Folklorist Jacqueline Thursby’s strikingly but appropriately titled Funeral Festivals in America is a welcome and timely discussion of the varied rites that surround death in contemporary and historical America. Drawn chiefly from published material, and employing a broad range of interpretive strategies, Thursby is attentive and open to the ceremonies she chronicles. Her openness is important because it reveals what is truly special and important about the study—the celebration, joy, and humor in an occasion too often seen solely through the mourner’s veil.
Thursby’s key observation is that the informal and family-based events occurring in proximity to the death of a loved one clearly fall within the definition of “festival.” It is an observation that makes sense, once we think about it. In case it doesn’t, Thursby provides well-supported arguments from the scholarship of folklore and the social sciences. Having established this important premise, Thursby examines familiar facets of festivity—song, costume, poetry, and (especially) foodways—as expressed over time and in a host of American communities.
The evolution of funerary customs, including the range of events that occur after burial, is explored in a fairly bare-bones fashion, as setting for more detailed studies of how death is observed within particular cultural traditions. It becomes clear that Thursby’s real interest is how contemporary Chinese-American, Mormon, African-American, Jewish, Hispanic, and other communities express their feelings not only for the dead but for the living—in wakes, informal religious ceremonies, and funerary feasts. The book largely steers clear of funeral practices prescribed by organized religions, an appropriate step for a study focused upon informal rather than formal ceremony, although readers unfamiliar with “regular” Roman Catholicism may have some difficulty understanding references to “folk” Catholicism practiced in many Hispanic communities.
In terms of the cultural examples presented, the book is largely a survey rather than an in-depth study of any or all of its chosen communities. As a folklorist at Brigham Young University, Provo, Thursby is not surprisingly more attentive to Mormon, Native American, and Hispanic customs found in the American West than those of, say, Pennsylvania Germans. Some slack should be granted for this, although it is surprising that Don Yoder’s extensive research on Pennsylvania German funerary traditions is not even referenced here.
What is really special about Funeral Festivals in America is something that may unfortunately escape the attention of many potential readers: Thursby’s book is largely and most successfully about American foodways. Thursby is at her best when describing the cultural uses of food, particularly its capacity to bring people together within the temporary community of a funeral gathering. Foodways provides the means for Thursby to successfully argue that funeral customs are really about the living. Her use of this material, largely culled from scholarly and literary sources, suggests that foodways no longer exists at the margins of folklore studies, but can be regarded as central to important areas of cultural practice.
Seen as a survey rather than an in-depth treatment of its subject, the book should spur new research and confirm the usefulness of folklore’s inquiry into the region of American folklife currently referred to as “everyday life.” This means that readers may find themselves wishing that Thursby had provided fuller texts for her many examples within the body of the book or its (very slim) notes. Although a few passages are written in first-person, Thursby seems reluctant to report what she knows about the subject from her own experience or from field research. The author, as well as her readers, have a wealth of personal experiences to draw upon. This book provides the means for those experiences to be summoned and reconsidered.
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[Review length: 600 words • Review posted on August 22, 2006]