Not Just Dead Meat: An Evolutionary Account of Corpse Treatment in Mortuary Rituals

Abstract

Comparing mortuary rituals across 57 representative cultures extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, this paper demonstrates that kin of the deceased engage in behaviours to prepare the deceased for disposal that entail close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse. At first glance, such practices are costly and lack obvious payoffs. Building on prior functionalist approaches, we present an explanation of corpse treatment that takes account of the unique adaptive challenges entailed by the death of a loved one. We propose that intimate contact with the corpse provides the bereaved with extensive veridical cues of death, thereby facilitating acceleration of a grieving process that serves to recategorize the deceased as no longer a relationship partner, opening the door to relationship replacement and a return to social functioning. The benefits of exposure to such cues are tempered by the costs of exposure to cues of disease risk, a balance that in part explains the relative rarity of highly invasive mortuary practices that exacerbate the latter factor. We conclude by discussing implications of our model for contemporary mortuary practices in the developed world.

Death among primates: a critical review of non‐human primate interactions towards their dead and dying

“…Noting the extensive exposure to death cues through visual and physical contact directed at corpses across human cultures, White, Marin & Fessler () propose that mourning rituals serve an evolutionarily selected purpose. The death of a group member may not only be detrimental to immediate family by decreasing inclusive fitness but would also impact the wider group.…”

“…Loss of a social partner can negatively impact fitness in the living and promote a shift in the hierarchical order. Assuming that primates can extract valuable albeit limited information from dead conspecifics ( sensu Cronin et al , ; White et al , ), there are indirect evolutionary benefits to thanatological responses. In the context of a social group, we suggest interactions with the dead: ( i ) promote more rapid re‐categorisation from living to dead; ( ii ) decrease costly vigilance/caregiving behaviours; ( iii ) are crucial to the management of grieving responses; ( iv ) update individual position in the group hierarchy; and ( v ) accelerate the formation of new social bonds.…”

The kiss of death: three tests of the relationship between disease threat and ritualized physical contact within traditional cultures

“…Rather than reflecting an absence of disease risk, the prevalence of intimate corpse contact by kin during mortuary rituals is likely explicable in terms of a competing selection pressure, namely the benefits of abbreviating bereavement, a debilitating state, by accelerating the cognitive reclassification from relationship partner to non-agent that is thought to be a central component of grief (White et al 2015). If the advantages to kin -and to society at large -of truncating bereavement generally outweigh the costs of pathogen exposure, and if intimate contact with the corpse facilitates this, then such practices will be relatively ubiquitous, and thus will not reflect local pathogen prevalence; this then may explain our null result in Test 3.…”

Hominin evolutionary thanatology from the mortuary to funerary realm: the palaeoanthropological bridge between chemistry and culture

“…Among small-scale societies, the preparation of the dead for disposal, which entails close and often prolonged contact with the contaminating corpse, is strikingly similar among 57 representative groups recorded in the Human Relations Area Files [57]. As these activities function, in part, to confirm that death has occurred, they can be seen as a cultural elaboration of morbidity.…”