*Continuing Bonds in Cuzco: Skulls at Home

The skulls of loved ones are kept at home in Cuzco:

"An ancient tradition, this comes from our ancestors. In Inca times the mummies of the dead Emperors would be kept in homes and maintained a very important role as leaders in Cuzco. Even though half a millennium has passed, we still keep an intimate relationship with the bodies of some of our dead. People say the skulls of loved ones are good company to have in the house. They draw love, memory, and affection, at the same time, just as they living, they are expected to do important things around the home.

People live with the skulls of their dead. They make altars for them and give them flowers and light candles for them. They pray to them so that they will watch over the home and make everything go well for the family."

http://www.cuzcoeats.com/2013/07/loved-ones-skulls-protect-homes-in-cuzco/


This strikes me as a good example of 'continuing bonds' (1996) in grief theory by which the bereaved maintain a link with the deceased and go on to create new relationships with them. One of the more predominant paradigms is to consider death in terms of 'loss' - a consequence of 'love' and 'attachment.' The theory of continuing bonds maintains that the concept of 'loss' is not a necessary discourse but can instead be considered in terms of renewal, reconstruction, and a continued relationship by which the dead play an active role in the mundane.

Of course this is a different form of logic and cosmology/practice (about the dead) than what most western folk are used to. Anthropologist Evans Pritchard noted the differences in the logic behind tragedy and causation. While a scientifically minded non-religious (as opposed to secular) individual may consider the collapse of a beam due to natural causes (old wood, termites, gravity, shit happens). Another way of conceiving the physics of causation is to look at who was hurt and who held malicious intent towards that person. This places physics in the realm of human intentions and unseen forces that emanate from them. What's funny about this is that this form of thinking about causation still persists in the "secular" (as opposed to non-religious) world today: 'The Secret' (youtube clip here). It's been often referred to as the "law of attraction" that is akin to putting out "good vibrations" of what you want and the universe responds. It made a lot of money; endorsed by Oprah; and became a hit in the mid 2000s ('06 I think). And of course, people today talk about putting out "bad vibrations" as well ("don't bring that negativity here!"). The epistemology is, in a practical sense, irrelevant. There is a rationality behind "irrationality". One of the problems is that we like to look at isolated scenes, events, or episodes within a relatively short period of time. Looking at it solely within a single frame is going to raise issues of misconstruction and misinformation.  

The initial reaction to exhumation practices or placing the skull of an ancestor in the home may be one of disgust or disrespectful and appalling. It's so taboo to "disturb the dead" in the West. However, the logic of maintaining a relationship with the deceased is not something foreign. Placing flowers on grave sites, praying to a deceased grandmother, keeping an urn of cremated ashes in the home, having an altar, a lock of hair, an ossuary, etc. etc. are all practices of keeping relations. Of course the theory of continuing bonds is just one of many about grief and the bereaved. But I find it to be a useful one.