Return to main pageDeath and Slavery: "Reading" Slave Funerals
as Sites of Political Contestationby Dave Burrell
History 700: Seminar in World History
Dr. Ken Andrien
22 December 1997
Throughout History 700, two primary themes have recurred. The first has been a search for an effective methodology by which to apprehend the peasant voice in historical studies. The second has been an attempt to understand the dimensions, definitions, and limitations of rebellion within these societies. In looking at American slave funerals as sites of political contestation, I seek to address both themes.Generally viewed as personal, religious, and social functions, funerals also provide the potential for political disruption. The symbolic reassertion and reassembling of social hierarchy after the death of a monarch or a political leader is only the most familiar example of politicized funeralizing. Because the respect shown to the dead helps to define the respect owed to the living, the lamentations of mourners or an excess of display may well imply a critique of society and its values. This concept is well known to French historians but alien to most historians of death in America. With gravestone historians focused upon the elaborate and fascinating folk art of New England carvers, death historians attracted to the religious sources of ideology, and historians of slavery more interested in cultural origins than funerary meanings, the significance of slave funerals seems largely to have been lost.
Yet as Gail Kligman's study of Transylvanian funerary customs reveals, "life-rituals" such as funerals and weddings reveal many crucial societal characteristics: they realign personal relations, affect economic institutions, require collective participation, and condense social symbols which sustain a community. Moreover, the ubiquitous nature of death makes it a potent and ever-present social fact with which to be reckoned. In bringing people to consider their own religion, relationships, and reality, death can occasion challenges to a society's inevitable ambiguities and contradictions. I argue that such was particularly the case for the antebellum United States South. For both a white society which defined bondspeople as chattel and a black society which resisted dehumanization, slave funerals were boundary experiences defining the limits of the slaves' humanity and threatening society with a silent rebellion of strengthened self-concept or an open rebellion of anti-white violence. Studying slave funerals might thus offer the historian of American slavery rich rewards.
Underlying all such speculations are several social scientific theories. The first and most central is the sociological insight of Emile Durkheim, which describes death as presented above: a disruption of the social fabric with the potential for crises of legitimization and succession. Funerary rites thus offer key opportunities to form cohesive communities, defining each individual's meaning to the collective. Yet Durkheim's formulation of society's relation to death does not solve it. A second social scientific view from psychology deepens the problem. Suggesting that the terror of death provokes an anxiety which makes direct confrontation with mortality impossible, Ernest Becker has pointed out that ritualized representations of death tend to deny the substance of death. Funerals thus glorify life and sustain personal expectations of ongoing meaning and existence. In all societies, this process occasions a certain degree of ambivalence and cognitive dissonance; in slave societies, in which slave claims to life and humanity are themselves contested, the predicament is especially portentous.
Perhaps this is because, as a third theory by Orlando Patterson has suggested, slavery is itself "social death." The "institutionalized marginality" of bondspeople necessarily intertwines the legal, social, and political status of enslavement with cultural conceptions of death, for the question of what has been lost in death implies the question of personhood itself. Plantation society did recognize slaves as more than simply property in numerous subtle messages, as a wealth of historiography since 1960 has demonstrated. Slave funerals were therefore not alone in their conflicting messages of personhood. Yet if, as Patterson argues, the institution of slavery was the conduit for Western society's "discovery" of freedom, then understanding funerals in the American South might help to reveal important clues regarding the nature of African-American life and personhood.
The theories of Durkheim, Becker, and Patterson could certainly lead one to assume that death is important for antebellum slaves and masters, but it would remain an assumption. A wealth of anecdotal evidence, anthropological evidence, and African origins might reinforce this assumption, for in African-American life, death and life were dialectically and experientially related, with significant cult of ancestor worship and frequent communication between living and dead. And Eugene Genovese states flatly that slave demands earned them control of their own funerary customs: "The slaves cared passionately about their funerals and demanded that they be elaborate. White southerners, for the most part, yielded to this black demand." Yet this prospectus seeks to go beyond mere heroicization and assumptions to discover whether and how death and funerals were in fact "passionately" important in the antebellum South.
The first and most obvious means to search for potentially destabilizing effect of funerals is in examples of slave violence and revolt. The historical record shows that the two were often conjoined. In 1687, for instance, the laws of Northern Neck of Virginia prohibited public funerals by slaves because authorities feared that they helped to hatch a recent conspiracy. In 1772, the corporation of New York City prohibited nighttime slave funerals and limited attendance to a maximum of twelve people. Their explicit reasons for doing so were the "heathenish" and potentially seditious nature of such gatherings. So too the 1783 Slave Act of the British Virgin Islands and the 1780 Act in Antigua demarcated strict limits for funerals, fearing slave tendencies to equalize themselves with whites. And in 1800, Gabriel Prosser's insurrection showed that slaveowner distrust of mortuary gatherings were not simply imagined; the revolt was organized during the funeral of a slave child. Funerals were portentous times.
However, it could be that these revolts resulted simply from an opportunity to gather together, and did not represent the ambiguity of funeralization itself. I will therefore seek evidence to show that mortuary rites were themselves precious to Southern bondspeople. For instance, over 4000 black members withdrew from the Charleston Bethel Church in the late 1810s because the church's white trustees built a hearse house on an African-American burial plot. While certain other issues were at the heart of this rift, the fact that a burial ground was the symbolic rallying point may be more than happenstance. Just as Nancy Farriss suggests that the centrality of deceased saints united a mobile Mayan peasantry, I will insist that slave deaths helped to unite the slave community with symbols, communal rituals, and a perceived connection to Africa. This study of funerals may therefore revise our understanding of the strength, cohesiveness, and rebelliousness of the antebellum slave community.
There will not be much to review insofar as secondary sources on Southern African-American death are concerned. Few such sources exist. The vast majority of work on death in American history has investigated white New Englanders, and particularly their gravestones. Much of that work will prove unhelpful, as gravestones were not plentiful and cemeteries were not well recorded or laid out - nor did slaves exercise the measure of choice presupposed by historians seeking mortuary ideology in the medium of gravestones or cemeteries. Moreover, the secondary sources are not well integrated into the literature of either slavery or death: two of the three found were student thesis (one M.A. and one honors) and the other was published in a periodical devoted to New England studies. Only Eugene Genovese, in a chapter entitled "Let the Dead Bury the Dead" in his massive study, Roll, Jordan, Roll, appears to have integrated slavery and the rites of death. His work will therefore be my starting point, while studies relating to mortality rates, African funerary culture and arts, and white mortuary practices might help contextualize the primary evidence.
Fortunately, numerous sources exist to begin an investigation of slave funerals, even if they have been neglected up to this point by historians interested in death studies. The hope of this study is to jointly investigate sources from slave, slavemaster, and outsider perspectives, and thus seek dichotomies or agreements therein. The first and most abundant source for information regarding the late antebellum period are the WPA narratives recorded in the 1930s. In addition to gaining a great variety of specific events from these narratives, I hope to look at funerals presented in a systematic fashion as "performance events," applying anthropological tools to seek meaning in the structures and stylistic codes. By locating familiar codes in numerous African-derived societies - for instance, the ritual of spirit possession - we might understand the funeral rite and cultural content of African-American life more fully. But in order to do so, one must not isolate the icons of death from those of living and dying (as Gail Kligman did). How does the Welsh Neck Baptist Church's 1829 declaration that slaves separated by their owners were "virtually dead" to each other relate to the "real" or "social" death in slave quarters?
Slave autobiographies, published funeral sermons, folklore, and epistolary sources will serve a similar function to the WPA narratives, but from a shorter temporal distance and inclusive of funerary practices before the 1840s. For instance, Charles Ball's account of his life under slavery includes a detailed account of a funeral, noteworthy not only for the age of the deceased (an infant) and the recounting of the numerous grave goods included in the coffin (food, bow and arrows, miniature canoe, small stick, iron nail, white muslin, and a lock of hair), but also for the insight into the beliefs and customs that differentiated native Africans from second- or third-generation African-Americans.
In looking for "somewhat inchoate and naïve state of consciousness... the very beginnings of a theoretical consciousness" within the Indian peasantry, Ranajit Guha asserted that religion invariably sacralizes the authority of rural elites even when it appears not to. This study disagrees with that position. As Dan Beaver's study of seventeenth-century England has suggested, the religious symbolism of funerals can help create a revolutionary local community. As noted previously, funerals at least provide an occasion to consider religion and one's relation to the potentially-triumphant afterworld of the soul, or as one folk hymn put it: "de last long solemn day / When we stand around de throne." Was this a balm for earthly-discomfort or a cause for worldly discontent? Either was possible; only a study of the evidence will shine light on the answer. Yet reports of slave funerals seem to depict active historical agents in opposition to the dominant culture. For instance, white Baptists were shocked at the organized slave processions to and from cemeteries incorporating the "shout" and occasionally sought to curb these heathenish practices. Though one might seek to understand whether slave practices were simply ordinary responses to life events (Isaacman's "coping" mechanisms) or attempts to undercut the regime ("resistance"), their potential for subversion seem clear.
Given the revolutionary character so far attributed to funerary customs, one might well wonder why slave funerals were not more regulated. In investigating the resources of the slavemasters, I expect to find both an explanation for slaveowners' laissez faire and a muddier picture of funerals' "revolutionary" nature. The fact that funerals could be fraught with peril does not mean that they were detrimental to the slaveholding regime - but it does mean they provided a vibrant arena of debate. As James Scott informs us, the frontier between public and hidden transcripts represents a constant zone of struggle which was "perhaps the most vital arena for ordinary conflict, for everyday forms of class struggle." It is that conflict which I seek to uncover.
According to ex-slave narratives, it does appear that most slavemasters allowed slaves to hold funeral ceremonies and even attended or preached at them. To account for this, partly I expect to find humanity and paternalism in the slaveowners, as some of them recognized that prohibiting funerals for other human beings would be barbarous. Partly too I expect to find a cynical concern for slave morale and simple fear of slaves' negative reactions if funerals were to be prohibited. And partly I expect a necessary alignment of whites to their own claims of "benevolence" in the face of abolitionist critiques; the "respectable performance" of the public transcript here becomes a historical force in itself. To judge the relative importance of these various possible components of slaveowners' motivations, I will seek both white explanations of their views and the differences over time and space perceived by blacks.
Were there time, I might also investigate additional sources, such as material artifacts (coffins, broken earthenware, and wooden markers), business records (carpenters, morticians, gravediggers, and preachers); and anthropological studies of mortuary remains. The accounts of travelers such as Phillip Fithian, James Barclay, and Frederick Law Olmsted would also prove valuable as a third-party perspective on slave funerals. For instance, traveler Henry Knight suggested that slaves both had considerable control and that African customs remained vibrant in slave quarters. "When a slave dies, the master gives the rest day, of their [the slaves'] own choosing, to celebrate the funeral. This, perhaps a month after the corpse is interred, is a jovial day with them; they sing and dance and drink the dead to his new home, which some believe to be in old Guinea." Whether Knight's interpretation is confirmed in other sources has yet to be determined.
Much ink has been spilled over the origins of slave practices. Were the practices of nighttime burial, eastward orientation of dead bodies, throwing dirt on a grave, and "second burials" evidence of cultural carryovers from Africa or were they accommodations to white practices and the exigencies of slave labor requirements? The question is not only nearly impossible to unravel but also, for the purposes of this study, moot. Whereas origins reflect the genesis of practice, only the functions, perceptions, and contests for definitions of funerals begin to approach the meanings here envisioned. My study will seek questions regarding the social structure in death, the definition of slaves as persons, and evidence of conflict which arose in the midst of funerary practice. For instance, Genovese suggests that slave funerals "allowed the participants to feel themselves a human community" and "decisively negated the mythical foundation of the slaveholders' world." Moreover, Genovese believed that in focusing on the perceived threat of post-funerary revolt, slavemasters failed to notice this implicit subversion. While it seems possible that this interpretation is correct, I also might find the significance of death circumscribed the limits of white authority or, alternatively, that slave notions of personhood or funerary customs had been so drained of vitality that they did not serve the revolutionary instincts theoretically inherent in their design.
Finally, Genovese asserts that when slaveowners prohibited or limited funerary rites, "many slaves suffered terribly from their masters' indifference." This seems a remarkable and unsubstantiated statement - and one well worth pursuing. To what extent did the master's funeralizing matter to slaves? To what extent did private recollections, black spirituals, and communal discussion of a fellow slave's passing fulfill the supposed need for funerary rites? And how might the lack of formal rites have transformed slave notions of death, slavery, and emancipation from worldly ties? Only through an investigation of these contentious issues may we better understand American death, funerals, rebellion, and slavery.
Bibliography
Primary sourcesWPA narratives: Specific sources in George Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography.AlabamaNarratives VI (1): 22, 155, 279-80, 307, 332, and 398. GeorgiaNarratives XII (1): 5, 77, 98, 127, 154, and 208. GeorgiaNarratives XII (2): 5. GeorgiaNarratives XIII (3): 17 and 159. GeorgiaNarratives XIII (4): 118. Kansas Narratives XVI (1): 65. OklahomaNarratives VII (1): 95, 99, 113, 208 and 264. TexasNarratives IV (1): 52. TexasNarratives IV (2): 58 and 85. TexasNarratives V (3): 56 and 117. South CarolinaNarratives II (1): 73, 229, and 333-35. South Carolina Narratives II (2): 15, 51, 89, and 198. Narratives in Fisk University, Unwritten History of Slavery: 5, 131, 54, and 151. Narratives in Fisk University, God Struck Me Dead: 159. Narratives in Yetman, ed., Life Under the "Peculiar Institution": 65, 70, 92, 127, 146, 189, 257, and 332. John W. Blassingame, "Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems." Journal of Southern History XLI (November 1975): 473-92.
Slave autobiographies and letters: Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball, Henry Bibb, William Brown, Elizabeth Keckley, Solomon Northrup, and Austin Steward. Benjamin Drew, ed., The Refugee: A North-Side View of Slavery. Reading, MA: 1969. A compilation of interviews with fugitive slaves living in Canada; originally published 1855. Almon Underwood, A discourse on the death of the late R.T. Torrey, a martyr to human rights. Newark, NJ: Small & Ackerman, 1846. John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Robert S. Starobin, Blacks in Bondage: Letters of American Slaves. New York: 1974.
Folklore: Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, and Robert Tallant, eds., Gumbo Ya-Ya: A Collection of Louisiana Folk Tales. Compiled by the Works Progress Administration, Louisiana Writers' Project, and the Louisiana State Library Commission. Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Company, 1991. Richard M. Dorson, ed., American Negro Folktales. Greenwich, CT: 1967.
Plantation records: Kenneth M. Stampp, ed., "Records of Ante-bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War." University Publications of America. 862 microfilm reels; 10 series.
Slavemaster diaries: 19th century - James K. Polk, John Blackford, James Henry Hammond, Mary Boykin Chestnut, Bennet H. Barrow, Robert F. W. Allston, Hugh Fraser Grant, Frances Kemble, George Noble Jones, Caroline Gilman, and Edmund Ruffin.
Travel accounts: Phillip Fithian, Henry Knight, James Barclay, and Frederick Law Olmsted.
Polemical literature: E. N. Elliott, ed., Cotton is King, and Pro-Slavery Arguments. New York: 1968; originally published 1860. Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. Louisiana State University, 1981. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters. Richmond, VA: 1857. Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman's Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, Relative to the Coloured Population of the United States. Charleston, SC: 1822. Humanize slavery arguments: Charles C. Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes. In the United States. New York: 1969; originally published 1842. Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South. New York: 1857.
Treatises on slave management: Foby, "Management of Servants," Southern Cultivator XI (August 1953): 226-28. James O. Breeden, ed., Advice Among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South. Westport, CT: 1980.
Death in America
Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799-1883. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
Gary Laderman, "Locating the Dead: A Cultural History of Death in the Antebellum, Anglo-Protestant Communities of the Northeast," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 27-52.
James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.
Charley Shively, A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860. New York: Garland, 1988.
Jackson, Charles O., ed. Passing: The Vision of Death in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Arien Mack, Death in American Experience. New York: Schocken Books, 1973.
Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, eds., A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth-Century America. Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980.
Anita Schorsche, Mourning Becomes America: Mourning Art in the New Nation. Harrisburg, PA: William Penn Memorial Museum, 1976.
James K. Crissman, Death and Dying in Central Appalachia: Changing Attitudes and Practices. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.
South
Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage, 1976.
Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Peter Kolchin, "Reevaluating the Antebellum Slave Community: A Comparative Perspective." Journal of American History LXX (December 1983): 579-601.
Laurence Shore, "The Poverty of Tragedy in Historical Writing on Southern Slavery." South Atlantic Quarterly LXXXV (Spring 1986): 147-64.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "The Mask of Obedience: Male Slave Psychology in the Old South." American Historical Review XCIII (1988): 1228-52.
Leslie H. Owens, 'This Species of Property': Slave Personality and Behavior in the Old South, 1778-1861. Ph.D. thesis, Riverside: University of California , Riverside, 1972.
Nathan Irvin Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery. New York: 1977.
Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: 1981.
Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790. New York: Norton, 1982.
David R. Roediger, "And Die in Dixie: Funerals, Death & Heaven in the Slave Community, 1700-1865." Massachusetts Review XXII (Spring 1981): 163-83.
Cynthia Connor, "Sleep and Take Your Rest": Black Mortuary Behavior on the East Branch of the Cooper River, South Carolina. M.A. thesis, University of South Carolina, 1989.
April Kristy Harrison, Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices of Late Nineteenth-Century Black Atlantans. Honors thesis, Georgia State University, 1982.
Stephen J. Vicchio, "Baltimore's Burial Practices, Mortuary Art and Notions of Grief and Bereavement, 1780-1900," Maryland Historical Magazine 2:81 (1986): 134-48.
Terry G. Jordan, Texas Graveyards. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.
Jack Solomon and Olivia Solomon, Gone Home: Southern Epitaphs and Funerary Art. Black Belt Press, 1997.
Fred T. Smith, "Death, Ritual, and Art in Africa." African Arts 21:1 (November 1987): 28-9.
Jeffery R. Young, "Ideology and Death on a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833-1867: Paternalism Amidst 'A Good Supply of Disease and Pain.'" Journal of Southern History 53:4 (1993): 673-706.
Betty Wood, "Slave Birth, Death, and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765-1810." Slavery & Abolition 6:2 (September 1985): 99-121.
Lorena S. Walsh and Russell Robert Menard, "Death in the Chesapeake: Two Life Tables for Men in Early Colonial Maryland," 69 (1974): 211-27.
D. B. Smith, "Mortality and Family in the Colonial Chesapeake," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 13 (1978): 735-59.
Patrick H. Butler III, Death, the Individual, and Society in Colonial Tidewater Virginia. Ph.D.: Johns Hopkins University, 1984.
William Fitzhugh Brundage, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
New England Death
David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religious, Cultural, and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Gordon E. Geddes, Welcome Joy: Death in Puritan New England. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981.
Ronald A. Bosco, ed., The Puritan Sermon in America, 1630-1750: Volume 4, New England Funeral Sermons. Delamar, New York: Scholar's, 1978.
Beatrix T. Rumford, The Role of Death as Reflected in the Art and Folkways of the Northeast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Master's thesis, State University of New York - Oneonta, 1965.
Travis Richard Loudermilk, The Mortal Part: Funerary and Burial Customs in Old New England. Deerfield, MA: Historic Deerfield, 1978.
Etta Madden, "Resurrecting Life Through Rhetorical Ritual: A Buried Value of the Puritan Funeral," Early American Literature 3:26 (1991): 232-50.
John L. Brooke, Society, Revolution, and the Symbolic Uses of the Dead: An Historical Ethnography of the Massachusetts Near Frontier, 1730-1820. Ph.D.: University of Pennsylvania, 1982.
Theodore Chase and Laurel Gabel, Gravestone Chronicles: Some Eighteenth-Century New England Carvers and Their Work. New York: Macmillan, 1990.
Thomas Clifford Mann and Janet Greene, Over Their Dead Bodies: Yankee Epitaphs & History. Brattleboro, VT: St. Greene Press, 1962.
Ann Douglas, "Heaven Our Home: Consolation Literature in the Northern United States, 1830-1880." in David E. Stannard, ed., Death in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.
Peter G. Slater, "From the Cradle to the Coffin': Parental Bereavement and the Shadow of Infant Damnation in Puritan Society," Psychohistory Review 6 (Fall-Winter 1977-78): 4-24.
Gary Laderman, "Locating the Dead: A Cultural History of Death in the Antebellum, Anglo-Protestant Communities of the Northeast," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 63 (1995): 27-52.
Anthropological work
James G. Frazier, Fear of the Dead in Primitive Religions. New York: MacMillan, 1933.
Elizabeth Benson, ed., Death and the Afterlife in Pre-Columbian America. Washington, DC: Dumberton Oaks Research Library and Collections, 1975.
John W. Hohman, Through the Mirror of Death: A View of Prehistoric Social Complexity in Central Arizona. 2 vols. Ph.D. thesis, Arizona State University, 1992.
Russell A. Judkins, Mortuary Studies in the History of Anthropology. Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1973.
Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Robert J. Kastenbaum, Death, Society, and Human Experience. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1995.
E. Bendann, Death Customs: An Analytical Study of Burial Rites. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1969; originally published 1930.
Penny Colman, Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Ann Warren Turner, Houses for the Dead: Burial Customs through the Ages. New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1976.
Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh, eds., Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.
Sociology
Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion. London: Faber and West, 1848.
Emile Durkheim, Suicide. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.
Douglas James Davies, Death Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites. Washington, DC: Cassell, 1997.
Graig Morgan Sturdevant, Funerary Elaboration and Societal Complexity. M.A. thesis, University of Iowa, 1971.
Robert Blauner, "Death and Social Structures," Psychiatry 29 (1966): 387-.
Paul E. Irion, "Changing Patterns of Ritual Response to Death," Omega 3:22 (1990-91): 159-172.
Arthur Alan Saxe, Social Dimensions of Mortuary Practices. Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1970.
Jack B. Kamerman, Death in the Midst of Life: Social and Cultural Influences on Death, Grief, and Mourning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988.
L. R. Kass, "Death as an Event," 173 (1971): 694-702.
Archeology
C. W. Ceram (psued.), and Kurt W. Merek, Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archeology. New York: Knopf, 1951.
Robert Chapman, Ian Kinnes, and Klavs Randsborg, eds., The Archaeology of Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
What Means These Bones?: Studies in Southeastern Bioarcheology. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991.
Theresa A. Singleton, "The Archaeology of Slave Life," pp. 155-75 in Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. and Kym S. Rice, eds., Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South. Richmond, VA, 1991.
Anne L. Grauer, ed., Bodies of Evidence: Reconstructing History Through Skeletal Analysis. New York: Wiley-Liss, 1995.
Miscellany
John E. Seery, Political Theory for Mortals: Shades of Justice, Images of Death. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
A. Toynbee, "The Relation between Life and Death, Living and Dying." In Man's Concern with Death, edited by A. Toynbee et alia. New York: McGraw Hill, 1968.
Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites that Transform Our Lives and Our Communities. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.
Michael T. Gilmore, "Eulogy as Symbolic Biography: The Iconography of Revolutionary Leadership, 1776-1826," Harvard English Studies 8 (1978): 131-57.
Gail Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Poetics, and Popular Culture in Transylvania. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Nancy Marguerite Farriss, Maya Society under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.