toxic-burial

The most interesting aspect of this image is that it doesn't show straightforward forms of toxicity. One form of toxicity that comes through in the argument is the separations of death from different organisms which the ethnographer suggests holds other "Social statuses". Expanding on this would help highlight the toxicity at work here. Another toxic dynamic at work is what the ethnographer calls the individualizing of responses to death. There is a lot to unpack here, especially begging the question of what processes are at work to create such individualization and how it might be creating individualized experiences that alienate humans from the non human.