Respect for the owners of the death

Ryan Schram
ANTH 1002: Anthropology in the world
Module 4, Week 1, Lecture 2
Social Sciences Building (A02), Room 410
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
October 23, 2019
Available at http://anthro.rschram.org/1002/2019/4.1.2

• Wailing
• The haus krai
• Speaking to the dead

Social anthropologists loved talking about witchcraft and sorcery. It seemed a perfect test case for their ideas about social function:

• Witchcraft and sorcery function in relation to a society's egalitarian ideology. People bewitch their social equals out of jealousy that they might be gaining prestige and authority (Fortune 1932).
• Witchcraft is a way of mediating social conflicts (Nadel 1952).
• Witchcraft is a collective representation of deviance itself, the “standardized nightmare” of the society (Wilson 1951: 313).

Witchcraft exist in an equilibrium, and is part of a process of maintaining social equilibrium.

In many ways, the mourning of a person's death is the total social fact of Auhelawa society

• because it involves everyone in the community in some way, and
• because what they do together to mourn is the foundation of their relationships to each other in a social structure

People's mourning, their ideas about death, and the roles they play in mortuary ritual are all part of a positive feedback loop which includes their relationships as members of matrilineal groups and as kin.

Death divides the world into two sides:

• The matrilineal kin of the deceased (mothers, siblings, mother's brothers) are the owners of the death
• The affines (spouse, other in-laws) must mourn for the death by wailing, respect, and giving gifts. If a man dies, then the wife and her children are both mourners.

When a matrilineage owns a death, then any other matrilineage for whom they have mourned will now mourn in return.

• For instance, one mourns for the matrilineal kin of one's father. This group will reciprocate this mourning for your matrilineage during your life, and when you die.

Other, unrelated matrilineages also join as “supporters” of either the mourners or the owners.

• People of the same bird (totem) will support each other when one is mourning for or owns a death.

The mourners, and especially the husband or the wife and her children, must show that they are mourning. Besides wailing, they will:

• abstain from washing their hair
• wear only dirty clothes
• eat only poor vegetables, and abstain from meat and feast yams

These prohibited things are all bwabwale (forbidden). The mourners will also give a pig and many feast yams to the owners; this gift is also called bwabwale.

• The mourners do not eat what they give

Respect creates a division, but a division enables the two sides to enter into a specific kind of reciprocal exchange.

In many societies, death is always caused by someone's witchcraft, and poses an immediate danger to the living.

As Evans-Pritchard notes, Azande people kill witches. Witches can also be asked to pay compensation for the death (Evans-Pritchard [1937] 1976, 5).

• People are responsible for their witchcraft even though they cannot control it.
• The kin of a witch are also supposed to help pay compensation.

A witchcraft attack causes a collective injury, and is a collective responsibility.

This is very different from the concept of responsibility in Western criminal law.

Now let us consider “good death” and “bad death” in Kwahu-Tafo, Ghana, a society in which everyone is related to everyone else in some way, and their relationships define who they are as persons. In Kwahu-Tafo, what is the worst way to die?

Go to Canvas and take Quiz no. 19: The worst way to die.

The code for this quiz will be announced in class.

When people die, the relationships that they mediate are interrupted and must be restored. Death is an injury to the social body.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1937) 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Edited by Eva Gillies. Abridged edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.