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The treatment of bodies
 
​The diverse methods to prepare the bodies of the dead all deal with the inevitable process of bodily decomposition:

Avoidance: cremation or funeral cannibalism
Acceleration: exposure or ritual abandonment
Dissimulation: burial
Slowing down: temporary embalming, thanatopraxis
Freezing: mummification, cryogenisation
 
Starting from this scheme, however, it must be borne in mind that the choices made in the treatment of corpses are almost never exclusive within a society: in fact, different forms of treatment of corpses may coexist, as for example in Italy (where we find a minority who choose cremation, around 30%, in parallel with the majority who choose burial), just as the treatment may vary according to the rank and social position of the deceased.
Without straying too far from the Italian context, in countries such as the Netherlands and Great Britain we find, for example, cremation as the method most frequently chosen, or in the United States where the majority of the population chooses partial embalming before burial.

A further example of the coexistence of different types of treatment of corpses concerns traditional Tibetan rituals which involve cremation, burial, immersion or the cleaning of corpses by the feeding of animals. Religious leaders, on the other hand, were mummified in order to become objects of devotion.
Cremation and funeral cannibalism fall into the category of avoiding the putrefaction of bodies. By cremation we mean the act of burning the body. We find traces of ritual cremations as far back as the Palaeolithic period, with evidence of its use in the historical period as far back as ancient Greece and ancient Rome, from 750 BC.
Geographically, cremation is also a widespread practice, with societies practising it on all continents.
In the West, the practice of cremation underwent a reversal of meaning: due to the influence of Christianity and the doctrine of resurrection, cremation was for a long time practised exclusively for pejorative purposes, reserved for categories of individuals who were enemies of Christianity. It was only from the end of the 19th century that cremation began to spread, largely due to space problems and hygiene issues in increasingly crowded cities.

Hindu Funeral. A picture of Final farewell of the corpse and going for the 16th Ritual called Agni Sanskar- Photo by See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tower of Silence, Yazd - Photo by Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One of the most famous examples of ritual abandonment of the corpse, understood as an exposed body, can be found among the Parsis or Zoroastrians, a religious group particularly widespread in India, who consider human corpses to be highly contaminating. For this reason, these peoples began to build so-called 'Towers of Silence', or dahkma, or platforms raised from the ground where they could lay their corpses, which soon became prey for vultures. With progressive urbanisation, from the 20th century onwards, it became increasingly difficult for the adherents of this religion to carry on this funeral practice, until it was abandoned and the subsequent choice between burial or cremation was made.

By burial we mean here all those practices of corpse treatment that have the aim of both concealing and allowing putrefaction. This term obviously has an important semantic breadth, both with regard to the burial sites, which can be earth, as well as tree roots, caves, water, etc., and with regard to the variety of body containers, i.e. sheets, skins, cloth, coffins and sarcophagi, etc.
The category of 'burial' thus encompasses very different practices, united, however, by the concealment of the putrefaction of bodies, which is thus 'allowed' and not avoided or accelerated.
Graves, or in general the burial places of the dead, mark a very important gathering place:
 
"Burials - the places of the dead - structure the world of the living: as long as the memory of that ancestor is preserved, the group will maintain its compactness and unity. When this is lost, the identity of the ancestor will dissolve into that of a founder of a new group and a new grave (Fables, 2003, p. 66)'.
 What emerges, therefore, is that, in different societies, the organisation of the world of the dead has a strong influence on the organisation of the world of the living, resulting in a territorial bond that shapes and moulds social identities.
Finally, the last categories that can be found are slowing down and blocking. 

Funeral cannibalism, strange as it may seem to us, falls into the category of avoiding the putrefaction of bodies. An example is given to us by the Warí, a small population living in the Amazonian region of Brazil, on the border with Bolivia. This people, in fact, until the 1960s, ate a large part of the bodies of the dead: this behaviour was seen as the most respectful way of treating their dead, in order to avoid placing the dead in the earth, at the mercy of animals. The Warí were later forbidden to practise these funeral rituals by the Catholic Church and the state authorities.
Adriano Favole (2003), an anthropologist, proposes a possible explanation:
 
"The most plausible explanation of Warí cannibalism is to be found in the complex representation of the body that this group has elaborated: the Warí express with particular poignancy the idea that the body is a bio-cultural construction. They see the human body as a nexus of kinship, personality and social relations. Kinship is physically defined as the sharing of bodily substances [...]. By eating the dead, the Warí reaffirm the cultural character of bodies and reappropriate those social relations of which they are (literally) constituted.
To allow bodies to be broken down by the biological processes of putrefaction would amount to a kind of rejection of the corpse or a denial of the humanity that is intrinsic to them (Fables, 2003, p.58).”
​In the category of accelerated decomposition of bodies, we find exposure, or ritual abandonment. By exposure we mean the entrusting of the body of the deceased to atmospheric agents or animals. It is, however, a ritual act for which there is a social control of the practice, with the consequent recovery of the remains, and therefore it should not be understood as a way of disposing of one's dead.

By slowing down we mean all those forms that involve interventions on corpses with the aim of preserving the integrity of the body, at least for the period of the funeral rite. An example of this practice is Thanatopraxis, i.e. a treatment of the inner cavities of the deceased with antiseptic liquids and the use of cosmetics to treat the face, which is widespread mainly in the United States, southern France and Spain. The aim of this practice is to allow the body to be exposed for the rather long period of the wake, followed by burial.
Blocking, on the other hand, refers to all those interventions whose aim is to preserve the body of the deceased for an indefinite period, such as mummification and cryogenisation, i.e. a practice (widespread in the United States) of preserving bodies by progressively hibernating the corpse and storing it at temperatures of -160 degrees, with the hope that in the future advances in biomedicine will make it possible to bring the deceased back to life.

The Muslim funeral rite  ​

The body must be washed with hot water, to be purified, and then wrapped in a cloth, the kafan (a term also used to describe the whole operation), which is a white cotton sheet without seams.
There is then a moment of collective prayer, in the house of the deceased or in the mosque, followed by the moment of burial in the ground (dafin). The ceremony must be simple, avoiding ostentation, and those present throw three handfuls of earth on the body of the deceased, who has his head turned towards Mecca. Generally, a funeral banquet is then recommended, during which passages from the Koran are recited.
The Islamic funeral rite prohibits cremation in an unconditional manner, as it is considered contrary to the dignity of the person.
 
During the Covid-19 pandemic,
 
"The closing of borders has made it impossible to transport the bodies of foreign-born Muslims back to their country of origin, a widespread practice especially among residents in France and Italy. Forced to organise funerals in their country of residence, Muslims face the problem of the lack of space dedicated to them in Italian and French cemeteries.
“Before the crisis caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, only about fifty municipalities in Italy - out of almost 8,000 - had a Muslim cemetery, UCOII president Yassine Lafram told the Post (The Post, 2020)."
 
The pandemic has thus brought to light a problem that actually existed before, namely the scarcity of Muslim cemeteries where the faithful can bury their loved ones. While it is true that many first-generation Muslim immigrants choose to have their remains repatriated, it is necessary to reflect on the wishes of people who have been resident in Italy for a longer time, perhaps second- or third-generation immigrants or simply citizens of the Muslim faith who do not have foreign origins and who therefore do not have a sacred burial place for their loved ones. It is also important to bear in mind that, for the Muslim religion, it is important to organise the funeral as quickly as possible, as waiting for burial goes against the dignity of the deceased, and it is equally important to be buried among people of the same religious faith.

The evolution of death in the West

​In historian Philippe Ariès' classic work, Man and Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (Ariès, 1980), the transformation of the relationship with death in the West is illustrated. The work is of particular interest as it provides judges with a diachronic look at how the West experienced death and the related practices of mourning, burial and the cult of the dead, and finds similarities with practices that are still common among certain groups today. Aspects useful for iuris dicere include: the fact that death for a long time had a public dimension, in the sense that it was common to expose the dying person to the community, including children who were fully involved in the stages of mourning, burial and subsequent cult of the dead; sudden and unconscious death was abhorred as the subject had to have time to repent and confess, just as burial was obligatory as the body was considered dormant until the resurrection of the bodies, which is why other practices such as cremation were considered disreputable; cemeteries were places included in cities, where activities of the living such as markets and even festivals took place (Ariès notes how the model of the Spanish closed squares originated from the cemetery ossuaries that surrounded a space where a market took place). Ariès identifies a moment of caesura in Napoleon's decision to issue the Edict of Saint Cloud, Décret Impérial sur les Sépultures, which required that cemeteries, hitherto inside churches or in town squares, be built outside the city walls in ventilated areas. That this rule produced a strong cultural caesura compared to previous practices is well demonstrated by the opposition it aroused in Italy, even from the cultural elites. It should be recalled, in this regard, that I sepolcri by Ugo Foscolo was written precisely to contest the displacement of cemeteries from the centre of cities and churches, in areas outside urban areas, a profile that, according to Foscolo, would have compromised the cult of the dead and the inspiration to great deeds that this cult nourishes in citizens.
Ariès points to a progressive process of estrangement and removal of death, which is increasingly relegated (from the house open to all neighbours, to the house with relatives only, to the hospital). Mutatis mutandis, the tendencies of some cultural groups to experience the tomb as a place of communion with the deceased in ways that go beyond bringing flowers and that also include dancing, banquets, celebrations, might be better understood by considering how, among these groups, that process of distancing death from life that, according to Ariès, took place in the West, did not occur.