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Poem: Funeral Blues (W.H. Auden)

 5 Interesting Death And Funeral Rituals Around The World, From Mongolia To Sweden

The "traditional" model of Western, Christian funerals may be the one we see most often on film and TV, but it barely scratches the surface of death rituals around the world. The coffin, the mourners, the burial, the wake — every culture and religion has their own specific ideas about how these particular things need to work. But there's a nasty habit for Westerners to coo with delight over "foreign" funeral rituals: a Japanese funeral sometimes involves abone-picking ceremony where relatives select pieces of bone from the ashes and place them in an urn? How quaint! It can feel like the worst kind of tourism: seeing a culture from the surface, and picking out the parts that are alarming, aesthetically pleasing, or charming to us.

But we should dig deeper. Ideas about death and its rituals tell us a lot about a culture, and what it values and believes. They help us appreciate and reflect on human perspective. And as the world melds, more and more of us are likely to go to a funeral for a person of a different culture, religion, or home country, and it'd be damn good if we didn't gawk or make utter fools of ourselves.

Here are some incredibly different funeral and death rituals from five countries around the world, from Mongolia to Sweden. Some of them may be outmoded or slowly shifting in response to modern pressures; others are still going strong. So keep this in mind if you're ever invited to a third-day memorial service in Iran.

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