Case Study #354: How we view the dead

WARNING: BOIL UPDATE
This unsettles me, and I hope to study rotting bodies someday. Chances are excellent you might find this slightly unsettling. None of the pictures are truly gruesome, but still.

I don't have the time to be writing this since I should be working on my anthro final paper, but it hit me in the face when I opened up the Interwebs and it's really really bothering me. My homepage is currently the New York Times, and the opening picture is this . It's a picture of parents encountering the dead body of their teenage daughter. The rest of the photos include other pictures of the dead. None of them are particularly gruesome, but there is also no attempt to pull a veil between the viewer and the corpse.
Now think about this: how often have you seen photos of contemporary dead Americans? How many pictures of unwrapped in situ (still in place where they were found/died) corpses did you see after Katrina? Our soldiers die every day: how many of their corpses have you seen on the front page of the New York Times?
If we're gonna fucking be squeamish about seeing our own dead, extend that fucking respect to people from other countries. If we're okay with showing the harsh reality of death to the American public, fucking sack up and do it with our own people too. ALSO: to be honest, I"m not as familiar with Japanese death rituals as I could/really kind of should be, but I do know that there's a lot of respect paid to the body. It's why there is a whole issue with organ donations and why they don't embalm. "Good wholesome American Christian" treatment of a dead body has NOTHING on the respect the Japanese have for their dead.
Don't get me wrong: I think that photo of the parents is beautiful, and as long as they were okay with it (if they weren't consulted, um.... omg wtf), I am glad the NYT featured it so prominently, though I'm shocked they had the journalistic balls to do so, given our terror of death. However, if working with 3,000 year old bones has taught me one thing, it's that people and cultures take their death rituals very seriously. I mean, I don't particularly care what happens to me after I die; if a sky burial isn't possible, I'd be down with a Body Farm or "hanging on the hook in the medical school" sort of option. Really whatever is fine by me, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority here, particularly since treatment of the dead has almost nothing to do with the dead person and everything to do with the feelings of the survivors.
I don't even know what I'm getting at here. I am exceedingly conflicted about the entire situation, mostly because I feel at least three or four or seventy of the sides all at once. I actually probably respect the dead more than I respect the living because the dead can't make any more mistakes. Respect and compassion are not the same thing though, and in situations like this, it's the compassion towards the living that really matters. Like I said, I don't even know what I'm saying, but still....food for thought.

Be Seeing You

Edit: My friend posted this on his Facebox wall.

It's possible that the photographers are actually Japanese citizens/residents who are documenting from an emic perspective. All the same, the publishing of the photos in our media still raises a number of questions.