Locating a sense of immortality in early Egyptian cemeteries

Despite the passing of a century, Hertz’s seminal work of 1907, Contribution à une Étude sur la Représentation Collective de la Mort, remains a source of inspiration for many modern interpretations of mortuary practices. Most such studies have taken Hertz’s schema of secondary funerary rites as their primary focus, but it is his wider frame of reference with its emphasis on the communal, affective experience of mortuary rituals that is the theoretical stance explored further here. Notably in this vein, his ideas have wider resonance today with the more recent anthropological emphasis on emotion and embodiment (Davies 2000, 97–8) and with studies seeking to link the spiritual and the material (Venbrux 2007). Such collective representations of death can provide particularly germane departure points for the inference of prehistoric notions of immortality. Instead of grappling with the thorny issue of personal belief, such representations allow the focus of analysis to be shifted to the shared, material contexts of experience and meaningmaking, which are more visible to archaeologists (Tarlow 2000; DeMarrais 2011). In pursuing this line of reasoning with reference to the early Egyptian evidence, I take a position already adopted by several other scholars (e.g. Hodder 2010; Kertzer 1988, 76; Price 2008; Rappaport 1999, 119–20) that concepts of spirituality (or in this case immortality) need not entail structured belief, but rather that in particular spaces and in particular scenarios an embodied sense of transcendental being can be created and encountered. In terms of the context of death, I take this to be commensurate with what the psychologists Lifton & Olson (1974) referred to as ‘experiential immortality’, key to which is the feeling of the reorientation of time. Yet contrary to their assertion that this experiential immortality emerges because of an individual’s innate sense of their own perpetuity, I contend, following recent suggestions in cognitive science (Hodge 2011a, 2011b) and in keeping with Hertz’s emphasis on the social, that it emerges from people’s intuitive sense of the continued existence of others. Building on these points, I suggest here that one way in which a sense of immortality can be stimulated is through the communal experience of how others are buried and how social relationships are dramatized in burial rites and settings.