For as long as I can remember, but I suppose, restricted to the time when I first began to think about the dead, I have held the opinion that death means honesty. I can elaborate on this.
We do not leave our minds behind when we die. Our personal identities, the 'self' that philosophers have been arguing about for over a thousand years, does not leave any marks upon our bones. The casing for our minds becomes empty, and when people find us, hundreds or thousands of years later, the story that we have to tell them is limited to physicality. Originally, I believed that this was the most honest representation of the human form- bones don't lie, essentially. However, I am beginning to rethink that idea.
There is truth to physicality. Has the woman given birth? how old was she, had she ever had a disease, or broken a bone? did she eat well, or did she starve? where was she born, and where did she die? all of these tell us something about the person that we unearth. But who they were, really, remains a mystery.
Funerary practices are more varied than I could ever have believed. I had often brushed off such things as being universal: you either buried someone, or you burned them. I never really considered the wide variety of how these two methods were practiced, or, other methods... such as tying a body to a canoe and balancing it in the branches of a tree. Which is actually a thing.
We like to think we have control over our funerals, in Western society- or at least, I did. But who thinks about what they will wear? and really, if they want to bury us, and we wanted to be cremated, well, it's not as if we can really fight them off. Truth is, the dead have no control over anything anymore. Paperwork may exist, there may be some form of assurance that certain things will be performed in certain ways, but this is never a surety.
As brought up in class this week: a man may be buried in his best suit, that in life, he only ever wore to other peoples funerals. A transgendered male to female person may be buried in menswear, even though in life she identified as female. We don't get to pick our jewelery, our shoes. If we are dug up five hundred years from now, there can be no assurance that we will be represented in any way like we were in life... but instead be a representation of how the living chose to present our physical forms to the Earth.
I couldn't help but think about Pharaoh Hatshepsut, my favorite Egyptian Pharaoh. A lifetime of struggles, and a relatively successful rule. Her subjects build her a beautiful funerary temple at Djeser-Djeseru, and the entire obsession of her culture dictated that she would be buried in style, to go to the afterlife with her name on every wall, a fortune in items with her, and a body preserved for an eternity. But after her death, the next ruler sought to wipe her from existence. The body that we found, which we originally believe to be her, turned out to be her handmaiden, or perhaps a slave.
Imagine if we had never discovered that the handmaiden wasnt her. The world would tour her mummy as a famous queen, when in life she never was.
The representation of people after death is fascinating. I'm more and more convinced that apart from the need to dispose of a body, everything else done to a person after death is purely a manifestation of the culture of the people performing the actions, and what we see, however many years later, isnt as personal as I once thought- even though really, what's more personal than your body?