Comparative History of the Civilizations Concerning Funerals and Commemoration of the Dead: Relatives, Neighbouring Societies and States

悼念和纪念死者是人类社会的共同义务。这是所有文明都无法回避的问题。葬礼是通过与死者分离的仪式来重组生者社会关系的主要程序。对死者的纪念仪式是活着的人重新确认自己身份和统一自己群体的机会。本研究以死者在葬礼或纪念仪式中的待遇为研究对象，旨在为我们比较理解前现代与当代的国家和社会提供重要线索。死者的葬礼和纪念可以分为两类社会现象：（1）“普通死者”，其葬礼和纪念基本上是亲属或邻近社区的问题;（2）特殊死者，其葬礼或纪念活动涉及更大的社区或国家（主权者，独裁者，不同宗教的烈士，在民族战争中丧生的士兵或平民等）。从这一假设出发，我们研究了：（1）各宗教的葬礼和纪念活动及其融合特征;（2）“特殊死者”仪式与“普通死者”仪式之间的复杂关系;（3）大宗教影响力减弱的当代社会葬礼和纪念活动所体现的良心;（4）纪念阵亡将士的“政治意义"。

It is a common obligation for human societies to mourn for the dead men and to commemorate them. This is a problem that all civilizations cannot avoid. Funerals are main procedures, which reorganize social relations of living people through rituals of separation from dead men. And commemorative ceremonies of dead men are occasions for living people to reconfirm their own identities and to reunify their own groups. This project, focusing on how dead men were treated in their funerals or commemorative ceremonies aimed to find important clues to our comparative understanding of states and societies from pre-modern era to contemporary one.The funerals and commemoration of the dead can be divided into two types of social phenomena: (1)`the ordinary dead', whose funeral and commemoration are fundamentally the problems of relatives or a neighbouring community; (2) special dead' whose funeral or commemoration concerns a larger community or state (sovereigns, dictators, martyrs in different religions, people killed in national wars as soldiers or civilians, etc.)Starting from this suppositions, we have studied: (1) funerals and commemoration in various religions with their features of syncretism; (2) the complex relations between the rituals for`the special dead'and that of`the ordinary dead'; (3) the conscience represented in the funerals and the commemoration of contemporary societies where the influence of grand religions is weakened; (4)`political meanings of commemorations of killed in war.