Books: How the Other Half Dies

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In Panama, the Cuna Indians recite from memory a 20-hour epic. In Umbria, Italy, when the funeral procession begins, the corpse leaves the house by the "dead man's door," a special exit never used for other purposes. In Bali, as in Burma, some of the floats and effigies paraded to the burning ground are so huge that 75 men are required to carry them. In Rumania, at the funeral of a girl of marriageable age, a young man volunteers to be her bridegroom, and he walks with her to the grave as if to the altar.

Burial customs defy enumeration.

Earth burial is most common, and often most bizarre. The Jivaro of Peru and Ecuador sit the dead man, head in hands, on a bench, and bury him beneath the floor of his own home, which is then abandoned. The Cuna people dig deep pits, roof them over and bury their dead in hammocks swinging gently underground. Air burial is widespread. The Sioux have been known to bury their dead in trees. In Tibet, the corpse is chopped up and tossed to the vultures.

In Ghana, if a child should die before it is nine days old, the Fanti simply stuff its remains in a pot and throw it on the trash heap—they take the child's hasty departure as an insult and feel no obligation to respect the departed. Among Orthodox Jews, when two dead men arrive for burial at a cemetery, the more learned of the two, according to Talmudic prescription, must be buried first. In the U.S. Northwest and British Columbia, the Salish Indians dispose of their dead by rolling an avalanche over them. In China, since the Communists took power, thousands of cemeteries have been plowed up and sown to crops. The bones, allegedly removed for reburial, were probably ground up for fertilizer.

Buried Alive. The burial of the body, or even a funeral feast, does not necessarily conclude the obsequies. In parts of Sumatra, bones are dug up and given an annual airing. In Rumania, bones are sometimes dug up after three, five or seven years, taken to church, blessed, and reburied with full rites. And among the Azande, a Congo tribe, graves are opened for less innocent purposes. Tribesmen are apparently subject to dreams in which the dead demand a human sacrifice, and when the tribal oracle approves such a dream, a victim is found, his legs are broken, and he is buried alive.

Four and a half pounds of such grave information, adorned with floral displays of sociological prose ("Grieving is a sense of reaction with motor implications"), are assembled in this handy encyclopedia of death. Financed by the National Funeral Directors Association, the book may indeed make one of the more significant contributions to the U.S. death industry since the invention of Frederick & Trump's Corpse Cooler. It goes a long way toward reconciling its readers to the sentimental (and expensive) horrors of the usual U.S. funeral. The rest of the world, it seems, is not much better off.