Les rites de la mort à Bornéo: séparation ou renaissance ? Actualité de Robert Hertz

The recent publication by the Borneo Research Council of a collection of essays on death provides an opportunity to reassess the heritage of Robert Hertz, whose theory of the double obsequies relies heavily on the ethnography of the Ngaju and other Borneo peoples. The translation of Hertz’s essay on the collective representation of death in the 1960s, prompting in particular Peter Metcalf’s work on the Berawan, has consecrated the explanatory power of Hertz’s model. With this new book, however, time seems to have come for the final celebration that marks the heirs’ liberation from the deceased’s spiritual influence. While still largely valid as a general theory of mourning, Hertz’s paradigm of death as a reactive process proves inadequate to fully make sense of some lesser known or hitherto unpublished ethnographic materials that indicate a circulation of the components of the self taking place beyond the life-death opposition, or the direct influence of secondary burials on the rebirth of ancestors. This article deals with these criticisms from the standpoint of Hertz’s essay itself, and highlights its ethnographic intuition and lack of theoretical dogmatism.

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.