Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

In karmic traditions, death and life-giving waters are
intimately connected in the constitution of humans,
societies, and cosmos. Water is a medium which
transforms death into life, creates food for society
through successful crops, and links this world with the
heavenly Other-world. Water is the very essence of life.
The life-giving waters are of particular concern when a
society is re-created, and death rituals emphasise the
forthcoming life of both the deceased but also society
and cosmos in general. The individual death is a part of
the hydrological cycle, and death is related to three types
of cycles: firstly, the cycle of the personal life such as
birth, marriage, and rebirth; secondly, the cycle of the
year, especially in regard of the seasons and harvests,
and thirdly, the cosmological cycles. Water is the most
important life-giving element in these cycles, but not all
types of water are equally important. The life-giving
waters are for the welfare of society, and karma and
soteriology are hence interwoven in the ways the
deceased becomes a part of the hydrological cycle.
The relation between water and death is essentially the
way societies spatially structure and organise the
interaction with their gods in the cosmogonic process
where funerals represent the most dangerous, but also
the most important, rites in a society. The water-worlds
are an intrinsic part of the constitution and the
development of the Indian religions. The pervasive role
of water-worlds in society and cosmos is, however,
rarely investigated despite its structuring function, which
unites micro- and macro cosmos, creates life, and
legitimises social hierarchies. Cremation, caste, and
cosmogony are three interwoven and fundamental
variables in the worlds of life-giving waters.
Therefore, my aim is to develop a synthetic perspective
for enhancing the understanding of the roles death and
life-giving waters have in the constitution of society and
cosmos in karmic traditions through a material culture
study of death and funeral practices as cultural, ritual,
and religious processes in parts of Nepal, Bangladesh,
India, and the Indus valley (fig. 1.1).
Disciplinary, this is a material culture study concerned
with all aspects of the relationship between the material
and the social. Material culture studies strive to
overcome the logistical constraints of any discipline. The
aim is to model the complex nature of the interaction
between social strategies, artefactual variability, and
material culture (Miller 1985:4) “The study of material
culture may be most broadly defined as the investigation
of the relationship between people and things
irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted
may be global or local, concerned with the past or
present, or the mediation between the two” (Miller &
Introduction
1
Tilley 1996:5). A material culture study is neither
archaeology nor anthropology but both. All types of
materiality contain both aspects of the past and the
present, and it is not expedient to distinguish
systematically between a natural world and an
artefactual one (Miller 1994:398). The main
characteristic of materiality is its physicality, and “to
study material culture is to consider the implications of
the materiality of form for the cultural process”
(ibid:400). Therefore, material culture studies have the
advantage of both emphasising the past and the present,
the continuity and transformations of traditions, and this
approach enables one to juxtapose between different
problems and time scales searching for the role of water
in the development of religions.
Empirically, I will present, on the one hand, a
comparative ethnography of different ways people
understand and act upon death of relatives and members
of society according to social, cultural, economic,
ecological, and religious variables. Then I will analyse
archaeological materials as a means for probing deeper
into the world of waters, and by combining these
empirical approaches enable a discussion of death and
life-giving waters in the past and the present. Common
for all the investigated groups and peoples are the belief
in reincarnation and the doctrine of karma. Using the
philosophical-religious system as a point of departure
enables an analysis of variables that structure the lifegiving
processes associated with death and funerals. The
major challenge is, therefore, to distinguish the
interrelatedness of relevant variables when explaining
why and how people with the same religious world-view
act upon and solve the same problem in various ways.
Consequently, a broad empirical and comparative
approach is the basis for theoretical elaborations.
Theoretically, my aim is to challenge the Cartesian
dualism and its subsequent scientific dualism of nature
and culture. Firstly, the traditional separation between
mind and matter cannot be upheld. The flesh of the body
is a bio-moral substance which encompasses both
morality and materiality, and therefore the mode of
destruction of this embodied matter in funerals is of
uttermost importance in the reconstruction of society and
cosmos. Secondly, since Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
there has been a dictum in social and human sciences
that social facts can only be explained by other social
variables (Durkheim 1966). C. P. Snow designated the
scientific divide as the “two cultures” – a universe of
humanities as opposed to the natural sciences (Snow
1966), and within post-modernism the dogma of mind’s
superiority over matter has been forced to its extreme;
there is nothing but language. When social scientists
have acknowledged nature as a relevant aspect in social