Tag Archives: Rachael Lewis

Putting the Fun in Funeral

What describes your life? Is it a camera? A football? Maybe a plane? I have a hard time picking an object that sums up my life, but some people have the perfect idea in mind.

That is where Paa Joe from the Ga tribe in coastal Ghana comes in. Unlike modern Americans, people in Ghana celebrate death and commonly commemorate it with elaborate and unique coffins. The living aim to honor their dead with coffins that represent their legacy. Paa Joe, after almost five decades in the business, now works with his son to handcraft these highly sought after caskets. His son explains that their coffins

“remind people that life continues after death, that when someone dies they will go on in the afterlife, so it is important that they go in style.”

Ghanian families and surrounding community members place much value on showcasing the part that contemporary African art plays life and death.  They strongly believe that the dead must be buried in something that represents the role they played while alive, in order to remember where they come from and what they have left behind as they move into the afterlife. Although these handmade coffins can cost upwards of $15,000, people of the Ga tribe believe that it is more honorable to live in lifelong debt because of the burial ceremony than it is to cut the costs of a proper funeral. In conjunction with the idea that the funeral is the culmination of all life events, it is extremely vital to allocate all resources to executing this ritual in the proper fashion.

I find it very interesting that although the casket appearance is intended to encapsulate someone’s entire life, the people within the casket actually have no say in deciding what that object will be. Family and friends are tasked with the job of determining what they commission Paa Joe to create. What object will a part time fisherman, talented artist, soccer-loving father be placed in?

Reducing a person to the representation of a singular object goes hand in hand with the impersonal nature of the cadaver. The cadaver may symbolize the person and the life they once had, but in itself is bereft of any form of personhood. Memories and stories take the place of the body in terms of remembering who the person was and what they were like. These exquisite coffins are by all means quite impressive, but many could argue that they are unnecessary. After 3-4 days of public display, they are lowered six feet under the ground and are never seen again. Culturally they still uphold values of social order and religion, but physically they play a minimal role in the end of life.

All things considered, would you want to be buried in a fantasy coffin, and if so…what would it be?

For more information and pictures, click here or watch this short clip.

References

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4496430

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/24/paa-joe-ghana-fantasy-coffin-artist-casket-funeral

https://www.cnn.com/2016/10/14/africa/gallery/ghana-coffins-mpa/index.html

 

 

 

 

What Would You Do?

Equality.

A term flaunted in many public circles, political campaigns, and social justice movements. In these instances, “equality” refers to fairness and justice in life; the act of viewing all people without bias or discrimination. Our society is obsessed with rallying behind crusades that foster impartiality in every aspect of life…but what about death? Is there equality in dying?

With current advancements in artificial intelligence, it is no surprise that self driving cars are on the horizon.  In an effort to gather information about how humans make decisions, researchers at MIT created the “Moral Machine.” This database contains a variety of what-would-you-do scenarios involving car crashes and vehicular manslaughter in attempt to create an algorithm for decision making based on how humans act in life-and-death situations.  For example:

This scenario incites intense debate over what the car should or should not do. If the car continues in a straight path, one woman and her unborn child will die. However, if the car is programmed to swerve, five people will die. If only provided with the number of deaths, many people would choose to have the car continue straight, saving the most lives. But what happens when we place value on those lives? When the victims are women and children, versus criminals, how do we decide which lives to value more and which deaths to value less?  That is the heart of what the Moral Machine aims to uncover.  By categorizing people into different groups based on their social value, we assign significance to individual deaths. After perceiving the criminals’ role in society, many people may change their minds and program the car to swerve, taking a greater number of lives but saving (arguably) more important or worthy ones.

The dilemma in the various circumstances boils down to the modern perception of death and the processes to follow. Our society has cultivated an environment that fights against death. People do not want to die “before their time” and thus are bred to accept death only when they feel that their life is complete or that they have nothing more to give. These personal sentiments are subconsciously broadcast into situations like the self-driving car, where knowing the demographics of a person ranks them on a scale ranging between “worth-saving-at-any-cost” to “not-a-huge-loss.”  It sounds gruesome but it’s true. 

Additionally, our determination of what the car should do originates in the process after a death. We can justify the decision to kill the five criminals if we consider that the pregnant woman and baby would be heavily mourned and grieved whereas the convicts probably would not.

Inadvertently, we place values on life and death based on our culture’s view of death and the proceedings to follow. Death and life seem to have an linear relationship; the more we value someone’s life the more we value their death. Is this a true embodiment of equality though? Can equality be extended to the grave? And lastly, what would you do?

 

To see other related scenarios, click here.

References

http://moralmachine.mit.edu/