Should Obituaries exist in the SEA context?

Singapore
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How people handle death in the past. Why now must make obitauries so
elaborate? Is it a SEA thing?

Debates related to obituaries:

1. Obituaries, it should be noted, go beyond the limits of a mere announcement
of a demise; it is also a means of affirming the cultural background,
religion,social status, and migration patterns of the deceased and their
family.
2. This is supported by Lawuyi (1991), who identified obituaries as socially
legitimised advertisements of deceased and bereaved persons, often built on
the aspirational rather than the true identities of the people in the text.
3. Bonsu (2007) observes, despite the implied potential ofobituaries as
residential provinces for exploring social phenomena, they haveoften been
neglected as research sites.
4. Kachrus (1982) studies of obituaries in Asia revealed thatconceptual
metaphors and euphemisms were common factors used to avoidthe direct
mention of or reference to death. Nwoyes (1992) investigation ofNigerian
obituaries also showed how authors employ flowery andflamboyant
language to avoid mentioning death directly. Second, I suggestthat obituaries
are a site for the bereaved to manipulate the personal, social,religious and
cultural identity of the deceased and their own identity throughthe
presentation of the dead individual. It is suggested that obituaries providean
opportunity for the bereaved to pursue their own identities whilepresenting
the deceased in a favourable light.
5. Like Bonsu (2007) I perceive obituaries ascultural texts that appropriate
language for a very specific agenda.
6. One of the main ways in which individual or personal identity isrepresented is
through naming practices (Llamas & Watts, 2010). A personsname is
generally important in distinguishing one person from another andlocating
them within a particular family, role, place, occupation, ethnic group
Although euphemisms and metaphorswere used, they were not as frequent
as in Fernandezs (2006) study and thephilosophical and cultural outlook was
also different.
- Two of the conceptual metaphors found by Fernandez were not found in
theSri Lankan obituary corpus at all. These are death is a joyful life and
death isthe end. This can be explained by the fact that death is not
viewed as acelebration of life nor as an end of life. Because of cultural
reasons, mostpeople in Sri Lanka believe in either rebirth or life after
death

Acharya focuses on the history of ideas which continues to be a relatively neglected field in the
study of Southeast Asia and draws attention in particular to the role of local, Asian (especially
Southeast Asian) actors in bringing about change. These local norm entrepreneurs, he suggests, are
not mere passive learners (p. 169) but take part in a creative process of constitutive localisation a
process in which foreign ideas about authority and legitimacy are borrowed and then fitted into
indigenous traditions and practices (p. 15). The localisation perspective, which gives weight to
cultural analysis, is actually drawn from the writings of historians about the spread of ideas in an
earlier period in Southeast Asia in particular the import of ideas from India from about the fourth to
fourteenth centuries. Acharya cites (among others) Georges Coedes, Ian Mabbett, J.D. Legge and
Milton Osborne, but it is O.W. Wolters who is most strongly associated with the concept of
localisation in Southeast Asian historical studies.