My culture is engraved on my tombstone
Keywords:
Textual analysis, content analysis, culture, language, tombstonesAbstract
We, humans, mirror our cultural characteristics in death just as we do in life. This study focuses on the way the dead communicate with the living through their gravestones. For this, we surveyed, photographed and documented a plethora of gravestones affiliated to Shamanism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and conducted content analysis of thematized scripts on stones and objects left on graves for remembrance. Our findings suggest that each set of beliefs displays specific as well as common messages concerning the deceased and the society they belonged to. The study asserts that although we, ephemeral creatures, pass in our final hour, our gravestones keep transmitting our cultural identity from generation to generation with information regarding who and what we were.
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