Collection of 8 papers by anthropologists who have done field studies in the archipelago of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines -- Amazing window into the "other," cultures outside everything I have known --

On "rites of secondary treatment of the dead (nulang)" as performed by a village in northwestern Borneo, Peter Metcalf writes, "In common with many other peoples worldwide who practice such rites, the Berawan do not see death as the matter of a moment. Instead, it is a slow separation of soul and body, a process whose physical manifestation is the decay of the corpse. The spiritual transition is equally repellent; as the body sinks into corruption, so the soul begins a miserable existence, caught between the lands of the living and the dead. From its dank and lonely exile on the margins of the jungle, it looks back with mounting jealously toward those most dear in life. It is the malice of the recently dead that sets death in motion." For a year after death, the family of the deceased is most in danger. After that year, "The corpse is now dry bones, and the soul is correspondingly transformed into pure spirit, acceptable among the company of the incorruptible ancestors. Its malice has evaporated." (262)

BUT, that is only for a person who has died a "good death." The doomed soul released by a "bad death," such as a woman who dies in childbirth (now there's the topic I would like to pursue!) is "caught between worlds, just like the newly dead, and remain[s] spiteful indefinitely." (268)