The one universal fact of life is death. Yet different cultures define and react to death so variously that the events surrounding it are a key indicator of the exuberant inventiveness of each society. In Madagascar the bereaved may be required to engage in drunken incest, in contemporary America to watch the postmortem video. The Yoruba of Nigeria mourn the young but joyfully celebrate the life and death of the old. In Melanesia, the Dobu stress "replacement": the living step into the shoes of the deceased, regardless of the havoc wrought on the rules of kinship. Death is shown to be more than an individual experience. Anthropologist Nigel Barley writes that his colleagues long ago decided to give it a big role in the collective drama of life. Malinowski, for example, saw it as the origin of all religion, and later ethnologists have seen the fear and denial of death as the origin of all culture.Grave Matters reveals that the body may be preserved or obliterated, transformed into furniture or eaten. Everywhere death is not just a window on eternity but a mirror in which we see ourselves in all our human diversity and the variety of our purposes.