Michael Jindra - Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon

Edited By

Published in 2011 by

www.berghahnbooks.com

2011, 2013 Michael Jindra and Jol Noret
First paperback edition published in 2013

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Funerals in Africa : explorations of a social phenomenon / edited by Michael Jindra and Jol Noret.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-85745-205-4 (hardback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-85745-206-1 (institutional ebook) ISBN 978-1-78238-128-0 (paperback : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-78238-129-7 (retail ebook)

1. Funeral rites and ceremoniesAfrica. 2. DeathReligious aspects. 3. AfricaSocial life and customs. 4. AfricaReligious life and customs. I. Jindra, Michael. II. Noret, Jol.

GT3287.A2F86 2011

393.9dc22

2011003895

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper

ISBN 978-1-78238-128-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-78238-129-7 retail ebook

CHAPTER 1
African Funerals and Sociocultural Change: A Review of Momentous Transformations across a Continent

CHAPTER 2
A Decent Death: Changes in Funerary Rites in Bulawayo

CHAPTER 3
Transformations of Death among the Kikuyu of Kenya: From Hyenas to Tombs

CHAPTER 4
Decomposing Pollution? Corpses, Burials, and Affliction among the Meru of Central Kenya

CHAPTER 5
The Rise of Death Celebrations in the Cameroon Grassfields

CHAPTER 6
Funerals and Religious Pluralism in Burkina Faso

CHAPTER 7
Funerals and the Religious Imagination: Burying and Honoring the Dead in the Celestial Church of Christ in southern Benin

CHAPTER 8
Of Corpses, Clay, and Photographs: Body Imagery and Changing Technologies of Remembrance in Asante Funeral Culture

CHAPTER 9
Funerals and Fetish Interment in Accra, Ghana

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Funerary rituals fascinate people in most cultures in part because they are so full of contradictions. Nothing is more natural to human life than its cessation, yet nothing is more culturally specific and arbitrary than the disposal of the dead. At certain moments in funerary rituals, the dispositions and funerary techniques in play seem to be as globally standardized as the layout of airport terminals, yet at other moments nothing can be more parochial and better reflect local thought and practice. Hence nothing is more familiar to us and nothing more exotic than funerals elsewhere. Moreover, funerals are about the dead, yet intended for the living. No other ritual focuses more intensely on the individual, yet at the same time celebrates kinship and neighborhood to such a degree. Funerals are tearful, yet fearful: the rituals attempt to assuage grief through the induction of the deceased into the collective memory, yet at the same time they are a means to bid farewell. Often the living hasten to cut all ties with the newly dead, yet as soon as these same dead are on their way to become ancestors, the living nevertheless also want to communicate with them. Funeral rituals tend to be carefully planned and often are a triumph of rationality, yet they allow for the strongest and sometimes most spontaneous expressions of grief, and they are designed to sublimate the strongest emotions.

Funerals often trigger a crisis among the surviving kin and neighbors (who killed this dead person?), yet the rituals also tend to knit these groups closer together and to increase their solidarity. Funerals deal with the ethereal, yet they often also involve great expense and a considerable calculation of material expectations. Funerals are as much about death as they are about the manifestation of ultimate reality and the ultimate meaning of life, even as they are coping with the most concrete and evanescent details of the here and now. Hence no rituals are more static, stodgy, and conservative than funeral rites, yet nothing is more dynamic, inspired, and innovative than these rites that always change on one point or another with every new occasion. Funerals transcend fashion, yet slavishly adhere to it. Many paradoxes surround funerals, if only because by definition death tells us about life, society, and culture. No wonder, then, that funeral rituals fascinate, and, as the editors of this book put it, that they are often the key cultural event in tropical African communities. Levi Strauss might have said: funerals are good to think.

Precisely because they are so good to think, funerals act like an isotope in the bloodstream: they allow us to better understand communities and their culture when we see them in action. Hence a book of essays about funerals in tropical Africa happens also to be an excellent introduction to the overall diversity of tropical African societies and cultures. The editors have brought together essays about nine cases, every single one of which is presented in its specific and contingent social and cultural surroundings. Moreover, the uneven spatial distribution of these cases is particularly well designed to facilitate an analysis of the funeral phenomenon in and of itself. Readers are presented with two clusters of funerary traditionssouthern Ghana and north-central Kenyawhich shrilly contrast with one another in almost every particular, while two further West African cases complement the first cluster, and finally one essay from Zimbabwe contrasts with all the others. Thus on the one hand, readers can appreciate the detailed dynamics and relative importance of small changes within each cluster, while on the other, they can also focus on the huge contrasts that exist between funeral practices in one part of Africa and in another, contrasts almost as stark as could be imagined between funeral traditions anywhere in the world. Perhaps nothing better illustrates how diverse societies and their cultures can be, even within tropical Africa.