Digital Dying By: Justin Nobel

by Justin Nobel

Stripper funerals are common in rural Taiwan, the more chaotic the better. At one event a stripper went into the audience and rubbed a man's genitals. (Photo courtesy of Marc Moskowitz)

Have you ever been to a funeral where strippers dance on glowing flatbed trucks? Marc Moskowitz has. In fact, he has made a movie about it, called Dancing for the Dead. Moskowitz, a University of South Carolina anthropologist, has spent the past two decades researching pop culture in China and Taiwan. Digital Dying spoke with him about just how raunchy Taiwan stripper funerals get, why city folk don't like them and how the trend could come to America.

What does a Taiwan stripper funeral look like?

Women sing and dance as a truck with blinking neon lights follows a funeral procession through the streets. The trucks are called Electric Flower Cars, or EFCs. Vendors sell things alongside and there is some really fabulous singing and a whole range of performances, taking off clothes is just one part. Often there's a host, a middle aged man or woman who tells jokes and interviews performers between events. Usually the strippers wear bikinis, or an outfit like you might see at a nightclub.

But isn't it strange to have naked dancers at a funeral?

There's a concept in Taiwanese culture called renao, which refers to the hustle and bustle of an exciting event, the hot and noisy. For it to be successful it has to be renao. Even if you go to the mountains or the beach, it is renao. Think of a quiet rock concert, that would be a failure. Or a quiet amusement park. The EFCs also perform at weddings and religious festivals. Nudity attracts more people and more people make it more hot and noisy. Making the funeral a noisy event means people will talk about it for years. To some extent the more extreme the better.

FUNERAL CUSTOMS ACROSS THE WORLD

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by Justin Nobel

Xiaohe, a 3,800 year old mummy discovered in 1934 in the deserts of western China is considered the world's most beautiful mummy, but an Egyptian mummy discovered in 2005 claims the same title.

Xiaohe is a beauty; she has long eyelashes, a button nose, auburn hair that falls across her shoulders and has been dead for 3,800 years. The now famous mummy, known as The Beauty of Xiaohe, was discovered by a Swedish archeologist in 1934 in China's Tarim Basin, in the western province of Xinjiang, a remote arid land once off limits for outsiders. “Now they're pulling mummies out of the ground like it's an Abbott and Costello movie,” notes one article. But the mummy has led to controversy, part of an exhibit touring the US called “Secrets of the Silk Road”, her travels were halted last February by the Chinese government.

Chinese officials said the mummy had been away for too long and needed to return home to China, but some scholars speculate the real reason she was pulled from the show was because of her looks. Xiaohe's Caucasian features suggest Europeans had actually been living within China at a time thousands of years earlier than was previously thought, debunking Chinese narratives of how the history of their own country developed. The existence of a mummy like Xiaohe, says Spencer Wells, a geneticist and anthropologist at the National Geographic Society is “as though a group of Celts or Vikings had been mysteriously transported into the middle of a Chinese desert.” One thing officials in both countries can agree on is her beauty; but Xiaohe does have a rival, a mummy discovered in Egypt's Saqqara pyramid complex, about 16 miles south of Cairo, in 2005. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

Amish carry their dead to the cemetery in horse-drawn hearses. There are no flowers, there is no singing, there are no eulogies.

The Amish keep their death rituals private but last month reporters were able to peak into this world after a terrible horse-drawn buggy accident in Kentucky. A family was traveling to a neighbor's home to use a community telephone when the buggy toppled in a rain-swollen creek. Four children, all cousins or siblings, were swept away by the churning water; one was 5, one was 7, one was 11 and one was just five months-old. The creek they perished in is normally a trickle but thunderstorms had dropped several inches of rain in just hours, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood warning for the entire county. While many residents noticed the warning scroll across their TV screens or heard it on the radio, the Amish live without electricity. It is possible the family never got the message, noted one weather forecaster.

There are nearly 8,000 Amish living in Kentucky and 250,000 in total scattered across the US. The Amish are followers of the Mennonite Church, a group that originally came from Switzerland, led by Jakob Ammann, who began a schism with the Swiss Alsatian Anabaptists in 1693. His followers became the Amish, and in the early 18th century many of them immigrated to Pennsylvania, facing religious persecution and poverty back in Europe. To this day, their life has changed very little. They still speak a peculiar language known as Pennsylvanian German, follow a strict organizational doctrine known as the Ordnung, abstain from using electricity, automobiles and clothing other than their own, educate their children in one room Amish schoolhouses that often stop at the eighth grade and refuse to serve in the military, buy insurance or accept government assistance, such as social security. Breaking the Amish code can lead to excommunication or public shaming. It is a simple stark life, and nowhere is this more apparent than in death. Read the rest of this entry »

by Justin Nobel

In Colorado, simple discreet open-air cremations have become more common. In Bali, cremation ceremonies take months of planning and draw tourists from around the world.

Belinda Ellis got her wish, upon death her body was covered in red cloth and laid atop a rectangular steel grate inside a brick hearth. One by one family members placed in juniper boughs and logs, someone tossed on a bag of marijuana. A woman produced chimes by playing a set of crystal bowls. With a torch, Belinda's husband lit the fire. Smoke billowed into the steely dawn sky above Colorado's picturesque Sangre De Christo Mountains. “What was a physical body will become one with the sky,” said a man with the Crestone End of Life Project, the group that organized the funeral pyre.

It took almost five hours for Ellis's body to completely burn. Afterward, since separating human remains from charred wood is impossible her family received about five gallons of ashes. This was the 18th open-air cremation that the Crestone group has performed; their first was in January of 2008. They have gotten requests to host funeral pyres for people from as far away as New York and Florida but the group has chosen to limit their services to those inhabiting the tiny towns immediately surrounding them. As far as they know they are the only facility in the nation offering open-air cremations. The ceremonies are small, simple and discreet, a stark contrast to the cremation ceremonies half a world away in Bali, where Hindus believe open-air cremation is an essential part of returning one's constituent elements to the world around them and freeing the soul.

“In Bali, the body is nothing more than an impure, temporary shell, having no significance at all, except as the container of the soul and its anchor to earth,” says Fred Eiseman Jr. in his 1996 book on Bali culture, Sekala & Niskala. “The body is just there to be disposed of, and that as quickly as possible.” Read the rest of this entry »