Care of the dead: Ancestors, traditions & the life of cultures

Humans stand apart from other animals in our care for children and elders. We are most distinctive, however, in our care for the dead. Such care is fraught in a modern episteme marked by disenchantment. Beginning with an analysis of exemplary individual relationships with the dead, we develop a theory of the complex links that bind present to past. Through the traces they leave, the traditions they transmit, and the institutions they build, the dead participate in countless chains of causally linked neural and material representations. These should be viewed as living things sustained by attention, memory, and action. Contemporary politics and cultural economies have disrupted our relations with the dead, seeking to control the past for present ends. We call instead for the relationship cultivated with the dead in the humanities, one that emphasizes our shared limitations, our shared fate, and our shared responsibility to make the world from the possible.