 75 men are required to carry them. In Rumania, at the funeral of a girl of marriageable age, a young man volunteers to be her bridegroom, and he walks with her to the grave as if to the altar.

Burial customs defy enumeration.

Earth burial is most common, and often most bizarre. The Jivaro of Peru and Ecuador sit the dead man, head in hands, on a bench, and bury him beneath the floor of his own home, which is then abandoned. The Cuna people dig deep pits, roof them over and bury their dead in hammocks swinging gently underground. Air burial is widespread. The Sioux have been known to bury their dead in trees. In Tibet, the corpse is chopped up and tossed to the vultures.

In Ghana, if a child should die before it is nine days old, the Fanti simply stuff its remains in a pot and throw it on the trash heap--they take the child's hasty departure as an insult and feel no obligation to respect the departed. Among Orthodox Jews, when two dead men arrive for burial at a cemetery, the more learned of the two, according to Talmudic prescription, must be buried first. In the U.S. Northwest and British Columbia, the Salish Indians dispose of their dead by rolling an avalanche over them. In China, since the Communists took power, thousands of cemeteries have been plowed up and sown to crops. The bones, allegedly removed for reburial, were probably ground up for fertilizer.

Buried Alive. The burial of the body, or even a funeral feast, does not necessarily conclude the obsequies. In parts of Sumatra, bones are dug up and given an annual airing. In Rumania, bones are sometimes dug up after three, five or seven years, taken to church, blessed, and reburied with full rites. And among the Azande, a Congo tribe, graves are opened for less innocent purposes. Tribesmen are apparently subject to dreams in which the dead demand a human sacrifice, and when the tribal oracle approves such a dream, a victim is found, his legs are broken, and he is buried alive.

Four and a half pounds of such grave information, adorned with floral displays of sociological prose ("Grieving is a sense of reaction with motor implications"), are assembled in this handy encyclopedia of death. Financed by the National Funeral Directors Association, the book may indeed make one of the more significant contributions to the U.S. death industry since the invention of Frederick & Trump's Corpse Cooler. It goes a long way toward reconciling its readers to the sentimental (and expensive) horrors of the usual U.S. funeral. The rest of the world, it seems, is not much better off.

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