Death and Posthumous Existence in Social Strategies: Why People Create Rules for Communicating with the Dead

Abstract

The article introduces a special theme of the issue on “Life after Death: A Cross-Cultural Aspect of the Postmortal” Modern studies of concepts of death and dying in different cultures and different social environments demonstrate an increase in multidirectional tendencies of their development in the post-industrial era. On the one hand, under the influence of globalization processes, the processes of unification and technologization of the funeral and funeral rites intensify, and new “ecological” methods of burial and traditions of honoring the dead, often significantly different from the traditional ones, are introduced. On the other hand, many traditional beliefs about the after-death and burial rituals continue to be maintained. Moreover, in some cases it is possible to talk about a kind of “return to the archaic”, when, under the guise of innovation, old traditions and ideas about the nature of death and post-mortem existence return to the everyday life of modern societies. The need to understand the patterns of the processes taking place, their specificity in different cultural environments and social groups dictated the “postmortal” research that we undertook. Its various aspects are reflected in contributions by M.L. Butovskaya, D.A. Dronova, A.A. Zakurdaev, I.A. Morozov, L.A. Tkachuk, E.G. Chesnokova.