¿A dónde van los muertos?: las crisis de la muerte y las geografías sagradas en el esquema tripartito de los ritos de paso

Abstract

Within funerary archaeology, contemporary studies on death rites have promoted a series of conceptual needs to understand the commemoration of death and its impact on human sociability from new perspectives. The purpose of this article is to propose a conceptual discussion to study the tripartite structure of death rites, and to explore the way in which places of aggregation become sacred geographies to redefine the role of the dead. To this end, concepts structured within the ritual theory are discussed and integrated into a set of ethnographic data compiled from secondary sources on the nukak makú of the Colombian Amazon. The discussion consolidates a series of conceptual and interpretative contributions to understand, based on a perspective of funerary archaeology, how funerary rites are structured and how they can transform the critical and ambiguous status of the dead, by creating sacred geographies of reintegration. The study articulates anthropological and archaeological concepts that enhance the analysis of aspects little explored in Latin American funerary archaeology. These include the relationship between the crises of death, the physiognomy of rites, and the construction of ritualized geographies, operating not only in the physical world, but also in the realm of ideas.

Keywords

• archaeology of death and burial
• death
• mortuary rituals
• rites of passage
• ritual theory
• sacred geographies