Death Is the Mother of Culture (pt. 1)

January 19, 2008

On occasion we find a book that is worth a series of posts. Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt by Jan Assman is one such book, due to its implications for the study of culture in general. The book sets death as the primary entrance to a culture: "death is the origin and the center of culture" [1]. That might get no argument when it comes to studying ancient Egyptian religion, profuse with mortuary texts and ruins, but Assman wants to set this as a central concern in the study of all cultures: "I thus pose... the question of whether and in what sense death and the way a culture articulates it, treats it, and copes with it might perhaps not constitute the center of the consciousness of that culture..." [2]. In other words death will be at the center of every culture and the individual elements of a culture can to some degree be understood through it.

Assman distinguishes between two visions of the relationship between death and culture. The first is the notion that death must be forgotten in order to live.. and culture therefore as a tool whereby human beings invent themselves. The second recognizes the imposing reality of death and uses culture as a structure built to protect itself from the bleak knowledge of what is to come. Culture (and religion) is therefore an immense and energy-consuming path to security from an excess of knowledge. The multiplicity of cultural paths and practices can therefore be analyzed from the standpoint of death. This is the point that Assman would like to prove as he moves through ancient Egyptian responses to death.

I am not sure death deserves this much credit for culture creation. It makes culture into a more heady and conscious matter than I think it deserves. Clifford Geertz writing on the cockfight in Bali calls attention to the way that event connects to the deepest cultural values of the Balinese.. and I do not see why it would be important to introduce death into a matter that seems to embody social hierarchy and status. As humans we are alive and form patterns of meaning.. and yes, some of that meaning will help individuals overcome the paralyzing fear of death.. but culture works irrespective of death (thus we even see evidence of a kind of proto-culture among animals that have no consciousness of death).

None of this takes away from Assman's success at demonstrating how death was a central notion that drove Egyptian culture. He is successful as no one else in pointing out how Egyptian wisdom literature and cultural values are tied organically to the ideas expressed in mortuary texts and rituals. I would be inclined to say that different cultures find different centers of gravity.. leading values and metaphors. Egypt happens to have taken up the notion of death with a steady determination. I have no problem with the idea that the constellation of ideas revolving around death could be insightful with respect to ancient Egyptian culture. I am just not sure if that can be applied to all cultures.