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Reconsidering "Sati in Universal Context"
SARAH SCHNEEWIND
University of California, San Diego
| By sheer coincidence, I had just put down both my colleague Lu Weijing's manuscript on faithful maidens in late imperial China, bereaved fiancées who lived out their lives as if they were widows bound to chastity or who followed their fiancés in death, and Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, with its chilling description of a young Parsee widow being dragged to her husband's funeral pyre with great ceremony (to be rescued by the daring Frenchman Passepartout), when my Journal of World History 16:3 (September 2005) arrived with its thought-provoking contribution to comparative and world history, Jörg Fisch's article "Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context."1 |
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Fisch proposes to treat sati (suttee) in the context of other practices of Totenfolge, or "following into death," which he defines as "on the occasion of the death of a person, one or several persons follow that person into death, voluntarily or involuntarily, in a public ritual," irrespective of the means of the followers' deaths (p. 296). Sati, the immolation of widows, is the most tenacious example, but customs of following in death, Fisch says, have been widespread in world history; examples include headhunting in Southeast Asia (p. 301) and the ritual murder of a king's cook, brewer, and shepherd in Baganda (p. 299). Such customs, Fisch argues, have two preconditions: social inequality, which means that some categories of people die for others, and a dominant social belief in a life after death that is "a continuation or duplication of this life" (pp. 304–306). In this short response, I would like to comment on Fisch's use of sources (understandably secondary sources in many cases); on his terminology, delineation of topic, and logic; and on the political implications of his argument. |
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Fisch points out that the history he wishes to write cannot be written, because the evidence is always fragmentary (p. 297). Given the sparse data on Totenfolge, it is admirable that Fisch has taken on the topic. But, equally, it is regrettable that he has not taken full advantage of the data on East Asia, an area prominent in his argument, that are readily available in English. Japan is mentioned three times in the article, and the single source cited—a work on modern Japan—does not bear out Fisch's analysis in any way. Fisch argues that a belief in a hereafter that is similar to this world is a precondition for following in death. Robert Jay Lifton et al., the authors of Six Lives, Six Deaths, explain that immortality in Japanese thinking followed several modes (including biological, focused on continuation of the family line; theological, mainly a belief in a kind of spiritual power over death; creative, meaning that one's work lives on; and natural, referring to reentering earth's diurnal course), none of which presupposes a hereafter like this world. Rather, they say, "the dominant Japanese image of what happens at death is that one 'enters' the cosmos, stays there for a time, and then gradually fades away and disappears." Even the Buddhist idea of punishment after death was dissolved into this kind of thinking by the late twelfth century, Lifton et al. say, with belief in salvation by the Amida Buddha. Ritual suicide was not a following into death that entailed continued existence, but was a way to take control of one's inevitable death, or a way to resolve an impossible situation.2 Fisch refers to the case of Nogi Maresuke, a general who killed himself on the day of the funeral of the Meiji emperor, to show that "the underlying beliefs" in a hereafter "lingered on" (p. 321). But Nogi, according to Lifton et al., "had no religious faith and subscribed to no philosophical system," and according to his own will and testament he recognized that his suicide, far from being a duty, was a crime. He says that having become old and useless, he "can no longer serve [his] lord" and has long "searched in vain for an opportunity to die."3 This is the only source Fisch cites for his contentions that following in death was practiced in Japan and was opposed by Confucianism there. |
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