摘要：Perhaps because of the universality of death, subtleties of specific cultural configurations in deathways have sometimes been obscured in attempts to compare other perceived universals, such as demonstrations of grief, and the symbolism and socio-politics of deathways (Metcalf and Huntington 1991). On the one hand, archaeological reconstructions of death rites have given us insight into long term sequences of cultural change, while on the other, ethnographic research has provided accounts of living traditions, even if they capture those traditions at the particular moment of the social anthropologist's relatively brief encounter with another culture
