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Working Session: Mortuary Rites in the Pacific Organizers: Eric Silverman and David Lipset For MacPherson, Dalton, and Lutkehaus who were not in attendance in Canberra but expressed a wish to contribute, comparative ethnographic issues were broached, e.g., about the sentiments of grief and desire, as well as processes of burial and mourning. These were related to concepts of the afterlife and personhood (Keck and Wassman, von Poser) and gender (Sinclair, Silverman), expressive culture (Keck and Wassman), aesthetics and spectacle (Bell, Silverman) and creativity (Sykes, Lipset) as well as to local-level inequality (Carucci, Bell, Bainton). In addition, a number of presentations involved the explicit participation of fieldworkers in them (Bell, von Poser, Sykes), which needs further theorization. More generally, the papers featured two themes: a) historical and dialogical relationships between mortuary rites and modernity as a kind of identity politics in which a changing but culturally conservative discourse of spirit and embodiment are debated and elaborated--sometimes in defiance of modern subject (Sinclair, Carucci, Bainton), sometimes in compromise with it (Bell, Sinclair, Carucci, Lipset); and b) the methodological relationship of mortuary rites to developing a more general view of ritual that privileges it as a reconstitution of local-level society, and as a reconstitution of the contested, disputed, anxiety-riddled relationship of local society to modernity. In this latter sense, mortuary rites are not an initiation, a la van Gennep, but a generalizable schema of birth-death, which may be disconnected from mortality, as in Bainton's case in Lihir. Not every paper turned on either or both of these thematics, but several certainly did so in compelling ways. The session will resume next year at the symposium level. Those wishing to join should contact David Lipset immediately. Drafts of papers are due for circulation at 31 May 2008. Eric K. Silverman, American Studies and Human Development, 200 The Riverway, Wheelock College, Boston, MA 02215, USA; tel (617) 879-2423; <esilverman@wheelock.edu> David Lipset, Department of Anthropology, University of Minnesota, |
