Burial in different cultures

The World Health Organisation advises that only corpses carrying infectious diseases strictly require burial.
Human burial practices are the manifestation of the human desire to demonstrate “respect for the dead”, and to prevent the possibilities of revenants harming the living.
People from different cultures vary in their mode of respect for the physical remains.
Leaving corpses lying on the ground, so scavengers may feed on the corpse, is considered disrespectful to the deceased in many but not all cultures.
In Tibet, sky burials are very common.
Sky burial is the placement of the deceased’s body on elevated ground like in trees and mountains so birds of the sky can feed on the remains. In Tibet this is considered to help the spirit return to God, while the body joins the cycle of life, which acknowledges the body as food, a core tenet of some Buddhist practices.
In most cultures burial is seen as an attempt to bring closure to the deceased’s ties with family and friends.
Psychologists in some quarters, as well as practitioners in the funeral industry, claim that by interring a body away from plain view, the pain of losing a loved one can be lessened.
For cultures, which believe in the afterlife, burial is viewed as a necessary step for an individual to reach the afterlife, with the human corpses being buried in the soil.
The act of burying corpses is thought to have begun some 200,000 years ago. As a result, burial grounds are found throughout the world as mounds of earth.
Some burial practices are heavily ritualised while others are simply practical.
Natural burial
A trend in modern burial is the concept of natural burial, (the process by which a body is returned to the earth to decompose naturally in soil). It was popularised in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s by Ken West (a professional cemeterian for the City of Carlisle).
He popularised the concept in response to the United Kingdom’s call for government to align local burials with United Nations’ Env-ironmental Programme Local Agenda 21.
The practice, however, is gaining ground rapidly and has now expanded to Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, North America, China, and Japan.
Coffin burials
The body is often buried wrapped in a shroud and placed in a coffin. The coffins are usually covered by a burial liner or a vault, which prevents the coffin from collapsing under the weight of the earth or floating away during a flood.
These containers slow the decomposition process by physically blocking decomposing bacteria and other organisms from accessing the corpse. An additional benefit of using containers to hold the body is that if the soil covering the corpse is washed away by a flood or some other natural process, the corpse will still not be exposed to open air.
The body may be dressed in fancy and/or ceremonial clothes. Personal objects, such as favourite pieces of jewellery or photograph, of the deceased may be included with the body. This practice, also known as the inclusion of grave goods, serves several purposes.
Reasons for inclusion of grave goods
In funeral services, the body is often put on display.
Many cultures feel that the deceased should be presented looking its finest. The inclusion of ceremonial garb and sacred objects as well as personal effects may be motivated by the beliefs that in the afterlife the person may wish to have with them what was important to them on earth.
Alternatively, in some cultures it is felt that when a person dies, their possessions and sometimes people connected to them such as wives should go with them out of loyalty or ownership.
Though not generally a motivation for the inclusion of grave goods with a corpse, it is worth considering that future archaeologists may get a clue to the type of life the deceased lived from the remains and artefacts such as clothing and personal effects.
Burial positions
The deceased may be buried lying in a number of positions. Christian burials are made extended, meaning that the body should be lying flat with arms and legs straight, or with the arms folded upon the chest, and with the eyes and mouth closed.
Extended burials may be supine-lying on the back or prone -lying face down.
However, in some cultures, being buried face down shows marked disrespect.
Other ritual practices place the body in a flexed position with the legs bent or crouched with the legs folded up to the chest. Warriors in some ancient societies were buried in an upright position.
In Islam, the head and face are pointed toward Mecca, the holiest city in Islam. Many cultures treat placement of dead people in an appropriate position to be a sign of respect even when burial is impossible.
In non-standard burial practices, such as mass burial, the body may be positioned arbitrarily. This can be a sign of disrespect to the deceased or is done due to considerations of time and space.
Burial sites
Apart from sanitary and other practical considerations, the site of burial can be determined by religious and socio-cultural considerations.
Thus in some traditions, especially with an animalistic logic, the remains of the dead are banished for fear their spirits would harm the living if too close to dwellings.
Others keep remains close to dwellings in keeping with local traditions to help surviving generations spiritually.
Religious rules may prescribe a specific zone.
For example Christi-an traditions hold that Christians must be buried in consecrated ground, usually a cemetery.
Early Christians provided burial sites in or very near the church to those exceptional individuals as a high posthumous honour. Many existing funeral monuments and crypts so created remain in use today.
Royalty and high nobility often have one or more traditional sites of burial, generally monumental, often in a palatial chapel or cathedral.
Most modern cultures mark the location of the body with a headstone. This serves two purposes.
Firstly, the grave will not accidentally be exhumed.
Secondly, headstones often contain information or tributes to the deceased. This is a form of remembrance for loved ones.
It can also be viewed as a form of immortality, especially in cases of famous people’s graves.
Such monumental inscriptions may subsequently be useful to genealogists and family historians.
Cities of the dead (necropolis)
In many cultures, graves are grouped, so the monuments make up a necropolis — a city of the dead, paralleling the community of the living.
Graves are marked with durable markers, or monuments, intended to help remind people of the buried person. An unmarked grave is a grave with no such memorial marker.
Another sort of unmarked grave is a burial site with an anonymous marker, such as a simple cross; boots, rifle and helmet; a sword and shield; a cairn of stones; or even a monument. This may occur when identification of the deceased is impossible.

– Philip Mataranyika is the CEO of Nyaradzo Funeral Assurance Company. He can be contacted at mavmat67@hotmail.com