The Dominion of the Dead

This book begins with this introduction::

If I were to try to phrase the principal thesis of this study—a hazardous proposition, to be sure, since a number of diverse theses come together here—I would say that humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories. And since I will be referring to the human rather often in these pages, let me put forward a premise here to the effect that humanity is not a species (Homo sapiens is a species); it is a way of being mortal and relating to the dead. To be human means above all to bury. Vico suggests as much when he reminds us that "humanitas in Latin comes first and properly from humando,burying" (New Science§12). By properly he means essentially and irreducibly. And if I have mentioned Vico more than once already it is because his New Science(1744) is the major inspiration for this study. Certainly it was Vico who first helped me understand how the human is bound up with the humus and why burial figures as the generative institution of human nature, taking the word nature in its full etymological sense (from nasci,"to be born"). As Homo sapiens we are born of our biological parents. As human beings we are born of the dead—of the regional ground they occupy, of the languages they inhabited, of the worlds they brought into being, of the many institutional, legal, cultural, and psychological legacies that, through us, connect them to the unborn.