Viva muchos años! is the ordinary greeting in Spain, and it is usual throughout the whole world to wish people a long life. It is not a knowledge of what life is that explains the origin of such a wish, but rather knowledge of what man is in his real nature: namely, the will to live.
Each culture’s wordview includes beliefs about the meaning and purpose of life and what happens after death. Although the final outcome of death is the same for all humans, cultures vary in how they conceptualize death and what happens when a person dies. In some cultures, death is conceived to involve different conditions, including sleep, illness, and reaching a certain age. As an example, the Truskese of Micronesia believe that life ends at 40 years of age, and when you reach 40, you are, in effect,dead.
In other cultures, death is said to occur only when there is a total cessation of life. In a similar manner, certain cultural traditions view death as a transition to other forms of existence; others propose a continuous interaction between the dead and the living; some cultures conceive a circular pattern of multiple deaths and rebirths; and yet others view death as the final end, with nothing occurring after death. These different conceptions have a noticeable influence on people’s lifestyles, their readiness to die for a cause, the degree to which they fear death, their expressions of grief and mourning, and the nature of funeral rituals.
The difficulty of having a unitary view of death or the death experience can be better appreciated when we realize that it is problematic to even define what we mean by death. The first definition of death in Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary is that it is “the act of dying; the end of life; the total and permanent cessation of all the vital functions of an animal or 31 plant.” (1989, p.372). This appears straightforward enough, until we realize that it represents a largely Western conception of death. However, a relatively global conceptualization of death issues would have to incorporate the many cultural variations that exist in the world.
Internet: <http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au> (adapted).
