In recent years, death has received new attention in the West. After three generations of silence, our mortality is again a topic of discussion. Seminars, courses, and television talk shows on death and dying are commonplace, where not so long ago they would have been considered in bad taste. Psychologists, sociologists, theologians, physicians, and social critics have all contributed to this new awareness. There is even a professional specialism of thanatology.

Our research was not initially directed to matters relating to death; instead we were interested in aspects of social life. But we found ourselves working in places (Huntington in Madagascar, Metcalf in Borneo) where funerals are important events and where people are remarkably open in their dealings with death. Back in Cambridge, we benefited from discussions of the similarities and differences in our two cases. In the process, we were led repeatedly to the same theorists, Arnold van Gennep and Robert Hertz, who also drew on material from Madagascar and Borneo, respectively. When they wrote their best-known essays in the first decade of this century, the comparative study of ritual forms was of crucial concern to the majority of scholars in the young discipline of anthropology. Hertz and van Gennep brought an impressive sophistication to the understanding of death rites, so that their work has hardly been improved on to this day. By midcentury, however, religion had retreated into the background, replaced by an obsession with kinship and social structure.