Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased: From Corpse to Concept (Toronto Studies in Religion)

"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."--Jacket. «William W. McCorkle, Jr. makes a significant contribution to the study of mortuary ritual. ‘Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased’ should be essential reading for those interested in explaining this remarkable aspect of human behavior.» (Harvey Whitehouse, Professor of Social Anthropology, Fellow of Magdalen College, University of Oxford) «In this exciting, controversial, and scholarly work, William W. McCorkle, Jr. combines a sophisticated historical knowledge of Buddhism with insights from cognitive and evolutionary psychology, as well as ethnography, to make sense of the widespread practice among humans to ritually dispose of dead bodies in bizarre and unexpected ways. McCorkle punctures claims that Buddhism ignores such practices by producing evidence to the contrary. This book is not only a good read but represents an important moment in the continually developing cognitive science of religion.» (E. Thomas Lawson, Editor, ‘Journal of Cognition and Culture’) «William W. McCorkle, Jr. stands firmly in the excellent tradition of reading Buddhist texts with the same kind of historical-critical acumen developed in dispassionate Biblical studies. Furthermore, he pays more attention to actual behavior than to proclaimed beliefs. It turns out that even among those Buddhists who explicitly reject supernatural assumptions connected with death and the dead, their behavior is steeped in superstitious behavior and references to superhuman and non-natural agents. McCorkle adds a much-needed corrective to a long history of scholarship that ideologically reproduces religious rhetoric and ignores actual behavior.» (Armin W. Geertz, Faculty of Theology, Aarhus University) «‘Ritualizing the Disposal of the Deceased’ is an outstanding contribution to our growing understanding of why humans engage in what are, from an evolutionary perspective, costly and seemingly useless behaviors that we call ‘religion’. William W. McCorkle, Jr. offers a persuasive case that like many recurrent features of religion the ritual disposal of dead bodies is a by-product of ordinary species-wide cognition that evolved to handle social interactions with living agents. This book is thus an excellent example of how refreshing and fruitful it is to shift the focus away from trying to interpret what rituals and other features of religion might mean to why we do them. And this is no arm-chair anthropology. McCorkle combines the best of both methodological worlds – cross-cultural data acquisition through on the ground fieldwork and controlled laboratory experiments. This enables him to test the very theory that he argues best explains what he found in the field. This is interdisciplinary scholarship at its best.» (D. Jason Slone, Author of ‘Theological Incorrectness: Why Religious People Believe What They Shouldn’t’) Contents Acknowledgments ix Technical Notes xiii Illustrations xv Part One: The Culture of Death Chapter One. Hanging Out with Dead People 3 Disposal of Dead Bodies: A Cultural Phenomenon 4 Ritualized Disposal of Corpses 6 The Religious Context 11 Summary 19 Chapter Two. Manufacturing Buddhism 21 The Generation of a World Religion 22 Material Culture and Mistaken Identities 26 Are Religious Experts Really That Different from the Laity? 29 Summary 31 Part Two: Buddhalogical Incorrectness Chapter Three. Lies, Damn Lies, and Buddhist Texts 35 Bones, Stones, and Schopen’s Monks 36 The Myth of the Mahāyāna 38 Ghosts, Buddhist Gods, and Globalization 40 The Histories of Buddhism 41 Summary 42 Chapter Four. Stupa, Relic, and Hungry Ghosts 45 When One Burial Simply Will Not Do 46 Selling the Dharma 52 Relics Recapitulate Rituals 53 Summary 56 Chapter Five. The Domestication of Living Buddhist Traditions 59 Buddhalogical Incorrectness 62 Discussion and Possible Conclusions 64 Summary 66 Part Three: Mental Culture Chapter Six. When Meaning Doesn’t Matter Anymore 71 Symbolic Theories 74 Symbolism: When Representations Collide 80 Funtional Theories 82 Emotional Theories 83 The Evolution of the Social Mind 87 Practical Theories 88 Problems 89 Summary 90 Chapter Seven. Evolutionary Disgust 93 Are Dead Bodies Dangerous? 94 The Smell of Death 97 The Biology of Pollution and the Behavior of Disgust 100 Summary 102 Part Four: From Corpse to Concept Chapter Eight. Corpse, Concept, and Contagion Triggers 107 Experiments and Correlations 109 Vignette Analysis 1 112 Vignette Analysis 2 115 Discussion 118 Explanations 127 Summary 131 Chapter Nine. Memes, Genes, and Dead Machines 133 The Mental Culture of Dead Agents 134 A Cognitive Ethnography for Mortuary Behavior 145 From Ritualized Compulsions to Ritual Scripts 149 Conclusions 151 Appendix 153 Bibliography 165 Index 177 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. Traces mortuary behavior from the early fossil record to modern religious contexts in diverse cultural settings. In this book, by using archival and ethnographic evidence from Buddhist traditions, the author offers the disparity between doctrines that contradict actual practices performed by Buddhists themselves.