DEATH is a fact of life. This statement is at once banal and profound. It is banal insofar as it is common knowledge that all human life is limited in duration; it is profound, however, insofar as serious reflection on the end of life challenges the limits of human language, conceptual thought, symbols, and imagination. In an important sense, the meaning of life is dependent in part on one's understanding of death. That death is a fact of life is also paradoxical, for it suggests a coincidence of opposites—death-in-life and life- in-death. How people have imagined death-in-life and life- in-death has shaped their experience of biological death both individually and collectively.Death is paradoxical, as well, in that although every death is an individual experience-- only individuals die, even when they die together in large numbers—death is also a profoundly social experience. Death as a biologic fact or as a physiological state is uniform across time and space. However, this universal sameness in biological terms should not lull one into the error of assuming that the human sense or experience of death has been—or is also—uniform across space and time. when contemplating death today, people must avoid the anachronism of projecting their contemporary understanding and experiences of death back onto others in the past. Similarly, they must also avoid the cultural imperialism of assuming that their understanding and experience are nor mative and that those of other cultures should be measured in their terms. This entry on death is concerned with the diverse ways in which death has been imagined and the many different ways it has been experienced in different cultures and different ages. To say this is to recognize that although death is "given" in one sense, it is culturally and historically constructed in various ways.
The study of beliefs and ritual practices surrounding death has been pursued using a number of different methodological, approaches, including ethnographic, sociological,psychological, historical, morphological , and structural to name a few. The best comparative studies of death in the history of religions build upon the large number of available detailed ethnographic descriptions of specific communal beliefs and ritual practices, but move beyond these in a number of ways. Comparative studies in the history of religions are interdisciplinary in nature, integrating the findings of different disciplines in an effort to understand the complex existential meanings of religious beliefs and practices. The classic ethnographic monograph tended to present a historically "flat" and socially undifferentiated picture of the conception of and death and the performance of mourning and funerary rites in a given culture. Unfortunately, such "snapshot" studies of different cultures implied that religious beliefs were static over time and uniformly held by all members of a given culture or religious tradition. More recently, the subfield of historical anthropology has reintroduced history into the mix and produced numerous sensitive studies of change in beliefs and practices. Scholars have also paid more attention to the effects of cultural contact, colonialism, and issues of gender, resulting in more complex representation.
__In this essay, no attempt will be made to present an exhaustive survey of beliefs and ritual practices related to death. Rather than providing ethnographic detail and careful historical analysis, the entry focuses on selected themes and issues that emerge from a broad survey of cultures and religions, and in so doing offers some general reflections concerning the human imagining and experience of death. In passing, it also touches upon methodological issues involved in the comparative,cross-cultural, and historical study of beliefs and ritual practices surrounding death.