Volume 21, Number 10 · June 13, 1974
Death's Checkered Past
By Robert Darnton
Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present
by Philippe Ariès, translated by Patricia M. Ranum
Johns Hopkins, 111 pp., $6.50
Although death has inexorably followed life throughout all time, historians have assumed it has no history. They generally prefer dramatic events to the great constants of the human condition—birth, childhood, marriage, old age, and death. Yet these constants have changed, however slowly and imperceptively To give birth and to die today are quite different experiences from what they were in antiquity. They differ at present within the boundaries of the United States, among the Apache, the Hopi, the Cocopa, the Mormons, the orthodox Jews, and the bourgeois of Los Angeles. Anthropologists have treated death as a rite of passage that reveals fundamental aspects of culture. But cultural historians generally keep to Culture with a capital C—or a capital K. Kulturgeschichte, a product of German universities in the nineteenth century, could learn much by following anthropologists into the field.
Review, 3712 words
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