Abstract
Treatment of the body after death varies considerably around the world, with death as a personal and intimate event being the common practice for many contemporary, non-Western cultures. The perception of death as disconcerting and toxic is a Westernized concept, and relatively recent within the span of humanity’s cognitive ability to recognize death and its meaning. Perceiving death as a form of corruption has been a part of American culture since the late eighteenth century when people began to physically and mentally separate themselves from death and its attributes though action, consolation, ritual, and even word choice. Schillace (2015), in discussing current American perceptions of death, writes: “We find ourselves in a culture of opposites: bent on living forever, but committed to the disposable nature of absolutely everything else” (Schillace, 2015, p. 5). It is the denial of our temporary time as animated bodies that, some argue, leads to negative perceptions of death and the dead.
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Zejdlik, K., Burke, S.E. (2019). The Evolution of American Perspectives Concerning Treatment of the Dead and the Role of Human Decomposition Facilities. In: Shackelford, T.K., Zeigler-Hill, V. (eds) Evolutionary Perspectives on Death. Evolutionary Psychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25466-7_9
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