文档介绍：[Note: this is the original English version of an essay to be published in 2005 as: Die Reise der Seele: Bemerkungen zu Bestattungsritualen und oralen Texten in Arunachal Pradesh, Indien In Der Abschied von den Toten. Trauerrituale im Kulturvergleich . Jan Assmann, Franz Maciejewski and Axel Michaels, ed. G?ttingen: Wallstein] The Journey of the Soul: Notes on Funeral Rituals and Oral Texts in Arunachal Pradesh, India. Stuart Blackburn I. Introduction plexity and sophistication of the scholarship on death rituals is nearly equal to the time-consuming and elaborate things that people do when someone dies. Whatever else they may disagree about when writing about funerals, most scholars seem to agree that it is the ambiguities inherent in death—the dead person is here but not here; death is a full-stop for an individual, but the living continue as a group —which call forth plicated ideas and actions, in an effort to resolve them. Those resolutions vary widely and in fascinating detail: the pyramids with ships in the sand; burying, cremating or dismembering the corpse; rituals that continue for ten or fifteen days and then resume after a year or more; theologies of the soul; multiple afterworlds and so on. Analyses of funeral rituals, however, are less multifarious and have focused primarily on the restoration of the social order, although the specific argument may latch onto 2 different notions--political authority, the fate of the soul or fertility. This legacy of Durkheim and Hertz might be unkindly seen as a crude form of functionalism, but the arguments are (for the most part) original, persuasive, and based on good data. 1 Nevertheless, this dominant sociological analysis of funeral rituals, deriving from the shared intellectual tradition of social anthropology, has limitations. One element of funeral rituals that deserves more attention is oral texts. Most researchers mention and some describe these texts, which include mourning