Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased: From Corpse to Concept

William W. McCorkle, Jr.

ISBN 10: 1433110105 / ISBN 13: 9781433110108

Published by Peter Lang Publishing, 2010

About this Item

Crisp, apparently unread copy. 23 cm. 182 pages. Additional info or photos on request. Ships in sturdy cardboard packaging, with tracking and insurance.

Seller Inventory # 14042

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased: From Corpse to Concept
• Publisher: Peter Lang Publishing
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1433110105
• ISBN 13: 9781433110108
• Binding: Softcover
• Condition: FINE
• Weight: 415 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Sociology & Anthropology

About this title

Synopsis

Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased traces mortuary behavior from the early fossil record to modern religious contexts in diverse cultural settings. By using archival and ethnographic evidence from Buddhist traditions, the author highlights the disparity between doctrines that contradict actual practices performed by Buddhists themselves. By appealing to the evolved cognitive architecture of human minds, this book argues that ritualized disposal behavior is the by-product of mental systems designed to handle living people. Due to complex social intelligence, humans are compelled to handle dead people in ritualized behaviors and to represent them in counterintuitive ways. The author also examines the professional religious guilds that have taken advantage of these ritualized compulsions over the last several thousand years, by giving and controlling the meanings behind these actions. Furthermore, experimental evidence is given to support this hypothesis, providing the first mature cognitive and evolutionary theory for mortuary behavior by humans.

About the Author

The Author: William W. McCorkle, Jr. is an evolutionary and cognitive anthropologist interested in ritual, language, and communication. He earned his Ph.D. from the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University in Belfast, one of the world’s premiere centers for research on cognition, culture, and religion. He has conducted fieldwork in India and Japan and devised original experiments to test his theory on the ritualized burial of dead bodies by humans. He regularly gives papers and presentations internationally on ritual and human behavior. Most recently, he has served as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri.