Human history has been plagued by the need to stave off death, as well as many ideas about how to heal an ailing body. When considering the paths to physical and mental health, it is important to acknowledge that there are many approaches and ideas, and though they may be different, they are not more or less valid than other approaches. Below is an amalgamation of critical abstracts describing articles that looked at the interactions between medicine, death, the body, and human interaction with the environment in attempts to prevent what is currently the inevitable.
As this can be taken as a darker subject, here is a lighthearted video on the many stupid ways people can die, followed by a message about train safety.
While it may be difficult to establish the connection between corporeal healing, death and cryogenics, and the environment, I believe they do all interact. It becomes a war between culture and nature, at least as how most people would define the two terms. The idea is to push back and ultimately prevent a natural process, which involves the ecology of the body. There is also the issue of what is done with the body post-mortem, which continues to affect the ecology of the body as well as in some ways divide what is considered natural and what is cultural.
Death and Organ Transplant
In Margaret Lock’s Death in Technological Time: Locating the End of Meaningful Life, the question of when life ends is discussed through the lens of both North American (the stereotypical “Western” culture) and Japan. The author collected recent medical, philosophical, and media publications as her data. Lock discusses the reported cases of people who were pronounced dead by medical professionals and who later “came back to life,” which leads into her discussion of clarifying the concept of death and when exactly life ends. She covers briefly the history of medical advancements such as artificial respiration and organ transplant, and though her main concern is the point where we can determine a person has died, Lock presents a series of dichotomies in her paper. There is the division between Japan, which opposes organ transplantation in most cases and had declared brain death to not equal legal death, as well as that we cannot assign death to a measureable point in tie as it is a social process, and the North American region which is used to represent the “Western” point of view, a view that allows organ transplants and seeks to define a point of death, be it the death of the neocortex or the “whole brain” death. Lock also presents the division of culture and nature, insisting “culture has intruded into nature yet again in the guise of science.” This discussion is interesting because it introduces cultural differences in how death occurs, who declares death, whether it is an individual declaring death or a social consensus. The argument centers around the body and the perception of where a person’s “soul” or “center” is, which becomes a serious point of contention in cases of brain dead patients being used for organ donation.
Above: A brief reminder.
The next abstract looks at how Death is treated in America, namely how it is feared and reviled.
Death in America
Elizabeth J. Emerick in her article Death and the Corpse: An Analysis of the Treatment of Death and Dead Bodies in Contemporary American Society provides not only an analysis of how American culture treats the concept of death and the actual dead body, but details regarding the appearance of the body as it dies and post-mortem. Through her research doing interviews and reading previous discussions on death and the human corpse, Emerick has found that medicine is for Americans a way to harness death- though through our increased medical knowledge, we also now know exactly what happens to a body throughout aging, dying, and decaying. Signs of aging are a constant reminder, and the signs that death is approaching and cannot be stopped cause a sense of anxiety and a loss of control. She goes on to discuss the idea that American’s have made dying more difficult now- declaring death used to be a simple matter of a lack of a pulse and not breathing, but now if one vital organ still functions, a person is not dead. Physically, after a person dies, the decomposition if they are not embalmed or entombed, starts after a few days and moves beyond the sensibilities of most people. Americans fear the corpse; the mortal remains of their departed loved ones- the body that cannot care for itself frightens us according to Emerick. Cadavers represent something else as well for Americans: the failure to stop death as a society. According to Emerick, our biggest fears are the unknown and the uncontrollable, both of which are manifested in death.
Burial practices are some of the most varied cultural practices around the world. From the Tibetan Sky Burial to the Turning of the Bones in the Philippines, humans have created a variety of ways to cope with the loss of loved ones (and not so loved ones). The abstract that follows the video below focuses on the funerary practices of the Cashinahua of Western Amazonia, and the removal of the spirit of the recently deceased.
The video linked in is from the YouTube channel Ask a Mortician, and it covers the idea of forever corpses for educational purposes (though how they got those bodies is not always legal).
Consuming Pity
In Consuming Pity: The Production of Death Among the Cashinahua, an ethnography by Cecilia McCallum, the funerary practices of the Western Amazonia Cashinahua. The author uses not only interviews she conducted with the Cashinahua, but also cites academic papers books when discussing the perceptions of the body when alive and while dying. The article presents information about Melanesian people that could be cut down, and there are times when the author herself is unsure of the reasons behind behaviors and thus speculates. According to McCallum, the Cashinahua percieve death as a process brought about by human and cosmic agencies- with gender playing an important part in how the deceased moves into the afterlife and what their funerary practices will be. McCallum also discusses the difference between the eye soul (or the “true soul”) and the body soul. In moving into the afterlife, men’s’ true souls must confront hostile spirits and spirit monsters, ultimately reaching the heavens where they are “transformed into kin through the consumption of vegetable foods”, while women’s souls are taken to the heavens by their dead kin, and, like the men, they take an Inka (god) spouse (447). To ensure that the souls leave the village, the Cashinahua go through rituals, severing the ties between the soul and the physical world. One such ritual, no longer practiced, is endocannibalism, or the eating of one’s kin. It was restricted to certain subsets of the civilization, and it took place in two stages: the consumption of the flesh and the consumption of the bones, the first to ensure the body soul left and the second to ensure the eye soul left. Throughout the article, there is the idea of gender perceptions influencing the deaths and afterlives of Cashinahua people, and the idea of consuming the body to aid the release of the souls.
Moving beyond consumption of the body and the acceptance of death with an afterlife, the next abstract looks at what Russian Secularists are doing to stave off death in the search for immortality. There are many ways for people to hunt for immortality, through religion, cryogenics, attempts at making a Frankenstein monster, but there is a question that no one seems to be asking regarding those who accept death as part of their natural life cycle: namely, where are all the dead bodies at? The video below, also from Ask a Mortician, looks at that vital question.
Cryogenics, Transhumanists, and the Russian Orthodox Church
In Anya Bernstein’s Freeze, die, come to life: The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia, she presents the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian Orthodox Church. Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing a decline in secularism, which has lead the Orthodox Church to push against the transhumanist movement that seeks to use technology to achieve immortality. Bernstein conducted interviews with cryogenicists and Dmitry Itskov (head of the Avatar Project, which aims to one day forgo the need for physical bodies all together), translated Nikolai Federov (who had the ultimate goal of using technology to overcome death and resurrect the dead), Alexander Bogdanov (who believed blood transfusions were the way to immortality and would create a “physiological collectivism” where people’s corporeal properties would be shared), and interviews with other Russian transhumanists and Russian Orthodox Church members. Her research delves into not only the history of transhumanism, but also the philosophy behind separating the brain and the body, as many of the transhumanists believe that what makes a person who they are is their brain. Her article argues “the physical body is not all that there is to the human,” and the way to immortality is not divided only between science and church, but between cryogenics, artificial bodies, blood transfusions, and the resurrection of those long dead. The paths to immortality are all rooted in the body, and the arguments against these paths center themselves in the culture/nature debate- arguing that it is unnatural and against God’s plan to even attempt eternal life.
Moving into health, the final abstract for this page looks at the current medical standard for a neutral body- the stand in for everyone in a population. It’s a healthy white male. Not very surprising. The abstract discusses some of the problems with using a healthy white male for a basis of normativity as it pertains to sleep patterns.
Whiteness of Sleep
Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States, written by Matthew Wolf-Meyer, is an analysis of the use of white bodies as the medical (and to a certain extent, the social) standard. Wolf-Meyer conducted both ethnographic and archival research in the Mid-West on sleep clinics and people suffering from sleep disorders, and what he found was that “whiteness” is no longer about the body, but the potential of the body. When Wolf-Meyer speaks of whiteness, he means the body that is orderly, benign, and unexceptional. Sleep patterns around the world vary, but in the United States, there is a set pattern for sleep that everyone is expected to follow- namely eight hours of sleep all at once, as opposed to the eight hours of sleep with a period of wakefulness in between that we had prior to the Industrial Revolution. People with sleep disorders are characterized as having a non-normative sleep schedule, which can severely impact their lives. They must rearrange their disordered sleep schedules into the orderly one that the rest of society follows, and in Wolf-Meyer’s analysis of sleep aid and sleep disorder treatment advertisements, he found that often the white body is the representative of obtaining orderly sleep. Advertisements using predominately white women to sell their sleep aid product are combined with a system that uses a healthy white male as the default human, and notes that racially marked hereditary problems are exclusively the burden of the non-white body.
Though this is a morbid topic, it is important to remember that death is a part of life, and at the moment it is unavoidable. When in doubt, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.