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He ordered himself to be thrown anywhere without being buried. And when his friends replied, "What! to the birds and beasts?" "By no means," saith he; "place my staff near me, that I may drive them away." "How can you do that," they answer, "for you will not perceive them?" "How am I then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no sensation?"
-Diogenes the Cynic, 412-c 320 BCE in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I, 43.
Everywhere else death is an end. Death comes, and they draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spain they open them. . . . A dead man in Spain is more alive than any place else in the world (Lorca 1998: 55).
THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE DEAD BODY IN deep time and about its work in particular places at particular times. Diogenes speaks for the first; Lorca for the second. The cynic was right; his argument is persuasive enough to have been repeated for more than two millennia. It also profoundly wrong. The dead body mattered and matters everywhere and across time; in particular times and particular places; in disparate religious and ideological circumstances; and even in the absence of any particular belief about a soul or an afterlife or a God. It matters because almost always, the living need the dead more than the dead need the living. The dead body has always been enchanted at the same time as it is known to be rubbish: powerful, dangerous, a thing to be reckoned with. "And yet . . ." and "except for . . ." are the long and infinitely engaged history of our responses to Diogenes' argument.
There is no more protean or more generative enterprise than the words and acts that challenge Diogenes. Of course, comes the collective voice in thousands of different timbres, the dead are not refuse like the other debris of life; they can not be left for beasts to scavenge. They remain part of culture; base as they are, they do not revert back into nature easily. To the contrary, they bear witness to the historical continuity of humanity. We as a species care for the dead; we live among them; we make of them ciphers...