5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 9b: Rituals
Chair: Mark Wehrly
Maniat Laments as 'traditional' Narratives: From the Performed to
the Monumentalised
Korina
Giaxoglou
King’s College, London, United Kingdom
Lamenting in its contextual
pervasiveness and multi-functionality has been and still is an integral
part of Maniat verbal art tradition (Laconia, Greece). Instead of focusing
on the performative dimensions of ritual laments in the lines of anthropological
approaches, I shall follow the lines of linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics
and focus instead on the textualising dimensions of their accommodation
in a folklore collection as ‘traditional’ narratives, i.e.
as texts shaped in the form of selective representations of local culture.
As this paper shall show, the compiler shapes ‘traditional’ texts
through practices of verbal monumentalisation in writing, which frame
lament fragments as original lament performances, attributed to an identifiable
lamenter. This temporal and contextual framing shall be challenged here
and the dynamic character of lament verbal art across different kinds
of contexts shall be emphasised, making use of the notion of entextualisation (Bauman
and Briggs 1990).
Key-manifestations of lament entextualisation in the
metadiscursive practices of a local philologist shall be discussed in
more detail presenting a set of specific meta-textual strategies through
which the female multi-voicing and lament dialogicality are being erased
in the collection along with their con-textual trajectories; the underlying
purpose of such erasure is the verbal monumentalisation of laments as
narratives of local oral history put in the service of Greek nationalism.
The Uneven Rites of Death
Anna
Lindström
Department of History, Växjö University, Sweden
This paper deals
with death-related rites in southern Sweden during the first half of
the twentieth century. Based on a collection of memories this study underscores
the importance of incorporating a thorough class perspective in the analysis
of secularization.
The collection of memories, which can be described
as a mixture of interviews and diary notes, were recorded by the Department
of Ethnology at Lund University in 1949. The stories contain detailed
descriptions of the respondents’ experiences
of death-related rites in a wide range of settings, from breaking the
news of a person’s death, until the last funeral guest had left
the house of mourning. The aim of the study is to show that the framing
and contents that death faces depends on who he or she pays
a visit. The class analysis is used to exemplify that identity constructions
are vital in order to understand the changes in the death rite – both
in the historical present and over time.
The Parasocial Paradox: How Personalized Funerals
Extend Our Relationships Beyond Death
Terri
Toles Patkin
Communication Department, Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic,
CT, USA
Recently, many American funerals have become personalized
productions, with strategies including the display of photographs and
mementos, displays of cremated remains in unique settings, decorated
caskets, and fully-themed participatory experiences with sports themes,
nature displays or lifestyle representations. The personalized funeral
illustrates Erving Goffman’s
model of social interaction as performance, as well as assisting in the
creation of parasocial relationships, one-sided, nonreciprocal relationships
in which control of the relationship rests in the hands of the performer
(in this case, assisted by family and friends).
Paradoxically, the attempt
to personalize the memorial transmutes the unique person into a massified
commodity in a mediated taste community, deindividuating the departed
even as mourners celebrate his or her life. Theme funerals - utilizing
sports memorabilia, cultural or ethnic symbols, occupational identifications
and lifestyle depictions - serve as the ultimate fan activity, searing
the memory of the person’s self-identification deeply into survivors’ minds
by attaching the departed to a larger social group.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2007