Funeral laments and female power in Sardinian peasant society

Abstract

The members of all societies, maintain a shared pattern of behaviour for dealing with death. Patterns for regulating this ultimate rite of passage are culturally prescribed on the basis of a particular culture's values, norms, and conception of the nature of life after death. Furthermore, in every society, behavioral roles in rituals surrounding death are assigned to males and females according to the societies' view of what is considered to be appropriate behavior for each sex. In most studies of funeral behavior the emphasis has been on the activities that follow the event of death, commenting on their function as a socially sanctioned expressive outlet for feelings of loss and grief. When funeral laments have been analyzed, the goal has been primarily to determine the structural properties or singing style of the form. Surprisingly, the actual words of funeral laments have received little attention, and, in particular, there is little information about the funeral laments of women as they reveal the woman's view of life and death and her attitudes about her condition in her society. Above all, funeral laments have not been studied from the point of view of the woman's role in the basic subsistence activities of her society as this role relates to her institutionalized position in ritual activities. The ideas that peasant women communicate in their laments and the specialized audiences to whom they relay this information have not been the subject of systematic analysis, and there has been no significant theorizing as to the degree of social control which peasant women may actually exert through the public drama of the wake and funeral in societies where women, not men, have control over the dissemination of information about past and present events in their communities.