4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 8A: Death in Cultural Context, I
Chair: Kriss Kevorkian
Funeral Rituals
Emilie
Jaworski
Department of Ethnology, University of Sciences
and Technologies of Lille, France
The globalization
may be described as the expansion of the capitalist system and its ideals.
This phenomenon implies deep structural transformations inside societies
and reorganization of worldwide population, because of the intensification
of the migratory movements.
It is then obvious that each society must redefine all their social and
cultural practices, in order to give sense to the new social reality.
The
mechanism of those reshapenings obviously appears in funerar rituals.
Those events, which combine economical, social and cultural dimensions
of a society, are interesting to get a better understanding of a population.
The part of participators for funeral is to establish the died among
the ancestors - references for the identity of a group - and fix his
memory. Then, during this
action, they solicit all the values and ideals of the society. So, funeral
are a “total social fact”which
can be considered as a mirror of the society.
This problematic which
involves social change and funerar rituals, can be applied to the case
of Poland and polish community in the North of France. Since the fell
of communism in 1989, the social and cultural environment of Poland had
deeply changed and the population must adapt itself to a new reality.
The polish community also had to reconfigure its practices but in a foreign
environment. A comparative study of those two common origined populations,
facing the social change, can help to understand the mechanisms which
drive the social and cultural reshapenings. According to this aim, I
especially focus on a practice which was common to both of the concerned
populations: the post-mortem pictures,
consisting in taking pictures of dead relatives in the coffin before
the funerar mess. By working on social uses and functions of those pictures,
and by reestablishing them in the whole of funerar practices, it is possible
to understand how works a society and how a population adapt itself to
changes.
Death and Funerals In Sunni
Societies in Turkey
Reyhan
Valri Gork
School of Social Sciences, Middle East Technical University
(METU), Ankara, Turkey
This study discusses the perception of death and funerals in Sunni Moslem communities of Turkey whilst evaluating Islamic culture and urbanized society. The main theme is to understand the attitudes of the urbanized Islamic Sunni society toward the death phenomenon in metropolitan cities provincial towns particularly in Ankara and Marmaris. Emphasis is placed on changes in attitudes over time, in the light of comparisons between Ottoman and modern Turkish culture. Graves, tombs, tombstones, epitaphs and cemeteries are also discussed from the viewpoint of Islamic culture. With these objectives, the study begins with the analysis of the concept of death. In order to carry out the study, a method approaching the subject from four disparate points has been employed. First, literature was surveyed to gain an understanding of the meaning of death in present-day society. Second, the Islamic canon was reviewed with regard to the death phenomenon. Third, reflexive narratives originating from personal observations as a participant in the funerals of my family members’ were employed in this study. The fourth and last field of research includes field observations and photographs from Karşıyaka Cemetery in Ankara, and copies of photographs from several other sources in order to identify the divergence of the modern from traditional. The major verdict of this study is that in modern Islamic culture, in contrast to its earlier traditional evaluation, death is sequestrated from social communal life and assigned to the status of an institutional event.
Britain's" Punk" Mourning
Culture
Gerri
Excell
The University of Reading,
United Kingdom
In 1977 the British music industry was rocked when the Sex Pistols catapulted into the music world with their anti establishment assault on the industry. Now it’s the turn of the British mourning culture, out with established rules of mourning and in with the new anti establishment mourning culture of the roadside memorial. There are no prescribed rules of what constitutes a roadside memorial and this is exactly the characteristic that appeals to the bereft, the personalisation of a memorial site. A content analysis of 50 roadside memorials in the UK reveals that it is the individuality of the symbolism that is important for those bereft in today’s society. The roadside is a public space and is the perfect space to incorporate a memorial that can draw attention to the end of a life; the roadside can be used as a place to celebrate the life whilst at the same time protest the untimely death. Religious iconography does not focus heavily in the roadside memorial culture of the UK, is this because the roadside is not perceived as the place for a religious icon? Could it be that the death itself has questioned their faith? This paper will chronicle the development of the roadside memorial in the UK and discuss how the proliferation of memorials is challenging established rules of mourning. The new “punk” movement of mourning will not go away but may possibly evolve as policy is fashioned and attempts are made at standardising the memorials. However, more can be learnt from the individualised memorials, what are societal values today? , what makes a statement about this life and maybe more importantly what might have been missed about this life if a memorial had not been placed. The roadside memorial provides a voice for a life that may only have a brief eulogy in a crematorium by an officiant who never knew that individual, this voice encourages freedom of speech.
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