Funeral Traditions in The Mat Lou Ethnic Culture in Lilinta Village, Raja Ampat Island

This study aims to determine the implementation of the funeral ceremony in the Mat Lou ethnic community in Lilinta Village, West Misool District, Raja Ampat Islands. This research was qualitative using the social phenomenology paradigm with a flow chart model analysis. Results of this research: The culture of Raja Ampat community, especially in Lilinta village, which is Islam as a majority, has been through a culture diffusion and transformed with the existing local culture to produce a new culture. The cultures which are still conducted in the performance of various death are Tahlilan that has differences on its implementation, lifting the corpse using Koi (beds) where the other region in Indonesia those activities are conducted using coffins, the differences in making tombstone and also bones bath (Sof Kabom) which has various myth symbols in it. Immigrants have a role in spreading culture to bring up the assimilation of new cultural traits and elements of the Lilinta community in the form of other rituals that complement the death ritual

The Hungarian-Jewish Social Contract, its Rupture, and Jewish Death Rituals

This article explores the supposedly reciprocal social contract between “Greater Hungary” and its Jewish population from the “Golden Age” of the Dual Monarchy to its rupture in the Holocaust. The afterlife of this broken contract will be addressed through the upkeep and neglect of cemeteries in Subcarpathia and Hungary proper. Along the way, I present memoiristic vignettes that illustrate the challenge of loyalty to state / military authority and death rituals in the time of the 1918-1919 Hungarian-Romanian War, Jewish mourning in the context of Czechoslovakia’s loss of Subcarpathia, and the disjuncture between the normal praxis of death ritual and the spectre of Auschwitz-Birkenau, as well as the ritual contrast to Hungarian Jews who were deported, but not to Auschwitz. I also turn to the historical research of Tim Cole and Daniel Rosenthal, in conjunction with Hungarian (especially North-Transylvanian) Holocaust memoirs, to reflect on Holocaust-era suicide as a mode of victims’ resistance to their brutalization by Hungarian gendarmes -- the pinnacle of the betrayal of the erstwhile contract between Hungarian state authority and its Jewish population.

Exploring the Prospective of Dark Tourism in Pashupatinath: A Hindu Pilgrimage Site, Nepal

A unique and increasingly pervasive feature within the tourism landscapes in the post-modern world is the special interests of tourists in death and anything associated with death. It is often believed that those who indulge in death and disaster site tours could potentially awaken their spiritual journey. The visitor immersions, in the spaces of death, and the events that have taken place or are re-created, triggers social conscience, or some shared emotion or an experience of involvement, with the death event. Reckoning to this facet, Pashupatinath temple- a place of pilgrimage for the followers of Santana Vedic religion which shows the comprehensive aspect of Hindu death rituals, symbols and processes has been chosen. The study proposes the site as a dark tourism destination and explores the convergence of cultural heritage site, pilgrimage and death rituals in the area that is associated with its characterization- particularly with reference to the witnessing of live open pyre burning death rituals at the cremation ground (ghat) that exclusively showcases the eastern phenomenon of death-spectatorship exhibited by Hindu death ritual. Despite an immense influence of the site in the tourism industry, the eastern dark tourism potential induced by the site has not been recognized formally by the tourism stakeholders. Even though it is widely consumed by the western visitors as a tourist element. The phenomenon of Hindu death tradition in the ghats of Pashupatinath is inclusive of all the death-related rituals and is a threshold of transition and transgression, a place in between life and death. Henceforth, as the central tenet of dark tourism being “the death”, Hindu death rituals in Pashupatinath could be firmly brought into the realms of dark tourism discourse. The findings are based on the prevalence of push factors that encourages consumption of the proposed site as a dark tourist product in liminal conditions (an in-between position). To be more specific, the practice of intellectualization of emotion, convenience of visits, edutainment elements, practice of moral disengagement. The prospective of dark tourism in Pashupatinath, if entitled to the mere promotion of the crematory site, may send a negative connotation and raise moral and ethical concerns. Hence, tourism stakeholders should consciously introduce the phenomenon as an accompaniment to the popularized mainstream religious and cultural value of the site.

Pure Land Buddhism in Tibetan Contexts

Buddhist literature in India and Tibet abounds with literal and allegorical references to terrestrial, celestial, and transcendent realms. Of all celestial dwellings cast along Buddhist lines, the pure land Sukhāvatī holds a prominent place in the religious, cultural, and national imagination of the Tibetans. Many centuries before the first imperially sponsored Sanskrit to Tibetan translations of the long and short Sukhāvatīvyūha sutras, Buddha Amitābha and his western abode Sukhāvatī made headway in the cosmopolitan region of greater Gandhāra. Active in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent he emerged as an influential solar deity with his own paradise in Buddhist monastic circles and enjoyed unprecedented success in his subsequent transmigration to East and Central Asia and across the Tibetan plateau. Notwithstanding a Mahāyāna theological reading of Amitābha and his Pure Land, heliocentric metaphors and symbols informed Mahāyāna Buddhism in its encounters with Eurasian solar cults celebrating the vital force of the sun and its metaphorical transition into a spiritual life triumphing over darkness and death. Ritual invocations and creative visualizations of Amitābha-Amitāyus are noticeable in Indian Vajrayāna scriptures imported to Tibet during the postimperial transmission of Buddhism. This second wave of religious assimilation coincides with Amitābha rising to a position of retroactive primacy and exclusivity in narratives concerning Tibet’s conversion to Buddhism and in ancestral myths of the Tibetan race rescued, through his divine emissary Avalokiteśvara, from indigenous forces of malignancy. His overstated presence in Tibetan mythopoiesis bears witness to various soteriological instantiations and expressions of worship in religious art and esoteric registers. In his dual function as the lord of infinite light (Amitābha) and infinite life (Amitāyus), this Mahāyāna deity absorbed functions that had previously been attributed to a range of divinities. Over time, Amitābha and his celestial field inspired a distinct genre of Tibetan pure land literature, the demön, comprising for the most part aspirational prayers for rebirth in Sukhāvatī and tributes to his extraordinary salvific powers. Under the guise of attaining rebirth in the pure land, these popular supplications of devotional nature were supplemented by substantive commentaries elaborating on Mahāyāna practices and doctrines. Hence, the demön came to encompass a wide range of exoteric and esoteric scriptures including funereal rites, tantric rituals for extending life, and meditation manuals derived from visionary kratophanies of the deity. Sukhāvatī inspired a number of ontological possibilities, corporeal, incorporeal, and subtle interpretations derived from the pure land sutras, the tantras, and the revealed scriptures of the Nyingma school. The fusion of devotional praises, faith-based aspirations, and esoteric subtle-body practices had a profound effect in the soteriological formulation of the pure land in Tibet conceptualized simultaneously as an external after-death destination, an interiorized place of the subtle-body infrastructure culminating in the Vajrayāna practice of mind transference to the pure land, and as a sublimated state representing the immutable nature of the awakened mind.