That women in many places confront death in ways that have gone grievously misunderstood or misrepresented by the androcentric, officializing scholarly traditions of past eras is incontestable, wrong, and deserving of a robust scholarly response. Such a response, however, will not emerge by claiming that those challenges that have in fact occurred were either inadequate or exclusively launched by female authors.
Håland’s (poorly) edited volume brings some new data and a great deal of republished material to bear on these questionable claims. Her own call to examine how modern Greek mourning practices might illuminate ancient dynamics, while unexceptionable and indeed fundamentally right, actually adds little to the writings of Margaret B. Alexiou and C. Nadia Seremetakis; she also assumes a “Mediterraneanist” perspective defended, she says, in a doctoral dissertation that she cites frequently but without further illumination. More fundamentally disturbing is her unsupported assertion that Loring M. Danforth’s work is necessarily flawed because “he, as a male ethnographer, has no possibility of carrying out fieldwork in the female sphere” (49, note 36; my emphasis); conversely, she attributes the concept of a “poetics of womanhood” to “chapter 10” of Jill Dubisch’s study of pilgrimage (In a Different Place), whereas Dubisch—whose own important reflections on the dynamics of gender in Greece get notably short shrift—herself correctly and generously acknowledges my authorship. Such rejectionist evasions do nothing to further the broader themes of the book.
Fortunately, most of the other authors do not feel constrained by the ideological task that Håland has set them in a manner that, to be fair, she proclaims as deliberately open-ended. Gail Holst-Warhaft’s overview essay, which avoids the traps of functionalism and over-determination, offers a far more useful perspective than Håland’s clumsy and misdirected polemics. She notes key commonalities in the linkages between womanhood and death in cultures widely separated in time and space, but, while offering cogent observations about the forum that mourning has given women for the public social critique of male power, resists the temptation of an easy, comprehensive explanation in favor of a nuanced call for additional research under the present-day conditions of globalization.
The remaining papers, such as Helena Ruotsala’s study of the Mari, contain fascinating detail; Ruotsala is especially interesting on the complex syncretism of Orthodox with Mari belief systems and cultic practices. While she is heavily reliant on previous scholars’ reports, her synthesis is reasonably up-to-date and thus offers one strand of the larger project that Holst-Warhaft’s essay portends. Against the pressures of an intrusive modernity, suggests Ruotsala, women’s involvement with mortuary ritual enhances their role as the preservers of Mari tradition generally, in that their engagement in practices of commemoration operates at multiple, mutually reinforcing levels.
Tatiana Minniyakhmetova gives a somewhat similar account of another Finno-Ugric group, the Udmurt, whose women, she argues, derive their capacity to manage social regeneration in the modern world from their procreative role, which, by linking them with the spirits of the departed, makes them threatening to men. This is a classic study in female liminality, but—like most of these essays—it lacks an ethnographically grounded demonstration of the relevant interactional dynamics such as might have allowed us to peer beyond the confines of ritual enactment to the tenor of everyday life.
Jenny Butler’s Irish materials, while textual and historical, do, in her hands, move more decisively in the direction of analyzing practical power. As she points out, the struggle over female mourning practices goes far beyond the tussle between a hegemonic church structure and local custom; it is also, in a way that comes alive in this essay far more than elsewhere in the book, about gender dynamics at an intensely local level.
Liv Helga Dommasnes’s discussion of bog burials brings a measure of historical depth to the collection. Alexandra Cuffel makes heroic efforts to rescue Jewish women martyred in the Middle Ages from exemplarily documented male indifference and from their own ambiguous cosmological status. Nefissa Neguib’s examination of one Cairene Armenian woman’s photographic archive furnishes a useful methodological exercise; although she may be too willing to accord agency to inert objects, she nevertheless convincingly shows that they in fact absorb meaning from social actors’ responses to them.
Mojca Ramšak’s discussion of cancer metaphors in Slovenia is descriptively interesting, although more tangential than other chapters to the analysis of power in relation to gender and the management of death. Finally, Terje Oestigaard’s closing chapter on Bangladeshi Hindu images of the mother goddesses Kali and Ganga takes us back into fairly conventional areas of folklore and the anthropology of religion, by assessing the ways in which the complentarity of these figures encompasses a full range of cosmological elaborations on the themes of life and death.
In short, there are modest but potentially useful pickings here, but the book offers no sustained or novel central argument and little serious critical engagement with an already impressive bibliography on its main topic.
WORKS CITED
Dubisch, Jill. In a Different Place: Pilgrimage, Gender, and Politics at a Greek Island Shrine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
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[Review length: 834 words • Review posted on June 9, 2009]