Focusing on the Dead in Continuing Bonds: A cross-cultural study in the family dead, the hostile...

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March 24, 2014 Focusing on the Dead in Continuing Bonds:

A cross-‐cultural study of the family dead, the hostile dead, and the political dead

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Dennis Klass, Ph.D. I had been assembling material for this paper when Kenneth Doka and I decided to edit a memorial volume for Robert Kastenbaum, one of the founders in the study of death and dying. The data I had was from many times and cultures. I thought I should use it to honor Kastenbaum whose mind so wide-‐ranging. The festschrift will be published as a double issue of Omega, the journal for which Kastenbaum was the long-‐time editor. As I wrote my contribution I kept editing out material. Academia.edu allows for papers like this one, longer than a journal article but shorter than can be published as a stand-‐alone piece. I have taken out the parts about Kastenbaum, included more material than was possible in the shorter piece, and expanded on the cross-‐cultural comparisons In the paper I reverse the usual way we think about continuing bonds. Instead of focusing on the living who continue their bond with those who have died, I focus on the dead to whom the living are bonded. When we ask the question this way, we can more easily see that continuing bonds, and therefore the dynamics of grief play far larger roles in individual, family, communal, and cultural narratives than are now included in our models of bereavement. Looking at the roles of the dead in their interactions with the living is an extension of my earlier work on how continuing bonds function in acute grief and in the ongoing lives of the bereaved. Readers who know my work on ancestor rituals and other cross-‐cultural study of grief will find some familiar material here put into a somewhat different contexts. I have also included a lot of reports from other cultures that I have not used before. I welcome any suggestions on how to carry these thoughts forward.

Bereavement studies now recognizes that a significant portion of the population continue their bonds with those who have died. In both scholarship and bereavement support, however, the focus remains largely on the living individuals who remain bonded to the dead and to a lesser extent on bereaved nuclear families. We have not focused on the dead who are active in the lives of the living. In this paper we will explore some of the varieties in continuing bonds across cultures and over time by looking at the roles the dead play in their continuing interactions with the living. Questions about the relationship between the living and the dead have been interesting to people over the course of human history. We have, then, an incredibly long and broad record on which to draw. Turning the focus to the dead in continuing bonds opens up some dynamics of grief that are not so apparent when we keep the focus on the living. We will see that many cultures have developed ways of managing continuing bonds that seem no longer available in the developed West. We will also find that that continuing bonds

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are important elements in individuals’ sense identity and sense of belonging, as well as in the power struggles that shape history. Focusing on the dead in the bonds the living maintain with them thus makes the study of grief even more interesting than it was when I thought continuing bonds were just about bereaved individuals and families.

The contemporary academic study of bereavement started within a few decades after the culture stopped concerning itself about the well being of the dead. That is, in the developed West, our concern over the last century has been on the survivors’ life after death, not the life after death of the dead. The ontological status of the dead is now relegated to parapsychology or other narratives that use ideas from the fringe of academic discourse (see Berger, 1995; Stoeber, & Meynell, 1996; Becker, 1993).

Our almost exclusive concern with the living rather than the relationship between the living and the dead makes us relatively unique in human history because in most times and places, the discussions about continuing bonds are about the well-‐being of the dead that is linked to the well-‐being of the living. Our excluding the dead from our theories of grieving poses a problem to the bereaved and to those who study them. “Bereaved people are positioned between the living and the dead,” Tony Walter noted, but “how do they manage to relate to the dead in a rational secular society that has no place for the dead?” (1999, p. 205). To understand grief across cultures we need to know where continuing bonds, fit into the cultural narratives in which the individual and family narratives are nested. For example Sarah Tarlow’s (1999) study of graves in Orkney, an archipelago in northern Scotland, showed that in the late 18th century, “when personal and individual relationships were starting to become more important in social interactions” (p.80) instead of the prior hierarchical and more communal individual identity, “the living bereaved related to their dead as individuals, and the relationship after death corresponded to the kind of relationship in life” (p.127). When I began to study Japanese ancestor rituals, one of the first questions that came up was how continuing bonds in cultures like traditional Japan, in which dependence is a dominant cultural value was, were different from continuing bonds in cultures like 20th century North America, where autonomy is a dominant cultural value (Klass, 1996). Our present cultural narrative fosters bonds that can be both similar and very different from bonds based in other cultural narratives. It is easier to clarify both the similarities and differences, when we focus on both the living and the dead. The attributes of the dead fluctuate a good deal over time and cultures. Medieval historian Ronald Finucane (1996) notes that in some periods the dead remain close to their bodies so are often contacted at the grave. At other times the dead remain in the place where they died. Sometimes the dead are separated from their bodies and place of death and so may appear to the living anywhere, any time. Sometimes the dead return bearing the marks of the illness or violence from which they died, and at other times they are as insubstantial as wisps of fog. Sometimes they bang on and come in the door, and at other times they can float though walls.

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Sometimes they are recognizable to those who knew them, other times their identity is disguised. It may be that there are some cultural variables that correlate with these differing attributes just as there are cultural variables that create differences in the nature of bonds with the dead. That is, it is possible that in a particular time and place the forms the dead take when they interact with the living may be related to other dynamics during that historical period in the culture. If there is scholarship on the topic, however, I have not located it. In this paper, then, we will bring in the attributes of the dead only when they are important to help us understand interaction we are describing. Three broad kinds of relationships the dead have with the living will organize our thinking. We will look at first at the family dead, that is we will look at ways the living can help the dead and what the dead offer the living when the dead remain part of the family. We will begin with ancestor rituals and then show that the dynamics of ancestor rituals are also found in cultures where those rituals are not so formalized. Second, we will explore the hostile dead, that is, the dead spirits that threaten the well being of the living. The hostile dead are often, but not always the darker side of ancestor bonds. We will see that as individuals settle the relationship to the hostile dead, the individual is also of establishing a place in the social system. Third, we will consider the political dead, that is, we will look at the ways the living enlist the dead in political interests, causes, and conflicts, and on the ways the dead motivate the living to battle on their behalf. Continuing bonds with the dead are, then, an element in the power struggles that shape history. THE FAMILY DEAD The dead are in the collective memory, not merely in the individual memories of those who knew them. Paul Connerton (1989) says collective memory is maintained by ritual performance, that is, it is not so much abstract and mental, as it is bodily. The physicality of individual grief, Connerton says, makes it a very good vehicle by which collective memory is performed and transmitted. The bonds with the dead play a major role in developing social solidarity and identity in families, tribes, ethnic groups, or nations. The dead are what Emil Durkheim called collective representations (1965, 1974). A good place to begin to understand continuing bonds in the family is in ancestor rituals that occur at some periods in the history of most cultures. Peter Ching-‐Yung Lee (1995) says that in traditional China, the family, not the individual was the basic unit of society. Families were defined as far broader networks than the nuclear families that we typically study in bereavement research. It was natural Lee says, that the most important religious activity was ancestor rituals, “the veneration of predecessors in the father’s line of descent, beginning with his parents” (p.174). The Confucian tradition assumes the continued existence of the dead and the mutual dependence between the dead and the living. The importance of ancestors veneration is seen in the altar in the main hall of every house. Every day incense and food are offered there to the dead. The rituals,

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Lee says, maintain the continuity of the bonds between the living and the dead, and serve as “a reminder of the existence of the role of the dead among the living in the family” (p.180). The rituals, thus reinforce the ties of loyalty and solidarity among family members, as well as symbolizing and helping the family’s good fortune and well being. Japanese Buddhism, in the Theravada tradition, has incorporated the Confucian idea of family and ancestor rituals as a central element in lay people’s relationship to their temples (Klass, 1996; Goss & Klass, 2005). Indeed, ancestor rituals are so central to lay Buddhism in Japan that it is often called “funeral Buddhism.” The bond between the living and the dead is mutually beneficial. A Japanese student told me that her mother has a history of depression. When she is depressed, she thinks that her mother (my student’s grandmother) is lonely and hungry. To help the depression, my student and her mother travel to the small town where the grandmother is in the family grave and where the grandmother’s tablet is in the family Butsudan (a small Buddhist altar). In front of the Butsudan and at the grave, they burn incense, present food offerings, and pray. The prayer gesture is to bow and hold the hands with palms together. When Japanese people try to tell English speakers what they are doing, they say they are praying, but as several have explained to me, the prayer is not like they perceive Americans praying, with many words addressed to God. Rather, prayer is the living person and the dead person experiencing each other’s presence. In the rituals my student and her mother experience the grandmother’s presence. In her attitude in silent prayer, the mother may apologize for not visiting often enough, and promise to come more often. Perhaps the mother intuits that the grandmother accepts her apology; in rare instances she might even hear her mother’s voice. The interaction is really not so different than if the grandmother were in a retirement home and her adult daughter lived a several hours away. After the rituals, my student reported, her mother feels less depressed, and the grandmother no longer feels lonely and hungry. Where are the spirits of the Japanese dead? In common speech, ano yo ("that world"), as opposed to kono yo ("this world").

The world beyond cannot be described in any but equivocal phrases. Spatially it is both here and there, temporally both then and now. The departed and ancestors always are close by; they can be contacted immediately at the household shelf, the graveyard, or elsewhere. Yet when they return "there" after the midsummer reunion they are seen off as for a great journey. They are perpetually present. Yet they come to and go from periodic household foregatherings (Plath, 1964, p.308; also see Gilday, 1993).

Some Japanese dead are in a Pure Land, some in a kind of hell, but most are still near the earth, available for interaction. Ritually they are thought of as at the grave or on the altar where they are venerated. So the spirit may be contacted by addressing the stone or tablet, and may be called back in the Bon festival. Some of the dead go on to become kami, that is Shinto gods. To some extent this is a function of where and by which rituals they are venerated (Buddhist or Shinto). Easiest way to become kami, as we will discuss in the section on the political dead, is to die in war or be a Shogun or emperor. But for others, the movement is slower and occurs at the end of the

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funeral rituals, that, depending on the Buddhist sect is doing the rituals, is either the thirty-‐third or fiftieth anniversary of the death. In effect, they are available for interaction for as long as anyone personally remembers them. In the Mahayana Buddhist traditions of southern Asia, continuing bonds are expressed in merit transfer. Monks can work off their negative karma, accumulate positive karma, and thus move toward a better rebirth, by devoting their lives to meditation and ritual. Lay people accomplish that task by ethical living, that is by right intention, right action, and right speech. More often, however, lay people see their religious life as offering material gifts to the monks. In return, the virtuous power of the monks returns a reward of merit. The merit earned by the lay person’s giving can be transferred to a deceased relative about whom the gift giver is concerned. Merit transfer was important in the early development of Buddhism in India as it replaced the Brahman rituals before Brahmanism was revised into what we now know as Hinduism. As often happens when religious traditions change, the development of merit transfer was led by business people of lower social status, in this case low caste. Their caste status prevented them from performing the Brahman rituals, but they could act ethically in their business dealings and use what they earned to support the monks (see Holt, 1981; Goss and Klass, 2005). The living helping the family dead is a common theme in the Western traditions as well as the Asian traditions. We find continuing bonds in which the living help the dead in many Muslim cultures (see Goss and Klass, 2005). Before Wahhabi reforms prohibited it, prayers were offered at the graves of Muslim saints (wali; plural: awliyā). Often those prayers were asking the saints to help those who have died toward a more secure eternal life. Even now, Almad H. Sakr says, helping the dead is an important part of many Muslims’ religious life (also see Hussein and Oyebode, 2009). A person, Sakr says, is a composite being: the soul and the body. In the grave, the physical body goes back to its constituent chemical elements except for a seed that remains waiting to be reborn at the resurrection of the body just before the final judgment. In many Muslim cultures, the soul hovers above the physical body until burial. The soul can hear and see what is going on, but cannot communicate. The grave is, then the focus of continuing bonds. Some Muslims visit grave the second day to ask forgiveness of the deceased. The living should not forgive the dead because that was supposed to have happened when the person was alive, especially during the dying process. Survivors can also settle the accounts of the dead. Heirs are responsible for paying debts of the deceased. Some debts can be religious debts such as Hajj (pilgrimage) or fasting in Ramadan (p. 60). A Saudi student told me that the year after his paternal grandmother died his father went on Hajj “for her. He loved his mother very much.” Although in most contemporary Islam the dead have no direct contact with the living, there are things the living can do for the family dead. Some of what Sakr lists are the pillars, while others are ways of acting that define being a good Muslim. The living can:

1. Make supplication of forgiveness and mercy for the deceased. 2. Give charity (sadaquah) and zakat (alms) on behalf of the deceased.

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3. Perform pilgrimage (hajj) on their behalf. 4. Perform extra prayer (salat) on their behalf. 5. Give water to the thirsty people on behalf of the deceased. 6. Fast any number of days outside the month of Ramadan for the deceased. 7. Read Qur’an on their behalf 8. Teach Qur’an or request someone to teach Qur’an on their behalf. 9. Spread knowledge through television, radio, books, or other literature on their behalf. 10. Build schools, mosques, clinics, and hospitals on their behalf.

Sakr says, All of us are in need of these while we are in our graves. Otherwise, we may be penalized daily. We may cry for help, but in vain. Allah may allow the soul of the deceased to come over in our dreams to remind us of our needs for supplication (du’a) and other good deeds on their behalf. We hope and pray that we do something good for the deceased before we ourselves go to our graves (p.68). Because bonds with the dead are managed within folk religion, we find a broad

range of beliefs and activities in the interactions between the living and the dead. “Although the Qur'an says specifically in Surah 27:80 that the dead will not be able to hear, a variety of stories, nonetheless, seem to contradict this, most indicating that the dead hear very well although they are unable to speak” (Smith & Haddad, 1981, p.51). In a hadith Muhammad is reported to have said, “Whoever does not have faith does not have permission to speak to the dead” (in Smith & Haddad, p.51). Usually the dead are aware of the activities of the living that “affect the circumstances of the deceased” (Smith & Haddad, p. 59). The dead know whether the living miss them sufficiently and how well the living are carrying on the deceased’s family and personal affairs. If the living are careless in those matters, they cause discomfort to the dead. The dead are aware of whether the body and the grave were prepared correctly, whether the grave is cared for, and whether visitors to the grave show proper respect.

Al-‐Ghazali tells a story about a father who engaged a teacher for his sons. The teacher died. Six days later the sons were at the teacher’s grave discussing “the matter of God's command.” A man came by selling figs, the boys bought some, and as they ate, they threw the stems on the grave. That night in a dream their father saw the teacher who said, “Your children took my grave for a garbage pile and talked about me, with words that are nothing but infidelity!” We do not know what the boys were saying about “God's command” as they sought to understand this significant death in their lives, but clearly the teacher disapproved of their views. After the father reprimanded the boys they said to each other, “Glory be to God! He continues to bother us in the hereafter just as he did on earth” (in Smith & Haddad, p. 52). In ancient Greece the responsibility of the living to insure a good afterlife for the dead is similar what Sakr describes in Islam. Johnson says,

The living had to meet not only certain basic needs of the dead, such as burial and periodic nourishment, but more complex needs as well: they had to help

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protect them from immediate threats after death, such as demonic interference, to help guarantee their safe passage to the Underworld, and occasionally to perform rites after the death of an individual in order to “purify;” his soul or otherwise help it achieve a peaceful afterlife (p. 80).

These accounts of continuing bonds in ancestor rituals, merit transfer, and helping the dead to a better eternal life are very different from continuing bonds we experience in the contemporary developed West. We cannot access the dead as we could in the cultures we have described. We have only vague ideas about where they are, what they need and want from us, and therefore only vague ideas about what we need and want from them. Edith Steffen and Adrian Coyle’s (2010) study shows the problem concisely. They collected reports of a sense of presence from contemporary people in the United Kingdom. As we have seen, the sense of presence is a common phenomenon in continuing bonds. Steffen and Coyle’s subjects had difficulty using the sense of presence in their constructions of meaning because they have no culturally sanctioned way of locating the dead.

The potential of spiritual benefit-‐finding as a result of presence-‐sensing may, however, be difficult to realize if the conceptual frameworks that are available for making sense of the experience do not permit spiritual interpretations or if they privilege reductionist explanations (p.227).

It is very likely, then, that the mixed results we find in empirical studies of the correlation between continuing bonds and coping (Root & Exline, 2014; Field, , Gao, & Paderna, 2005; Field, Gal-‐Oz, & Bonanno, 2003) are a cultural artifact. That is, the results show difficulties that arise when one partner in post-‐death interactions is so nebulous. It was, of course, not always so in the West. Patrick Geary (1994)says that in the middle ages in Europe, “Death marked a transition, a change of status, but not an end” (p.2). The side altars in medieval churches allowed many priests to offer masses for the dead to secure their early release from Purgatory, much like merit transfer in Mahayana Buddhism helps the dead to a better rebirth. The living, Geary says, owed the dead memoria, that is remembrance. This meant “not only liturgical remembrance in the prayers and masses offered for the dead for weeks, months, and years but also preservation of the name, the family, and the deeds of the departed” (p.2). Significant people (we know almost nothing about the bonds to the dead among the peasants) had a prayer list of the names in the historical succession that led to them. Inheriting property carried with it the duty to pray for those who gave it. Saying the names, Geary says, “was the means by which the dead were made present” (p.87). The sense of presence, that is so often vague in Steffen and Coyle’s modern British research subjects, was the ground of the individual’s sense of self a thousand years ago. (see Gordon & Marshall, 2000). Just as we saw in Asian ancestor rituals, the dead provide the individual his or her place in the family, and thus in the society. The name given to a child was often chosen to reinforce the historical lineage.

By reusing certain name elements or entire names from generation to generation, families or individuals were consciously preserving their own

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names and those of their ancestors. Names were a form of immaterial inheritance” (p.88).

When the sagas were still a living tradition, the idea of Purgatory was in its formative stages, so ideas about the relationships of the living with the dead were not yet fixed. In the early medieval period the dead could be directly involved to encourage moral behavior and to help the individual monitor his or her thoughts. In the later medieval period, the church took control of the relationship between the living and the dead. All interactions between the living and dead were supposed to go though the church. The development of the concept of Purgatory, payment for priests to pray or say masses for the dead, and the increased importance of relics of the saints were all elements in the change. One of the reasons property was given to the church or to monastic orders was so the name would be remembered. Geary gives an example of man who had no sons, only daughters, who give a vineyard to a monastic estate. Apparently one of the monks took the name the man would have given a son, and the man's name was remembered in the prayers of the monks for several generations (p.89). The ancestral line thus continued, even though the succession of male heirs had been broken.

Continuing bonds are still important in defining social membership among some groups in the West. In their study of London cemeteries, Doris Francis, Leonie Kellaher, and Georgina Neophytou (2005) say that as immigrant groups establish themselves in England, the cemetery becomes a piece of the old country, an ethnic homeland. Funeral and burial practices there are often hybrid, that is elements of English practice come into the ethnic traditions. In this way, the cemetery is a transition space in the movement from one country to another. Often early in the immigration history, bodies or remains are shipped back home, but later, the homeland is brought to England as a section of an older cemetery. They note that in the Greek Cypriot burial ground shows clearly the way bonds with the dead are part of the bond with the ethnic identity. One of their interviewees said, “There is no separation between the dead and the living; we are all part of the [Greek] Orthodox community” (p. 192). Another said, “To be buried in a community cemetery makes me feel that we are with our own people; here where my parents are buried, there is a small part of Cyprus” (p. 192). We will deal with the political roles of the dead later in the paper, but we can note here that Francis, Kellaher, and Neophytou report that in some ethnic cemeteries, patriotic observances are part of the memorial rituals to the dead. For example, “It is now customary to include a memorial service at New Southgate (Cemetery) on the anniversary of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, conducted by local Orthodox priests, bishops, and the Archbishop” (p. 190). THE HOSTILE DEAD There is, of course, a more problematic aspect of continuing bonds, an aspect that is downplayed in the dominant cultural narrative and almost absent in the scholarly narrative about grief. In many cultures, some of the dead are hostile to the living.

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Most of the hostile dead are within ancestor bonds. Before we turn to the ancestor rituals proper, however, we will spend a few moments looking at the hostile dead that have more to do with how the person died than with the person’s family relationships. Maruice Eisenbruch (1984) noted some kinds of death create spirits that are dangerous to the living.

For many years, in a range of European and other societies the death of a young girl was regarded as a special threat to the solidarity of the community. Her spirit, denied entry to paradise, might seek revenge upon relatives still living. Ritual weddings were held in attempts to deceive the spirits into believing that the dead girl had really been married (p. 293).

In the ballet Giselle, or The Willis, the willis (singular: willi) are spirits of those young women. In the ballet, Count Roberto promises to marry Giselle, but is enchanted by a seductress and forgets her. She waits for him through the seasons, and in winter she dies. Her death breaks the enchantment. He returns, but is now in danger from the willis who are angry for what he had done to Giselle. In the ballet she saves him by dancing with him from dusk until dawn. She can do so because she has not yet become a willi, though she soon will be one. We do not know if she will be as angry as the other willis when she joins them, but before then, the love in her continuing bond with Count Roberto is stronger than the anger of these hostile dead. In the romantic spirit, then, continuing bonds with the dead could be complicated by very negative aspects in the relationship and in difficult life circumstances. The ballet ends with her dead and him going on in his life sustained only by her memory in his heart. Giselle’s becoming a willi precludes any further positive interaction between them. Contemporary research on continuing bonds and clinical practice in grief counseling rarely give us reports on such this kind of complicated grief. We do not know, then, what techniques in contemporary bereavement counseling (Neimeyer, 2012) might have helped Count Roberto construct a narrative in his grief that would allow him continue the bond with Giselle, find another girlfriend, and/or fulfill his obligation as a the scion of a titled family to marry and produce a legitimate male heir. The hostile dead are often a negative side of ancestral bonds. Hamlet’s father is a familiar example. The father’s violent death has gone unpunished. So the he is,

Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away (1.5.9-‐13).

In accepting his filial obligation to right the death, Hamlet narrates his grief as a revenge tragedy, with a predictably bad conclusion. The problem of the ancestral dead returning as harmful spirits is deeply woven into Asian ancestor rituals. Lee says that the positive motivations of family loyalty and solidarity in the Chinese rituals was balanced with the negative consequences if the rituals were not performed. The spirits of a dead person could

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become “unpredictable and might do evil even to his or her own intimate kin” (p 177). If we had more intimate descriptions of relationships in the ancient world it is possible we would find the same was true there, but at this point I have not found any studies that would help us. In ancient Greece the roles of the dead changed over time, and increasingly included the hostile dead with whom the living had to deal. Sarah Iles Johnston (1999) says,

Greek beliefs evolved from a system in which the dead were relatively weak and unlikely to affect the world of the living, except under very special circumstances and then of their own volition, into a system in which the dead were an active force in the world of the living and could be called into action when the living chose (p. 31).

Johnson says, “Care of the dead was a civic concern as well as a concern of the individual most directly involved with any given dead person,” because the hostility of the dead could have effect on the city (the basic unit of ancient civilization), not just on the individuals or families to whom the dead belonged ( p. 80-‐81). Ancient Romans exorcised hostile family ghosts from their homes during the Lemuralia in mid-‐May. The Wikipedia entry notes Ovid says that in the ritual the head of the household walking barefoot and throwing black beans over his shoulder followed by the other household members banging on pots and saying nine times, "Ghosts of my fathers and ancestors, be gone!”. Mary Picone (1981) notes that in traditional Japan because aborted children are “cheated out of life and of the veneration of descendants, the souls of children can be particularly dangerous” (p. 30). The condition of being aborted, then, is similar to Giselle’s in Europe. But these children fall outside the ancestral format of continuing bonds. Normal ancestor rituals could not be done for the children to integrate them into the family because they had no progeny. Beginning in the 1960s mizuko kuyo, rituals for aborted children and children who died prenatally or as neonates, were introduced into Buddhism. Mizuko means water child. Kuyo means rituals for the dead (Klass & Heath, 1996). Although modern scientific thinking has made a dent in primary naiveté, fear of the child returning as a harmful spirit continues from earlier days. Bardwell Smith (2013) quotes from women’s written thoughts in journals kept at a mizuko temple where the women come to do the rituals. One woman wrote, “In scientific terms it is clear that curses do not exist, but there is something that I cannot completely dismiss emotionally” (p.102). For other women, thoughts and feelings about the child causing bad things to happen is intertwined with their thoughts about their relationship with the child’s father.

Whenever I encounter something bad I take it as mizuko retribution. No matter how much I suffer, I take it as fate . . . Although I have such a strong sense of tsumi (having given offense), the man seems to feel nothing . . . The sin belongs to both man and woman, but why is it that the woman has to carry the full weight of this? (p.111).

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The reconciliation between the living and the dead in traditional Japan transforms the dead from hostile to helpful. In his study of new religions, Winston Davis (1992, pp.288-‐290) gives a case of how spirits of the dead can be harmful and how they can be transformed into helpful spirits by including them in the lives and concerns of the living. His story is of an unmarried woman—a bad fate in Japan—who was now alone in the world living at the dojo, the group’s practice hall. The woman had spirit seizures that recurred after each time she received healing/purification rituals that her sect’s teaching said should have cured her. The spirit, she discovered, was her older sister in a previous life. The sister had died at twenty-‐eight from tuberculosis. Angry at her untimely death, the sister became a malevolent ghost, possessing and killing off family members, so finally there was no one left to do the rituals for her. Because of what the dead woman had done, and because there was no one to care for her, she was transformed into various animal spirits that were described as “big as elephants.” After the woman living at the dojo discovered the spirit’s identity, the spirit gradually got smaller and smaller and finally took on human shape, wept, and confessed the evil she had done. The seizures then abated. The presence of this hostile spirit explained the bad things that had happened in the woman’s life. The spirit had often caused her to be sick just as the spirit had caused the family to be sick in the previous life. The spirit had also caused her to remain single. She remembered that she had suitors but that things had never worked out. So, she reasoned, if she had known earlier, she might have gotten married. As the woman decided that the spirit was her sister in a former life, she was adopting the spirit. As the spirit had someone to care for it, the spirit became less and less hostile and then became a comforting ancestor. The woman was also bothered by some other spirits, including her grandmother, who complained of being hungry. She went home to see what was wrong and found that a family member who had converted to Soka Gakkai (a Buddhist sect) had wrapped the grandmother’s memorial tablet in a cloth, stored it away, and put a new tablet in its place. Soka Gakkai encourages its members to acquire a special kind of Butsudan (Buddha altar) as a way of connecting bonds with the dead to bonds with the sect. That is why the grandmother’s tablet was put away and replaced with another tablet. The woman realized the grandmother’s spirit had not moved to the new tablet, so of course the grandmother was hungry; she could not eat the food that was put out as an offering. The woman got out the old tablet, put it beside the new tablet so the grandmother’s spirit could move, and the grandmother was satisfied. The story ends with the woman no longer harmed by the spirits and given the positions of member of the dojo’s auxiliary cabinet and vice chairperson of the Helper’s Society. That is, as she integrated her sister’s spirit into her life and made sure that her sister and grandmother were included in the proper rituals, the woman also moved up in status as she was more fully integrated into the religious community that was effectively her family. Geary says that in medieval central Europe hostile dead were also an aspect of the family relationship to the dead. He says the gifts of the dead, including life, property, and personal identity, were so great that the living would be threatened if

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they did not offer gifts in exchange. The threat was “hostile or dominating intrusions by the dead in the society of the living” which could only prevented by restoring the balance of gifts. In Germanic sagas, “the dead regularly return to inflict punishment, share meals, exact revenge, give advice, teach, offer advice or — more often, through mute suffering, warnings — to repent” (Geary, p.83). Geary says one of the ways Church brought stability to middle ages and solidified the hegemony of its narrative was through rituals for the dead. First, it became the intermediary between the living the dead -‐-‐ that is prayers for the dead, as we noted earlier, were offered in church, and if the dead were to speak, they were most likely to do so through a priest or monk. Second, the church possessed the bodies of saints in the form of relics and the church could control access to the relics. The new rituals maintained the role of supporting moral living both through the positive examples the dead provided and by the threat that if the rituals were discontinued the dead would come back as harmful spirits that could bring extreme misfortune on the individual, family, and even the whole town or village. We find an interesting variation in medieval Icelandic sagas before Christianity took full hold. Individuals of marginal social status were integrated into the society and moved to higher status by conquering and banishing the hostile dead. Icelandic dead remained attached to their bodies. The most common way to get rid of the hostile dead was to dig up, decapitate, and then burn the corpse. In one saga, the hostile spirit appears while the farmer is driving his cows into the barn. The farmer attacks the spirit with a spear. The spirit grasps the spear so the shaft breaks off, then before the farmer can attack the spirit more, the spirit sinks into the ground. The next day the farmer digs at the place the spirit sank and finds the body with the spearhead in it. He then burns the corpse and the spirit cause no more problems. Kirsi Kanerva’s study (2013) shows that the those who become heroes by confronting and defeating the harmful dead often had a marginal social status. They did not have inheritance rights because they were born of “an unapproved sexual relationship” (Kanerva, p. 115), for example the child of concubine. The problem was that they were living on farms that were not rightly theirs. The dead being buried on the land, of course, made the land legitimately belong to the dead. By destroying the corpse, the hero undercuts the claim and makes the land his own. In effect, the hero kills the ancestor of the place, and thus begins a new hereditary line on the land. Overcoming the hostile spirit offers the heroes a possibility to renegotiate their social status. Thus they can step out of the liminal space of ‘fatherlessness”, and take their place in society after obtaining a position as a rather heroic, well thought-‐of man and farmer (p.116). In cultures where all continuing bonds with the dead are forbidden, any interactions with the dead are regarded as harmful to the living. The dead are not allowed to remain part of the family. That was the case in Europe and North America in the middle of the twentieth century. At that time, psychiatry provided the cultural guidelines for grieving. In the work of grief:

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Each single one of the memories and situations of expectancy which demonstrate the libido’s attachment to the lost object is met by the verdict of reality that the object no longer exists” (Freud, 1917, p.255).

If the living insisted on maintaining bonds to the dead they were deluded. They could not adequately function because they lived in a fantasy world separated from socially sanctioned reality. That is, continuing bonds to the dead kept the bereaved from reintegration into the society of the living. In order to fully function in the present, the theory said, the living must be emancipated from their bondage to the dead. In bereavement scholarship interactions within continuing bonds were regarded as illusions, albeit in some schemes necessary illusions. Although they avoid the term hallucination, Colin Parkes and Robert Weiss, for example, explained the sense the presence of the dead as a false perception that inhibits the resolution of grief. By continuing to turn toward the fantasy of a continued relationship with the dead partner, the bereaved are able to maintain an illusion of security. To recover, it is necessary to give up this fantasy (1983, p. 153). The fantasy for Parkes and Weiss is part of searching behavior that marks one of their earlier stages of grief. When the survivor does not find the dead person, the survivor settles for an illusion that will diminish as time go by. If the bereaved do not successfully realize that the “object no long exists,” the goal of psychiatric intervention, Vamik Volkan said (1985), was to help them to do so. He and Robert Showalter described “re-‐griefing” psychotherapy in a case study of a 16 year-‐old girl whose mother had committed suicide.

Instead of talking with her about her mother as a dead person, her mother was referred to as an inanimate object consisting of degenerating anatomic structures such as skin, muscle, and bone. Such an attempt, after the phase of abreaction, serves to hasten the actual return to normal reality testing while paradoxically giving impetus to repression of some conflictual ideas expressed. As can be readily seen, this somewhat harsh technique does not provide for full emotional insight but rather serves to repress some instinctual demands, especially the patient’s “death wishes” toward the lost object. . . . The therapist must be authoritative but at the same time he must be understanding. In this way the “strong” therapist can take over most of the guilt that the patient had been experiencing (Volkan & Showalter, 1968, p. 370).

It is interesting that Volkan and Showalter in the mid-‐twentieth century Europe and North America thought the spirit of the dead was associated with the body, much as it was in medieval Iceland. While the Icelandic heroes physically dig up the bodies to destroy them, Volkan and Showalter demand that the adolescent visualize her mother’s body being destroyed by natural processes. That is, when the body is destroyed, the spirit should no longer be available for interaction, thus emancipating the bereaved teenager from her continuing bond with her dead mother. In contemporary bereavement research and interventions difficult continuing bonds are now often labeled as intrusive thoughts or intrusive presences. Kirsten Tyson-‐Rawson (1996) found that about one third of the late adolescent women she

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interviewed experienced their deceased fathers as an intrusive presence, characterized by nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and debilitating levels of anxiety. Tyson-‐Rawson found that the common factor was unfinished business, either as no closure on the relationship with the father or as highly conflicted relationships characterized by cut-‐offs and minimal interaction. She gives the following excerpt from an interview two years after the death:

After he died, I was so depressed that I couldn't go to school or sleep or anything. So they put me on an antidepressant for a while. Lately, I've been feeling that way again. I have these dreams, nightmares, and I can't stop thinking about him dying. I think he's mad at me . . . I think I feel this way because I never said good-‐bye to him. I knew he was dying and all that time I just stayed away, went to someone else's house (p.138).

Some contemporary bereavement theory retains the ideas that supported re-‐griefing. In the theory, these “recurrent, intrusive, and distressing thoughts about the absence of the deceased make it difficult for persons . . . to move beyond an acute state of mourning and live in the present” (Prigerson, Vanderwerker, & Maciejewski, 2008,p.170). Absence and presence are, of course, reciprocal concepts, that is they are each concepts that are defined in terms of each other. Whether we label the intrusive thoughts as about the “absence of the deceased” or about a missed presence is a matter of the researchers’ interpretation. Our interpretation has consequences. As Steffen and Coyle’s (2010), whom we quoted earlier, said, it is hard for people to use continuing bonds to resolve problematic complications in their grief “if the conceptual frameworks that are available for making sense of the experience do not permit spiritual interpretations or if they privilege reductionist explanations” (p.227). Perhaps if, as I am trying to do in this paper, we focus on the dead instead of just on the living, we could learn from some other cultural narratives. Instead of diagnosing people like the young woman who thinks her dead father is mad at her as having intrusive and distressing thoughts about his absence, we could treat the dead with respect, as having needs and desires of their own. We might thereby give those they left behind better handles on how to change the dead from hostile to helpful presences. Perhaps the young woman is right, that her father is mad at her because she stayed away. It is also possible that her father is not mad, just sad because he misses being close to his daughter and that beneath her depression she misses being close to him too. She never said good-‐bye, but neither did he. We don’t know from the vignette where her mother, his wife, or other family members fit into the relationship. If we think about the continuing bond from the father’s perspective, we might find a way to help the father and the daughter reintegrate into a more comfortable family configuration. THE POLITICAL DEAD We saw in our description of ancestor rituals, that the dead are in the collective memory, not merely in the individual memories of those who knew them. In national, tribal, and ideological groups we see dynamics very similar to those we have seen in biologically related families. Just as ancestor rituals are important in

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family loyalty and cohesion, bonds to the dead create and reinforce social solidarity and identity among members. The dead, it seems, can be on any side of a political conflict, and as we will see, some times, the dead themselves are an obstacle to a faction’s political agenda and so must be marginalized if the faction is to consolidate its hegemony. Our exploration of the political dead, then, leads us to a diverse set of data, but in each we will see the similar dynamics in continuing bonds to those we saw in ancestor rituals. We will look first at the dead supporting the dominant cultural narrative and thus undergirding the loyalty of the people in their citizenship. We will see that some loyalty to the nation is in conflict with other loyalties, for example, continuing loyalty to the Confederate cause after the American Civil War was an opposition to loyalty to the Union that had won the war. Second, we will look at times some continuing bonds with the dead stand in the way of political movements and must therefore be eliminated or transformed into bonds that support those who hold political power. Third, we will look at the dead supporting protests against those in political power. The dead thus support reform movements. The nation’s dead George Washington remains a collective representation of the United States. The rituals at his funeral in1799, Gary Laderman (1995) says, elevated him from his already honored status as the new nation’s foremost military and political leader to that father of his country. The funeral

began his apotheosis. Many of the orators who delivered eulogies reminded the public that the mortal part of Washington, that part which obeyed the laws of nature and God by returning to dust, was less an object of reflection than his spirit. According to this interpretation, the spirit must survive in the memory and nourish the soul of the country (p. 28).

Mary Louise Kete (2000) shows how the sentimental attachments of shared grief and a strong sense of the continuity between the community of the living on earth and the community of the dead in heaven created the middle class identity in early 19th century America. She says that Abraham Lincoln was building on that sense of sentimental attachments in his address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in which he linked the people’s bonds with the dead buried there to their bonds with the ideals of the nation whose union they fought to save: “that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion.” The sentiments Lincoln expressed over the graves of Union soldiers are the same sentiments, albeit expressing different meanings, that leaders say over the graves of the war dead in every culture. The interpenetration grief and the individual and family bonds with the larger society can be seen at its most elemental level in the bonds with warriors who die “in the service of the country.” We give our sons, and increasingly our daughters, to die protecting or advancing the interests of our tribe, nation, or religion. They are in a holy service during war -‐-‐ though we may find it less holy in peace. In their deaths they belong to the whole people, not simply to their families. Their graves become patriotic pilgrimage places and their memory is evoked to rally the population to

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action and ideals. The dynamics we see in the cultural response to the warrior’s death are also present in the grief after every death. That is, to resolve the sorrow and sense of loss individuals construct meanings by integrating their experience of grief with larger cultural and religious narratives (Neimeyer, Dennis, & Klass, 2014). The political question is, then, which collective -‐ family, community, tribe, sect, nation -‐ controls the meanings in which the dead are remembered? In the American South, during and after the Civil War, Angela Esco Elder says, the political narrative of the Confederacy was supported by the ideal that young war widows selflessly transferred their monogamous love for their dead husbands to the cause for which they died. “Condolence letters urged widows to remember both the husband and the cause that put him in an early grave” (2012, p.7). Thus, by connecting their continuing bond with the deathless ideal of the Confederacy, the widows were told, their husbands would live forever. After the war was lost, remembering the dead as gallant and heroic was important because, as Elder says quoting a letter, nothing could be worse than to be remembered as “a hero in a broken cause” who was “pouring out his wasted life,” and leaving “the land he loved to darkness and defeat” (p.7). Elder traces the many ways the widows both chaffed under and exploited their politically assigned grief narrative that could be at variance with their individual sense of selfhood and with the private meanings they made of their husbands’ deaths. The burial places of soldiers who die in wars become national pilgrimage places. In 1864, during the American Civil War the house and land of confederate commander Robert E. Lee in Arlington, Virginia was appropriated as a cemetery for the Union dead. Although there are many other national cemeteries for the war dead, Arlington retains its premier status. Signs at the entry, and at several places around the grounds remind visitors to behave with dignity and respect. Outside the visitor’s center the sign reads, “Please remember these are hallowed grounds.” At the John Kennedy grave a sign reminds visitors to maintain a respectful silence. Scientific discoveries created an interesting example of different collectives’ claim on the dead. There is no representative from Vietnam War in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington. A body was entombed there in a ceremony presided over by Ronald Reagan on Memorial Day, 1984. Then the remains were disinterred in 1998 after DNA tests identified him as Air Force First Lieut. Michael J. Blassie. His remains were returned to his family and reburied in a national cemetery close to their home (New York Times, June 30, 1998). We might ask in what sense as the decades go by will this formerly unknown still belong to the nation, in what sense will he belong to his family, and in what sense will his name just merge with the names on the thousands of identical stones that stand in formation across acres of lawn. At Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, established in 1868, only a few years after Arlington, we can see the changing meanings of a nation’s bonds to its war dead as the national narrative changes. The Shinto shrine, was founded to house the spirits (kami) those who died fighting for the Meiji side in the Boshin War, a civil war that ended the Tokugawa Shoganate whose political and ritual center was in Kyoto (see Gordon, 2013). The Meiji established a unified Japan under the government in Tokyo where the shrine is located. The rituals at Yasukuni were State Shinto that channeled

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loyalty to the new government and fostered a sense of cohesion for the nation as a whole. State Shinto was often opposed by the Buddhists whose rituals were for family ancestors. The dead at Yasukuni belonged to the nation, not to families as did the ancestors. Yasukuni, thus, began like Arlington, a symbol of national unity by the victorious side after a civil war. Japan’s defeat in 1945 ended State Shinto. Yasukuni became a self-‐governing religious corporation. Although it is no longer connected with the government, the corporation has strong ties to right wing parties. Bonds with the war dead took on new, often divisive meanings in the changed national narrative. Those who died in World War II were enshrined. Then in 1978 military leaders who had been convicted of Class A war crimes were enshrined in a secret ceremony that was made public the next year. The Chinese, Koreans, and Manchurians, where the war crimes had been committed, were offended. Since then, the visits of officials to the shrine have been closely watched. The press as well as foreign governments note which officials come to Yasukuni. The Emperor and his family do not participate in shrine services. After Prime Minister Shinzo Abe went to the shrine in 2013, the Chinese Foreign Ministry summoned the Japanese ambassador to formally protest. The United States embassy in Tokyo issued a statement expressing disappointment. (Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2013). At Yasukuni, then, we see that the nation’s bond with its war dead retains its symbolic power, though the meaning of the symbols changes with changes in national narratives. The dead there were once unambiguously symbols of national unity. Now they are symbols of one side of a divided narrative about the meaning of nationhood. The dead as obstacles to new narratives Continuing bonds change over time as the culture in which the bonds are embedded changes. We saw an example in Tarlow’s study of graves in Orkney. Richard Horsley (2003) says that when we look at in cultural narratives, we can understand them best when we see the underlying advance or retreat in the arrangements of political power. We can see relationship between continuing bonds and political power rather starkly in times of sudden changes in who holds political, and thus economic power. In those times loyalty to the family dead detracts from the individual’s allegiance to the new order. “This new loyalty—to God or the Church, to the Nation, to the Party or ideology—awards maximum points to those who forsake all other ties” (Mount, 1992, p. 6). When power arrangements change, we often see continuing bonds with ancestors suppressed or recast into narratives that more directly support those who now claim political and economic power (Goss & Klass, 2005). A few examples will illustrate this wide-‐spread phenomenon. In the Deuteronomic reform (621BCE) under King Josiah in ancient Israel, monotheism finally overcame Canaanite religion that worshiped Baal at the local level and Mesopotamian gods in the court. Josiah’s reforms were the final victory for one side of a long-‐standing tension in Israelite national narrative between those who worshiped only Yahweh and those who worshiped other gods and goddesses as well. For most of the Israelite history, the dominance of larger nations meant that veneration of those nations’ gods took place along side of, and sometimes instead of veneration of Yahweh.

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The Yahwehists were nationalists. Their myth was the Exodus story in which Yahweh had revealed himself to Moses, given the Law, provided cultic objects that were now in the Jerusalem temple, led the Israelites to victory in the battles for the promised land, and established David and his successors as kings of Israel. A large part of the message of the Yahwehist prophets, now preserved in the Hebrew scriptures, are complaints that the people are following foreign gods, or are practicing Baalism, the Canaanite fertility religion. Early Yahwehism seems to have included ancestor rituals some of which were part of the political claim in the Israelite covenant with Yahweh. Abraham bought a cave at Machpelah to use as a tomb. In doing so he was laying claim to the land he said Yahweh had promised him and his descendants.

Such burials indicate a widespread propensity to make, as it were, permanent settlements of corpses, marking as they do a sense of community between the place, the dead and the living. It is by having the dead placed within it that the land truly becomes occupied by the living. This . . . is the significance of the early Bronze-‐Age cave-‐tomb of Abraham at Machpelah and of other Israelite burials, such as that of Joshua. (Davies, 1999, p.73).

The idea that burying the dead claimed the land probably accounts for the fact that near the end of the Israelites’ conquest, “The bones of Joseph which the people of Israel brought up from Egypt were buried at Shechem” (Joshua 24:32) one of the most important Israelite ritual sites before the fall of the Northern Kingdom. In the Icelandic sagas we saw a similar belief that being buried in a place is a claim on the land. We have also seen a contemporary example in the Cypriot burials in London. The archeological evidence indicates that for almost all Israelite history rituals were conducted at family graves, much as we saw in Japanese and Chinese ancestor rituals. The euphemism for death, “slept with his fathers,” probably indicates that the graves were for families, not for individuals. After the Exodus and conquest of the land, ancestor rituals were quickly mixed with Baalism. Tombs around Jerusalem from the centuries before Josiah contain cylindrical ceramic female figurines with prominent breasts (Bloch-‐Smith, 1992). These figures are images of Astarte, Asherah, Ishtar, or one of the other goddesses that were consorts of the male gods like Baal. Since such figures are found in virtually all tombs, they are evidence that, before Josiah, continuing bonds were narrated within Canaanite fertility religion. As a means of obliterating Baalism, Josiah ordered that family graves, where ancestor rituals were performed, be destroyed and the bones dumped on the altars of other gods. Communications with the dead were forbidden (Bloch-‐Smith, 1992). Joshiah’s reform effectively put an end to ancestor rituals in the Western religions. The dead were under the care of Yahweh who could only be truly worshiped at the royal temple in Jerusalem. Although Josiah’s reform was short lived, the Israelites who went into the Babylonian Exile after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed used the reform as a template as they revised Yahwehism into book-‐based Judaism, thus setting the pattern that would be adopted every time monotheism was strictly enforced in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The individual’s primary bond should be with God, who, as the history developed, judged the dead and assigned them to realms appropriate to the their thoughts and behaviors when they were alive. The official

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religion equated the dead with idols, false gods whose veneration was an offense against the one true God. In the Wisdom of Solomon written, scholars think, by an Alexandrian Jew, around 100 BCE we find a condemnation of continuing bonds that has reemerged periodically in all three monotheistic religions.

For some father, overwhelmed with untimely grief for the child suddenly taken from him, made an image of the child and honoured thensforth as a god what was once a dead human being, handing on to his household the observance of rites and ceremonies. Then this impious custom, established by the passage of time, was observed as a law (14:15-‐16a NEB).

In mid-‐20th century, a very similar change happened in China. In the Communist narrative under Mao Zedong individuals were no longer to regard themselves as family members, but rather to define themselves as workers, members of the proletariat. Funeral reform was high on the Communist Party’s agenda. Ancestor rituals were suppressed (Whyte, 1988). Filial piety was converted into loyalty to the state, and then to loyalty to Mao himself. The dead were eulogized as exemplars of dedication to Mao and to newfound zeal in production. As a way of consolidating the new cultural narrative, the Communists created new ancestors (Wakeman 1988). In an antique Chinese house last inhabited in 1982, now at the Peabody Essex Museum near Boston, Mao’s name heads the list of ancestors above the ritual table. Mao thus became the collective representation of the new People’s Republic of China. After Mao’s death, his preserved body in a tomb on T’ien-‐an Men Square became a pilgrimage site. In all of these developments, continuing bonds were assigned new meanings in keeping with the emergent dominant narrative of the state. As the Communist Party retained its political power, but abandoned its underlying ideology in favor of state-‐controlled capitalism, the family ancestors were less of a threat. Tentatively as first, and then openly, family ancestor veneration is again widely practiced. A New York Times article (September 29, 2002, p.6) reported that in eastern China, south of Shanghai, clan members are restoring graves and updating clan ancestor records to replace the ones burned during the Cultural Revolution. The article quotes Chi Yugao, who organized the editorial committee to reconstruct his family’s records, “We must never forget or shame our ancestors. They made us who we are, and we have to remember them for it.” Chi has two copies of the family record books that were published in 1936. The books escaped destruction during the Cultural Revolution because they were hidden by poor members of the clan whose houses were far up in the hills. Using the old records Chi and other clan members located many untended ancestral graves. The newly revived interest in ancestors is not a reversion to pre-‐communist Confucianism when only men in the male line of succession was recorded. Now the clan’s history often includes wives’ names and puts daughters into family ranking if there were no sons (a common condition under the one-‐child policy). It would appear, then, that as the state-‐controlled market system replaces the old Marxist economics, Chinese families are finding a balance between grieving and continuing their bonds within a newly developed individualism and the extended family system that has endured through three centuries of massive political change.

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The reform dead As collective representations, the dead are often involved in the political aspirations of groups that are excluded from political and economic power. It is common to hear the names and memories of those who died for the cause evoked as a way of energizing group members to work to achieve what those martyred have died for. Union leader and song writer Joe Hill put it simply after he was sentenced to die by firing squad. “Don’t mourn for me — organize.” We find continuing bonds in the politics in some interesting places in history. In mid-‐nineteenth century American Spiritualism, grief and continuing bonds with the dead played an important role in the fight for woman’s rights (as it was called then) and in the movement to abolish slavery. Spiritualism is a broad term, but we can roughly define it as a religious belief that communication with the spirits of the dead is a means of directly experiencing sacred power and an expression of the best aspect of human nature. In Europe, especially in England, Spiritualism was a popular response to the cold rationality of the enlightenment. The romantic movement always had a spiritualist side (see Finucane, 1996, pp. 153-‐216). American Spiritualism began in 1848 in Rochester, New York when Kate and Margaret Fox, ages 11 and 15, communicated with spirits of the dead through mysterious rapping sounds. Among the earliest people to recognize the validity of the Fox sisters being mediums were Amy and Isaac Post, who were Quakers active in the anti-‐slavery and marriage reform movements. The Post house was a station on the underground railroad. William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglas had stayed as guests there. Among the early spirits the sisters contacted in the Post home was the Posts’ five-‐year-‐old daughter who had recently died, and then a five-‐year-‐old son who had died several years earlier. The Posts were convinced and gathered “a small group to meet weekly in search of the truth that might be revealed by communicating with the dead through the girls’ mediumship” (Braude, 1989, p. 11). In a short time other people discovered they were mediums, and the Spiritualist movement was soon wide spread. The rapping was replaced by writing, in which the spirits guided the medium’s hand, and speaking in which the spirits used the medium’s voice, or spoke from out of the darkness that surrounded the séance table. Later, the spirits communicated through a planchette, an early form of Ouija board. The early Spiritualists were, like Amy and Isaac Post, radical reformers who campaigned for woman’s rights and for the abolition of slavery. Ann Braude (1989) says the two causes were related in that both were a challenge to the political and religious hegemony of white males.

While most religious groups viewed the existing order of gender, race, and class relations as ordained by God, ardent Spiritualists appeared not only in the woman’s rights movement but throughout the most radical reform movements of the nineteenth century (p.3).

The Spiritualists made two claims that undermined white male authority. The first claim was scientific. If the spirits of the dead could be contacted directly, then the sacred could not be confined to the Bible or to the churches. Spiritual truth was no longer the province of the clergy. Science could now overcome the barrier between

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the living and the dead just as the recently-‐invented telegraph could overcome the barrier of space and time. Verifiable scientific experience could replace the second-‐hand theological doctrines from the past. The Spiritualist were, of course not alone in their idea that science could replace revealed religion. As radio was being developed in Britian, Marconi’s chief rival, Oliver Lodge thought the spirits of the dead could pass though the ether much as electrical waves did. Second, Spiritualism made a theological claim. The Spiritualists reported that the dead who returned told of a beautiful heaven that everyone could enter. Humans were thus by nature good, not worthy only of damnation as the Calvinists preachers taught. The essential goodness that all humans shared was not limited by race or gender. If there were a gender preference, women were more spiritually inclined. The preachers of the day said that women were too passive and emotional for religious or political leadership. The Spiritualists argued that the passive emotional qualities of women made them better instruments through which the spirits of the dead could speak. It is very likely that the first time a person in the mid-‐nineteenth century heard a woman speak in public, she was a Spiritualist medium and soon thereafter a Spiritualist reformer. Many people who came to Spiritualists meetings hoping to communicate with the dead were bereaved parents. Nineteenth century children were valued in the world where the private sphere of feminine domesticity had recently replaced the masculine dominated theological and political spheres as the locus of religious life (see Lasch, 1977). The spirits of the dead functioned much like we see continuing bonds functioning today. The spirits provided solace and moral guidance to those who felt their presence. The political meaning, however, was different. The moral guidance from the dead gave the Spiritualists heavenly support for the causes to which they devoted their lives. Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman (1992) note that middle class women and liberal ministers had both been excluded from public discourse and political power with the rise of early capitalism. The women and ministers became allied to promote the values of the private sphere. With its Victorian sentimentality and especially its concern with the feelings of grief at the deaths of little children, the private sphere could be a force that could counteract the masculine, rational competitiveness of industrial capitalism. Ann Douglas (1977) says that in defending the reality of the communicating with the dead and in the loving descriptions of heaven as a world just as real as the physical world of earth, ministers and women attempted to establish a new balance of power in the competitive democracy of early industrial capitalism. We need not describe the whole arch of American Spiritualism or the academic fate of spiritualism at large. Ann Braude’s book remains a delightful read. Spiritualism gained popularity rapidly in the 1850s and through the Civil War. Séances became an accepted part of Victorian life. As Spiritualism moved into the homes of the privileged and into the public sphere, the reform doctrines receded. Continuing bonds with the dead could still be intensely personal, but were largely separated from political meanings. The Civil war began as a fight to save the Union, but was redefined as a war to end slavery. After the war some reformers, for example abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, believed the reform movement had been successful, even though women’s

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rights remained as they had been. Women played public roles in other reforms, for example speaking in public for the prohibition of alcohol, although the politics of that movement was the older immigrant groups that were largely Protestant against the newer immigrant groups that were often Catholic. At the same time, developments in Protestant theology made the Spiritualist opposition to Calvinism seem outmoded. From the late 1860s into the 1880s, Spiritualism’s scientific claims led to more exaggerated and theatrical demonstrations. To prove their scientific claim, the Spiritualists abandoned the theological claim and then resorted to fraud. Harry Houndini was only one of the magicians who came forward to expose the charlatans who had turned communication with the dead into stage shows. Spiritualism fell of its own weight, although a small band of true believers remains to this day. The reforms that had been so intimately connected with Spiritualism moved forward on their own. The women’s cause proceeded with little additional help from the dead toward women’s constitutional right to vote and toward equality in the workplace. Birth control separated sex from conception, thereby helping women gain the control over their bodies as the Spiritualists had demanded. The fight against slavery had been won, although the battle against Jim Crow still lay ahead. The Freedom Movement of the 1960s that completed the work of the Civil War had few reference to continuing bonds with the dead. Those who died in the struggle, including Martin Luther King, were honored as collective representations, but they did not return to offer advice or to testify to truths from beyond the grave. As the movement succeeded and African-‐Americans were more integrated into the larger society, King became a collective representation of the whole country, commemorated with a white granite monument in Washington DC almost equidistant from the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, and the Washington Monument. CONCLUSION In this paper we have explored a many varieties in the continuing bonds between the living and the dead across cultures and over time. We noted that our contemporary culture is relatively unique in that we recognize continuing bonds, but study them by focusing almost exclusively on the living. In other places and times, the concern is for both the living and the dead. As a corrective, then, in this paper we have described continuing bonds with a focus on the roles played by the dead. We have looked at both the interactions themselves, and at the cultural narratives in which the continuing bonds are embedded. The dead are, we noted, in the collective memory, not merely in the individual memories of those who knew them. We cited Paul Connerton (1989) who said collective memory is maintained by ritual performance, that is, collective memory is bodily as much as abstract and mental. The physicality of individual grief, Connerton said, makes it a very good vehicle by which collective memory is performed and transmitted. As collective memories the dead are what Emil Durkheim called collective representations (1965, 1974). They play a major role in social solidarity and identity in families, tribes, ideological groups, or nations. The dead are a diverse group, as we have seen, and the relationships between them and the living are complex. Although the categories are not exclusive, we found

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a useful division of the dead into three kinds as a way organizing the paper: family dead, the hostile dead, and the political dead. Ancestor rituals gave us an entry into understanding cultural narratives in which the dead remain in the family. The rituals reinforce the ties of loyalty and solidarity among family members, as well as symbolizing and helping the family’s good fortune and well being. We saw that many cultural narratives that include the dead as family members, the well-‐being of the living is connected with the well-‐being of the living. The living care for the dead with rituals and with conduct approved of by the dead, and the dead give the living a sense of identity, comfort, and protection. We found the family dead in a variety of narratives in addition to ancestor rituals: in the merit transfer in Mayahana Buddhism, in Islamic prayers and help for the dead, as well as in medieval European memoria and later in church rituals. The hostile dead seem, at least overtly, less of a problem among bereaved people today than other times, perhaps, as we noted, because rather than being defined as the hostile dead, they are labeled as intrusive thoughts or intrusive presences. Some dead are hostile because of the nature of their deaths, for example, unmarried young women or aborted or stillborn children. For the most part, however, the hostile dead are part of the narratives of the family dead. Sometimes, for example in the Icelandic sagas, the dead are hostile to the founders of ancestral lines that will replace theirs. In most cases however, the dead become harmful spirits when the proper rituals are not performed for them, that is when the living do not include them in their circle of care. The political dead can be understood as ancestor rituals on a larger scale. Dead warriors figure in all narratives that channel the loyalty of citizens to their nation, tribe, or ideological group. Fidelity to the dead can be an element in conflicts about the meaning of cultural narratives. Among our examples were the meanings ascribed to the war dead in the post-‐Civil War American South and in post-‐WWII Japan, as well as the transformation of Martin Luther King to a representative of the whole nation. We saw that in a rapid change in the arrangements of political power, loyalty to the dead in ancestor or tribal rituals can make the dead an obstacle to the new power holders consolidating the hegemony or their narrative. We saw examples of this widespread phenomenon in the Deuteronomic Reform in ancient Israel and in the Communist revolution in China. If the continuing bonds to the dead reinforce loyalty to larger cultural narratives, then, as we have seen, bonds to the dead also are important elements in narratives that oppose hegemonic narratives. Our example was the role communications with the dead played in the 19th century movements to abolish slavery and to support women’s rights. As we understand more about the family dead, the hostile dead, and the political dead, we also see that other cultures have strategies for managing continuing bones, including negative bonds, that are hardly available to the bereaved in the developed West. We also see that continuing bonds are important within larger cultural dynamics, in individual’s sense of belonging, and in the political movements and power struggles that shape history.

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