For as long as I’ve been studying religion and theology, I’ve been trying to find a way to think about fossils. Of course, I think about fossils in the way that paleontology teaches me to. And, of course, I reject the renegade ideological “paleontology” that creationists have used to preserve their own worldview (even if I do have a kind of lurid fascination with it). I nevertheless have all sorts of thoughts and feelings about fossils that can’t be rightly contained within the field of paleontology. For a time I even thought that fossilization would be a good metaphor for thinking about the strange ways that theological ideas get embedded in secular culture; these ideas are fossilized into a bedrock and, unless excavated, are ignored. I’ve used “fossil” as another name for what I’ve described as theological relics.
I’ve been thinking about fossils and other remains again, as I’ve been working on my new book project on underworlds. I’ve been thinking, especially, about paleontology as a method of underworld journeying. In a few weeks I’m taking a trip to France (and I’ve convinced my mom, who is an artist, to come along with me!) to see Paleolithic cave art in the Dordogne region. So I’ve been spending a lot of time with paleontologists. Recently I’ve been reading Beebe Bahrami’s Café Neandertal and was struck by a conversation she had, with a paleontologist, about the motives that fuel his research. I thought it was a fascinating example of how the political theology of death that I describe in Sister Death has been fossilized into the imaginative landscape of even the most secular of scientists. But I also thought it was an interesting example of how a scientist, working in paleontology, might speak with the dead.
Paleontology and the War with Death
In conversation with a paleontologist, at the site of a Neanderthal dig in France, Bahrami asks him about his motive in pursuing this particular line of work. She wants to know what the field has meant to him. “It gave me access to the beauty of the world, the beauty of everything,” he tells her dreamily. But then he pushes a bit further. “I think it sort of combined an interest in the remote past and the notion of ancestry with an interest in the living world. It was a way to multiply the beauty of the present world by accessing the beauty of the worlds that came before it.” It was, he finally reflects, “a sort of fascination with this lost world.”
This nostalgic meditation on loss makes him realize that perhaps his interest in paleontology “has also something to do with the fear of death.” His drive to do paleontological research, he suggests, is bound to his drive to fight “oblivion” to fight “the complete disappearance of a past life.” Of course, he notes, “it’s a fantasy”. But he nevertheless finds it amazing that through paleontology a researcher can “resuscitate” the past, he can “take from death, from the ends of death, something that should have disappeared.” Invoking psychoanalysis, the researcher muses that the discipline itself (paleontology) is itself an act of “fighting death.” It’s a way of expressing that “even if you’re dead, there is a chance, somehow, to survive. To somehow extract from the nothing, from the vacuum, from complete oblivion, things that are unknown.”
I find this little anecdote both amusing and illuminating. It is, I think, an excellent example of how this theological narrative—that life and death are at war—shows up, in subtle ways, in otherwise secular contexts. This is a Man of Science, someone who laughs at himself for his own silly “fantasy” that perhaps death is not actually the most absolute power or force in the cosmos, after all.
Why would this seem like such a fantasy? Well, if there is no God—or if God is dead—then it must mean (naturally) that God’s enemy (death) is the victor, after all. If Christianity proclaimed that God and death were essentially at war, and if God lost (or died), then it must be the case that death is the true victor. Secular views have often been simple oppositional reversals of Christian views, and I think that this is arguably what’s going on here. To speculate that there is an “end” of things that’s not death would be a kind of secular, or scientific, blasphemy. It would be a stupid and ridiculous fantasy.
As I read it, however, this view remains stuck in a binary opposition that was fortified by (if not established by) a Christian mythological landscape, or cosmology. It’s a narrative that accepts the terms set out by Christian thought: that life and death are at war. It simply reverses the view of who wins, and who loses, the battle. But I think it’s interesting to note that death, while becoming the victor, still remains the enemy in this view. In this analysis, death is the ultimate and the figure of the absolute. But it’s nevertheless something to fight, and do battle with. Death won the battle against God (death killed God). And if God couldn’t win, we clearly won’t win! It’s a futile battle. But we’ll have to keep fighting death in an endless battle anyhow, because that’s just what we do I guess? This paleontologist isn’t fighting against death on behalf of God. He’s not fighting for something better. But he’s fighting nevertheless. He gives death other names that its accrued across the course of western history—nothingness, oblivion—and he imagines himself doing battle with it.
Look, I won’t lie and pretend like I don’t sympathize with this metaphor, or that I don’t find meaning in it. I won’t pretend as if, when my own loved ones are sick, I wouldn’t do almost anything to kill whatever it is that could kill them. I completely understand how much this metaphor—that we are fighting against death—resonates with crucial aspects of our life experience. We want to live! We want the people we love, and the things that we love, to live. We want the earth itself to live. When this is what we want, death feels like a total defeat. The battle against death feels, in so many ways, like a basic affirmation of our survival instincts.
But when I listen to this paleontologist talk about death, even if he’s using the battle metaphor to describe the work he does, it doesn’t actually sound (to me) like he’s battling death. On the contrary, it actually sounds to me like he’s doing a certain kind of death work—a labor of care that we could call death work. This paleontologist has cultivated a deep connection with ancestors who are so ancient, they aren’t even classified as human. In this sense, it sounds to me like he’s actually collaborating with death, and the dead. Or he’s at least recognizing one of the ways in which life and death work together, to preserve the ancestral past and reveal it within the present.
Science, in Conversation with the Dead
Let’s think about the work that this paleontologist does as an act of retrieval. He’s digging deep into the cavernous dimensions of the earth in order to retrieve something from some of the most ancient burial grounds that exist. Let’s not get lost in semantics about whether these Neanderthal burials were “intentional” or not. This is a debate, in paleontology: did Neanderthals actually bury their dead, like we do? Or did they just throw people away like garbage? The fact that the earth itself closed over these bodies, and held them, is also a form of burial. So, I think we can leave it at that for now, in order to suggest that this paleontologist is doing something like a ritual disinterment, for the purpose of understanding ourselves and our world more deeply.
Disinterment is actually relatively commonplace, in the diverse spread of burial rituals (which are wildly variant, from culture to culture). One example that’s become quite famous over the past several decades is the Ma’nene ritual, practiced in Toraja, Indonesia. There’s a whole tourist industry that’s developed around Torajan death rituals, which people like Americans and Europeans have become fascinated with.
The Torajans actually embalm their dead, which has been the standard and mainstream practice in America since the Civil War (when formaldehyde became a common method for preserving the bodies of dead soldiers, so that they could be buried at home. So, the fact that Torajans embalm their dead isn’t what fascinates most tourists. Rather, it’s the fact that they keep the embalmed bodies of their ancestors in the home with them, until they can afford to stage a huge burial ritual in their memory. After that, through the practice of Ma’nene, they will periodically disinter their ancestors in order to change their clothes, and check in on them.
I mention this not just because it’s interesting, but because I think that in the United States and Europe, the practice of disinterment has come to be interpreted as fundamentally disrespectful. And in these cultural contexts, it often is. It was in the spirit of the utmost disrespect that the people who colonized the Americas disinterred indigenous ancestors, in order to loot their graves. And it was in a spirit of disrespect (or, at least, greed) that people in 19th century urban settings stole bodies from American and European graves, in order to sell them to early anatomists for dissection. But this doesn’t mean that all disinterment is disrespectful. And I think that this paleontologist could arguably be involved in a form of ritual disinterment that has a sacred dimension to it. It’s a kind of vision quest, we could say. He is part of a community of people who are hungry to understand the past and the present, in order to better prepare for the future. He’s part of a community of people who want to make sure that we don’t let the dead disappear. He wants to keep us in conversation with the dead. Fossils, and buried remains, are icons of this spiritual quest.
I don’t really read these as ritual practices that illuminate our war with death. Instead, I read them as ritual practices that reveal an intimacy between life and death, a sisterhood between these powers that do so much to structure our lives.
Why, then, would a paleontologist describe his work of retrieval, understanding, and preservation as a war or battle against death? Because, I think, he lacks other scripts. He is simply pulling from a political theology that has, for centuries, been the most dominant expression of the relationship between life and death for most Europeans and Americans. When he tries to reflect on what he’s doing, he can’t help but reactivate this script. But, of course, not everyone in American and European culture have been using this script. Other scripts have always been used, and are still being used. We only need to listen for them and to watch how people perform their understanding of the relationship between life and death differently.