From the page: "Before getting too carried away with this classification business, it's worth reflecting on the value of the enterprise. Say that we have for each dimension of a cultural death system a set of mutually exclusive and totally exhaustive categories such that each culture can be pigeon-holed into one and only one, what then? So what?
The first step might to see how these various categories cluster together. For instance, are there patterns in the way beliefs in an afterlife correlate with cultural/personal orientations toward abortion or euthanasia? Is cultural thanatophia related to cultural gerontophobia-- in other words, do death fears lead to fears of growing old? This question brings us to the second and most important step: how orientations toward death relate to orientations toward life."
Sep 17, 2005 3:38pm