From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

These chapters build on Ethical Engagement With Diverse Death Practices as political and cultural forces. Chapter 3 details the complex history of the holiday Día de los Muertos. The holiday has its roots in pre-conquest Indigenous traditions, and it also bears the history of Mexico’s colonized past. Doughty visits Santa Fe de la Laguna, where Indigenous Purépecha people live. During Spain’s colonization of Central and South America, Dominican friars celebrated that Indigenous people were “happy to adopt the Catholic Festivals of All Saints and All Souls” because they already had holidays honoring the dead (94). However, these friars intended for people to assimilate entirely to their version of Catholicism, eradicating old practices. When people instead blended practices, the Church called their cultural practices “horrifying” and even “banned the Indigenous population from gathering in their family cemeteries” (94). The imposition of Western cultural forces into Cultural Diversity in Death Practices is a theme that runs throughout this book, and this example shows the long history of this trend.

However, it also emphasizes Indigenous peoples’ resilience and resistance to Western hegemony. For instance, despite this cultural oppression, the Purépecha people maintained their customs, and Mexican people on the whole maintained some Indigenous aspects of Día de los Muertos. The various aesthetics of the holiday all reference this interrelation, but they also emphasize the political importance of the holiday. While the holiday was initially dismissed as folklore by people living in cities, it was readopted by those reacting against the incursion of the Americanized, capitalist celebration of Halloween into the most privileged parts of Mexican society. So, the holiday is a marker of not only “national identity” but also Mexico’s political identity (80).

Thus, while death practices in Mexico are a complex blend of forces, Doughty witnesses how they can empower someone like Sarah, who found no comfort in The Western Sanitization of Death that she had experienced in the United States. Sarah’s pregnancy became political when she learned that her baby had Trisomy 13; her doctors advised her to end her pregnancy. At the clinic, anti-abortion protesters outside “screamed over and over that [she] was a murderer” (100). They tried to “rescue” Sarah, screaming at her, “[W]e can still save you!” (100). Their actions exemplify the political strife around death-related issues like fetal death, abortion, and bodily autonomy.

In Chapter 4, Doughty further explores the relationship between death culture and politics. Katrina’s incentives to compost human bodies are politicized by some bloggers. Katrina’s project was born from practicality: Cities are running out of places for the dead, they won’t set aside more funerary space, and Katrina, an architecture student, posited a potential solution. However, she became a target for political conspiracy theorists. Doughty identifies Mike Adams, founder of the website Natural News and an “anti-vaxxer, 9/11 truther, and Sandy Hook shooting skeptic” (120), as one of the bloggers targeting Katrina. In 2017, Adams and others claimed that Katrina’s project supported “mass euthanasia of the elderly” to create compost to grow food for the “new world order” (120). The “new world order” is an alt-right conspiracy theory with antisemitic origins that argues that a “cabal of powerful elites is secretly implementing a dystopian international governing structure that will grant them complete control over the global populace” (Flores, Myles. “The New World Order: The Historical Origins of a Dangerous Modern Conspiracy Theory.” Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey: Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism, 30 May 2022). While Katrina saw her project as a practical solution, it ended up becoming politicized.

Katrina, too, sees the project as political, but in a radical sense. She sees decomposition as a “radical act” for those who have been “socialized female” (136). Doughty also agrees that women historically have had their “bodies under the purview of men, whether it’s [their] reproductive organs, [their] sexuality, [their] weight, [their] manner of dress” (136). Sarah’s story in Chapter 3 emphasizes how female bodies become politicized when it comes to reproductive matters. For Katrina and Doughty, human composting can be a means for women to take control of their bodies in death—they can decide what happens to their bodies rather than letting the state legislate what should be done, with their regulations on cremation and burial. Human composting can be a final act of political rebellion since decomposition is “messy,” while the state wants to make death “neat and clean” (136). This is a rebellion again Western, sanitized death practices, showing that marginalized or disenfranchised groups can find empowerment in death culture.

In contrast to the messiness of human compositing, Chapter 5 discusses a Western, hyper-modern, and state-regulated funerary practice in Spain. Here, technology is used to mediate the death process. Doughty finds this similar to the sanitized death practices of the United States, where funerals are a big business. The Spanish funeral home Altima is “elegant,” with “[w]ide balconies,” “gardens,” and “floor to ceiling glass” (137). There is the same distance from the dead that is present in traditional funerary practices in the United States, unlike those found in Mexico, Indonesia, and alternative funerary practices in Crestone and Cullowhee. Many Spanish people choose Altima, leaving Doughty to ponder the role of aesthetics in making death approachable to Westernized audiences. This type of death culture—where people engage with death but the physicality of death is still distant—introduces nuance into Doughty’s ideas of how to make death less taboo. This depiction also sets up a contrast that she will take up in Chapter 6, where Doughty sees how technology can be used to complement cultural diversity in death practices.