Newspaper Article

IDEAS & TRENDS; Body Language: The Lure of The Dead

Boxer, Sarah

1995

Overview

Approaching a dead body is like standing at the edge of a cliff. \"The closer you get to it, the more alluring it is,\" says Sherwin Nuland, the author of \"How We Die.\" Echoing Freud, Dr. Nuland says, \"we are most attracted to the things we fear most. We cover our eyes, but spread our fingers so we can see.\" Why? \"We identify with that body,\" he says. \"It is us.\" And the more horrible the death, the more alluring the body, because a violent death combines two things we fear most -- our own death and our aggression. Not everyone feels this intense a bond, but almost everyone has some visceral reaction to corpses, and not just at Halloween. Dr. Guillen says, \"My father doesn't want to shake my hands when he knows I've been working with dead people.\" The author Joyce Carol Oates likens looking at ancient corpses to \"looking at baby pictures.\" Sarah Carthew, who heads the British Museum Society, says that when she looks at Pete (the pet name for Lindow Man, who was dug from a peat bog), she thinks, \"That's my uncle.\" There's a price for digging up the dead. The very presence of corpses among the living endangers their survival. As Freud once said of buried memories and buried antiquities: \"Their burial had been their preservation.\" And so, their excavation is the beginning of their demise. \"This one has not let me sleep for the past two months,\" Dr. Guillen said of the ice woman. \"I'm worried about her.\"

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: ARCHEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY / INCAS / MUMMIES AND MUMMIFICATION