by Justin Nobel
Professor Marla Toyne's class about death at the University of Western Ontario is one of a surprisingly few college courses on the topic. “In North America, we have had a sterilization of death,” says Toyne. (Photo by Justin Nobel)
Writing an obituary was their first assignment and next month Professor Marla Toyne's students will visit a cemetery.
You can take a course on virtually anything in college: University of Iowa offers a class entitled, “The American Vacation”, students at Centre College, in Danville, Kentucky, can formally study the “Art of Walking” and at Georgetown, discussions revolve around time travel and the possibility of sentient robots in “Philosophy and Star Trek”. But, despite college student's notoriously death-defying lifestyles, there are virtually no college courses on death. Toyne, an anthropologist at the University of Western Ontario who studies human sacrifice in the ancient tribes of Peru, believes that's a problem, so she started a course on the topic.
Young adults may think they are immortal but they need to know about death, said Toyne. “As an adult you have to think about the future, and one thing that happens in the future is that death will come.”
The different ways it can come is the focus of her research. She studies the Incas, as well as the Chimu and Lambayeque tribes, who inhabited the deserts along the coast of Peru from the 12th to the 15th centuries. By looking at skeletons, Toyne can determine if people died naturally or violently, and amongst the indigenous cultures of Peru, violent deaths were common. “You have children who have frozen to death,” she said. “Some show evidence of vomiting, maybe they were forced an alcohol beverage. Some were buried alive. In other cases, throats were cut and a great deal of blood was spilled.” Read the rest of this entry »
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