Consuming the dead: a Kleinian perspective on death rituals cross-culturally

The author argues that Melanie Klein's theories of mourning shed light on certain funerary practices encountered widely in ethnographic literature, namely 'second burial'. Pointing out that the death of a loved person is experienced in fantasy as the destruction of the internalised mother imago, the author shows how various Kleinian processes involved in infantile fears of maternal loss--such as persecutory anxiety, guilt, depression, and attempts at reparation--are clearly expressed in rituals of mourning cross-culturally. The argument is illustrated with two extensive case studies, Bali (Indonesia) and the Mekeo of coastal Papua New Guinea. A number of other cultures are considered briefly to indicate the relevance of Kleinian theory to the symbolism of death rituals more broadly, including the role played by sorcery and witchcraft beliefs, fears of malevolent ghosts, repeated re-burial, mortuary gift exchange, cremation, mortuary cannibalism, and the denial of death in modern western funeral rites.