Death Customs: an Analytical Study of Burial Rites (1930)

Miss Bendann’s book is what it purports to be: an analytical study of burial rites. With commendable courage, the author launches into a comparative investigation of a type which for some time has been out of fashion. In a historical introduction, the author deals rather cavalierly with some outstanding representatives, living and dead, of anthropological theory. Then the author plunges into a study based on an intensive investigation of burial rites and associated ideas in Melanesia, Australia, Northeast Siberia and India, where the Vedic conceptions receive particular attention. Here and there, as when commenting upon the universality of the notion that death is unnatural, the author draws her material from a much wider geographical range.