From the Dead to the Living: Death as Transactions and Re‐negotiations

Abstract

Apart from eschatological aspects, death is more important for the living than the dead. It is argued that funerals are one of the most important settings for recreating society through the re-establishment of alliances. When an important person dies, his or her former social relations and alliances come to an end and have to be re-established from a societal point of view. At funerals not only are gifts given to the deceased, but it is equally important that the ritual participants make new alliances and re-negotiate old ones by the exchange of gifts. Thus, the distributions of artefacts, or the construction of different funeral monuments, are here seen as the outcome of such transactions. By emphasising transactions and re-negotiations of alliances in different funerals we argue that the distribution of prestige goods in Europe is not only part of trade or warfare. Exchange of gifts and prestige items as part of reciprocal relations was crucial in the structuring of inter-regional areas. Funerals were such occasions where the descendants and the living could legitimate future hierarchies by transferring the deceased's social status and power to themselves by re-negotiating former alliances and creating new ones.

Unity and Diversity in the European Iron Age: Out of the Mists, Some Clarity?

“…Olivier (1999) has taken an embodied approach to Hallstatt burial mounds, analyzing them as a series of time-embedded events experienced by the deceased and the living. This approach also has been used in Scandinavia (Oestigaard 1999;Oestigaard and Goldhahn 2006), where burial within an urn or a mound, usually considered as only a receptacle, might have symbolized a whole sequence of embodied events representing the personhood of the deceased that may have been interlocked in the minds of the peers who carried out their mortuary treatment. Hill (1997) investigates the Romanization of the body through the incorporation of a foreign hygiene and toilet ritual into British life and the institutionalization of Roman ways of presenting the self, not only among some elite group but across a wide spectrum of social classes and contexts.…”

Bronze Age ‘Herostrats’: Ritual, Political, and Domestic Economies in Early Bronze Age Denmark

“…In other regions the picture is less clear-cut. In the more loamy eastern parts, the landscape impact is less distinct, and there may have been an increased emphasis on cereals in some regions (Odgaard 2006). This development may be interpreted in different ways.…”

“…In other areas there was not the same scarcity of timber, but it is a general feature of pollen diagrams throughout south Scandinavia that, within the settled areas, the landscape generally became more open and more heavily grassed with less availability of solid building timber (Odgaard 2006).…”

Making markets with the dead: Residential burial among theYoruba

“…Furthermore, some forms of relationships and beliefs are navigated, materialised, and transformed through consumption and related practices in death negotiations, for instance, transactions and renegotiations (Oestigaard & Goldhahn, ), sentiments of affinity (Schiller, ), emotional and physical proximity (King, ), the veneration of ancestors (McAnany, ), rites and rituals (Bonsu & Belk, ), and meaning making (Neimeyer, ). The study is thus conducted against the background of the consumption culture theory—referred to as a “family of theoretical perspectives that address the dynamic relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace, and cultural meanings” (Arnould & Thompson, , p. 868).…”