Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time 9781785338953

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Mirrors of Passing

Mirrors of Passing Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time

Edited by

Sophie Seebach and

Rane Willerslev

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2018 Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Seebach, Sophie, editor. | Willerslev, Rane, 1971– editor. Title: Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time / edited by Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev. Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018015956| ISBN 9781785339080 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785338946 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785338953 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Death—Cross-cultural studies. | Material culture. Classification: LCC GN485.5 .M57 2018 | DDC 306.9—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018015956

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-908-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-894-6 paperback ISBN 978-1-78533-895-3 ebook

Contents

List of Illustrations Introduction. Mirrors of Passing Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

vii 1

Part I. Death’s Time Chapter 1. The Time of the Dead: Anthropology, Literature, and the Virtual Past Stuart McLean Chapter 2. Orpheus in Love, Death, and Time Marina Prusac-Lindhagen

15

33

Chapter 3. Death before Time: Mythical Time in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Rune Nyord

57

Chapter 4. When Bad Places Turn Worse: The Necropolitics of Death Sites in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Per Ditlef Fredriksen

74

Chapter 5. Narratives of Ebola: Temporal and Material Changes of Social Riverscapes Theresa Ammann

90

Part II. Materialities of Death Chapter 6. “Saving the Dead”: Fighting for Life in the Siberian North Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård

107

Chapter 7. Death, Rebirth, Objects, and Time in North American Traditional Inuit Societies: An Overview Matthew J. Walsh and Sean O’Neill

123

Chapter 8. Transforming and Creating Multiple Worlds: Strange Attractors in the Mongolian Landscape Malthe Lehrmann

145

vi • Contents

Chapter 9. The Dead among the Living: Materiality and Time in Rethinking Death and Otherness in Lowland South America Clarissa Martins Lima and Felipe Vander Velden

166

Part III. Life after Death Chapter 10. Making Presence: Time Work and Narratives in Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Work Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik

187

Chapter 11. The Multiple Identities of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby: The Case of the Sámi Skulls Susan Matland

202

Chapter 12. Media, Ritual, and Immortality: The Case of a Masculine Hero Johanna Sumiala

218

Chapter 13. The Temporality and Materiality of Life and Death in a Sepik Village Christiane Falck

233

Part IV. Exhibiting Death, Materiality, and Time Chapter 14. The Wonderful Exhibition That Almost Was Alexandra Schüssler

253

Index

289

Illustrations

1.1. James Joyce. Photograph by Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915. Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

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1.2. “Snow was general all over Ireland.” Photograph by D. Sharon Pruitt. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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1.3. “The souls of my own dead as thick as bees around me.” Photograph by Francis Chung. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

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1.4. Kukeri: masked and costumed figures associated with the period between New Year and Lent. Simitli, Bulgaria. Photograph by Ivaneskoto.

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1.5. Kwakwaka’wakw raven mask, used by Hamatsa secret society, collected at Memkwumlis, Village Island, around 1917. Native American Collection, Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Photograph by Daderot. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

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1.6. Famine Memorial, Custom House Quay, Dublin, Ireland. Photograph by William Murphy. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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2.1. Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus. Jacopo da Sellaio, c. 1480. Oil on panel. Rotterdam, Boijmans van Beuningen, inv. 2563 (OK). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

36

2.2. Orpheus calming the three-headed, monstrous dog Cerberus with his music at the gate of Hades. Orpheus. Franz von Stuck, 1891. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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2.3. Orpheus before Pluto and Persephone. Francios Perrier, 1647–50. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Michel Urtado.

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2.4. Hermes, Eurydice, and Orpheus. Roman copy, 31 BC–AD 14, of Greek original, 450–400 BC, by Alcamenes. Naples, National Archaeological Museum, inv. 6727. Photo: German Archaeological Institute in Rome, DAI 66.1836.

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2.5. Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld. Jean-BaptisteCamille Corot, 1861. Oil on canvas. Texas, Houston, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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viii • Illustrations

2.6. Eurydice disappears, detail. Orpheus and Eurydice. Auguste Rodin, 1887–93. Marble sculpture. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 10.63.2. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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2.7. Orpheus and Eurydice. Titian, 1508–12. Oil on wood. Bergamo, Accademia Carrara. Photo: Wikipedia Commons (Italian version).

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2.8. Nymphs Listening to the Songs of Orpheus. Charles Jalabert, 1853. Oil on canvas. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, inv. 3737. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

42

2.9. Orpheus playing the lyre. Roman marble sculpture, fourth century AD. Athens, Byzantine and Christian Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

43

2.10. Menad with the head of Orpheus. Orpheus. Gustave Moreau, 1865. Oil on panel. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, inv. RF 104. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

44

2.11. Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus. John William Waterhouse, 1900. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

45

2.12. Mosaic with Orpheus surrounded by animals from AD 200–250. From Palermo, Piazza della Vittoria. It is one of several Roman mosaics with Orpheus and animals. In Palermo, Regional Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas, inv. NI2287. Photo: © Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY 2.5.

46

2.13. Orphic gold leaf, fourth century BC. Found in a bronze urn in Thessaglia. Malibu, J. P. Getty Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ Gift of Lenore Barozzi.

49

2.14. Roman fresco, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii. First century BC. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

51

3.1. Schematic rendering of the three seasons of the ancient Egyptian calendar year.

59

3.2. Head of a statue of the crocodile god Sobek. In mythology Sobek was known to have swallowed the god Osiris, an inauspicious deed for which he was punished by having his tongue cut out. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, AN1912.605. Photo: Graeme Churchard.

61

3.3. Facsimile of a tomb painting of the sun god Re as a cat fighting an enemy in serpent form from the Book of the Dead. The myth of the primeval battle between Re and one or more serpents in the city of Heliopolis is referred to in a number of Egyptian texts. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 30.4.1. Photo: Rogers Fund, 1930.

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3.4. Pectoral worn on the chest of a mummy depicting a winged scarab pushing the solar disk before it with the front legs. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 30.3.34. Photo: Rogers Fund, 1930.

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3.5. The mummified Osiris revivified by his son Horus (left) and sister-wife Isis (right, and in the guise of a bird over the phallus of Osiris) from the temple of Seti I at Abydos. The myth of Osiris and the transference of his vital force (and royal office) to his son Horus provided a striking pattern for the Egyptian understanding of life and death. Photo: Olaf Tausch.

68

Illustrations • ix

3.6. Amulet of the god Thoth in the shape of a baboon holding the eye of Horus. Thoth is credited with restoring the eye of Horus, which had been wounded by Seth. The healing of the eye thus becomes a potent model for regeneration of all kinds, seen especially clearly in the waxing (restoration) and waning (decline) of the moon. Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 08.480.80. Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 08.480.80_front_PS2.jpg.

69

4.1. The Nyamaan Bridge, December 2014. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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4.2. The inyanga’s secret recipe. The muti is kept in this calabash container. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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4.3. Medicines in an inyanga workplace in Phondwane. In addition to various containers for herbal medicine, there are also animal hides and snakeskins brought by local hunters who know that such items and substances will be of use to the inyanga. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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4.4. The buffalo thorn (Ziziphus mucronata) with its thorny twigs. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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4.5. As a spirit returns to the umsamo a celebration is brewing. As Hylton White notes: “A yard should not be left to continue too long without the ‘smell’ of beer and the ‘noise’ of a feast, for these are sensory indices that prove to the watchful spirits of the dead that the home they have left behind still has honor and standing, making them proud of their heirs and predisposed to performing benevolent acts on their behalf” (2001: 461). The more traditional Zulu beer pot to the left is accompanied by beer bottles, wine, and liquor. Ideally the meat should be from slaughtered cattle, but this is expensive. Most of the time a goat, even a chicken, will have to do. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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4.6. Decaying twigs in the umsamo. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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5.1. Maxwell, his brother, and a customer at his brother’s drugstore (from left to right). Photo by Theresa Ammann with permission of all parties.

93

5.2. George’s death certificates (all identifying information has been redacted). Photo by Theresa Ammann with permission of all parties.

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6.1. Chukchi male in a trance on fly agaric mushrooms, after having played the drum. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

108

6.2. This five-year-old Chukchi boy is a chain-smoker, because he is an incarnation of his grandfather’s brother, who was a chain-smoker. The boy has taken over the deceased’s name and character. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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6.3. The deceased is being dressed in his death suit while the women are imitating ravens. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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6.4. The deceased is being cremated on the pyre. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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6.5. Participants are sitting with their backs to the pyre, while a few women keep an eye on the fire and on how the deceased is burning. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

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x • Illustrations

6.6. Two women sit on each side of the road and cleanse the participants by touching them with alder twigs as they pass by. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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6.7. The ancestral world bound within a lasso full of offerings at the annual mortuary ritual, tentyk. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

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6.8. The reindeer convoy made of antlers with the skull, left femurs, jawbones, and the first cervical bone at tentyk. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

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7.1. Map of the study area showing relative locations of the indigenous societies discussed.

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7.2. Grave goods from Point Hope, Alaska. “Ivory, Bone, and Stone Objects—Ipiutak Burials”: (1) snow goggles; (2, 3) buttons; 4) (bird bone tubes; (5, 6) “Unidentified Implements . . . possibly part of a ground squirrel snare”; (7) ivory scoop; (8) unworked amber; (9, 10) jet plates; (11–15) labrets; (16) perforated brown bear jaw (one of four specimens found across three burials). From Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey (1948). Anthropological Papers of the AMNH, Vol. 42, Plate 48. Image provided by the American Museum of Natural History; Neg. #319302.

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7.3. Grave goods from Point Hope, Alaska. “Tigara Types, Sewing Tools, Clothing, and Ornaments—Tigara Burials”: (1) snow goggles; (2) antler brow band; (3) carved ivory polar bear; (4–7) tooth pendants; (8, 9) perforated amber beads; (10, 11) ivory thimble holders; (12) possible needle case attachment found with specimens 11, 15, 16 and 21; (13–16) ivory bodkins; (17) bird bone needle; (18) drinking tube; (19, 20) needle cases; (21) unidentified ivory objects; (22) ivory mounting; (23) bag handle;( 24) wooden ladle with “ivory carvings on handles are embedded in the wood.” From Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey (1948). Anthropological Papers of the AMNH, Vol. 42, Plate 92. Image provided by the American Museum of Natural History; Neg. #319515.

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7.4. The grave of the Piuvlik Eskimo Haviron (d. April 1915) at Cape Lambert. Photo by George H. Wilkins (1916). Alternate photo to that included in The Life of the Copper Eskimos by Diamond Jenness. Grave of Haviron near Cape Lambert, Northwest Territories (Nunavut), George Hubert Wilkins, 1916. Canadian Museum of History, 37163.

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7.5. Grave under a canoe. From The Caribou Eskimos by Kaj Birket-Smith. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

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7.6. Grave with raised pole. From The Caribou Eskimos by Kaj Birket-Smith. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

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7.7. Caribou Eskimo women: “Left: Kibkarjuk, Igjugarjuk’s other wife, one of my best story-tellers. Right: Huwakzuk, who was said to have turned black in the face because one night she slept beside a corpse.” From Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos by Knud Rasmussen. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

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Illustrations • xi

8.1. Ovoo outside Ulaanbaatar. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.2. Shamanic ovoo in Bulgan Aimag. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.3. White food sacrifice. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.4. Fire shaman performing a shamanic drum session. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.5. White and blue hadags connecting the different elements of the ovoo. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.6. Temujin making a ritual. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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8.7. The ovoo as an organic meshwork of humans, materials, and spirits. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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9.1. A recent grave in the outskirts of a Karitiana village. Note the bowl at the left, turned upside down by the spirit that, during the night, left the grave and drank the chichi. Photo by Íris Araújo, 2013, reproduced with permission.

170

9.2. Cizino, the last Karitiana shaman, pointing to an old grave in the forest. Old graves can be recognized by small depressions on the ground scattered around ancient human sites. Photo by Felipe Vander Velden, 2011.

172

9.3. A Karitiana man in a photo taken in 1912 in a seringal (rubber plantation) on the Jamari River. He was identified by the present-day Karitiana as João Capitão, Cizino’s grandfather. In this the picture, it is possible to note the cranial deformation practiced by the Karitiana until the 1970s. Departamento de Arquivo e Documentação da Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, reproduced with permission.

173

9.4. A young Karitiana leader shows the potsherds found on the site of an old village. These are “the shards of spirits.” Photo by Felipe Vander Velden, 2011.

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9.5. Our Lady of the Mountains. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2015.

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9.6. The Xukuru participate in a toré, a ritual to engage in a dialogue with the forebears. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2015.

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9.7. Images of many saints in a Xukuru home. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2013.

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9.8. Toys and bed of a dead child, Xukuru village. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2012.

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10.1. Photo of Rigmore (private photo).

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11.1. Executioner Samson Isberg’s axe used in the execution of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby in 1852. Norsk Rettsmuseum. © M. Bolstad, 2016.

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11.2. Aslak Hætta’s temporary grave marker. © World Heritage Rock Art Centre—Alta Museum, 1999. Photographer: Heidi M. Johansen.

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11.3. Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s gravestones. © Alta kirkekontor, 2008. Photographer: Gunnar Tangvik.

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xii • Illustrations

12.1. Endless Agony by Hannes Heikura. © Hannes Heikura/Helsingin Sanomat.

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13.1. Katharina. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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13.2. Some of Nelcy’s relatives with kaikmanje. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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13.3. Monu set up for Nelcy. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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13.4. Kaikwagunda hung up for Nelcy’s “last cry.” Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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13.5. Last ritual washing in the context of Nelcy’s death. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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13.6. Heaven (left) and ground (right) phone. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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14.1–14.22. DMT design experiment “Accumulation and Destruction,” Oslo, April 2012.

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14.23. Discussion of DMT design experiment participants, Oslo, April 2012.

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14.24. Sketch of the DMT exhibition concept, Alexandra Schüssler, 2014.

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14.25. Plan and side view of the DMT exhibition, Alexandra Schüssler, 2015.

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14.26–14.31. DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017– 29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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14.32. DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017– 29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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14.33. DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017– 29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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Table 5.1. Human Insecurities Caused by and Related to Ebola

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Introduction Mirrors of Passing Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

All things that live will eventually die. However, we humans are apparently the only ones who are aware of our own death. This fact is foundational to our conception of time. Time permeates everything, but we cannot experience time directly, only indirectly through the decay of all things living, which, just like us, are perishable and will eventually die (Willerslev et al. 2013). We see the leaves falling lifeless from the trees, we see day turn into night, we see others and ourselves grow older, and we experience our parents and other close ones dying. All of these material expressions of change and decay, which eventually lead to death, are what allow us to experience the flow of time. Thus, it is only through the world of death that we as such get to sense time. The question of the nature of death, therefore, also brings profound implications about the nature of time and its inherent dependency on material form or expression. All life ages, all life dies . This must be so, because once an organism has given birth to its offspring, the latter will do better if the previous generation is not there to compete for resources (see, e.g., Dobzhansky 1973; Sacher 1978). In other words, death is from a narrow biological perspective as such integral to evolution. However, for human beings death poses a deep existential problem: “If I am destined to die, what is the point of my life?” It is a question that we as humans cannot escape but are forced to confront. Perhaps for this reason, in the face of absolute nihilism, many of us feel that somehow, death has to make sense—that is, it has to have a meaning beyond the evolutionary explanation of the purely biological organism’s natural death. Still, this possible meaning of death remains essentially unknown and is undoubtedly among the greatest mysteries of life that might never be unlocked. In this volume, we do not aspire to draw a conclusion to this magnum mysterium—why death exists and if there is an existence beyond it. Rather, we limit ourselves to examining the ways in which human bodily death and material decay are central points of reference in cultural life across time and place. This, we believe, can offer us key insights into human perceptions of time. Thus, rather than unlocking the mysteries of death itself, we hope to unlock its hidden connections to materiality and time. This will, in some roundabout manner, provide us with a better understanding of death’s nature, of why death is a necessary part of life and how we as human beings cope with the fearsome existential challenges that death poses. The volume is thoroughly interdisciplinary in its setup, approaching the problems of death, materiality, and time from variegated disciplinary starting points, including anthropology, archaeology, Human Security, history, and media and art approaches. An impressive comparative range, stretching from ancient Egypt and

2 • Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

Greece, through present-day Mongolia, Siberia, and the Arctic, Papa New Guinea, East, West, and South Africa, and South America to present-day Finland, Ireland, and Denmark, also marks this volume. This multi-sited, multidisciplinary approach allows us to explore death and its many relations to materiality and time through a myriad of academic disciplinary perspectives and geographical and historical settings. On the journey, the reader will get unique insights into how humanity across different historical periods and geographical places have coped with the grief of losing a loved one and the diverse ways in which humanity have attempted to control death by manipulating the flow of time through various material means, stretching from archaic mortuary literature and poetry and elaborate burial rituals to the present-day use of the Internet and cell phones as a means of communicating with the dead. This volume is a companion piece to the exhibition Letting Go at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, which marks the closure of a large research project headed by Rane Willerslev, “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time.” Thus, this book is aimed not just at an academic audience, but at a general public, curious about the questions raised by the exhibition concerning the nature of death, materiality, and time. For this reason, we, along with the rest of the contributors, have deliberately aimed at a writing style that is less concerned with impressing our academic peers, and more about making ourselves understandable to an intelligent readership of nonspecialists.

The Viewpoint of the Dead Perhaps the most pressing mystery regarding death and time is what happens after death. Are we immortal beings? And if so, then what characterizes the consciousness of the dead? These are questions that are not usually addressed by the social sciences, which tend to stick to the conventional doctrine of “methodological atheism” (Gell 1999: 160–61), which holds that scholarship is obliged not to take apparently absurd religious ideas seriously, such as ideas about an afterlife. The result, as Alfred Gell pointed out, is that the notion of an afterlife “becomes a property of the relations between various elements in the social system, derivable, not from the condition that a genuine [afterlife] exists, but solely from the condition that societies exist” (ibid.: 160). In other words, ordinary people who believe in a life after death—and they include the great majority of the world’s population, we might add—are really talking in metaphors when they talk about having seen this or that deceased in a dream or encountered a ghost. After all, the social sciences’ commitment to methodological atheism is just a cynical way of referring to a social life in which only the living are genuinely real. Somehow, this take on questions related to the afterlife is fundamentally dissatisfactory, if nothing else because it fails to take many ordinary peoples’ notions of the dead as someone living on within, parallel to, or beyond this realm seriously. If we want to know about life after death, we need to turn to fiction, to mythology, literature, and films that seek to uncover what the world might look like from the viewpoint of the dead. We believe that social scientists could learn something important from these fictions. One such fiction that has inspired our thinking about the world of the dead is Neil Gaiman’s novel The Graveyard Book (2008). In this story, a toddler escapes the

Introduction • 3

murderer who has taken the lives of his entire family and stumbles into an old graveyard. Here he is adopted by the dead, who take him in, name him Nobody Owens (Bod, for short), and protect him until he reaches his teens. Through Bod’s experiences, we come to learn much about the life of the dead, and the novel touches upon key themes to this anthology: the relationship of death to materiality and time.

The Dead beyond Time Within the graveyard exists a colorful medley of characters: from the mysterious presence within the hill on which the graveyard is built, a remnant of the very first settlers on the British Isles, to a Grey Lady on a grey horse, and even a witch, buried on the potter’s field just outside the wall of the graveyard. And then there are quite ordinary men and women who died over the centuries and who, despite having lived many years apart, share an afterlife in which their separate temporalities have collapsed, so that time no longer exists for them. In other words, the dead, in Gaiman’s universe, exist outside the flow of time, or perhaps beyond the flow of time. The material world of the dead is unchangeable, and as they themselves no longer change, time ceases to matter. Without change, there is no sense of time, and without time, there can be no change. Here, Gaiman touches upon one of the central arguments of this book, and of the exhibition it accompanies, albeit from the opposite direction. While we in our book show that we human beings only experience the passing of time, and indeed only grasp the concept of time, through our encounters with death and decay, Gaiman tells us that something similar happens when the dead encounter the living. Only then do the dead experience the passing of time. For only with the boy Bod is the matter of time introduced to the graveyard, because while the dead stand beyond their life, forever to remain static, Bod is at the beginning of his life, changing and growing as the years pass. Yet since we only truly experience death through the deaths of those around us (Bjerregaard et al. 2016; Willerslev et al. 2013), and through this experience become aware of the passing of time, Bod, who despite the fact that he is alive only really knows the world of the dead, initially fails to truly grasp what time is. In an exchange with one of his ghostly tutors, Mr. Pennyworth, a six-year-old Bod demonstrates his oversight when Mr. Pennyworth notes: “‘Time is passing, after all.’ ‘Is it?’ asked Bod. ‘I’m afraid so, young Master Owens” (Gaiman 2008: 96). Of course, nobody in the chapters of this book find themselves in Bod’s unique position. Yet one thing that becomes clear as we travel through these different times and places is that the human experience of temporality is fundamentally changed when the living and the dead interact. The chapters of this book show that death influences the temporalities of the living, such as the description of the devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, which disrupted people’s expected futures (chapter 5). Furthermore, several of the chapters show how the living are able to manipulate the time of the dead. This is, for example, the case with the people of ancient Egypt, who not only manipulated the bodies of their dead, but also their temporality and thus the very trajectory of their afterlife (chapter 3). Only once in the course of The Graveyard Book do the dead get to exit the graveyard and experience the world beyond, and thus the marking and the passing of time. When the white winter blossoms bloom, which in Gaiman’s universe happens every eighty years or so, they mark a very special night: the night of the danse macabre, where the dead march into the world of the living in order to

4 • Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

dance with them, an experience the living will not really remember. The danse macabre, a popular motif in medieval art and grave monuments (Oosterwijk 2004), is a reminder that death will take us all in the end, rich or poor, saint or sinner, and in Gaiman’s book, we readers are thus also reminded about the fact of death and that for us as individuals, time passes toward a common, inescapable end.

The Materiality of the Dead While the dead may have no real temporality, they do have a kind of physical materiality, just like the living. They are, in a sense, “classic” ghosts who operate on the threshold of the visible in a different ontological realm. They can walk through walls and appear or disappear at will. Yet they remain tethered to their material links to the world: to their remains, and the items with which they were buried. This notion is one that reverberates through many a notion of what the afterlife may be like; while we believe the spirit or soul to have left the body behind, it is nonetheless often considered to remain connected to the physical world in one way or another, as ghosts (chapter 1), ancestors (chapter 4 and 6), superstars (chapter 12), or even figures on the Internet (chapter 10). In Gaiman’s novel, the relationship between the dead and their material remains are expressed succinctly by Mistress Owens, Bod’s ghostly adopted mother: “I cannot [leave]. My bones are here . . . I’m never leaving” (Gaiman 2008: 22). The dead in the graveyard can also have a strong emotional attachment to the material objects with which they were buried, and which, though they remain in the material world of the living, also become part of the material world of the dead. Thackeray Porringer, a fourteen-year-old boy who died in 1734 clutching his copy of Robinson Crusoe, was buried with the book, enabling him to interact with it in his afterlife. Those who were buried with nothing, and whose graves are not marked, feel this slight, as they are absolutely cut off from the world of the living. That is the case with Liza Hempstock, the witch who was drowned, burned, and buried in the potter’s field outside the graveyard, with nothing to mark her final resting place. With no ties to the material world, she “might be anybody” (ibid.: 103); she loses the ties to her identity and personhood that a material memorial ensures, and thus she is in danger of entering the utterly anonymous existence that a complete cut from the material world entails. Like the objects buried with the dead, Bod too comes to stand on the threshold between the world of the living and the world of the dead, able to interact with the materiality of both. As a toddler, he is given the “Freedom of the Graveyard,” allowing him to roam the graveyard unhindered, and bestowing upon him some of the abilities of the dead: night vision, the ability to fade into invisibility and to slip through solid barriers, as well as the ability to haunt the living. With the ability to haunt, the dead are in fact able to create alternative materialities in which they can interact with the living in a way that they cannot otherwise. In dreams, the world of the dead and the world of the living can intersect. So it is in many cultures, where dreams and dreaming are seen as the entrance point par excellence for communicating with the dead. Dreams can both be a realm for receiving important advice or assistance from the dead, yet they also contain the danger, as in Gaiman’s book, of being haunted by the dead. The dead in Gaiman’s book are largely forgotten by the living, except of course Bod. They are the dead of long past, buried in a closed-down cemetery. What the chapters of this book show is that this is rarely the case; indeed, we humans continue to get involved with the dead, both in immaterial and material ways. Whether

Introduction • 5

we manipulate the remains of the dead (chapters 6 and 11) or process our memories and memorialization of the dead (chapters 10 and 12), the living do not leave the dead behind (chapter 1). And in some cases, as we will show, the dead remain part of the world of the living in a very real way (chapter 13). Evolutionary theory tells us that once people are dead, they are forever separated from the lives of the living: they cease to have an influence on the lives of the living. But people’s practices, rituals, myths, cultural narratives, and indeed their literature tell another story. We continue to invest in our relationships with the dead, not only because they remain a vital part of our lives, but because they are absolutely necessary to the flow of time and the continuation of life.

The Contributions The chapters of this book provide a myriad of scholarly perspectives into the nature of death along with its related issues, such as grief, the afterlife, rebirth, and so forth. We describe them here in turn.

Death’s Time This anthology’s central hypothesis is that our human awareness of death and/ or awareness of time are deeply connected. While it is our awareness of our own deaths that allows us to experience the flow of time, this also urges us to take control over the flow of time and the processes of aging and decay implied, and bend it toward our own desired futures. In The Graveyard Book, the dead do not experience time as such; they exist in a moment of collapsed temporality where nothing ever changes, and where there consequently is no future. The desire of the living to take control of the flow of time, to manipulate it, and to attempt to create a desired future is thus perhaps not only what makes us human, but what defines us as distinctly living human beings. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that all over the world, people employ various social technologies such as rituals and myths that are designed to regenerate life after death through symbols of fertility and rebirth (Bloch and Parry 1982). Indeed, there is an important sense in which death not only forces us to face the hard fact that time simply passes, that nothing living is eternal, irrespective of human interfering; it also offers a unique opportunity to take control over time itself (cf. Leach 1966). The mere fact that “timing” is a key aspect of every mortuary ritual, which is structured to slice the flow of time into different stages, intervals, and rhythms, bears witness to this fact (Willerslev et al. 2013). In the first two chapters, we take a step away from what we might call the empirical reality of death’s time and enter the world of literature and mythology. In both chapters, the authors draw on works of fiction in order to make claims about the relationship between time and death. Engaging with literature set in the Irish countryside, Stuart McLean (chapter 1) argues that the dead can never truly be left behind; indeed, they are and will always be a crucial component to our beingin-the-world. More specifically, he uses James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” to demonstrate how a radical suspension of the linear chronology underpinning the temporal order of modernity is possible, and argues that anthropology stands to learn much from literature about different ways of understanding and expressing time, and consequently understanding the relationship between the living and the dead.

6 • Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

Marina Prusac-Lindhagen (chapter 2) juxtaposes two texts crucial to Orphic beliefs, the Legend of Orpheus and the Orphic Theogony, in order to explore the relationship between death and time. The two texts represent quite different versions of this relationship. The Legend constitutes an account of an individual’s experience in the encounter with death—death as sudden, definitive, and brutal. In the Theogony, on the other hand, each death is part of an eternal cycle based on the transmigration of souls, a process that is quite the opposite of definitive; indeed, it is crucial for the upholding of the human race and the creation of the future. Egyptologist Rune Nyord (chapter 3) addresses this issue of timing and the human desire for regenerating life after death by exploring how the ancient Egyptians manipulated the time of the dead. He urges the reader to turn away from the allure of well-preserved mummies, and instead look to ancient Egyptian “mortuary literature” in order to discover how the living work to deliberately turn the dead into ancestors, and even gods, through ritual and physical manipulations of the dead. The cyclical nature of the world in ancient Egyptian cosmology entails that as the dead become gods, they then become involved in the continuous creation of the world. Thus, the living, through manipulating the physical remains of the dead, create the entities that will in turn create the future of the world. While human timing in mortuary rituals is of paramount importance for guiding the flow of time toward a desired future, the wrong timing can be disastrous. The dead are rarely regarded as simply good, but as both the source and the destroyer of life. While they can bring fertility and rebirth, they can also bring disaster and despair. Tragic deaths pose a special case in point, as the dead from the outset are agitated and unfulfilled and therefore prone to bring harm. This is the focus of Per Ditlef Fredriksen’s chapter (chapter 4), which takes us to northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and places associated with tragic death, such as sites of fatal road accidents. These places become gravitating nodes that attract more tragedy. Ancestral spirits in such places are dislocated and malcontent and will cause new accidents to happen at the same place. A death site may thus end up with a new sinister layer added onto its already troubled history. People attempt to prevent accidents and misfortune by providing containment and transport of spirits to “proper” spaces in the homestead. With the help of witch doctors, healers, or herbalists, the bereaved revisit past events in order to improve the present and prevent future troubles or misfortune. The theme of tragic death and its implication for the living’s conceptions of time is also the theme of Theresa Ammann’s chapter (chapter 5), which describes how one of the more devastating cases of mass death in recent years, the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, changed the flow of life for all those affected by it. With a background in Human Security, Ammann details the shattering hardships and material life changes experienced by three individuals living in Monrovia, Liberia, who were each to a varying degree in contact with the Ebola virus, and shows how the flows of their lives, or “riverscapes,” are forever changed. In Ammann’s chapter, death is the rupture altering expected temporalities and changing or destroying expected futures.

Materialities of Death In Western popular imageries, the dead, insofar as they exist at all, manifest themselves in some airy, foggy, or soul-like form, characterized by an essentially dis-

Introduction • 7

embodied existence. Presumably, this view is part and parcel of a Judeo-Christian discourse, which rests on the ontological opposition of “inner” and “outer,” “spirit” and “matter” (Valeri 2000: 24). Here the soul is thought of as spiritus, “breath”— “what is most invisible in the visible, most immaterial in the material” (ibid.). The physical body and the immaterial soul are seen as two radically distinct substances; the former disintegrates while the latter might continue its disembodied existence in another realm. Plato was an early advocate of this view and thought of body and soul as fundamentally different by nature: “The immortal soul’s residence within the corruptible body is an exile” (Plato, quoted in Alliez and Feher 1989: 47). Plato’s followers within the Judeo-Christian tradition have emphasized ever since that, as a soul, one is never really at home in a body and must make an effort to extricate oneself, most notably in the act of death (ibid.: 51). It comes as no surprise, therefore, that when a Christian philosopher such as Henry Habberley Price ([1953] 2001: 447–57) had to describe what the afterlife might look like, he imagined a condition of disembodied human souls who would communicate telepathically, and have dreamlike perceptions of reality. However, among so-called indigenous animist peoples around the world, there are apparently no examples to be found of a belief in an altogether immaterial soul (Pedersen and Willerslev 2012; Willerslev 2013). Souls are embodied entities that eat and drink, and can be preyed upon and eaten in turn (Valeri 2000: 24). This is the theme of Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård’s piece (chapter 6), which takes us to the tundra of northern Kamchatka, which is the home of the Chukchi, an indigenous Siberian population of large-scale reindeer herders. Here the mortuary ritual is all about controlling the deceased’s physical body so as to prevent it from being eaten and thus abducted by alien forms of life. The Chukchi inhabit a fearsome world in which every class of being, humans, animals, and spirits, are prey and predator to each other. Life here is all about eating and avoiding being eaten. This is not only a matter of filling one’s stomach; consumption is also a form of abduction in which a hostile class of beings take possession over another being’s body and turn it into one of their own, which means leaving the cycle of human rebirth. The great concern of the Chukchi, therefore, is to contain the body of the dead and enhance it, turn it into an armor of sorts, so that it may effectively resist alien attacks. Matthew J. Walsh and Sean O’Neill (chapter 7) provide a cross-cultural ethnographic and archaeological overview of the materiality of death among societies inhabiting the North American Arctic from Alaska to the eastern margins of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Their study provides insights into the remarkable flexibility and pragmatism with which traditional Arctic peoples treated the vicissitudes of time and the dead in the dynamic environs of the north. Across regionally congruent and highly complex animist cosmologies, Inuit societies navigated a social environment filled with living objects, places, and material and immaterial beings—even the artifactual interface between life and death—by adhering to strict (but not too strict) rules governing the treatment of all living things, which actually included the dead and their possessions. Ultimately, the impermanence of life was mediated by the “incomprehensible” persistence of the soul in nearly every aspect of the experienced world. It is now a fairly established insight that objects are not automatically inert things, but can possess powerful agencies (cf. Bjerregaard and Willerslev 2016; Gell 1997, 1999; Latour 2005). As extensions of human persons, objects can themselves act as persons and enter into personal relationships and provoke feelings of love,

8 • Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

hate, desire, or distress. Likewise, the agency of the dead can be present in objects and places in the landscape that possess the power to influence the living, to make them act as if they are engaging not with objects, but with deceased persons in the present. This is the theme of Malthe Lehrmann’s contribution (chapter 8), which takes us to Mongolia, where the landscape is dotted with stone cairns, ovoos, at which people pay their respects to the spirits and sacrifice food, drink, stones, and other items in the hopes of a brighter future. By engaging with the materials of the ovoo, Lehrmann circumvents the pervasive taboo in Mongolia regarding speaking of the dead. Rather than exploring the symbolic nature of the ovoo and the objects they attract, Lehrmann argues that we must explore the material properties of the ovoo, and in fact change our perspective to that of the ovoo, in order to understand people’s relationships with the world of the dead. The presence of the dead through actual materialities is also the focus of Clarissa Martins Lima and Felipe Vander Velden’s piece (chapter 9), which compares two peoples of lowland Brazil, the Karitiana and the Xukuru. The materialities of the dead that can be detected within these two communities point to a need to rethink how the relationship between the living and the dead has been understood in much of lowland South American ethnography. What has been emphasized is the fear of the dead, causing people to relinquish property and personal belongings of the dead, and at times even entire villages where death has occurred. These practices have been explained as a process of alienation, in which the dead are made into “Others.” However, Lima and Velden argue that while some aspects of the dead are associated with radical alterity, other aspects are not. Being dead is in fact multifaceted, just as the relationship between the living and the dead is not static but changes over time. Some aspects of the dead are intimately incorporated into the world of their living kin and take on concrete material expressions. Among the examples mentioned is the name of a person, which, as in the case of other indigenous peoples, like the Siberian Chukchi and the other circumpolar peoples described in other chapters, is regarded as the material expression of the soul. A deceased person’s name is given to a newborn, and thus the dead continues to exist in the one who bears his or her name. Likewise, the dead are believed to be present at burial places in the forest that are used as key markers in present-day legal fights for indigenous land rights and in objects and images, which have now been translated into the pantheon of Catholic saints. All of this points to the need to rethink dominant narratives in Amerindian ethnographies of the dead as simply being Others and to do so by taking their material presence in names, objects, and the landscape seriously.

Life after Death Post-Christian modern Western understandings of death have largely seen it as the absolute endpoint of life. For Martin Heidegger, just to mention one modern thinker for whom death was a major theme of philosophical inquiry, the character of our being is a “being-towards death” (1962: 247). Life ends in death, after which there is no more. As such, Heidegger argues, death, or rather the anxiety it causes, is the primordial source of all human anxiety. In a similar vein, Sigmund Freud ([1917] 2009) developed his theory about how to handle the grief of the bereaved on the assumption that death leaves no possibilities open for establishing a relationship with the dead. Instead of investing emotions in the dead, the mourner should cut all emotional bonds to the deceased and move on within the

Introduction • 9

real world of the living (as opposed to the fantasy world of the dead) (ibid.: 244). If the mourner did not get his or her head around the fact that death is final, he or she would eventually fall into depression—which would eventually lead to suicide. In other words, Western thinking about the dead has been dominated by a scientific view of death as being the endpoint to life and thus to invest in one’s relation with the dead has been seen as something people do out of ignorance, at best or at worst as an expression of mental illness (Willerslev 2013: 86). This view is fundamentally challenged by Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik (chapter 10), who show how investing in the dead helps parents who have lost a child deal with their grief. They describe the online afterlife of deceased children on the Danish website Mindet.dk, where bereaved parents can engage in ritualized grief work in order to maintain a contact with their deceased child. Through maintaining the website dedicated to their child (lighting online candles, writing personal messages, and communicating with other bereaved parents), the parents at Mindet.dk maintain a continued emotional link not only to their deceased child but also to their very parenthood, which is existentially and socially challenged at the loss of their child. A different kind of afterlife, although equally full of emotional attachments, is described by Susan Matland (chapter 11). Tackling a rather macabre case, Matland traces the “afterlife” of the severed heads of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby, two Sámi men executed in 1854 for their involvement in the Kautokeino Rebellion in Norway in 1852. Their heads were first taken to the Anatomical Institute at the University of Christiana (Oslo). Later Hætta’s skull was traded for two Inuit skulls, and lastly, in 1997, the skulls were repatriated and buried in Sápmi. Matland traces the social identity of the two men, and how it shifts as the skulls change hands, status, and worth. Johanna Sumiala (chapter 12) looks at a different kind of afterlife, namely, that of the celebrity. She tells the story of Finnish cross-country skier Mika Myllylä, from the pinnacle of his career through his public humiliation, when he was embroiled in a doping scandal, to his premature death in 2011. Through the media’s covering of his rise and fall, Sumiala argues, Myllylä attained immortality. She reflects upon the nature of death in today’s media-saturated society, in which the deaths of public figures and celebrities become public events and their deaths are ritualized in the media. Christiane Falck (chapter 13) takes a radical new perspective on the potential lives of the dead: here, the anthropologist herself is considered a deceased person. When she arrives in Timbunmeli village in Papua New Guinea, she is surprised to find that the locals see her as one of their own, returned in a new body. To the people in Timbunmeli, the dead live on in an invisible realm identified with whiteness. Here, the dead go to “white men countries,” so when Christiane Falck, a white woman from Germany, arrives, she is interpreted as being a dead person come to visit. In Timbunmeli, the time, and indeed the materiality, of the dead are not separate from the world of the living; instead, the dead remain a part of the lifeworld of the living and can be communicated with through the use of white technology, most notably cell phones.

Exhibiting Death, Materiality, and Time In the last contribution (chapter 14), Alexandra Schüssler, artist and cultural anthropologist, chronicles the messy and complicated process of creating an exhibition

10 • Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev

on death. Her text describes how in the process of making the exhibition Letting Go, she turned from a mere exhibition designer into a curator. Reflecting on design experiments that were part of the methodology of the “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time” research project, she comes to the conclusion that the relationship between the curator of an exhibition project and the designer ought to be structured like a love affair, in which finally both parties lose themselves in each other. Eventually they should grow into a team carrying out one vision. Through a series of e-mails, workshop notes, and exhibition proposals, Schüssler gives a rare insight into the creative work that lies behind the finished product. Questions about the nature of death have been debated since the birth of Homo sapiens and will continue to be debated as long as human beings exist. The chapters making up this volume should be read as diverse disciplinary takes on the same enigma: what is death’s relationship to materiality and time? While no final conclusion is reached, it is our hope that the chapters together will provide a myriad of perspectives on this question, thus providing data and analysis for how we might go about getting a better understanding of what death entails for human beings across history and geography and its significance for shaping our understandings of time.

Sophie Seebach is the curator of the Ethnographic Collections at Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, Denmark. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Aarhus University, and has conducted her fieldwork in Gulu, northern Uganda. The title of her PhD dissertation is “The Dead Are not Dead: Intimate Governance of Transitions in Acholi” (2016). The focus of her research is death, dying, and burial rites, and how the practices surrounding death are affected by social change. She has been a visiting scholar at the African Studies Center at Boston University. She has been affiliated with the research projects “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time,” and “TrustLand: Governing Transition in Northern Uganda.” Rane Willerslev is the director of the National Museum of Denmark. He was the lead researcher of the research project “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time,” on which Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time is based. He is also the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He is the editor (with Christian Suhr) of Transcultural Montage (2013); (with Ton Otto) of “Value as Theory” (special issue of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2013); and (with Dorthe Refslund Christensen) of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (2013).

Note The two authors contributed equally to the work.

References Alliez, Eric, and Michel Feher. 1989. “Reflections of a Soul.” In Fragments for a Human Body, part 2, ed. Ramona Feher and Nadia Tazi, 47–84. New York: Zone. Bjerregaard, Peter, Anders Emil Rasmussen, and Tim Flohr Sørensen. 2016. “Introducing Materialities of Passing.” In Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Tran-

Introduction • 11

sition and Transience, ed. Peter Bjerregaard, Anders Emil Rasmussen, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, 1–26. London: Routledge. Bjerregaard, Peter, and Rane Willerslev. 2016. “Assembling the Spark of Life.” In Bjerregaard et al., Materialities of Passing, 221–38. London: Routledge. Bloch, Maurice, and Jonathan Parry. 1982. “Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life.” In Death and the Regeneration of Life, ed. Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, 1–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dobzhansky, Theodosius. 1973. “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” The American Biology Teacher 35 (3): 125–29. Freud, Sigmund. (1917) 2009. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” ed. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Tierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowiez, 19–32. London: Karnac Books. Gaiman, Neil. 2008. The Graveyard Book. London: Bloomsbury. Gell, Alfred. 1997. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1999. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, ed. Eric Hirsch, 159–80. Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Leach, Edmund R. 1966. Rethinking Anthropology. University of London: Athlone Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Oosterwijk, Sophie. 2004. “Of Corpses, Constables and Kings: The Danse Macabre in Late Medieval and Renaissance Culture.” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 157 (1): 61–90. Petersen, Morten, and Rane Willerslev. 2012. “The Soul of the Soul Is the Body: Rethinking the Concept of Soul through North Asian Ethnography.” Symposium Fuzzy Studies, part 3, Common Knowledge 18 (3): 464–86. Price, Henry Habberley. (1953) 2001. “The Soul Survives and Functions after Death.” In Philosophy of Religion: Selected Writings, ed. Michael Peterson, William Hasker, Bruce Reichenbach, and David Basinger, 447–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sacher, George A. 1978. “Longevity, Aging, and Death: An Evolutionary Perspective.” Gerontologist 18 (2): 112–20. Valeri, Valerio. 2000. The Forest of Taboos: Morality, Hunting, and Identity among the Huaulo of the Moluccas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Willerslev, Rane, Dorthe R. Christensen, and Lotte Meinert. 2013. “Introduction.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. Dorthe R. Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 1–16. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing. Willerslev, Rane. 2013. “Rebirth and the Death Drive: Rethinking Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ through a Siberian Time Perspective.” In Christensen and Willerslev, Taming Time, Timing Death, 79–98.

PART I

Death’s Time

CHAPTER 1

The Time of the Dead Anthropology, Literature, and the Virtual Past Stuart McLean

What Do We Know? “But what do we really know of the dead and who actually cares?” asks Nick Cave in his song “Dig, Lazarus, Dig” (2008), which reimagines the biblical Lazarus as an outcast turned junkie, unwillingly restored to life and wandering the streets of present-day San Francisco and New York. One answer to the question posed by Cave’s song (and suggested by the fate of its protagonist) is: a lot less than we once did. Such at least has been the claim of some still influential versions of the story of modernity. From Friedrich Schiller and Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” to Jean Baudrillard’s more recent “extradition of the dead,” the process of becoming modern, assumed to be concomitant with, among other things, industrialization, urbanization, the colonial expansion of Europe, and the global diffusion of capitalism, has been understood, repeatedly, in terms of a severed or attenuated relationship between the living and the dead (Baudrillard 1993; Weber 1949, 1976). If the so-called modern period, with its social upheavals, its armed conflicts, its military technologies, and its mass media, has produced not only death but also the spectacle of death on an unprecedented scale, this has been accompanied, so the argument goes, by a corresponding diminution in the social presence accorded to the dead. Take, for example, the eminent French historian Philippe Ariès, who, in his magisterial history of Western attitudes to death, contrasts what he calls the “tame death” of the early Middle Ages, when death was viewed as a culmination and thus an accepted part of life, with the “invisible death” of modernity, which is characteristically enacted in the confined and sequestered spaces of hospital wards, hospices, and mortuaries, a development that he sees as indicative of modern Europeans’ increasing unwillingness to extend any sort of collective recognition to death (Ariès 1982: 5–28, 559–601). In seeming contrast, much past anthropological scholarship has focused on societies in which death and the dead appear to have retained a more conspicuous and acknowledged presence in the form of, for example, death rituals, mortuary rites, sacrificial killings, or offerings to ancestors. Nonetheless, the analytic lexicon of many such studies reveals what is, arguably, a no less characteristically modernist squeamishness in the face of death, offering contextually based explanations whereby death practices are treated as effects or epiphenomena of other social institutions, thus voiding simultaneously both the claims of local or indigenous understandings of death and the possibility that death might afford a vantage point from which to challenge or defamiliarize such received categories

16 • Stuart McLean

as social structure or the binaries of “nature” and “culture” (Seremetakis 1991: 14). Among Western European nation-states, Ireland, notably, has often been viewed as an exception to the supposed world-historical trend toward the elimination of the dead from collective life, being characterized instead in terms of an excessive or anachronistic attachment to the dead. The Elizabethan poet and colonist Edmund Spenser, writing in 1596, complained that the Irish were given to engaging in excessive lamentations for their dead, “ymoderate wailings” that he took as indicative both of a lack of civility and a residual paganism (Spenser 1934: 72–73). Four centuries later, a controversial study by Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran (1998) would criticize the “funereal culture” of Irish literature, past and present, for its alleged morbid fixation on the past and corresponding unwillingness to engage the present and future. It is tempting, but too easy, I think, to dismiss such characterizations as tropes of colonial discourse, lingering, in the latter case, into the postcolonial present. Instead, as the twenty-first century enters its second decade and the suspicion dawns (or perhaps it dawned long ago?) that none of us has, in Bruno Latour’s phrase, ever been truly modern, the predilection for death so frequently attributed to the Irish may present the opportunity to pose a different set of questions (Latour 1993). In this chapter, I aim to do more than reclaim death as presence within the history of Ireland and of modernity, a move that, at the very least, runs the risk of restating the glaringly obvious. Rather, I propose to claim that death—and the dead—are an indispensable and constitutive component not only of cultural memory, but also of the very texture of our—or, indeed, any—being-in-the-world. As such, the dead can never be truly left behind, even if we as a society or even as a species decline to acknowledge their presence. To affirm the presence of the dead, however, requires the radical suspension of the linear chronology underpinning the temporal order of modernity, to which many of anthropology’s extant explanatory frameworks remain tacitly or explicitly indebted. Anthropology, I suggest, stands to learn not least from literature about alternative ways of conceiving and expressing time that might facilitate an engagement with the dead as something more than beliefs or representations generated out of social relationships among the living. Literature deals with the dead not only as subject matter (as anthropology has often claimed to do), but is also able to manifest their ineradicable presence no less effectively through its engagement with the materiality of its own medium, the phonic and rhythmic substance of words, through which the sounds and vibrations of the world are distilled into intelligible discourse, and which continue to murmur to potentially disruptive effect alongside language’s meaning-bearing functions. I propose that if literature is able not only to speak about the dead but also to enable the dead to speak, it does so by calling attention to the material being of language in a manner that cannot be reduced to the expression of cultural meaning. Literature, that is, makes the dead matter. I take my cue from (arguably) Ireland’s greatest twentieth-century writer, James Joyce, a writer whose work is at once unimpeachably “modern” in its subject matter and pursuit of formal and linguistic experimentation and yet suffused at the same time by the presence of the dead (Figure 1.1). What I undertake is less an explication of Joyce’s writings than a series of reflections that takes Joyce’s work as its starting point and returns continuously to it, while pursuing, at the same time, some comparative anthropological tangents less frequently explored in mainstream Joyce scholarship.

The Time of the Dead • 17

A Winter’s Tale For reasons that will, I hope, become clear, much of what I have to say in the following pages can be characterized as a winter’s tale. Accordingly, I begin with another, better known and more celebrated winter’s tale—Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” written in Trieste in 1907 and first published in 1914 as the concluding story in the volume Dubliners (Torchiana 1986). The story takes place in Dublin, Ireland, in early January, some time around the beginning of the twentieth century, during the final decades of British rule. The Irish nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell has been dead since 1891, and the events of the Easter Rising of 1916 and the independence struggle that followed in its wake lie more than a decade in the future. The scene is the upper floor of a house on Usher’s Island on the south bank of the River Liffey. The occasion is the annual dance hosted by the Misses Morkan—two elderly spinsters, Aunt Kate and Aunt Julia, and their niece, Mary Jane. Outside snow is falling, covering the city and, as we later learn, the whole of Ireland, the heaviest snowfall in thirty years, according to the newspapers. As the snow continues to fall, the focus of attention indoors is on the Misses Morkans’ nephew, Gabriel Conroy, a “stout, tall- Figure 1.1.  James Joyce. Photograph by Alex ish,” bespectacled young man, by profession a teacher Ehrenzweig, 1915. Wikimedia Commons, public of languages and a graduate of what was then the Royal domain. University (now the Dublin campus of the National University of Ireland). At the opening of the story, Gabriel arrives, somewhat belatedly, in company with his wife, Gretta, who is, we are soon to learn, a native of County Galway, on Ireland’s western coast. They have left their two children at home in the middle-class suburb of Monkstown in the care of a servant and are planning to spend the night at the Gresham Hotel in the city center. The evening is to prove a fateful one for Gabriel. Things get off to a bad start when a casual inquiry about the servant, Lily’s, matrimonial prospects draws the bitter retort: “The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you!” (Joyce 1992: 211). Disconcerted, he begins to worry that his after-dinner speech will, likewise, prove a failure and that an allusion to the poetry of Robert Browning that he plans to include will fly above the heads of his listeners. There follows another uncomfortable altercation, this time with his colleague and university contemporary, Molly Ivors, who chides him for writing a literary column for the Unionist newspaper The Daily Express and for declining to join a planned excursion to the Irish-speaking Aran Islands, preferring instead a cycling tour of Continental Europe. Her cultural nationalist rebuke that he knows nothing of his own land and people prompts him to his own outburst: “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” resulting in Miss Ivors’s premature exit from the gathering (ibid.: 222–23). It is after the party, however, when he and Gretta are alone in their room at the Gresham, that Gabriel is confronted by the night’s most disturbing revelation, a revelation about his wife’s Galway past that propels the story toward its celebrated ending. In an outburst of tears, Gretta

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tells him that a song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” sung earlier in the night by one of the other guests, has reminded her of a young man whom she knew and loved as a teenager. The young man in question, Michael Furey, was an employee of the local gasworks. In response to her husband’s initially jealous questioning, she reveals that Michael Furey has been dead for many years, a victim of the tuberculosis that at the time claimed as many as ten thousand lives annually in Ireland, and that, as she puts it, “I think he died for me.” It was, she relates, the beginning of winter, and she was about to leave her grandmother’s house in Galway to attend a convent school in Dublin. Michael Furey was ill in his lodgings and was forbidden to receive visitors, “so I wrote him a letter saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in summer, and hoping he would be better then.” The night before she left, she was in her room packing up her belongings when she heard gravel thrown against the window. Unable to see out on account of the rain, she ran downstairs and found Michael Furey shivering under a tree in the garden. She begged him to go home, but he declared that he no longer wanted to live. Finally, she convinced him to return to his lodgings. Then, a week after arriving at the convent in Dublin, she learned that he had died and was buried at Oughterard, his family home, a small town seventeen miles northwest of Galway. “O, the day I heard that, that he was dead!” (ibid.: 251–254). As the story ends, Gretta has cried herself to sleep. Gabriel, still awake, lies beside her on the bed, reflecting on his marriage and contrasting his own relationship with his wife with the death-defying passion of Michael Furey. Outside, the city and, indeed, all of Ireland lies under a blanket of snow. What follows is, arguably, one of the most widely discussed passages in modern Irish literature, one that decisively transfigures the naturalistic surface both of the story itself and of the collection as a whole: Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Joyce 1992: 255–56)

The two paragraphs in question have been the subject of extensive critical commentary, much of it concerned with Gabriel’s seeming revaluation of his relationship to the West of Ireland, from which his wife hails and which he has so pointedly repudiated earlier in the story. I want to draw attention here, however, to two less frequently remarked features of the passage quoted. First, I want to note that the

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dead make their appearance in the guise of a crowd or multiplicity—“the vast hosts of the dead”—and that the named and individuated figure of Michael Furey emerges from and is, finally, reabsorbed by this undifferentiated mass of the dead, just as the figures of Odysseus’s mother and, later, Tiresias emerge from (and recede into) the “multitude of souls” who throng about the sacrificial blood in Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey (a work that would later serve as the template for Joyce’s 1922 masterpiece, Ulysses).1 Second, I want to mark the seasonality of this concluding manifestation of the dead, the fact that it takes place at the close of the Christmas season, in midwinter, as signaled by the ubiquitous and much discussed snow that falls alike on all the living and the dead, imparting to the scene, at the same time, a certain unassailable, if elusive, materiality that the dead themselves, in their “wayward and flickering existence,” might otherwise seem to lack (Figure 1.2). Let me consider each of these aspects Figure 1.2.  “Snow was general all over Ireland.” Photograph by D. Sharon in more detail. Pruitt. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The Invisible Crowd Elias Canetti, in his study Crowds and Power, suggests that the so-called invisible crowd of the dead may be among the most ancient and the most universal of human imaginings: “Over the whole earth, wherever there are men, is found the conception of the invisible dead. It is tempting to call it humanity’s oldest conception” (1992: 47). Of these invisible dead, he writes that “generally it was assumed there were a great number of them,” and he proceeds to give, by way of illustration, an eclectic range of ethnographic examples: the Bechuana of South Africa, who “believed all space to be full of the spirits of their ancestors”; the Chukchi shamans of northeastern Siberia, with their “legions of auxiliary spirits” called upon in effecting cures; the belief, shared by the Sámi of Northern Europe and the Tlingit of Alaska that the aurora borealis or northern lights is composed of hosts of the dead; and the Gaelic term sluagh, used in the Scottish Highlands to refer to massed spirits of the dead who “fly about in great crowds like starlings,” with the compound term sluagh-ghairm used for the battle cry of these massed dead, being the origin too of the modern English word “slogan,” so that “the expression we use for the battle cries of our modern crowds derives from the Highland hosts of the dead” (ibid.: 47–49). Let me add two further examples to those given by Canetti. The first of these concerns the Afro-Cuban “inspiration” known as Palo or Palo Monte.2 Like the better known and more thoroughly documented Santo or Santería, Palo developed during the plantation era among slaves of African descent and comprises

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a complex set of beliefs and practices relating to sorcery, healing, divination, and communication with the dead. A key concept in Palo practice is Kalunga, a Bakongo-derived term, which is often used to refer to the dead as an undifferentiated and all-pervading substance, or as what Todd Ramón Ochoa, in a recent study, calls “the ambient dead.” Ochoa writes that his own understanding of Kalunga (and his curiosity about the role of the dead in Palo more generally) derives in large measure from conversations with Isidra, a sixty-year-old woman and Palo practitioner living in an apartment building in the El Cerro district of Havana: Kalunga, as Isidra taught it through variegated reiteration, was the great, indifferent sea of the dead . . . Kalunga was not only haunted by the dead, but was also composed of the dead and simultaneously constitutive of them; the dead were immanent to it, in the same way a broth makes a soup. Kalunga, Isidra said, comprises all the dead that could possibly exist or have existed. It is ancient beyond memory, and within it the dead exceed plurality and become instead a dense and indistinguishable mass. According to Isidra, the world and experience, all things available to perception and perception itself, are a series of condensations within this fluid mass of the dead. (Ochoa 2007: 482)

In Isidra’s rendering, Canetti’s invisible crowd becomes something more akin to a universal primordial substance, a polymorphous stuff, capable of manifesting itself in a seemingly endless variety of forms (what Ochoa terms “versions” of the dead) and out of which not only material bodies but also thoughts and perceptions are fashioned. In other words, it is the dead who provide, among other things, the basic material of life. The second example that I wish to add to Canetti’s list is from a setting rather closer to that evoked in the final paragraphs of Joyce’s story. It comes from the book The Year in Ireland (first published in 1972), a study of Irish calendrical customs by the Irish broadcaster and folklorist Kevin Danaher. Danaher is describing beliefs associated with the Celtic festival of Samhain (spanning the night of 31 October–1 November) and its Christian counterpart, the Feast of All Souls (celebrated on 2 November). He is concerned specifically with the belief that the spirits of dead relatives could come to the aid of living family members at this time. He recalls an incident from his own childhood in County Limerick, when he had asked one of his neighbors, an elderly man known as a gifted storyteller, why he was not afraid to go into an abandoned house in the district that was reputed to be haunted. This was the man’s reply: “In dread, is it? What would I be in dread of, and the souls of my own dead as thick Figure 1.3.  “The souls of my own dead as thick as bees around me.” as bees around me?” (DanaPhotograph by Francis Chung. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic her 1972: 228; Figure 1.3). license.

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Between the Times The image of the souls of deceased relatives as a swarm of bees serves also to link the depiction of the dead as a crowd phenomenon to the second aspect of Joyce’s story to which I wish to call attention—namely, its seasonal setting. As Danaher notes, apparitions of the dead were often associated in Ireland with specific dates and times of year. During the winter season, these included not only Samhain and All Souls but also the Twelve Days of Christmas, spanning the period from Christmas to Epiphany. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus refers in a memoir to the setting of “The Dead” during the Christmas period, noting that in England and Ireland ghost stories were often told about the fire at this time of year and suggesting that “The Dead” itself can be understood as a ghost story of sorts (Joyce 1950: 20). The association of the Twelve Days of Christmas with a variety of out-of-theordinary and/or supernatural occurrences is, of course, by no means restricted to Ireland but is to be found across Europe as well as among populations of European descent in the Americas and elsewhere. In Orkney, Shetland, and much of Scandinavia “trows” or trolls are held to be especially prone to leave their underground habitations and wander abroad during the Christmas season (Marwick 2000: 32–39). In Romania, the activities of vampires (strigoi) and werewolves have been linked, particularly, to the period between Christmas and the New Year (Senn 1982). In the folklore of Greece and Macedonia, metamorphic beings known as Callicantzari or Karkantzari are often depicted as emerging from the underworld to wreak havoc during the Twelve Days (Abbott 1969: 73–75; Lawson 1910: 190–255). At the same time, at least until the twentieth century, in Britain, Ireland, and much of Continental Europe the Twelve Days have been widely marked by performances and masquerades involving a variety of animal masks and costumes (Figure 1.4). Sometimes the performers explicitly identified as impersonating spirits of the returning dead (e.g., Alford 1968; Dumézil 1929; Ginzburg 1991).

Figure 1.4. Kukeri: masked and costumed figures associated with the period between New Year and Lent. Simitli, Bulgaria. Photograph by Ivaneskoto.

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One explanation for this seemingly Europe-wide complex of associations can be sought in the fact that, like the festival of All Souls, the Twelve Days of Christmas represented the overlay of a Christian on a pre-Christian sacred occasion, in this case the midwinter and solstice festivals once celebrated across much of Europe and Asia.3 A more intriguing possibility, however, is suggested by James Frazer in the sixth volume of his magnum opus The Golden Bough, first published in 1913. Here Frazer suggests that the Twelve Days and the pre-Christian observances on which they were overlaid originated, long prior to the advent of Christianity, as a so-called intercalary period, inserted into the regular calendar to bridge the discrepancy between the solar year and the cycle of lunar months. As such, he suggests, they were widely regarded as existing outside the normal course of time, forming part neither of the lunar nor of the solar system. They thus represented, as he puts it, “an excrescence, inevitable but unaccountable, which breaks the smooth surface of ordinary existence, an eddy which interrupts the even flow of months and years.” The result, Frazer argues, was that intercalary days came to be viewed as periods of license, when ordinary rules of conduct did not apply and when customary authorities might be replaced temporarily by a capricious mock ruler, like the Lords of Misrule or Boy Bishops who presided over the medieval and early modern European Festivals of Fools that were also sometimes a feature of the Christmas season (Frazer 1980: 328–29). Leaving aside the historical verifiability (or otherwise) of Frazer’s account, I want to pursue the suggestion that occasions such as the Twelve Days can be understood as marking a temporal rupture, a break with the everyday social organization of time, and that such a break provided an occasion not only for raucous celebration but also for the remaking of the world through the summoning of the dead. Frazer’s argument is carried further by Hans Peter Duerr in his study Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization, first published in German in 1978. Duerr argues that what he calls “times between the times,” although largely unrecognized by the modern West, have been a feature of human societies in most times and places. Of such occasions, Duerr writes: No matter how great the differences between these groups of people, they were all united by the common theme that “outside of time” they lost their normal, everyday aspect and became beings of the “other” reality, of the beyond, whether they turned into animals or hybrid creatures or whether they reversed their social roles. They might roam bodily through the land or only “in spirit,” in ecstasy, with or without hallucinogenic drugs. Between the times indicated a crisis in the ordinary course of things. Normality was rescinded, or rather, order and chaos ceased to be opposites. In such times of crisis, when nature regenerated itself by dying first, humans “died” also, and as ghostly beings ranged over the land in order to contribute their share to the rebirth of nature. (Duerr 1985: 35)

Where Frazer is concerned with human perceptions and representations of time, Duerr is prepared to grant a distinct ontological status to these times between the times. What the lifting of the everyday temporal order grants access to, for Duerr, is a material and temporal flux underlying the seemingly solid realities of the familiar, commonsensical world. During such interludes, not only are the conventional boundaries between past, present, and future rendered fluid and permeable, but the physical contours of the material universe itself become likewise unfixed and malleable. Hence the association of such times both with the

The Time of the Dead • 23

returning dead and with a variety of masked, costumed, metamorphic beings and, further, with the power of metamorphosis itself. Think, for example, of Palo’s “vast sea of the dead,” eternally present and capable of assuming any form; or of the lone figure of Michael Furey, taking shape from out of the vast and immemorial hosts of the dead. The “other time,” of which these sources afford an intimation, is, for Duerr, one that must be distinguished from any conception of time as measurable, quantifiable, or otherwise culturally calibrated. In considering what this might entail, let me turn to the work of the early twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s writings are a sustained attempt to think about the reality of time as such. Most of our familiar representations of time, he suggests, signally fail to do this, substituting instead a repertoire of concepts and categories derived from the analysis of space—hence notions of linearity, chronology, and attempts to locate events “in” time, as though in a spatial container. In opposition to such spatialized representations of time, Bergson develops the concept of duration (durée). This involves the still startling claim that the past—the past in its entirety—is real, no less real than the present, albeit existing not in the register of the actual, but of the virtual. Our acts of memory, according to Bergson, involve detaching ourselves from the present and placing ourselves quite literally in the past, first of all in the past in general, then in a specific region of the past, from which an image is drawn in accordance with the requirements of action in the present. As a no less real counterpart to the actuality of the present, the past as a whole necessarily comprises more possibilities than can be made manifest in any given present. At the same time, the present, insofar as it is continuously passing, is constantly contributing to and transforming the virtual past (Bergson 1991: 133–77, 225–49). Bergson’s understanding of the past as a “virtual multiplicity” is elaborated by a more recent philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, who argues that the relation between the virtual and the actual is fundamentally distinct from that which has often been thought to obtain between the possible and the real. Whereas the real is directly prefigured in the possible (that is, the possible becomes real by having existence “added” to it), the actual is produced out of the virtual by a process of creative self-differentiation. Whereas the real resembles and proceeds out of the possible, the actual and the virtual are both coexistent and nonidentical. The coexistence with the present of the virtual past is thus what introduces into the world change, open-endedness, and unpredictability (Deleuze 1991).

Winter Ceremonial Comparisons between Bergson’s conception of time and Joyce’s writing have been made by a number of commentators, perhaps most controversially by the painter, novelist, and critic Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man (1927), where both Bergson and Joyce are criticized for their adherence to a “Time Philosophy” that is, in Lewis’s view (and contrary to its own claims), ultimately mechanistic and lifeless (Beplate 2005: 300–301). It is perhaps superfluous to state that my own assessment of both Joyce and Bergson is a more positive one. Before returning to Joyce (and, more briefly, Bergson), however, I want to pursue a final detour by comparing the European midwinter celebrations referenced in “The Dead” and elsewhere with the more lavish and much longer lasting Winter Ceremonial practiced, at least until the late nineteenth century, by the Kwakwaka’wakw, or

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Kwakiutl, of Vancouver Island and the Pacific Northwest and described by, among others, Franz Boas. Boas’s accounts of the Winter Ceremonial, which run to many hundreds of pages (including almost half of his posthumously published volume, Kwakiutl Ethnography), describe a production on an altogether more lavish scale than its European counterparts. The ceremonial began in November and lasted, without interruption, until well into the following year. Boas writes that, with the commencement of the winter season, “all quarrels, all sickness, all causes of unhappiness are forgotten.” At the same time, the ceremonial was a blatantly and avowedly theatrical occasion, one of the names used to describe it being linked etymologically to the Kwak’wala term meaning to cheat or commit fraud. Described as the “sacred” part of the year, in contrast to the “secular” summer, winter was the season when a variety of supernatural beings, believed to reside during summer in distant northern locations, returned to the Kwakwaka’wakw villages. These beings, with names such as Warrior of the World and Cannibal at the North End of the World, performed initiations of both men and women, and their presence provided the occasion for a succession of meticulously staged performances involving singing, dancing, and the wearing of intricately carved and painted animal masks and costumes, including a variety of birds, sea lions, killer whales, and grizzly bears (Figure 1.5). Just as these performances materialized ancestral beings of combined human and animal character, so the transition from the secular to the sacred part of the year was further marked by the adoption, on the part of the entire population, of different names. Many of these names were themselves passed down as an inheritance within individual lineages, giving the bearer the right to incarnate a particular lineage ancestor (Boas 1966: 171–298; Goldman 1975: 86–121).

Figure 1.5.  Kwakwaka’wakw raven mask, used by Hamatsa secret society, collected at Memkwumlis, Village Island, around 1917. Native American Collection, Peabody Museum, Harvard University. Photograph by Daderot. Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

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The Winter Ceremonial, with its elaborate stagecraft and its community-wide participation, as either audience member or performer, thus furnished a setting in which ancestors, including beings of combined human-animal character, were, through performance, afforded a collectively acknowledged, contemporary presence. The transformations undergone by performers and initiates, including not only ritual alterations of status but also the physical transformations involved in the donning of masks and costumes, were associated, in other words, with a suspension of linear time such that the past, including the human-animal protagonists of tribal origin myths, was able to obtrude upon and (at least for the duration of the ceremonial) to remake the present. We should not, of course, be over hasty in assimilating the spirits who descend upon the Kwakwaka’wakw villages during the winter season with the supernatural beings and apparitions of the dead described in European ethnographic and literary sources. Indeed, the spirits who appear during the Winter Ceremonial are not thought of as being dead at all, but as residing during the summer months in the far north of the world. Nor are the spirits conceived of as an undifferentiated mass. Rather, they themselves, the initiations they perform, and the possessions and privileges they confer (dances, names, masks, ritual objects, etc.) are clearly specified and distinguished in terms of their associations with the particular lineages through which they are transmitted from one generation to another (Boas 1966: 42–45). Nonetheless, the effect of the commencement of the Winter Ceremonial is, arguably, the suspension of linear, chronologically marked time. Stanley Walens, in a study of Kwakwaka’wakw cosmology, writes that “during the winter ceremonials, time stops” (1981: 138). According to Walens, the commencement of the Winter Ceremonial marks the dissolution of the social order that obtains during the secular, summer part of the year. This involves not only the abandonment of the practical, subsistence-related activities associated with summer such as food gathering, hunting, and fishing, but also a shift to a different principle of social organization. During the secular part of the year, priority is accorded to relationships among living humans, who are connected by virtue of being, for example, kinsmen, affines, or coworkers (just as spirits are thought of as related to one another on the basis of similar ties); during the sacred part of the year, in contrast, bonds such as kinship and affinity yield precedence to analogies between individuals currently living and the ancestors they incarnate through their dances and masked performances and through the adoption of names used only for the duration of the ceremonial. In thus prioritizing relationships with ancestral spirits, the Winter Ceremonial is also seen to usher in a different order of temporality. More precisely, time ceases to be understood or experienced as a linear progression from past through present to future, a mode characteristic of the practically oriented activities associated with the summer season. Instead, during the Winter Ceremonial, time ceases to be something that passes, and events cease to be thought of as related to each other in terms of a linear sequence. For the duration of the ceremonial, there is no before and after. Walens writes: “Thus, from the first blowing of the ceremonial whistles until the concluding speech, there is only a single instant. All acts during that period, though they may seem from a historistic viewpoint to precede or postdate one another, are considered to occur simultaneously” (ibid.: 139). Although the spirits who appear during the Winter Ceremonial are thought of as continuing to live on elsewhere during the summer months, the fact of bringing them quite literally on stage in the form of masks, costumes, dances, and seasonally adopted ancestral names has the effect of rendering them physically contig-

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uous and contemporaneous with human beings of the present generation. In the same way, the practice of passing on ancestral names from fathers to sons, which is also a feature of the ceremonial, calls attention to the enduring and unchanging character of the names themselves rather than the fleeting and transitory existences of their successive bearers. The Winter Ceremonial accomplishes the ritual annulment of the chronological distance separating the present from the mythic time in which these ancestors performed their world-forming actions. For all their insistence on the specificity of lineages and ancestrally derived ritual prerogatives, the Kwakwaka’wakw performers are also appealing to a creative, world-forming epoch that, for the duration of the Winter Ceremonial, displaces and annuls the calibrated time of the secular half of the year. The ceremonial involves a twoway traffic between differentiation and de-differentiation, between, on the one hand, the emergence of specific lineage identities through the acquisition of distinguishing privileges and attributes and, on the other hand, the assimilation of the present to the a-chronic or timeless time in which those differentiations were first produced, as participants don masks and costumes in order become the animalhuman ancestors from whom current lineages trace their descent. If much of the ceremonial appears to be marked by a particularizing assertion of clearly distinguished ancestral relationships and ritual prerogatives, this is in fact achieved through a corresponding de-differentiation between pasts and presents as understood in terms of a chronological sequence. Relationships between humans and ancestral spirits are able to achieve such clarity of articulation in the Winter Ceremonial precisely to the extent that the latter affords a ritually demarcated opening to something strikingly akin to Bergson’s durational time.

The Dead in “The Dead” The same interplay between naming and de-differentiation is much in evidence in the ending of Joyce’s story “The Dead,” juxtaposing as it does the named figure of Michael Furey with the anonymous “vast hosts of the dead” who crowd about Gabriel as he watches the snow from his hotel window. In fact, this final appearance of the dead in both massed and individuated guises has already been prefigured by a series of anticipatory references scattered throughout the text. These include, most obviously, references to deceased family members like Gabriel’s parents and grandparents, as well as to the future demise of those still living, including Aunt Julia and, by implication at the story’s close, Gabriel himself, along with the dinner table discussion of the monks of Mount Melleray, who sleep every night in the their coffins, as Mary Jane puts it, “to remind them of their last end”—a phrase echoed in the story’s final sentence (Joyce 1992: 219–20, 233, 239, 240–41, 255, 256). More subtly, the dead are present in the text in the form of a dense web of historical, literary, and mythological allusions that generations of commentators have been at pains to unravel. Let me list just a few examples. Richard Ellmann, in his classic biography of Joyce, points out that one antecedent for the figure of Michael Furey is to be found in Sonny Bodkin, a girlhood suitor of Joyce’s partner, Nora Barnacle, who had himself died from tuberculosis having stolen from his sickroom on a rainy night to bid Nora goodbye before her departure from Galway to Dublin (Ellmann 1982: 243). John Kelleher, reaching further back into Irish antiquity, draws a series of parallels between the actions of Gabriel in the story and the events leading to the downfall of King Conaire Mór in the Old Irish saga The Taking of Da Derga’s Hostel,

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which include the violation of a series of taboos (gessa), some of which explicitly concern his relations with women (Kelleher 1965: 419–423).4 More recently, the poet Paul Muldoon, in his Oxford Clarendon Lectures (published in 2000), has proposed a complex series of echoes and parallelisms encompassing not only the fate of Conaire Mór but also the stories of those other mythological heroes, Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cuchulain, along with their latter-day retellings by, among others, Samuel Ferguson, Standish O’Grady, Lady Gregory, and Jeremiah Curtin (Muldoon 2000: 50–66). Having myself no credentials as a Joyce scholar beyond an undergraduate thesis written more than twenty years ago, it is not my intention here to add further to this list. Instead, I wish to venture two remarks. First, it is striking that so many commentators on Joyce’s work have found themselves caught up in and thus carrying further the necromancy of Joyce’s texts through the identification and naming of the dead. In this regard, it is perhaps worth mentioning too the still more compendious scholarly labors expended over the years on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Second, although the critical pursuit Joyce’s sources and allusions presents itself as a labor of clarification, aimed at the identification of particular figures, whether literary or historical, it can be seen also to have had a rather different effect, whereby, as their numbers multiply, these named dead start themselves to resemble a crowd. Let us turn, however, to another, less frequently remarked-upon group of ghosts attendant at the Misses Morkans’ midwinter feast. In an essay published in 2002, the historian Kevin Whelan suggests that “The Dead” needs to be understood as a crucial cultural document of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s and its aftermath. Precipitated by the potato failure of 1845 and exacerbated, as it has often been argued, by the inadequate or nonexistent relief efforts of successive British governments, the Great Famine was a demographic disaster that claimed more than a million lives and drove a further two million people into exile during the ensuing decade, wiping out many communities in their entirety and plunging others into a spiral of population decline that would not be reversed, in some cases, until the end of the twentieth century (Figure 1.6). At the same time,

Figure 1.6. Famine Memorial, Custom House Quay, Dublin, Ireland. Photograph by William Murphy. Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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it was, as Whelan notes, a cultural catastrophe, resulting, not least, in the widespread loss of the Irish language, since many of those who died or were forced to emigrate were from Irish-speaking areas (Whelan 2002: 62–64, 87). Although the famine is not mentioned directly in Joyce’s story, Whelan argues that the cultural devastation wrought by mass starvation and emigration reveals itself in a variety of ways: through the spectral paralysis that afflicts the city and its inhabitants here and in other stories in the collection; in the Ireland-wide snow, recalling the “killing snows” of James Clarence Mangan’s 1846 famine poem “Siberia”; in the final images of snow drifted on the “crooked crosses” of Oughterard churchyard, evoking not only the final resting place of Michael Furey, but also the numerous Irish-speaking West of Ireland rural communities for which the famine years were to sound a death knell; and, not least, in the name of the story’s protagonist, Gabriel Conroy, borrowed from an 1875 novel of the same name by the American writer Brett Hart, describing the deaths from starvation of a party of snowbound pioneers in the Californian Sierras, and based in turn on the actual fate of the Donner party, who perished in the same location during the winter of 1846–47, coinciding with the notorious Black ’47 that marked the peak of famine mortality in Ireland (Whelan 2002: 65, 69–70, 71, 72). The victims of the Great Irish Famine could be seen to occupy a position somewhere in between the dead conceived of as an undifferentiated and anonymous mass and the individual figures who emerge from and recede into this backdrop. One the one hand, the famine dead are an undoubted historical presence and, in recent decades at least, a frequent object of scholarly investigation. On the other, many of them remain unnamed, piled into mass graves or commemorated only by anonymously erected improvised monuments, like the stone cairns that mark the locations of burial sites and death places along much of Ireland’s western seaboard and that are frequently referenced in the oral histories of the famine years collected during the 1940s by the Irish Folklore Commission (McLean 2004: 101–9; MacNeill 1946). Perhaps, then, what distinguishes the historical memory of the famine is a simultaneous two-way traffic between the anonymous mass of the dead and the more particularized referents of historical discourse. This would involve the condensation of the famine dead as an identifiable historical presence out of a more primordial and undifferentiated being-with-the-dead, akin to the “great sea of the dead” evoked in Isidra’s explication of the Palo term Kalunga, and, at the same time, the opening out of historical time to a different order of temporality, marked by the indissociable copresence of the living and the dead. It is in this regard, I suggest, that both history and anthropology have most to learn from literature. For Whelan, reading the final paragraphs of Joyce’s story in tandem with Mangan’s poem “Siberia,” this “other time” is characteristically cold, lifeless, and inhuman; it represents, he writes, “history’s appalled reversion to geological time, into a space and time which precede and follow human geography and human history and which are supremely indifferent to them” (2002: 72). For me, however, what Joyce’s description, and in particular the figure of the all-pervasive snow, captures so powerfully is not simply the inassimilable otherness of the time of the dead but also its inextricable interimplication with the time of the living. Elizabeth Grosz has suggested that geological time, like the similarly suprahuman temporality of biological evolution, need not be thought of as the antithesis or negation of humanly marked, historical time, but as its necessary precondition. Juxtaposing Bergson’s insights with those of Darwin, she suggests that, just as living organisms bear the genetic traces of their evolutionary past, so the whole of what we are accustomed

The Time of the Dead • 29

to think of as “nature” (including the results of evolutionary and geological processes) can be understood as the accumulated past of all life, including that of human society, coexisting virtually with the present as a latent transformative power that at once gives rise to the present and enables its overcoming and displacement in the direction of an unforeseeable future (Grosz 2004: 255–57). While the focus of Whelan’s essay is on reconstructing one of the least remarked upon contexts of Joyce’s writing, it has less to say about the specificity of literature’s (and Joyce’s) modes of engagement both with the events of the historical past and with the dead more generally. What is it, then, that literature can be said to know about the dead and the time in which they subsist? Could it be that the durational past immanent to the material substance of the world that Grosz evokes is present no less in literary language in the form not only of references to the dead (which are, as we have seen, plentiful in Joyce’s writings) but also of the shapes, sounds, and rhythmic pulsions of words as they carry us beyond human-centered meaning and into the anonymous impersonal life of the material universe? Deleuze too would argue that the latter (what he referred to elsewhere as “A Life”) found one of its most forceful expressions in literature as a medium capable of reaching beyond intersubjectival communication and, indeed, beyond subjectivity: “Literature exists only when it discovers beneath apparent persons the path of an impersonal—which is not a generality but a singularity at the highest point; a man, a woman, a beast, a child . . . it is not the first two persons that function as the condition of literary enunciation; literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips away the power to say ‘I’” (Deleuze 1997: 3). The contemporary Chilean poet Raúl Zurita goes further in claiming for literature the power not only to speak of or for the dead, but also to speak the dead: Each one of us is more than an I, each one of us is a torrent of the deceased that ends in our life just as we end in our descendants. This is what’s meant by a tradition and culture; that all those who have preceded us return to speak when we speak, they return to see when we see, feel when we feel. Each one of us is the resurrection of the dead and that miracle is achieved in every second of our lives. (Zurita 2012: 50)

In Zurita’s poetry the dead who return are, principally, the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1990. Yet beyond these flickering, individuated voices recounting their stories of abduction, torture, and assassination, there extends a vast, unquantifiable torrent, as expansive as Palo’s allencompassing sea of the dead and materialized in Zurita’s verses through recurrent images of the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, bordering Chile to the west and east, respectively. Both the sea and the mountains were in fact often used to dispose of the bodies of the “disappeared,” yet in Zurita’s writing they evoke too a zone of transition, where lives expunged by totalitarian violence are folded back into planetary and cosmic time. In the words of one anonymous narrator: “Before me the blue of the immense / sunrise merged with the Pacific, and the lines of / love, of madness and death, stuck to my lips also / without a sound, softly like an irrevocable silence” (ibid.: 44). It is, arguably, toward an attempted encompassment of this suprahistorical, more-than-human, durational past that Joyce’s writing moves through the course of his entire oeuvre. Bergson himself was doubtful that literature, bound as it was to the spatial and sequential arrangement of words on a page, could do more than hint at the possibility of durational time (Beplate 2005: 305). Joyce’s writings,

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however, evince a greater confidence in literature’s powers, a confidence that appears, in fact, to increase with each successive published work, culminating in the nocturnal linguistic explorations of Finnegans Wake (1939). Indeed, is Joyce’s final work, his “Book of the Dark” (in the critic John Bishop’s memorable formulation), not also a Book of the Dead, a work fashioned from a dream idiom in which not only past and present, living and dead, but also multiple languages and semiotic possibilities are afforded a simultaneous coexistence (Bishop 1993)? This coexistence, which Bergson and, later, Deleuze would identify by the name “virtual,” is, perhaps, what literature knows about the dead, a knowledge shared, in their somewhat different ways, by art and ritual, and long predating even Odysseus’s and Homer’s conjuration of the blood-hungry ghosts beside the sacrificial trench. It is this knowledge that Gabriel Conroy confronts as he prepares to set out on his much-debated imaginative journey westward. Surely Gabriel’s envisaged itinerary embraces not only the physical topography of the West of Ireland, not only the text’s multiple in-folded mythological, literary, and historical valences (including the spectral yet eerily palpable presence of the famine dead), but also the time of the dead, the time between times, the time of the Winter Ceremonial, the time that encompasses and enables cultural and historical cognition, displacing the present into unforeseen realms of memory and possibility, as snow continues to fall through the universe on all the living and the dead.

Stuart McLean is a professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota. He has carried out field research in Ireland and the Orkney Islands. He is the editor (with Anand Pandian) of Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing (Duke University Press, 2017), and the author of The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2004) and Fictionalizing Anthropology: Encounters and Fabulations at the Edges of the Human (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Notes   1. Leaving behind the isle of Circe the enchantress, Odysseus, on her advice, turns his course toward the realm of Hades, the ruler of the dead, in order to consult the blind prophet Tiresias about the reminder of his journey home. Odysseus’s detour in pursuit of the deceased sage takes him to the furthest shore of the Ocean circling the known world, to the land of the Cimmerians, “covered with mist and cloud,” a land of perpetual night, where the sun never rises. Beaching their ship, he and his men proceed on foot to the entrance to Hades’s kingdom, marked by a rock, beside which the River Styx flows down to the underworld. Here Odysseus sacrifices two sheep over a trench that he has dug. The dead appear first of all as a massed throng, crowding about the trench hoping to drink the blood that will restore them temporarily to speech and sentience. Only gradually is Odysseus able to distinguish particular individuals, including his former companion, Elpenor, killed in a drunken fall from a rooftop on Circe’s island, his own mother, Anticleia, and, finally, Tiresias himself. Holding his sword extended, Odysseus keeps the other shades at bay until Tiresias has drunk of the blood and spoken (Homer 1998: 128–29).   2. Ochoa explains his own preference for the term “inspiration” over the more familiar “religion” in the following terms: “Religion is, for me, overladen with European assumptions of form, doctrine and homogeneity, in short, with a static sense of belief and

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practice. Inspiration seems less defined; it is a more mobile term that has nonreligious usages important to my description of Palo’s overflowing creativity” (2010: 8).   3. There is, of course, as the British historian Ronald Hutton has noted, a danger in assuming a straightforward continuity between the masked performances condemned in early Christian writings and those described in the much later folklore record, particularly in the absence of documentation from the intervening centuries (Hutton 1996). Nonetheless, what seems to beg further elucidation is the seasonal coincidence of the practices in question and the fact that both earlier and later commentators have attributed such similar significances to them. If, for example, we accept the suggestions of Augustine and many later writers that the animal masquerades and other celebrations that they witnessed and described were indeed survivals of pre-Christian practices, we are left with the question of how these practices gained currency in the first place and of why they should have been associated in particular with the midwinter season.   4. James MacKillop defines the Old Irish term of geis (pl. gessa) as: “The idiosyncratic taboo or prohibition placed upon heroes and prominent personages in Irish narratives. The breaking of a geis often results in instant death and sometimes also brings bad luck or destruction upon the culprit’s people. Gessa (especially ones that prove impossible to comply with) are frequently imposed upon male protagonists by female figures identified as personifications of land or sovereignty” (2004: 257).

References Abbott, G. F. 1969. Macedonian Folklore. Chicago: Argonaut. Alford, Violet. 1968. “The Hobby Horse and Other Animal Masks.” Folklore 79 (2): 122–34. Ariès, Philippe. 1982. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. London: Penguin Books. Baudrillard, Jean. 1993. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Trans. Iain Hamilton Grant. London: Sage. Beplate, Justin. 2005. “Joyce, Bergson and the Memory of Words.” The Modern Language Review 100 (2): 298–312. Bergson, Henri. 1991. Matter and Memory. Trans. Nancy M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books. Bishop, John. 1993. Joyce’s Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Boas, Franz. 1966. Kwakiutl Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Canetti, Elias. 1992. Crowds and Power. Trans. Carol Stewart. London: Penguin Books. Danaher, Kevin. 1972. The Year in Ireland. Cork: Mercier Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Hammerjam. New York: Zone Books. ———. 1997. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Gresco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Duerr, Hans Peter. 1985. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Trans. Felicitas Goodman. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Dumézil, Georges. 1929. Le problème des centaurs. Paris. Ellmann, Richard. 1982. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press. Frazer, James George. 1980. The Golden Bough, part 6, The Scapegoat. London: Macmillan. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1991. Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Pantheon Books. Goldman, Irving. 1975. The Mouth of Heaven: An Introduction to Kwakiutl Religious Thought. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Homer. 1998. The Odyssey. Trans. Walter Schewring. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hutton, Ronald. 1996. Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joyce, James. 1992. Dubliners. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Joyce, Stanislaus. 1950. Recollections of James Joyce. New York: James Joyce Society. Kelleher, John V. 1965. “Irish History and Mythology in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead.’” Review of Politics 27 (3): 414–33. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lawson, John Cuthbert. 1910. Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKillop, James. 2004. A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacNeill, Maire. 1946. “Wayside Death Cairns in Ireland.” Béaloideas 16: 49–63. McLean, Stuart. 2004. The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Marwick, Ernest. 2000. The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Muldoon, Paul. 2000. To Ireland, I: An Abecdiary of Irish Literature. London: Faber and Faber. Ochoa, Todd Ramón. 2007. “Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality and Ethnography.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (4): 473–500. ———. 2010. Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press. Senn, Harry A. 1982. “Romanian Werewolves: Seasons, Ritual, Cycles.” Folklore 93 (2): 206–15. Seremetakis, Nadia. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spenser, Edmund. 1934. A View of the Present State of Ireland. London: E. Partridge at the Scholartis Press. Torchiana, Donald T. 1986. Backgrounds for Joyce’s Dubliners. Boston: Allen and Unwin. Walens, Stanley. 1981. Feasting with Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Weber, Max. 1949. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. 1976. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons. London: Allen and Unwin. Whelan, Kevin. 2002. “The Memory of ‘The Dead.’” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15 (1): 59–97. Witoszek, Nina, and Pat Sheeran. 1998. Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Zurita, Raúl. 2012. Dreams for Kurosawa. Trans. Anna Deeny. Chicago: Arrow as aarow.

CHAPTER 2

Orpheus in Love, Death, and Time Marina Prusac-Lindhagen

The Orphic mysteries were ancient and already veiled by secrecy in classical times, when depictions of the semidivine hero, Orpheus, were frequently used in funerary iconography as an emblem of lost love. Orpheus is easy to recognize, always playing the lyre, taming wild beasts, and searching among the shadows of the dead in Hades, the netherworld, for Eurydice, his bride, who died on the day of their wedding. The sudden death of Eurydice in the Legend of Orpheus has inspired a large number of artists, who have elaborated upon the inconsolable fate of the hero. The Orphic Theogony, however, promises an afterlife through resurrection. In terms of death and time, the definitive death of Eurydice in the Legend stands out in sharp contrast to the Theogony’s idea of resurrection and eternal afterlife. On the one hand, there is the individual experience of loss as the end of a shared life, and on the other, the collective idea of societal sustainability through reincarnation. It is challenging, on the basis of fragmentary evidence, to understand the contradictory views on time within a cultic context, but a solution to the time-death paradox in the Legend of Orpheus and the Orphic Theogony may be found in the dualistic relationship between love and fertility. This chapter offers a new reading of a Roman fresco in the Villa dei Misteri in the suburbs of Pompeii from the first century bc, which makes it possible to conclude that love can be the bridging element between the two concepts of death and time in Orphism. The Legend of Orpheus and the Orphic Theogony are two different gateways to Orphism, a set of religious beliefs often referred to as a mystery cult, and which already in classical antiquity was ancient and obscured by age. The origin of the cult may be traced back to a shared Indo-European cosmological-narrative tradition and a primordial monotheistic idea. The earliest written source is in a text fragment from the sixth century bc, where it is referred to as famous Orpheus (Ibycus, Fragments 17). The Orphic Theogony, which explains the origin of the world and the birth of Orpheus, differs from the mainstream Greek genealogies of the gods, such as most famously by Hesiod (Hesiod, Theogony). The birth of Orpheus was probably mentioned for the first time in the Protogonos Theogony from circa 500 bc, now lost, but parts of it were retrieved in the Derveni papyrus, which was found in 1962. The most widespread version of the Orphic Theogony was, however, composed in the Hellenistic and Roman period. This version is called the Orphic hymns and consists of eighty-seven hexametric verses, which form the basis for the retelling of the Theogony below. The canonic version of the Legend of Orpheus, which deals with the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, is a rather different text, authored by the great Latin love poet Ovid in the first century bc (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.1–85).

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When juxtaposing the Legend of Orpheus and the Orphic Theogony it is possible to find an ingenious, yet contradictory, explanation of death in relation to time. The Legend can be understood as an account of the individual’s experience of time in the encounter with death, whereas the Theogony conjures an image of the very upholding of the human race. In the Legend, death happens suddenly and definitively. In the Theogony, death is explained as an occurrence in an eternal cycle, which is based on the transmigration of souls, metempsychosis. The idea of a return of life after death, or the possibility of an afterlife, was foreign to the Graeco-Roman institutionalized religion, and a phenomenon that contributed to the making of Orphism as a complex and opaque philosophy and faith. Together, the Theogony and the Legend make it possible to understand Orphism as a dualistic allegory of two perceptions of time in relation to death: the cosmological eternity, which is inherent in the Theogony, and the individual experience of a limited lifetime on earth, which is the topic of the Legend. The challenge, in terms of death and time, is to define the ways by which the two contrasting perspectives on time can be united. The clue might be found in the dualistic relationship between love (Legend) and fertility (Theogony). In a new interpretation of the Roman fresco in the Villa dei Misteri at Pompeii, love and resurrecting fertility can be seen as bridging elements between the ideas of death and time in the Theogony and the Legend.

The Orphic Theogony In the time of the Titans, who inhabited the earth before mankind, the god of all gods, Zeus, was besotted by the queen of the netherworld, Persephone, and could not rest until he had her. After numerous attempts at seducing her, he succeeded, in the guise of a serpent. Hera, his spouse, was mad with rage when she heard of the illegitimate child resulting from the relationship and sent Titans to kill him. Dionysus Zagreus, still an infant, turned himself into various animals and tried to escape his executioners, but he did not stand a chance and was caught when in the shape of a bull. The Titans tore him to pieces. The wrath of Zeus was infinite and he did not stop until the Titans were defeated and burned to ashes. Zeus looked out over a dead world where the ashes still sent smoke up into the surrounding darkness. He had won the battle, but he mourned, not only the death of his infant son, but also his entire creation. He was the god of everything, he was earth and air, but he had failed and made something that had grown into a monster, a primal version of the monster created by Frankenstein—many monsters all at once—and his attempt to populate the world had spiraled out of control. These were Titans, giants that were too strong to be told what to do, even by Zeus. He had needed to mobilize all the twelve gods of the Olympus for the gigantomachia, the battle of giants, and now it was all over, and still, it was before the dawn of time. Zeus had to find another way to populate the world, which he was about to create anew, and he knew what he had to do. He had to mix the sperm of the primordial fertility god Fanes with the ashes of the Titans, and create man (Berntzen 2009: 65). He called upon Fanes, the origin of fertility, who lived in an egg guarded by a serpent. Zeus demanded that Fanes emerge. Once Fanes had done so, Zeus grabbed his phallus and swallowed it quickly, so that he could vomit the sperm on the ashes of the Titans. With an earthshaking roar, the shape of the cosmos was

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altered, and heaven and earth was born. With the waves of the ocean that washed over the earth and made it fertile, Time awakened. Everything was pure, but at the ocean floor, there was a seed of the Titans that had been forgotten, but which started to grow. It was still small, but it was a power as strong as heaven and earth together, because it existed for one purpose only: to join everything. This unbending power had been planted by another phallus, that which Cronos, the Titan with a sickle, had cut off his father, Ouranos, the god of the sky, and thrown into that which now had become water. The sperm had poured out, and the waves whipped it to foam. From the foam, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was born, and Zeus saw that she was necessary for the maintenance of the earth, and he saw that she was a compelling beauty. Meanwhile, Persephone, devastated by grief, had managed to save the heart of their murdered child, Dionysus Zagreus. Zeus, overcome with joy, planted the heart in the moon goddess Selene, where it would be safe and where it would heal and grow into a new child. Selene then gave birth to Dionysus, who, as a child, was pure and unspoiled. Mankind, however, which grew of the sperm of Fanes and the ashes of the Titans, was of both divine and Titan descent, hence both good and bad. Zeus watched them and saw that one day they would start questioning the world, themselves, time, and death. Zeus called for Apollo, the god of the arts, and told him to find Calliope, the wisest of the muses. Apollo did as he was told, and upon the request of Zeus, Aphrodite sprinkled her golden aphrodisiac on them, and in this way, the conception of Orpheus took place. Zeus had a plan for Orpheus. He wanted to use him as an explanatory model to teach the human beings the lessons of individual sorrow and collective apprehension of death and resurrection. Zeus knew that to the human beings, there would seem to be a paradox between the individual and the collective notions of death and time. Zeus waited until Orpheus had become a young shepherd in the wild woods of Thrace. Again, he called for Aphrodite. This time, he asked for more than an aphrodisiac. Take your love girdle, he said, your kestos himas poikilos, and bind Orpheus so tightly to a nymph, the most delightful of beings, that he cannot live without her. From this moment, Orpheus was the victim of a divine scheme in which he would be the protagonist of a ruthless game. He would be challenged with the impossible, to cross a line between two dimensions that should never, by any means, be united, because if the border was trespassed, time would stop. And without time, the world would be lost, since besides love, time was the driving force of all things on earth. Aphrodite found Eurydice, a nymph of such enchanting beauty that there could be no doubt that she was the right choice and, like Orpheus, perfect for the role. If Orpheus tasted her sweetness, he would never wish for anything else. His death would start with hers, in order to explain to human beings why their form had to die when their soul lived on, in the same way that the earth had to be reborn every spring. This will be a memory of the origin of creation, said Zeus. First, it had to die, for the sake of being reborn. Aphrodite did as Zeus said, after which they both left the earth to dwell on Olympus, where they belonged, and they turned their backs on the humans. This is a simplified and literary version of the Orphic Theogony, which differs from other ancient theogonies, such as the most famous, written by Hesiod. The Orphic Theogony formed the background for the Legend of Orpheus. The sophis-

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ticated, religious system of Orphism can hardly be put better than in Jan Bremmer’s words: These Orphic teachings are quite remarkable, since they combine cosmogony, theogony and anthropogony into one genealogy, whereas on the whole Greek mythology shows little interest in the creation of man. Here, on the other hand, man is suddenly promoted to the climax of creation. Moreover, we can observe that the diversity of the Greek pantheon has been reduced to a virtually monotheistic rule by Zeus, although Dionysus, whose position in the normative Greek pantheon was more eccentric, is also indispensable. (2002: 22)

The Legend of Orpheus The day of the wedding was perfect, and Eurydice was the happiest of brides (see, e.g., Ovid, Amores 11, 32). The blissful joy of the guests blended in with the sunshine, while Orpheus played the lyre so beautifully that the beasts were tamed and the stones became alive. Eurydice danced with her friends, the naiads, and the whole world celebrated. But, alas! The pleasure was brief. Eurydice stepped on a viper, and all of a sudden, she fell dead to the ground (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1.  Orpheus, Eurydice and Aristaeus. Jacopo da Sellaio, c. 1480. Oil on panel. Rotterdam, Boijmans van Beuningen, inv. 2563 (OK). Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

At a momentous shift in time, what seemed to be eternal happiness was transformed into the utmost despair. Orpheus literally went through hell. He entered a state of mind (Orphic liminality) where time was suspended and he drifted between the prospect of living without Eurydice, dying with her, or trying to retrieve her. In shock and bewilderment, he lost his senses, and made a fatal decision. He wanted to follow her to the netherworld and bring her back. It was a fool’s plan, and Orpheus was doomed to fail. He searched for the frightening cavern gate to the netherworld, found it, and entered a world where he was not welcome and where time did not exist. As he walked down the steep path, he crossed the threshold to a space where danger lurked in the gloomy mist (Figure 2.2). Orpheus, as the only mortal man ever to make that journey, managed to cross the dark River Styx, the territorial border of Hades. Reluctantly, Hermes, the messenger god, who accompanied the souls of the dead, took him to Charon, the

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Figure 2.2.  Orpheus calming the three-headed, monstrous dog Cerberus with his music at the gate of Hades. Orpheus. Franz von Stuck, 1891. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

ferryman. Nobody who crossed the river could ever return, but then again, nobody could convince others—even gods—as could Orpheus, with his music. Orpheus knew that he risked being lost among the eternally damned shadows of the dead, where he would be dwelling forever in a gap of time. But in that gruesome wretchedness, his Eurydice was about to drink of the lake of Mnemosyne, which would lull her into total forgetfulness, her soul then prepared for resurrection into something else that would be unrecognizable. Orpheus was aghast at what he saw. The shadows moved with no purpose, blankly and vacantly. They were nothing, bereft of identity, character, and memory. Eventually, he ended up at the court of Hades, where he pleaded for a chance to bring Eurydice back alive (Figure 2.3). The queen of the netherworld, Persephone, was moved by the ecstatic harmony of Orpheus’s voice. Persephone was the daughter of the fertility goddess Demeter, and as a girl, she had been abducted

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Figure 2.3.  Orpheus before Pluto and Persephone. Francios Perrier, 1647–50. Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée du Louvre. Photo: © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/ Michel Urtado.

by Hades, who wanted her as his queen. Demeter, obviously, had not accepted his misdeed, and after a long dispute, they eventually came to an agreement. Persephone would spend half the year up in the daylight with her mother and the other half in the netherworld with Hades. Confronted with the love story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre, Persephone convinced Hades to give Orpheus a chance to bring Eurydice back with him. If he could find her shadow, Hades agreed, she would follow him up the steep path to the world of the living. But—there was a grave but— Orpheus could not doubt her presence and turn his head to look at her before she was out in the sunlight, or she would be lost forever. Either Orpheus would have Eurydice back in his life, or she would be lost forever. The stark contrast between the alternatives was hard, and a harsh reminder of the relationship between the duration of a lifetime and the eternity of death. Orpheus thought he had a fair chance and that the dice of the Fates were not thrown, yet there was a threatening sky above them as they walked, because no one could return happily from Hades. The very fact that he was permitted by the gods to undertake the reckless mission should in itself have given reason for concern. The ancient gods always acted unexpectedly and were fiercely revengeful when confronted with human hubris. Having found his beloved Eurydice among the shadows, and with the help of Hermes, Orpheus walked back to the gate (Figure 2.4). Followed by the shadow of Eurydice, Orpheus ran hurriedly up the steps, eager and impatient, naïvely anticipating victory in a dreadful game (Figure 2.5). When he exited the cavern

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Figure 2.4. Hermes, Eurydice, and Orpheus. Roman copy, 31 bc–ad 14, of Greek original, 450–400 bc, by Alcamenes. Naples, National Archaeological Museum, inv. 6727. Photo: German Archaeological Institute in Rome, DAI 66.1836.

Figure 2.5.  Orpheus Leading Eurydice from the Underworld. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, 1861. Oil on canvas. Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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gate, he turned his head excitedly, only to see that she was not yet out. A footstep only from returning back into his arms, she perished (Figures 2.6 and 2.7). Her shadow faded away, dissolving as bleak smoke down the dark route to the netherworld, lost for all eternity. Orpheus was devastated. He had lost her twice, and this time, it was definitive. As a severe punishment for the mocking of the gods, Figure 2.6.  Eurydice disappears, detail. Orpheus and Eurydice. Auguste Rodin, 1887–93. Marble sculpture. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 10.63.2. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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Figure 2.7.  Orpheus and Eurydice. Titian, 1508–12. Oil on wood. Bergamo, Accademia Carrara. Photo: Wikipedia Commons (Italian version).

he had to live on, feeling dead. He could do nothing but play his lyre, eternally inconsolable, as time now seemed to him as one, long torturous day (Figure 2.8). Nature grieved with him. The poet Virgil, always eloquent, put it like this (Virgil, Georgics 4.464.6): As he consoles his sickened love on the hollow lyre it is you, sweet wife, by himself on the lonely shore you whom he sang as the day came and the day went away The judgment of Orpheus was a perpetual playing of the lyre—as the day came and the day went away—but as a human being, he too, in the end, had to die, and his end was as dramatic as his life. According to the Roman love poet Ovid, Orpheus, after returning from Hades, was forever altered (Figure 2.9). Disappointed, bewildered, and devoid of any hope of ever again being able to love another woman, he withdrew to the woods and turned his attention to men (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10). Three times the Sun completed his full course to watery Pisces, and in all that time shunning all women, Orpheus still believed his love-pledge was forever. So he kept away from women, though so many grieved because he took no notice of their love The only friendship he enjoyed was given to the young men of Thrace

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Figure 2.8.  Nymphs Listening to the Songs of Orpheus. Charles Jalabert, 1853. Oil on canvas. Baltimore, Walters Art Museum, inv. 3737. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Ovidian version of the myth of Orpheus claims that after three years in distress, he turned his heart to young men. There is, however, a disagreement regarding this interpretation of the last part of Orpheus’s life. Some historians argue that the Orpheus who loved men belonged to another legend (Graves 1955: 115). This other Orpheus was the one who traveled with the Argonauts, who joined the hero Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece in the mythological past, which preceded the Trojan War. In a more occult version of the myth, the Orpheus of the Argonauts visited Tartarus, the deepest and most feared corner of Hades, where he charmed the frightening goddess Hecate. Tartarus can be compared to the Christian perception of hell, but is not the same. In Tartarus, only a few famous cases, such as Sisyphos, were doomed to eternal torture as punishment.

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Figure 2.9.  Orpheus playing the lyre. Roman marble sculpture, fourth century ad. Athens, Byzantine and Christian Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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Since only the full-blooded gods lived forever, even Orpheus, at last, had to die, and he was destined to meet a tragic end. Upon meeting a group of intoxicated and revengeful bacchic women, maenads, he was killed in a brutal and savage way. Furious with him, possibly for his preference for men, they slaughtered him as an animal, and his divinely beautiful head was taken as a trophy (Figures 2.10 and

Figure 2.10. Menad with the head of Orpheus. Orpheus. Gustave Moreau, 1865. Oil on panel. Paris, Musée d’Orsay, inv. RF 104. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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2.11). The tragedy poet Euripides described how nature mourned their lost friend (Euripides, Bacchae 561–63): . . . in the deep-wooded lairs of Olympus where Orpheus once playing the lyre drew together trees by his songs drew together the beasts of the fields

Figure 2.11.  Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus. John William Waterhouse, 1900. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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On the Legend: Individual Grief and Death as the End Few mythological characters represent culture more strongly than Orpheus, son of Apollo and Calliope. At the same time, Orpheus is the only one who can tame wild nature with his divine music. When he plays the lyre, even the wildest beasts listen and stones become alive (Figure 2.12). For this reason, and because he came from wild Thrace, the cult of Orpheus is understood as perhaps the earliest evidence for animism in antiquity (see, e.g., Ovid, Amores 9, 21; Plato, Ion 533c). Some have gone as far as trying to define shamanistic elements in the cult (see Bremmer 2002: 27–40 for a detailed discussion on shamanism in relation to Orphism).

Figure 2.12.  Mosaic with Orpheus surrounded by animals from ad 200–250. From Palermo, Piazza della Vittoria. It is one of several Roman mosaics with Orpheus and animals. In Palermo, Regional Archaeological Museum Antonio Salinas, inv. NI2287. Photo: © Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY 2.5.

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In poetry and the visual arts, the earliest known evidence for the Orphic mysteries appears in a poem from circa 490 bc and in a relief from the Siphnian treasury at Delphi (Parmenides, cited in Bremmer 2002: 15–16). From the fifth century bc and throughout antiquity, Orpheus frequently appears in funerary iconography and in a wide range of written sources. Despite the popularity of the myth, Plato, for one, argued that Orpheus was a coward, and that suicide would have been the only honorable way to mourn true love (Plato, Symposium 179d–e). Since his love was not true, Plato claimed, because he did not want to die for love, he was punished twice: by losing Eurydice a second time, and by being killed by women. The immediate message of the myth to those who mourned was, however, something they could identify with. Something that expressed their emotional state of mind. A good example is to be found in Euripides’s tragedy Alcestis, where the fair king Admeteus mourns his beloved (Euripides, Alcestis 358–367): If I had the voice and music of Orpheus so that I could charm Demeter’s daughter or her husband with song and fetch you from Hades, I would have gone down to the Underworld, and neither Pluto’s hound nor Charon the ferryman of souls, standing at the oar would have kept me from bringing you back to the light alive. But now wait for me to arrive there when I die and prepare a home where you may dwell with me. For I shall command my children here to bury me in the same coffin with you and to lay out my body next to yours. Never, even in death, may I be parted from you, the woman who alone has been faithful to me! The story of Orpheus and Eurydice, reflected in the words of Admeteus, was about the extreme emotional challenges that an individual is confronted with at the moment when death steals away the life of a dear one, and the fact cannot be accepted. It is also about the defenselessness of humans when faced with untimely death and the first stages of mourning, when the wound is fresh and the pain is raw. The netherworld was conjured as a parallel realm where time did not exist. In Hades, time lapsed, and the absence of time was impossible to unite with being a physical human being with a body that aged and was transformed by time. In the first stages of mourning, it gave little comfort that the soul was eternal and had the ability to continue living, because it would be cleansed by the lake of Mnemosyne and lost. What remained would be developed into another nature. The lost individual could not be recognized when the soul returned. Therefore, for Orpheus, the life of Eurydice as an individual was lost. To those who mourned a deceased loved one, there was no comfort in the possibility of reincarnation. It was only when Orpheus himself was eventually freed from his physical form that his tormented misery ended, but then, nature itself mourned. When Orpheus died, something more than a semidivine hero passed away. With him, nature lost something beautiful, a unique kind of enchanting music, a pleasure for the senses that nobody, and nothing, could replace. In this way, even nature, in all its never-

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ending transformation, admits that there are arts that are bound to some individuals alone, and that disappear when they die. Resurrection is a comfort, but it does not dismiss the fact that some things, some individual features, can be lost forever. No loves are the same, and like the arts of Orpheus, the emotions that are tied to one individual cannot be retrieved in somebody else. The soul that lives on is something other than the individual form that is lost. The individual death releases that which will live on, but always at a cost, a kind of levy to the gods for the upholding of society.

On the Theogony: Reincarnation and Collective Sustainability The Homeric idea of the soul has much in common with the dualistic concept of the soul, which has been discussed among Scandinavian anthropologists (Bremmer 2002: 2). The Homeric psychê can be understood as a kind of free soul, which represents the individual personality. Psychê is manifested in dreams and at death, and has no direct connection to the physical body. Linguistically, psychê is connected with psychein, which means to blow, or to breathe. The ways by which psychê has been used in post-Homeric times are complex and involve a large number of classical writers and philosophers. Socrates claimed that the most important thing a man could do was to care for his psychê, and Plato developed the theory of the tripartite soul (Plato, Apology 30B; see also Bremmer 2002: 3). In the Orphic mysteries, the soul was believed to be reborn ten times, after which it would be possible to be purified from the Titan (evil) part of the human race. The Titan part of human beings held the soul in bondage, and ten times rebirth was the only way to cultivate the Dionysian (good) part of mankind. The Dionysian qualities of a recurring soul would eventually lead to a harmonic afterlife, or a kind of divine existence. According to Plato’s interpretation of Orphism, the soul would return at intervals of a thousand years. Since all souls had to be reborn ten times, the wheel of life would take ten thousand years. Another Greek philosopher, Empedocles, suggested thirty thousand seasons (Empedocles, B 115 DK). Irrespective of such calculations, rebirth over a long time span was inconceivable on an individual level. On a collective level, however, this in the long run inspired hope, and brought a sense of continuity and stability to society. On a collective level, it was possible to find a remedy for grief in metempsychosis, or the endurance of transmigrating souls, which gave the adherents to the cult a sense of shared hope for the hereafter in a cosmological perspective. The prospect of reincarnation connected human beings to the divine past, and placed the time of mankind between origin and end. The Orphic mysteries, which were founded on the Theogony and the Legend of Orpheus, are interlocked in the episode where Orpheus met with Hades and negotiated about the soul of Eurydice. What happened at the court of Hades was combat between death as in the Theogony and death as in the Legend. Orpheus meeting with Hades was a negotiation of souls. Orpheus had entered into the realm of Hades and this, of course, was a horrific idea, yet the most serious aspect of this mischievous endeavor was that by intruding, he tampered with the relationship between death and time. Diplomatically, Hades allegedly gave Orpheus a chance, because he could do so. Whether Orpheus was actually given a chance or not depends on the motivation of Hades. If the diplomacy was false and a part of the punishing scheme of the revengeful gods, Orpheus never

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had a chance. And if so, the meaning of the myth was to explain to all those who mourned that the reclaiming of a dead one was in itself impossible. At the court of Hades, where Persephone acted as the intermediary on behalf of Orpheus, she was the one present who could fully understand the experience of moving between the living and the dead. She alone could fill this role, because she was the object of another negotiation, and her fate symbolized annual resurrection and the changes of the four seasons, a necessity that ensured continued life on earth. Because of this extraordinary position between heaven and “hell,” Persephone was the center of another mystery cult, together with her mother. The seat of their cult was at Eleusis, near Athens. The heart of the Eleusinian mysteries was the cycle of the year, as an equivalent to life and death. Possibly the most important shared feature between the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries was the promise of a happy afterlife, and the strong symbolism of resurrection in earthly forms of fertility.

Culture Blurred with Nature The widespread fear of the netherworld of Hades in the Graeco-Roman constitutionalized religions made mystery cults such as the Orphic and Eleusinian attractive. It becomes clear in, for example, the reading of Plato that the Orphic priests performed specific rites for those deceased who had sacrificed rightly according to the given ritual (Plato, Republic 364e–365a; see also Bremmer 2002: 15). A number of gold leaves or tablets with passwords (symbolae) or inscriptions from Orphic-Dionysian eschatological contexts provide a glimpse into such rituals (Figure 2.13). The texts on the gold leaves were instructions for the netherworld (Bernabé and San Cristóbal 2008). One such leaf, from Pherae in Thessalia, Greece, has an inscription that states the relationship between the initiates to the cult of Orpheus and Demeter (trans. Bremmer 2002: 22): Passwords For man-and-child-thyrsos For man-and-child-thyrsos Brimo. Brimo Enter the holy meadow For the initiate has paid the price The clue here is in the word Brimo, Figure 2.13.  Orphic gold leaf, fourth century bc. Found in a bronze urn in Thessaglia. Malibu, J. P. Getty Museum. Photo: which is connected with the rage that De- Wikimedia Commons/Gift of Lenore Barozzi. meter experienced when Hades abducted her daughter. The rage expresses her power to intervene, and her influence on the destiny of the deceased as the mother of the queen of Hades. The thyrsos, the staff made of giant fennel with a pinecone on top and garlands of ivy vines and leaves, was a fertility symbol connected with Dionysus, and is another key word here. Dionysus, the fertility god who reigned over the vine, was in the wilder version of Bacchus dramatically connected to the death of Orpheus, and this connection, as we have seen, derives from the Orphic Theogony.

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In one of the most important Orphic texts of all time, the relationship between Orpheus and Dionysus Bacchus appears to be very tight. This text is written on a papyrus from Derveni in Macedonia, which is the earliest book ever found. It was discovered in 1962 in a funeral pyre from circa 350 bc, the time of Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great, and was fully published for the first time in 2006 (Janko 2002; Tsantsanoglou et al. 2006). In 2015, it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Large parts of the papyrus remain a puzzle, but it is unquestionably a testimony of the embryonic idea of monotheism, which is inherent in Orphism. God, it explains, is mind, and mind is air. The god in this context, of course, is Zeus, and in the Orphic Theogony, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and Persephone. Already from the earliest beginning, the relationship between the half-wild fertility god Dionysus and Orpheus is tight, and emphasizes the potency of the latter. The Phrygian cap, which Orpheus always wears, was in the Orphic iconography more than the usual attribute of the barbarian Other. It was also an attribute that symbolized fertility, as it was made of the testicle of a bull, the animal of Zeus in Greek mythology. In Orphism, it must also be understood as a reference to Zeus swallowing the phallus of Fanes, in which everything was embedded (Berntzen 2009: 65). The Orphic gold leaves and the Derveni papyrus also testify to the relationship between Orpheus, Persephone, and Dionysus. This strong trio of fertility gods is also depicted in classical vase paintings, such as an Apulian volute crater by the Darius painter from the fourth century bc, which has an image of Dionysus, Hades, Persephone, and a deceased. The joined hands of Dionysus and Hades in the vase painting suggest that Dionysus is negotiating on behalf of the deceased. Hence, it could be said that what are usually called Orphic mysteries were in fact also Bacchic mysteries (Bremmer 2002: 18; Euripides, Hippolytos 954; Herodotus, The Histories 2, 81; see also Bremmer 2002: 23 with reference to the Olbian tablets with the inscription “life—death—life: truth; Dio—Orphic[oi?]”). This conclusion is based on the many correlations between Orpheus, Persephone, and Bacchus, such as on the Orphic gold leaf from Pelinna in Thessalia, which reads (quoted in Torjussen 2014): Now you have died and now you have been born thrice blessed, on this day Say to Persephone that Bacchios himself has released you Bull, you jumped into the milk Quickly, you jumped into the milk Ram, you fell into the milk You have wine as your fortunate honour

The Fresco in the Villa dei Misteri The enigmatic formula on the Pelinna gold leaf, and a similar example with “a kid, you fell into the milk,” have been related to one of the most impressive and intriguing, both technically and iconographically, of all Roman frescoes (Figure 2.14). It is in the Villa dei Misteri, a suburban villa at Pompeii, and must have been made before the eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in ad 79, when the city was buried by ash and lapilli. The fresco, however, is painted in a style that belongs to the

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Figure 2.14.  Roman fresco, Villa dei Misteri, Pompeii. First century bc. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

first century bc. It is dominated by the typically intense Pompeian red color, and it includes a large number of informative details. Since no detail in classical iconography is random, attempts have been made at interpreting the motif of this fresco, with the kid, the milk, and the Bacchic scenery, as an Orphic-Bacchic initiation rite. So far, I agree, but I would like to suggest a new reading of the iconography, combining the Orphic Theogony and the Legend of Orpheus. It is true, as many have argued, that a similar scene has been found on an Etruscan sarcophagus and is, as such, not necessarily exclusively Orphic (Bernabé and San Cristóbal 2008: 306). The Greeks and the Etruscans exchanged cultural traits, and both cultures were familiar with the Egyptian religion. The Egyptian Book of the Dead probably even influenced the Orphic egg in Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds from 414 bc (see, e.g., Bremmer 2002: 20; for the Egyptian Book of the Dead, see Taylor 2010). However, neither the Etruscan parallel nor the relation to the Book of the Dead excludes the possibility of an Orphic reading of the fresco. The followers of Orpheus seem to have been using texts at an early stage, and in the classical Greek societies the art of reading and writing belonged to the upper classes. Special rights in the encounter with death would also be desired by those who thought themselves capable of buying them. No aim would be more desired than the concept of resurrection, and this aspect of Orphism was, as Bremmer has demonstrated, possible to link to other nonnormative religious societies, such as Zoroasterism and Christianity (2002: 41–70). There are details in this much admired and discussed fresco that can be interpreted as an Orphic wedding and at the same time as a celebration of OrphicBacchic resurrection. The driving forces in the joint understanding of the Theogony and the Legend are love, death, and time. These three ingredients are, I would like to propose, also the three pillars of the narrative in the fresco. The motif has traditionally been interpreted as the initiation of the mistress of the house into the mysteries of Dionysus and his mother, the moon goddess Selene (Bernabé and San Cristóbal 2008: 304; Sauron 1998: 135–36). The vivid representation of all those present makes the fresco one of the most important keyhole glimpses into the secret life of a Roman matrona. Women, obviously, could not practice cults outside the normative religion in public, but they could be powerful at home and in closed circles, such as mystery cults, which can be understood as “secret societies.” The matrona of the fresco in the Villa dei Misteri indeed be-

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longed to the wealthy upper class, as is testified by the remains of wine production and trade on the property, and there can be no doubt that the ceremony that takes place is orchestrated by her command. She would be a typical representative of adherents to the cult of Orpheus, if the comments by Plato still held true (Plato, Cratylus 20). The gold leaves and the lavish contexts in which some of them were found—the graves of Thurii and the bronze urns of the Thessalian leaves—have been understood as evidence for Plato’s comment that the Orphic priests took advantage of wealthy followers (Bottini 1992; Bremmer 2002: 17). Wealth would not be irrelevant for the matrona’s position as a kind of cult authority. Indeed, she would be exactly that, the authority present, and not the initiate. She is performing the ritual, not for herself, but for those who are about to be initiated. On the left side of the fresco is the real, physical environment: the room where the ceremony is taking place. At the center is the matrona, about to perform a rite. To the right is Silenus, the supervirile, close companion of Dionysus, with the lyre, the crown of laurel, and the wild and unkempt beard that places him in the wild, where Dionysus also belongs—and for that matter, Orpheus. Here, Silenus symbolizes extreme lust and fertility, and the persistence of the resurrecting nature. The most interesting scene is between Dionysus and Selene, where two young individuals are sitting, who are usually interpreted as two adolescent fauns. They are entertaining two goat kids, which stand in front of them. The faun to the left is generically identified as male, and seems to be in the act of playing the flute, but pauses and watches as the other faun, who is usually identified as female, offers something, which is commonly interpreted as her breast, to one of the kids. The other kid stands still, in frontal posture, listening. The young fauns are dressed in fur skins, the one to the left in that of a black wolf, and the one to the right in that of a doe, which in Graeco-Roman iconography signifies the maenads, the intoxicated, female followers of Dionysus Bacchus, who according to the Ovidian version of the legend killed Orpheus. In the Orphic hymns, which are known to us through the tenth-century lexicon Suda, but which were originally produced and reproduced from the third century bc to the second century ad, and in the Dionysus hymn by Macrobius from circa ad 400, we learn about the development of Orphism in Roman times, at the time when the fresco in the Villa dei Misteri was painted. The Dionysus hymn explains that the right dress had to be worn before starting the performance of the ritual. A shining dress, representing the god, the famous sun, should be draped around the initiate. To this dress, a doe fur should be added, hanging from his right shoulder. The doe fur, with its scattered white dots, was an image of the shining stars in the sky. A belt of gold should be draped over his chest, around the fur. This, the hymn says, is a powerful sign, and it continues describing Dionysus as he stands up, in all his glory. It is an impressive image that is described for the reader: the god is throwing his golden light over the stream of Oceanus, and there is an incredible glimmer that twinkles as it spreads and merges with the dew in its spherical cycle. In another belt, beneath his enormous breast, is the circle of Dionysus, which is wonderful to look at (trans. Berntzen 2009: 79–80). Oceanus, called Zeus-Dionysus at the beginning of the same hymn, is the father of the ocean. And Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was born by the semen of the primordial god of the sky, Ouranos. As we have seen in the Orphic Theogony, the powerful Titan Cronos had cut the testicles off his father, Ouranos, and thrown them in the sea, whereupon Aphrodite emerged in all her irresistible and seductive beauty. The belt of gold, which according to the Dinoysus hymn should

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be draped over the initiate’s chest, has a parallel in the kestos himas poikilos, or girdle of Aphrodite, which is mentioned by Homer (Homer, Iliad 14) and is much discussed symbol of a powerful love spell that the goddess of love could throw. Could, then, the glimmer that spreads from Oceanus in the Dionysus hymn be a metaphor for the ejaculated sperm of the initiate? We know from the same hymn that he was disguised as the god, the creator who swallowed the phallus of Fanes and recreated sky and earth. Moreover, the couple is sitting on a bed, and the privacy of the room is utterly erotic. The personification of Selene, with the veil held up in the shape of the moon, represents the night, Nyx, the mother of all gods in the Orphic hymns. The presence of Silenus to the right underpins the transition in the image from the real world, where the ritual is ministered by the matrona of the house, to nature, where the souls take the shapes of animals. What I am suggesting is that the fresco reveals a ritual performance of the union of Orpheus and Eurydice, interpreted in Roman times as an erotic act, where the border between what is human and what is divine nature is removed. This interpretation is bold, I admit, but it is possible to think of the adolescents disguised as fauns in the act of getting married in an Orphic wedding ritual. The faun with the doe fur hanging from the shoulder, who is usually identified as female, is instead, in my opinion, male, and the other, who holds the flute, female. The fresco is worn around the shoulder of the faun on the right, the one with the doe skin, and it is not possible to discern with certainty a naked female breast, as has often been claimed. Rather, a golden belt seems to hang across the chest, attaching the fur, as described in the hymn. The hand truly seems to offer the breast to the kid, but this part of the fresco has surface damage, and what is going on is not absolutely clear. It seems as if the fur that hangs from the shoulder has a head, which would be a doe head, which covers the breast. A rhyton (a ritual vessel shaped like a ram’s head) would certainly fit better into the narrowing shape that can be discerned than an adolescent female breast. Since the use of rhyta— animal-shaped vessels—have been found in Orphic contexts, what seems to be a breast here could in fact be a rhyton, presented as a breast. An adolescent dressed as a faun would not have milk to offer, and the kid would hardly be interested in an empty breast. A rhyton filled with milk, instead of wine, which is usually taken for granted in ritual contexts, could, however, attract attention. The persistent references to milk in Orphic texts might support this interpretation. The Orphic mysteries, as in the fresco, can be understood as a kind of initiation rite or a passage from adolescent innocence into life as a man, with conjugal duties and, at the same time, according to Greek social practice, the right to take on young male lovers. As a husband and head of his own house, he would have this right in the Greek classical world; hence the transformation of Orpheus from mourning widower into a lover of males in the Legend. In Roman times, however, when homosexuality was not a socially accepted practice, a fresco such as this would have a slightly different meaning. Fertility and resurrection would still be central, but in relation to marriage, as an initiation rite. I am suggesting that the two fauns are about to be bound to each other in an Orphic wedding. The innocence of Orpheus and Eurydice on the day they were married is staged, before the reality of life—defined by its adversity to death—enters their world. Because death is always threatening, verses such as those on the Pelinna gold leaf were articulated as a way of escaping youthful death: “Say to Persephone, that Bacchios himself has released you.” Instead of being confronted

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with death, the young couple would—as a new version of Orpheus and Eurydice— be blessed with the permission of Bacchus and be fertile, like nature. This time, love would expel death, but only for as long as the course of nature permitted. In the end, all things living had to be reborn. The fresco, then, can be seen as a picture of an Orphic ritual that cherishes youthful love on earth for the purpose of natural sustainability through resurrection.

Love, Death, and Time Possibly the most repeated Orphic verse is, in different versions, “I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven” (see, e.g., Bernabé and San Cristóbal 2008: 10). The direct reference back to the creation of time in this verse, the link to nature through Orpheus’s ability to control animals, his travel to the netherworld, and the Orphic idea of reincarnation were the cogwheels of a sophisticated religious system. Orphism, one could say, encouraged a shared experience of redemption, but not for free: the adherents had to accept that resurrection happened at the cost of earthly love, no matter how strong and enduring. Love, in fact, paired with fertility, was central in the cult. On the one hand, we have the Legend of Orpheus, which first tells a story of pure and beautiful love, followed by grief and agony in confrontation with death. In the hours immediately following Eurydice’s death, Orpheus is hurled into a stage of emotional liminality. On the individual level, which he symbolizes, time seems to stop. On the other hand, we have the Orphic Theogony, which made it possible to find a remedy for grief in metempsychosis, or the endurance of transmigrating souls, which gave the adherents to the cult a sense of shared hope for the hereafter. The prospect of reincarnation connected human beings to the divine past, and placed the time of mankind between origin and end. It is usual to discuss Orphism in connection with death and mysteries related to the afterlife, but the cult also paid a lot of attention to love—in the translation of conjugal duties—as a necessity for re-creation. Above, based on the fresco in the Villa dei Misteri, I have suggested that marriages (planned by authorities or not) would be equally important as funerals in the cult of Orpheus, in particular in Roman times. Ensuring offspring would be of fundamental importance to the practicing of the cult, not only in terms of societal sustainability, but also for the concept of reincarnation. The Theogony and the Legend put together a dualistic allegory of two perceptions of time in relation to death: the cosmological eternity of the Theogony, and the limited lifetime on earth in the Legend. The cosmological eternity of the Theogony is possible because of fertility and reincarnation. The shortness of a lifetime stands out in relief with the loss of a loved one, as in the Legend. The driving force of the Theogony is fertility, and in the Legend, it is Orpheus’s love of Eurydice that sends him to Hades, not her death. Had he not loved her, he would not have made that excess. Without love as a variable, the Orpheus legend with its loss, hubris, and punishment would seem oddly detached and discrepant from the Orphic Theogony, with its complex teaching about reincarnation and eternal life. The junction between the Legend and the Theogony is love: the necessity of love for Orpheus, who cannot live without his Eurydice, and the necessity of love as the driving force for fertility in the Theogony.

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Given that love and fertility are the monitors of the Legend and the Theogony, respectively, they do not grow out of nothing, nor do they exist uncontrolled by the gods. Fertility and reproduction depend on time, and the experience of love can only be fully appreciated when it is acknowledged that it cannot, by the laws of nature—or here, the gods—last forever. In the Theogony, fertility, death, and a notion of eternal time in the idea of resurrection are central. In the Legend, the dominant themes are love, death, and a notion of time as abruptly ending. In both cases there is death, but with contrasting notions of time. In the fresco in the Villa dei Misteri, the two fauns on the bed symbolize a love like that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and at the same time the fertility of the Theogony, as they are flanked by Silenus and Selene. Love and fertility intersect the Legend and the Theogony in the fresco, and unify the two dimensions of time. The fresco is subtle, elegant, and poetic, and celebrates love as an equal to planned marriages in the performance of conjugal duties, which ensured offspring for the benefit of society. Love/fertility, death, and time were reciprocally dependent on each other, since none of these components would make sense without the others. Orphism, on the basis of the interpretation here, advocated sex for the purpose of upholding society, and spiritual love for the unification of humanity and the divine.

Marina Prusac-Lindhagen is an associate professor and Curator in Chief of Classical Archeology at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. From 2014 to 2016, she chaired the museum’s research council with seven members from a multiplicity of disciplines, and she has directed a number of research and excavation projects. She has organized seven international conferences and curated two international museum exhibitions. Her doctoral thesis is called “Landscape and Cultural Identities in the Southern Balkans 500 bc–ad 500” (Acta Humaniora 312, 2007), and she has also written the monograph From Face to Face: Recarving Roman Portraits and the Late-Antique Portrait Arts (Brill Academic Publisher, 2011; 2nd edition, 2016) and thirty-two peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. She has edited six anthologies (Ashgate and Oxbow) and journal special issues.

References Aristophanes. 1938. Birds. In The Complete Greek Drama, vol. 2, trans. Eugene O’Neill. New York: Random House, 883–1058. Bernabé, Alberto, and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal. 2008. Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Berntzen, Arve O. 2009. Orfeus og tekster fra den orfiske tradisjonen (Verdens hellige skrifter). Oslo: De norske bokklubbene. Bottini, Angelo. 1992. Archeologia della salvezza. Milan: Longanesi. Bremmer, Jan. 2002. The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife. New York: Routledge. Empedocles. 1995. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, trans. Maureen Rosemary Wright. London: PhilPapers. Euripides. 2002. Bacchae. In Euripides: Bacchae, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus, trans. David Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 122–290. ———. 1994. Alcestis. In Euripides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, trans. David Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 151281.

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———. 1995. Hippolytos. In Euripides: Children of Heracles, Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, trans. David Kovacs. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 117–263. Graves, Robert. 1955. The Greek Myths. London: Penguin Books. Herodotus. 1920. The Histories, trans. Alfred Denis Godley. Cambridge, MA: Brill. Hesiod. 1970. Theogony. In Hesiod: The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 78–155. Homer. 1924–25. The Iliad, vols. 1–2, trans. Augustus Taber Murray. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press. Ibycus. 1991. Fragments. In Greek Lyric, vol. 3, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, and Others, trans. David A. Campbell. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 90–136. Janko, Richard. 2002. “The Derveni Papyrus: An Interim Text.” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 141: 1–62. Ovid. 2002. Amores. In Ovid: Amores—Kjærlighetseventyr, trans. Thea Selliaas Thorsen. Oslo: Gyldendal, 33–161. ———. 2008. Metamorphoses. Trans. Alan D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plato. 2013. Republic, Volume I: Books 1–5, trans. Christopher Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 2–460. ———. 2013. Republic, Volume II: Books 6–10, trans. Christopher Emlyn-Jones, William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 2–490. ———. 1909. Symposium. In The Symposium of Plato, trans. Robert Gregg Bury. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 1–179. ———. 1996. Cratylus. In Plato: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. Harold N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 1–191. ———. 1990. Ion. In Plato: The Statesman, Philebus. Ion, trans. Walter Rangeley Maitland Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, Harvard University Press, 401–47. ———. 1917. Apology. In Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold N. Fowler. London: Loeb, Heinemann, 63–145. Sauron, Gilles. 1998. La grande fresque de la Villa des Mystères à Pompéi. Paris: A et J Picard. Taylor, John H., ed. 2010. Journey Through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. London: British Museum. Torjussen, Stian S. 2014. “Milk as a Symbol of Immortality in the ‘Orphic’ Gold Tablets from Thurii and Pelinna.” Nordlit 33: 35–46. Tsantsanoglou, Kyriakos, George M. Parássoglou, and Theokritos Kouremenos, eds. 2006. The Derveni Papyrus. Studi e testi per il Corpus dei papiri filosofici greci e latini 13. Florence: Casa Editrice Leo S. Olschki. Virgil. 1930. Georgics. In Virgil: Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I-VI, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough. London: Loeb, Heinemann, 80–137.

CHAPTER 3

Death before Time Mythical Time in Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Rune Nyord

Introduction The ancient Egyptians are justly famous for their elaborate funerary preparations evidencing an extraordinary concern with the intersections of time, death, and materiality. In modern imagination, the Egyptian mummy is the clearest sign of this concern with investing the dead with an eternal and unchangeable form. From recent analyses, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that the specific focus on the long-lasting external shape of the mummy may ultimately derive more from the observable effects of mummification than the exact aims of the Egyptians. In other words, we can perceive from archaeological finds that mummies have often “survived” more or less intact, but that does not necessarily mean that this was the exact purpose with which the Egyptians made them. Recent research (Nyord 2013; Riggs 2014) thus tends to focus less on the modern idea of preserving the body, and more on the inherent notion of transformation in turning the deceased into an ancestor by ritual and material means. The way in which this was done in practice invariably involves identification of the deceased with gods, especially those responsible for the creation of the world or its cyclical renewal. The individual deceased in this way becomes closely involved in, or even responsible for, the creation of the cosmos in primeval times. This in turn leads to some difficult paradoxes when viewed through the lens of modern conceptions of time. Thus there seems to be a fundamental contradiction in the ability of an ordinary human being with a life span limited by its temporal bounds, not only to become a god, but in this capacity to have created the world at the beginning of time. And yet, this is precisely what we find in the texts from Egyptian burials. In order to examine, and hopefully resolve, these questions, we will begin by taking a closer look at the funerary texts in which these ideas are most poignantly expressed in an attempt to separate the threads of time, myth, ritual, and death entangled in this idea.

Egyptian Texts for the Dead The ancient Egyptian category of “mortuary literature” consists of a sizeable collection of ritual texts of diverse origin that accompanied the deceased in the grave. This characteristically Egyptian text genre is first attested on the walls of the pyr-

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amid of King Unas in the twenty-fourth century BC and continues through the second millennium, on the coffins of nobles of the Middle Kingdom, to the most famous version written on papyrus scrolls, the so-called Book of the Dead of the New Kingdom, and beyond. Among this group of spells is a particular subgroup explicitly intended to “transform” the deceased into various gods or divine beings. This transformation is accomplished by ascribing a variety of mythological roles to the deceased, especially roles of primeval or cosmic gods involved in the creation or regeneration of the world (Buchberger 1993; Servajean 2004). As an example of these texts, the beginning of the so-called seventy-ninth chapter of the Book of the Dead (Lüscher 2006: 174–210; English translation in Quirke 2013: 188–89), quoted here from the version in the Papyrus of Nu from the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1450 BC), reads: Spell for taking shape as the chief of the tribunal. Recitation by the estate manager of the treasurer Nu, born to the estate manager of the treasurer Amenhotep, true of voice [i.e., deceased]: “I am Atum who made the sky, who shaped what exists, who came forth from the earth and created the seeds of all that is, who gave birth to the gods, the great god who came into being by himself, the lord of life who makes the pantheon flourish.”

The contrast between the two parts of the quotation is glaring: First the deceased is introduced as the speaker of the spell by referring to him with his mundane administrative title and filiation, only to move on to claiming the loftiest status imaginable, namely, that of the primeval creator god Atum from whom the whole cosmos and all the gods emanated. To ordinary Western intuitions, this poses some immediate problems, such as: How can the deceased be responsible for the creation of a world of which he himself is part? And if the deceased as a distinct individual “becomes” the creator god, what happens to the already existing creator god? One tempting way to dissolve these paradoxes would be to suggest that the texts should not be taken so literally. On this view, the deceased does not actually “become” the primeval god Atum by and from whom the whole cosmos and the divine pantheon becomes differentiated, but rather the deceased appropriates certain capacities of the god without any fundamental merging of their identities (Servajean 2004). However, such a reading goes flatly against the wording in many of the spells and leaves a number of other problems unsolved. This raises the question of whether there is a way to adjust our understanding of other parts of the conceptual framework of time, death, and myth, to make it possible to make sense of the fundamental idea of a deceased person becoming responsible for the creation of the world. A suggestion along these lines will be made by exploring first the relation in Egyptian thought between the domains of myth and time, and then the related role of myth and ritual, in order to address finally the interplay between myth, time, and transformation.

Time and Myth: Egyptian Hemerologies A clue to ancient understandings of the interrelationship between time and mythology may be found in Egyptian thoughts about the calendar. The Egyptian calendar consisted of three seasons of four months with thirty days each, in addition

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to which a liminal period of five days labeled “those outside the year” (regarded as the time of birth of the major gods) preceded the beginning of the new year. Not surprisingly for an agrarian society, the calendar’s structure is shaped by the main events in the agricultural cycle (Figure 3.1), with the seasons being named Akhet, “Inundation” (after the annual flood of the River Nile covering the fields of the floodplain with fertile silt), Peret, “Sprouting” (referring to the growth of the crops planted once the Inundation had receded), and Shemu, “Heat” (the spring and early summer months when harvest took place) (Eyre 1995; Winand 2005). The beginning of the year was inaugurated by the first appearance in the morning sky after a seventy-day period of invisibility (heliacal rising) of the star Sirius in mid-July that coincided roughly with the beginning of the annual Inundation of the Nile. This basic calendrical framework plays a role in a wide range of cultural contexts, including cult, administration, and everyday affairs. The main turning points in the annual cycle in particular were deeply invested with religious meanings. Thus, the beginning of the Figure 3.1. Schematic rendering of the three Inundation was regarded as a complete reset of the seasons of the ancient Egyptian calendar year. cosmos renewing the depleted powers of fertility of the land, and the sowing season was connected with the burial of the grain god, Osiris. This direct effect of mythological events on daily life is particularly clear in a group of texts drawing on the calendar to structure mythological episodes, the socalled calendars of lucky and unlucky days, also called hemerologies, from Greek hemera, “day” (Leitz 1994, with a convenient introduction in Troy 1987 and recent discussion in Lehoux 2007: 127–37). An early, minimal version of such a text from the Middle Kingdom (Collier and Quirke 2004: 26–27) consists simply of a table of days of the month numbered from one to thirty with a brief remark as to the auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of each date. As it offers no clues to the methods behind the assignment of auspiciousness, the main importance of the text is to testify that the fundamental idea behind such calendars dates back at least as far as the early second millennium BC. The most detailed surviving manuscripts are somewhat later, stemming from the Ramesside period around 1200 BC (Leitz 1994: 6; see Naether and Ross 2008 for the later history of Egyptian hemerologies). Presenting a sequential list of dates of the year, these texts offer predictions of the general auspiciousness or inauspiciousness of each third of each day of the year. Thus, the format “Auspicious– Auspicious–Inauspicious” indicates that the first two-thirds of the day in question are auspicious, while the last one-third is inauspicious. Often sections also include more specific advice about particular activities that should or should not be undertaken, with reference to cosmic or mythic events serving as the background of the prognoses. An example of an entry reads: “Fourth month of Akhet, day 6: Inauspicious–Inauspicious–Inauspicious. You must not go out on it at noon. Standstill of the barque of [the sun god] Re in order to vanquish the foes in a moment on this day” (Leitz 1994: 155). One of the manuscripts of the main hemerology now in the Cairo Museum (JE 86637) relates the mythical origin of the text itself by presenting

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it in the introduction as having been “made” by one group of gods, “collected” by another, and finally “put together” by the scribal god Thoth, to be “found” subsequently in a temple library (Leitz 1994: 11). How was the auspiciousness of a particular day determined? In some cases, the connection is very general, so that a positive mythological event is understood to underlie a generally auspicious day. In other cases, the connection is much more specific, so that particular actions, such as sailing on the Nile, can be auspicious or inauspicious because of its association with a mythological event. Similarly, predictions are made about the manner of death of a person born on a particular day depending on the mythological events characterizing the day in question. In the following, I will examine some examples of each of these phenomena to illustrate the way these texts connect mythological events with daily life experience. In many cases, the degree of auspiciousness of a given day is connected to a mythological event in a fairly straightforward way. For example, the birth of the sun god, Re-Harakhte, on the very first day of the year is auspicious through and through, whereas events connected to the murder and dismemberment of the god of death and agriculture, Osiris, are generally inauspicious (see Leitz 1994: 452–79 for the underlying principles). More revealing about the conceptual background of the hemerologies than these very general correspondences, however, are the specific injunctions warning against particular actions with reference to mythological events. Some of these concern the general avoidance of destructive forces that are afoot on a given day, such as the first month of Akhet, day twelve, on which the sun god is said to have fought a group of opponents, and on this basis the text warns against going out before sunset. Here, the implication seems to be that one could oneself become a victim in this battle if the warning is not heeded. In other cases, particular human actions can be directly associated with those of the mythological events. Thus when the goddess Hathor, accompanied by a group of wind spirits, inaugurate the Nile flood on the first month of Akhet, day four, one “must not sail in a boat on this day” (Leitz 1994: 16–17). Similarly, on day eleven of the same month, no fire may be lit, because the day is connected with the appearance of a “great, raging flame.” In meteorological terms this flame is connected to an eighteen-day period of heat beginning on this date, while in mythology the flame is the punishing goddess setting out to destroy mankind at the sun god’s bidding (ibid.: 22). Kindling a flame would thus align the person doing so with the destructive forces at work on this day. In a similar manner, three different dates are associated with the transgressive acts of the crocodile god Sobek (Figure 3.2), who swallowed the body parts of the dismembered Osiris and was punished by having his tongue cut out. To avoid association with this destructive deed, a series of prohibitions are made: one against eating fish (first month of Akhet, day seventeen), one against purifying oneself in any water or sailing on the river (second month of Akhet, day twenty-two), and one against eating anything from the river (fourth month of Peret, day twenty-five). As the final type of connections to be discussed here, a number of dates contain a prediction of the manner of death of persons born on that particular day (Troy 1987: 136–37), as the manner of death was thought generally in ancient Egypt to be fixed from birth (cf. Quaegebeur 1975: 126–29). The most positive outcome of such a prediction would be dying at a ripe old age (e.g., fourth month of Akhet, day ten) according to Egyptian ideals, or even “as a nobleman among the people” (second month of Shemu, day sixteen). While such auspicious predic-

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Figure 3.2.  Head of a statue of the crocodile god Sobek. In mythology Sobek was known to have swallowed the god Osiris, an inauspicious deed for which he was punished by having his tongue cut out. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, AN1912.605. Photo: Graeme Churchard.

tions are associated with generally auspicious days, they are often not motivated further. Less auspicious fates, on the other hand, are often clearly connected to particular mythological events. Such predicted demises include dying at the hand of animals, such as a crocodile (e.g., first month of Akhet, day three, and second month of Akhet, day twenty-three—again connected to the myth of the dismembered Osiris being swallowed by Sobek), or a particular illness, such as the “plague of the year” (third month of Akhet, day twenty), a seasonal illness connected to the annual Inundation and associated in mythological terms with the destructive rage of the feline goddess Bastet. Common to all of these examples is the idea that the mythological events connected to a given day directly influence what kind of activities will meet with success or failure on that day. This indicates that the mythological narratives are thought to underlie and affect the human experience of time. A number of features in the hemerologies thus point in the same direction regarding the underlying role played by mythology: the mythological events are not purely matters of the past in a strictly chronological manner, but rather can be seen to recur regularly. This is perhaps most clear in the case of natural phenomena such as the birth of the sun god or the arrival of the Nile flood, which clearly happen repeatedly each year,

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ensuring the renewed relevance of the underlying mythology. But the prohibitions indicating that ordinary human beings can either help or hinder the ongoing mythological events are perhaps the clearest sign that the mythological events are not located solely in the deep past, but rather form recurrent patterns with direct effects on human lives. In this sense, the Egyptian hemerologies differ from other forms of divination, such as Carlos Ginzburg’s (1980: 13–14) reading of Mesopotamian divination, in that they do not seem to be based on any notion of communication or clues from the gods (although as seen above, the text of the hemerology itself laid claim to a divine origin). Rather, the point of contact between the mythological realm of the gods on the one hand and the everyday life of humans on the other is the specific mythological event(s) taking place on a particular day, regardless of whether it has left lasting observable traces in the world. This difference sets the hemerologies apart from so-called etiological myths (from Greek aition, “cause”) serving to provide mythological explanations of directly observable phenomena such as features of the local landscape or the name or other characteristics of a particular ritual. The etiological myths thus refer to the origin of a specific phenomenon, whereas hemerologies are general in the sense that they establish the global auspiciousness of each individual day to any person. In both cases, mythology is used to provide a background in the past for phenomena in the present, but the difference in the underlying logic is instructive for developing a broader conception of the function of mythology. The consequence of this distinction is that whereas the narratives found in etiologies can be (and in modern scholarship usually have been) understood as concrete historical background located in the deep past, such a reading is impossible for the hemerologies. Instead, the hemerologies are concerned with what might be termed patterns or schemata that are not so much repeated as reinstantiated or actualized on each date. As will be seen below, however, this general understanding can in fact be used to achieve a broader view of etiological myths as well. It is sometimes suggested (most recently in Porceddu et al. 2008: 328) that the connection between individual actions and mythological events in the calendars should be understood as dependent on the pleasure or displeasure of the gods involved. In this view, good luck can be seen as a divine reward and bad luck as divine punishment. However, the texts themselves do not really offer any support for this view, as it is the days themselves to which auspiciousness or inauspiciousness is ascribed. It thus seems likely that this idea may be too dependent on monotheistic expectations of rewards and punishments by an omniscient deity. Judging from the Egyptian texts, there seems to be a more direct cause-and-effect relation between the mythological event and the kind of human undertakings that will succeed or fail on a given day. This gives an overall impression of a drama of creation and destruction on a cosmic scale, which individual agents can either help further, or attempt to oppose at their peril.

Time, Myth, and Coming into Being Before moving on to exploring the implications of this view of myth in ancient Egyptian ritual, it is worth pointing out that illuminating parallels can be found in other cultures. The overall picture as explored above is one where experiential phenomena are thought to be structured by underlying relations—expressed here

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in mythological language—which are analogous across different scales and domains. Such a worldview is characteristic of what Philippe Descola (2010, 2013) has termed “analogistic” ontologies, a category covering most, if not all, early literate societies. Thus, it is no surprise that very similar phenomena are found in other divinatory traditions. A particularly close parallel is offered by the so-called daybooks (rishu, 日書) deposited in Chinese tombs from the Warring States period to the Han Dynasty (c. 453 BC–AD 220) (Lai 2015: 167–70; Poo 1998: 69–92). Much like the Egyptian hemerologies, the Chinese daybooks connect individual days with particular mythological events, and on the basis of potential connections to the mythology, particular actions are classified as auspicious or inauspicious. However, apart from mythology, the Chinese daybooks also draw on other significant cultural classification systems similarly used to express hidden tendencies of, and relations between, observable phenomena. The most famous such classification system is that of the “five agents” (wu xing, 五行, with the categories of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water), while other similar systems also occur in the daybooks, such as those known as the “ten stems” or “twelve branches” (Lai 2015: 169–70; Poo 1998: 69–71). From a more theoretical perspective, the role of mythology as recurring hidden and underlying patterns giving rise to observable phenomena can be compared to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s (2014) interpretation of myth as describing a “precosmos.” In this state of being the differences found in the world (e.g., between humans and animals) have not yet been articulated. In comparison with this Amazonian view, the agrarian ancient Egyptian mind-set is highly focused on the cyclical establishment and dissolving of such categories of being. This is usually conceptualized as a movement from the “precosmological” unity of the creator god Atum and the undifferentiated primeval ocean Nun, where all difference is dissolved, to the “million things” of the created world (cf. Nyord 2014: 39–42, 2015: 287–88). At the most basic level, mythological events can then be seen as concerned with establishing, transforming, or dissolving such distinctions. In this view, the creation of the world moves away from the primordial unity through the establishment of a successive series of dichotomies (Englund 1987). A very similar idea is found in Terence Evens’s (2008: 67–68) nondualistic distinction between matter as characterized by clear dichotomies and spirit as characterized by “ethereal” boundaries. In this manner, creation and regeneration can be understood as a movement toward the countless clearly articulated differences found in the material world, whereas decay and destruction can be seen as a movement in the opposite direction, toward blurring and dissolving these differences. Against this background, the Egyptian hemerologies offer a clear indication of the close connection between time and the continuous coming into being of the world, presenting a first step toward a better understanding of the association between mythology and death occupying us here. A next step is found in the ways in which mythological patterns of the type discussed here can be instantiated through the performance of rituals.

Myth and Ritual As seen above, the Egyptian hemerologies draw on mythology as a kind of technical language used to express the ongoing processes of the world’s coming into be-

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ing. This approach to mythology is not merely found in divination, where actions can be aligned with mythological patterns in a more or less auspicious way. It can also be deployed in the opposite direction, where a situation is altered by manipulating its underlying pattern, as found very frequently in ancient Egyptian ritual. A group of spells inscribed in a number of coffins of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom in the early second millennium BC codify the mythological knowledge behind calendrical rituals, especially those connected to the phases of the moon. Taking their point of departure in particular rites and observances, the texts provide mythological explanations of such actions. For example, one text takes up the question of “why a braided lock is made for a man,” interpreting a characteristic feature of the traditional hairstyle of the high priest of the sun god in the city of Heliopolis (De Buck 1938: 266–388; English translation in Faulkner 1973: 132–39; cf. Eaton 2011). The texts present the deceased in whose coffin they are written as someone possessing this knowledge. By being initiated into this mythological background, the deceased is able to participate in the mythological events described and the cycles of destruction and regeneration they signify (Jørgensen 2006). The texts are often regarded as purely etiological in the sense discussed above, where they would relate primeval events in the deep past commemorated in the rituals. However, the view of mythology developed here casts a slightly different light on these sources and allows them to be understood in another way. The beginning of the first of the spells in the sequence can be used to show the structure of the texts and the kind of connections they posit: I know the Ennead [i.e., pantheon of gods] of Heliopolis into which even the Greatest of Seers [the high priest of Heliopolis] was not initiated, the diminishing of the mouth at the Senut-festival, the aggression of the Destroyer against the heir of Heliopolis, and I know why a braided lock was made for a man: It is [the sun god] Re disputing with the Serpent-who-is-in-his-Flame about the division of Heliopolis, and his mouth was injured. That is the “becoming” [kheper] of the reduction in the month-festival. Then the Serpent-who-is-in-his-Flame said: “I will take my harpoon [maba], and I will inherit this city!” That is the “becoming” of the group of 30 [maba] [days]. Then Re said: “I will erect my flagpoles [senut] against him to oust him!” That is the “becoming” of the Senut-festival. (De Buck 1938: 272–81)

The passage illustrates two main strategies for establishing connections between mythological events and ritual. One is found in the first example, where the injury to the mouth of the sun god Re is presented as the mythological pattern behind the “reduction” in the month festival (Figure 3.3). The monthly cycle is widely regarded as a periodical process of deterioration (waning) and healing (waxing), and the month festival occurs at the first visibility of the new moon, that is to say, at the point in the cycle when the moon as it its “weakest.” In mythological terms this corresponds to the injury to Re’s mouth. Thus, a metaphorical connection is established between the visible moon disc and the god’s mouth. A different conceptual mechanism, that of a pun (or paronomasia), forms the basis of the two following connections. Here, a similarity in phonetic structure is used to establish connections between mythological entities on the one hand (in this case, maba, “harpoon”) and ritual phenomena (in this case, the division of the month into maba, “thirty,” days) on the other. Materiality lies at the heart of both types of connection in drawing on the sensory qualities either of what is referred to (metaphor) or the sounds of the word itself (paronomasia). We tend intuitively to deny such connections any real

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Figure 3.3. Facsimile of a tomb painting of the sun god Re as a cat fighting an enemy in serpent form from the Book of the Dead. The myth of the primeval battle between Re and one or more serpents in the city of Heliopolis is referred to in a number of Egyptian texts. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 30.4.1. Photo: Rogers Fund, 1930.

significance, precisely because they draw on an excess of meaning going beyond the conventional coupling of a signifier with a signified. Thus, if the moon as Re’s mouth is just a metaphor that means precisely that this identification has no relevance in the “real” world, and similarly, except in the boundary case where a plausible etymological connection can be made between them, two words with similar sounds cannot be thought to be “really” cognate (hence the mostly humorous modern use of “puns”). However, as was seen above, an underlying principle in the ancient Egyptian hemerologies and ritual interpretations is precisely that of taking such material connections seriously. In ancient Egyptian terms, a key concept in connecting myth and ritual in this way is that of kheper, rendered in the passage quoted as “becoming.” Usually translated by such terms as “happen,” “come into being,” “transform,” or, as a noun, “form” or “shape” (as in the transformation spell quoted in the beginning of this chapter), the term is often understood in passages like this to indicate a straightforward etiology in the sense discussed above: that of a primeval event in the deep past fixating the rites once and for all. However, the word is written by the hieroglyphic ideogram of a scarab, which offers a clue to the way such processes were understood by the Egyptians more in line with the view of mythology found in the hemerologies (cf. also Nyord forthcoming). The scarab (Scarabaeus sacer) is known for assembling balls of dung by rolling them around, often making them reach a size significantly larger than the insect itself. This offers a striking image of a dynamic, but largely hidden, force (the

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Figure 3.4. Pectoral worn on the chest of a mummy depicting a winged scarab pushing the solar disk before it with the front legs. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 30.3.34. Photo: Rogers Fund, 1930.

scarab), only the effects of which are directly observable (the movement of the ball). In religious iconography, this image is often associated with the sun, especially at dawn, with a cosmic scarab thought to push the visible solar disc over the horizon at sunrise. This dynamic aspect of the concept of kheper is difficult to capture in translation. Thus, it is tempting to render kheper in connections like the above as “structure,” “origin,” or similar, with the mythology forming the underlying pattern of the observable ritual and cosmic events. However, this would miss the nuance that the mythology simultaneously serves as a dynamic “push” bringing these states of affairs into being. James Allen (1988) has suggested that the term is best rendered as “develop,” which captures the gradual nature of the process very well, but downplays the ongoing and continuous aspect, as a “development” tends to have a clear beginning and end. Instead, in the translation above, I proposed a rendering in such connections of “becoming,” understood as the hidden process behind the actualization of phenomena in the world. As seen above, the technical language in ancient Egypt for describing and analyzing this ongoing process was precisely that of mythology. Another example of the use of the concept of kheper to connect myth and ritual comes from an illustrated ritual papyrus excavated as part of an extensive collection of texts and ritual paraphernalia from the late Thirteenth Dynasty (c. 1650 BC) tomb of a person whose name has not been preserved (Parkinson 2011). The so-called Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus (named after the place where it was

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found) contains a sequence of scenes of a ritual mainly focused on the statue of the king Senwosret I (1971–1926 BC) (Geisen 2012; Lorand 2009; Sethe 1928). Each of the scenes shows a vignette of the ritual action, above which the rite is described along with a brief mythological correspondence in the following way: “The ‘becoming’ [kheper] of 8 jars being brought before the processional boat by the royal companions: It is Thoth placing Osiris on the back of Seth, so that he carries him” (Sethe 1928: pl. 12, l.5). The two parts again correspond to the pattern found in the coffin inscriptions just discussed, although the sequence in which the two parts are presented is reversed here: the underlying mythology is again regarded as the kheper or “becoming” of the ritual action. In this way, carrying out the ritual action becomes a way to instantiate the mythological pattern in a concrete situation. A final illustration of the role of kheper in bridging the gap between observable phenomena and the underlying virtual patterns provides a slightly different perspective on the interrelationship. In a hymn to the god Osiris inscribed on the stela of a man named Wepwawethetep, now in the British Museum, the god is presented as a pivot of the regenerative cycles of the cosmos, notably the solar cycle: “Hail to you, Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, son of Nut . . . for whose sake the Sun rises to see his [sc., Osiris’s] ‘beauty’ [neferu] on earth, and it sets likewise to see him in the ‘becoming’ [kheperu] in the underworld” (Budge 1912: pl. 28, ll. 8–9). The word literally meaning “beauty” or “perfection” [neferu] is very often used in cultic contexts to refer to the temple statue, which is the site of the god’s manifestation and presence on earth. This visible aspect of the god during the day is contrasted here with the hidden processes taking place in the underworld during the night. Thus, once again the presence of the god in the experiential world (corresponding to the ritual level in the two preceding examples) is predicated on a hidden process of “becoming” (corresponding to the mythological background event). Characteristically, it is again the domain of rituals that offers the most direct contact to this mythological sphere. Thus, rituals are presented in texts such as those cited here as a means of instantiating and actualizing mythological patterns in the world of human experience.

Myth, Primeval Time, and Mortuary Transformation Having explored this role of myth as a technical language for describing the hidden, continuous processes behind observable phenomena, it becomes easier to understand the function of mythology and transformation in the sphere of mortuary religion. The overarching mythological pattern relevant to this domain is that of the death and dismemberment of the god Osiris at the hands of his brother Seth, and the subsequent restoration and transformation of the body of the god mirrored in the ritual act of mummification (Nyord 2013: 196–97). A closely connected theme in the mythology of Osiris, also drawn on extensively in Egyptian mortuary ritual, is that of the transference of the inheritance of Osiris to his son and rightful heir Horus, as opposed to the murderous Seth, who sought to become king through illegitimate violence. The relationship between Osiris and Horus in this way offers a prototype of filial succession and broader connections between the living and their ancestors. A complementary image of cosmic regeneration is offered by the various natural cycles observed by the Egyptians, the waxing and waning of the moon (as

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Figure 3.5.  The mummified Osiris revivified by his son Horus (left) and sister-wife Isis (right, and in the guise of a bird over the phallus of Osiris) from the temple of Seti I at Abydos. The myth of Osiris and the transference of his vital force (and royal office) to his son Horus provided a striking pattern for the Egyptian understanding of life and death. Photo: Olaf Tausch.

seen above), the daily and annual movement of the sun, the annual disappearance and reappearance of constellations in the night sky, and the all-important annual return of the Nile flood. These images of eternal recurrence complement that of the unchanging latent existence of Osiris manifested in his son Horus, corresponding to some extent to the Egyptian concepts of neheh (eternal recurrence) and djet (eternal stasis), as explored by Egyptologist Jan Assmann (2011; cf. Nyord 2013: 201–2). Against the background of mythological patterns and their ritual and cosmic instantiation, the idea that first set us off on this exploration of Egyptian thought, namely, that the deceased is transformed into a primeval deity, takes on a slightly different meaning than what we might have attributed to it at first. We can begin by noting that on the basis of the ritual texts quoted above, the idea of “becoming” (kheper) a god can be understood as a ritual instantiation of a mythological pattern. This connection is underlined by the fact that some of the transformation spells bear a close resemblance to hymns to the god in question that serve ritually to encapsulate and actualize the nature of the god. This connection can be seen most clearly in two hymns to the crocodile god Sobek, showing a number of sim-

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ilarities to spells for becoming Sobek from roughly contemporary coffin inscriptions (as already pointed out by Gardiner 1955: 45). The main structural difference is that the hymns are spoken to the god (in the second person), while the transformation spells are spoken by the god (in the first person). Transformation spells also contain more specific ritual allusions, such as the following references to the fifteenth-day (i.e., full moon) festival in a spell for “Making ‘becoming’ as [or, taking shape as] a god, causing the darkness to become light” (Book of the Dead, chap. 80; Lüscher 2006: 213–37; Quirke 2013: 190): “I have saved the eye from its void before the 15th-day festival had come. I have judged Seth in the upper houses as well as the elder with him. I have equipped Thoth in the temple of the moon before the 15th-day festival had come” (Lüscher 2006: 222–24). The period before the fifteenth-day festival is that of the waxing moon (a variant reading has “the 6th-day festival” instead, thus emphasizing more specifically the first part of this period). The references to making darkness light in the title and elsewhere in the spell thus refer to the role of the speaker in ensuring that the waxing of the moon takes place. In mythological terms, this is referred to in the quoted passage as the healing of the eye of Horus, which was injured in his battle with Seth, along with the judgment of Seth for this misdeed. In the myth, this healing role is usually ascribed to the god Thoth, so by equipping Thoth to perform this act, the speaker thus becomes identified as the underlying dynamic or ultimate cause of the process of regeneration. As with the perhaps at first sight more striking example of the primeval creator god cited in the beginning of this chapter, once again the main point is for the speaker of the spell to become responsible for the cosmic cycles, and especially for the creative, regenerating half of these cycles. This part of the cycles corresponds to the differentiation of the world from the primeval unity in mythology, or in astronomical terms, the first (waxing) half of the month as measured from the new moon. As was seen above, ancient Egyptian ontology is structured by the pattern of a continuum between primeval unity on the one hand and the observable multiplicity characteristic of the created world on the other. The movement between these two poles takes place continuously and is described, and ritually manipulated, through the language of mythology. On this basis, it stands to reason that death can be conceptualized as a movement away from the multiplicity of the created world and back toward the primeval unity. Figure 3.6.  Amulet of the god Thoth in the shape of a Perhaps less obvious is the consequence baboon holding the eye of Horus. Thoth is credited with drawn by the Egyptian transformation spells, restoring the eye of Horus, which had been wounded by that the way to “become,” for example, Atum is Seth. The healing of the eye thus becomes a potent model for regeneration of all kinds, seen especially clearly in the to carry out the deeds that Atum is known to waxing (restoration) and waning (decline) of the moon. have carried out, especially in terms of creating Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 08.480.80. the world. In other words, in order to regress Photo: Brooklyn Museum, 08.480.80_front_PS2.jpg.

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to the “precosmological” world, it is necessary to take on the role of creating the cosmos through differentiation. In one sense, this is simply because that is what playing that particular mythological role entails. On a more abstract level, this also implies that being located in a particular part of the ontological continuum is equal to performing the particular role in the creation of the cosmos associated with that position. The mortuary spells, with their ability to embed the deceased in primeval myths, is one way to accomplish this, or perhaps one aspect of the necessary transformation, and one that offers insight into the underlying concepts. But the material aspects of the procedure are equally important, although they can be more difficult to “read” and thus easier to misunderstand. Thus, as discussed in the beginning, whereas modern Europeans were struck by the well-preserved and lifelike nature of Egyptian mummies, this is unlikely to have been more than a side effect of a series of material manipulations aiming instead at transforming the deceased into a primeval being. Similarly, as shown by their intricate decoration programs, coffins from the Middle Kingdom were also able to effect this transformation, as the material properties of the coffin made it possible for the deceased to oscillate between different primeval roles, notably those of the gods Atum and Osiris (Nyord 2014).

Perspectives As seen above, the framework of Egyptian conceptions of primeval time and myth goes a long way toward explaining the seemingly paradoxical notion of the deceased “becoming” gods involved in the creation of the world—a creation better seen as continuous and ongoing than as a fixed deed performed once and for all in primeval times. However, this framework also raises a number of questions concerning the broader place of such spells in Egyptian thought about postmortem existence. The first such question concerns where these spells come from prior to being inscribed on coffins and funerary papyri. Over fifty years ago, Walter Federn (1960) suggested that the transformation spells might have their origin in meditation practices that would have given practitioners a mystical experience of merging with the god in question. A significant problem with this idea is that we have no evidence, direct or indirect, of such meditative practices from ancient Egypt. On the other hand, the more fundamental idea that the transformation spells were used in other, nonfunerary contexts by the living seems very likely in principle, although difficult to substantiate in practice, since we only know them from the copies written on coffins. As noted above, some transformation spells bear quite a close resemblance to hymns to the gods such as would have been used in the temple cult, and on the whole it seems likely that such a setting would be a main candidate for a primary use of the spells. This idea finds corroboration in a subgroup of transformation spells aimed at becoming not the deity him- or herself, but rather the scribe of the deity (Nyord 2015). These spells show that the identity as scribe is closely connected to a priestly role in the cult and festivals of the god in question, and that performing these rituals in fact makes the scribe take on the role, or even identity, of the god. Such a background, while clearly conjectural, might help to explain the focus on the creative and regenerative deeds of the gods.

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Another important question concerns the role of “becoming” various gods in the broader mortuary thinking of the ancient Egyptians. Modern Egyptology has inherited a number of fundamental expectations about “afterlife beliefs” from the nineteenth-century roots of the discipline. Before widespread access to Egyptian written sources there was a strong expectation that Egyptian mortuary religion should be concerned with issues of salvation leading to an eternal personal afterlife, and as the sources were gradually examined, they tended to be fit into this interpretive framework (Nyord 2018). The idea of participating in the world’s creation and regeneration and to give up one’s personal identity for that of a creator god as found in the transformation spells does not square well with this expectation. Correspondingly, like many other mortuary spells, the transformation spells are usually understood as a means to an end, representing a necessary step on the way toward the eternal afterlife that one expects but hardly ever finds in practice in the texts. It seems that an understanding of Egyptian mortuary thinking that took its point of departure in texts like the transformation spells, where the personhood of the deceased is apparently dissolved in order to enter fixed mythological and ritual roles in the regeneration of the world, would come to a rather different result than the traditional approach based on nineteenth-century expectations. These questions lead well beyond what can be discussed here, but they do show that there is still much work to be done to understand the role of primeval mythological events in ancient Egyptian thinking about death, and the temporal and material techniques connecting myth and death, on the Egyptians’ own terms.

Rune Nyord is an Egyptologist and Research Associate at Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on ancient Egyptian religion, and he is currently working on a book exploring the conceptual underpinnings of the mortuary religion of the Middle Kingdom. He is the author of Breathing Flesh: Conceptions of the Body in the Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2009), and coeditor of Being in Ancient Egypt: Thoughts on Agency, Materiality and Cognition (Archaeopress, 2009), Lotus and Laurel: Studies on Ancient Egyptian Language and Religion in Honour of Paul John Frandsen (Museum Tusculanum Press, 2015), and a special issue of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections with the title Egyptology and Anthropology: Historiography, Theoretical Exchange, and Conceptual Development (no. 17, 2018).

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Descola, Philippe, ed. 2010. La Fabrique des images: Visions du monde et formes de la représentation. Paris: Musée du quai Branly/Somogy éditions d’Art. ———. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Eaton, Katherine. 2011. “Monthly Lunar Festivals in the Mortuary Realm: Historical Patterns and Symbolic Motifs.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 70 (2): 229–45. Englund, Gertie. 1987. “God as a Frame of Reference: On Thinking and Concepts of Thought in Ancient Egypt.” In The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians: Cognitive Structures and Popular Expressions, ed. G. Englund, 7–28. Uppsala: Gustavianum. Evens, Terence M. S. 2008. Anthropology as Ethics: Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice. New York: Berghahn Books. Eyre, Christopher. 1995. “The Agricultural Cycle, Farming and Water Management in the Ancient Near East.” In Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 1, ed. J. M. Sasson, 175–89. New York: Scribner. Faulkner, Raymond O. 1973. The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, vol. 1, Spells 1–354. Warminster: Aris & Philips. Federn, Walter. 1960. “The ‘Transformations’ in the Coffin Texts: A New Approach.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 19 (4): 241–57. Gardiner, Alan. 1955. “Hymns to Sobk in a Ramesseum Papyrus.” Revue d’Égyptologie 11: 43–56. Geisen, Christina. 2012. “The Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus: A New Edition, Translation, and Interpretation.” PhD diss., Toronto: University of Toronto. Ginzburg, Carlos. 1980. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9: 5–36. Jørgensen, Jens B. 2006. “Secrets, Knowledge and Experience in Ancient Egyptian Religion: The Spells of Knowing the Powers of the Sacred Sites and related texts.” MA diss., University of Copenhagen. Lai, Guolong. 2015. Excavating the Afterlife: The Archaeology of Early Chinese Religion. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lehoux, Daryn. 2007. Astronomy, Weather, and Calendars in the Ancient World: Parapegmata and Related Texts in Classical and Near Eastern Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leitz, Christian. 1994. Tagewählerei: Das buch h.3t nh.h. ph..wy dt und verwandte Texte. 2 vols. ¯ Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Lorand, David. 2009. Le papyrus dramatique du Ramesseum: Étude des structures de la composition. Leuven: Peeters. Lüscher, Barbara. 2006. Die Verwandlungssprüche (Tb 76–88). Basel: Orientverlag. Naether, Franziska, and Micah Ross. 2008. “Interlude: A Series Containing a Hemerology with Lengths of Daylight.” Egitto e vicino oriente 31: 51–90. Nyord, Rune. 2013. “Memory and Succession in the City of the Dead: Temporality in the Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Cult.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. R. Willerslev and D. R. Christensen, 195–211. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. ———. 2014. “Permeable Containers: Body and Cosmos in Middle Kingdom Coffins.” In Body, Cosmos and Eternity: New Research Trends in the Iconography and Symbolism of Ancient Egyptian Coffins, ed. R. Sousa, 29–44. Oxford: Archaeopress. ———. 2015. “Scribes of the Gods in the Coffin Texts.” In The World of Middle Kingdom Egypt (2000–1550), ed. G. Miniaci and W. Grajetzki, 273–307. London: Golden House Publications. ———. 2018. “‘Taking Ancient Egyptian Mortuary Religion Seriously’: Why Would We, and How Could We?” Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections 17: 73–87. ———. Forthcoming. “(En)gendering the World in Ancient Egypt.” In Hierarchy and Equality: Representations of Sex/Gender in the Ancient World, ed. J. Økland, L. O. Johannessen, A. Martinsen, R. Skumsnes, and Z. Tankosic. Athens: Norwegian Institute at Athens. Parkinson, Richard B. 2011. “The Ramesseum Papyri.” Online research catalogue, British

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Museum. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/online_research_catal ogues/rp/the_ramesseum_papyri.aspx (accessed 15 December 2015). Poo, Mu-Chou. 1998. In Search of Personal Welfare: A View of Ancient Chinese Religion. Albany: State University of New York Press. Porceddu, Sebastian, Lauri Jetsu, Tapio Markkanen, and Jaana Toivari-Viitala. 2008. “Evidence of Periodicity in Ancient Egyptian Calendars of Lucky and Unlucky Days.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18 (3): 327–39. Quaegebeur, Jan. 1975. Le dieu égyptien Shaï dans la religion et l’onomastique. Leuven: Peeters. Quirke, Stephen. 2013. Going Out in Daylight—prt m hrw: The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, Translation, Sources, Meaning. London: Golden House Publications. Riggs, Christina. 2014. Unwrapping Ancient Egypt. London: Bloomsbury. Servajean, F. 2004. Les formules des transformations du Livre des Morts à la lumière d’une théorie de la performativité. Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale. Sethe, Kurt. 1928. Dramatische Texte zu Altaegyptischen Mysterienspielen, II: Der dramatische Ramesseum-papyros—Ein Speil zur Thronbesteigung des Königs. Leipzig: Hinrich. Troy, Lana. 1987. “Have a Nice Day! Some Reflections on the Calendars of Good and Bad Days. In The Religion of the Ancient Egyptians: Cognitive Structures and Popular Expressions, ed. G. Englund, 127–47. Uppsala: Gustavianum. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics for a Post-Structural Anthropology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Winand, Jean. 2005. “Temps physique et temps culturel: Le case de l’Égypte ancienne.” Bulletin de la Société royale des sciences de Liège 74 (4): 311–25.

CHAPTER 4

When Bad Places Turn Worse The Necropolitics of Death Sites in Northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Per Ditlef Fredriksen

Three years ago we had to clear up this place. There was just too many spirits gathering around this bridge. There were just too many dead in one place, and this attracted more death. That terrible accident was the last drop. We had to do something.

This field note passage after my first visit to the Nyamaan Bridge (Figure 4.1) near the town of Pongola in northern KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, alludes to a complex history. A recent traffic accident is only the latest strata of local memory added to the place. Tragic and untimely death can, and certainly does, evoke the past in troublesome ways. But the past is not a passive background canvas against which present events are played out. As I will explore in the following, the past actively shapes the present, and not necessarily in a good way. People look for causes of current challenges and problems in bygone events. And it is therefore not coincidental that problems occur where they do. Bad things happen at a place because bad things happened there before. A death site can attract and cause more death. There is a danger involved when different layers of time come in too close contact with each other at one particular place. And so the past of this place should be revisited in order to prevent loss of more lives. The realization that there will be endless future efforts to adjust the past has been a pervasive undertone in all my conversations with locals about such sites. So, when listening to the recorded conversations at the bridge that December morning in 2014, it strikes me that it is not danger for our own lives that is the main concern of my two companions and myself. Lwazi,1 the local interviewee and our guide during this particular visit, clearly wants to keep the stay as short as possible, and so does my colleague, Innocent.2 Our voices are low, respectful, and somehow distracted, now and then interrupted by a thundering passing truck. I remember the feeling of a void, an emptiness of a kind that would be difficult to fill. This sense was closely tied to a worry about the permanence of the spatial dislocation of ancestral spirits, and the challenges involved in their successful containment and transport home. Admittedly, my perception at the bridge was influenced by a not insignificant prior knowledge, as this visit was far from my first to sites associated with death and layered ancestral presence (see Fredriksen 2016). I knew that unexpected death while traveling or otherwise being away from home, often by accident or violence, rips open a void. One faces the danger that the recently deceased will be

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Figure 4.1. The Nyamaan Bridge, December 2014. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

lingering in nonexistence, as a nonbeing in an uncontained, undefined nonplace. More precisely, the ancestral spirit (sing. idlozi, pl. amadlozi3) is not yet where it should be, although the body of the deceased may already be buried. The dislocation means that the passing to the world of ancestors is incomplete, and both the dead and the living linger in a state of waiting. Social anthropologist Hylton White, having worked extensively in northern KZN, writes that any event involving ancestors has parallels in the past. The event mirrors a preceding performance, this again being a reiteration of a performance before that, often held because the earlier exercise failed to achieve its desired outcomes (2001: 461). In other words, there is an ongoing revisiting of the past, a constant oscillation that seeks to connect back to earlier time layers. Thus, the low-voiced and rather gloomy state of mind at the Nyamaan Bridge was due to the anticipation of endless efforts—that one would have to keep revisiting bygone events, and that those events could only be corrected by following a “right” procedure. Present and future voids could potentially be filled, but not necessarily, and it might very well be that one had to try again and again. As the opening reference to our conversation at the bridge indicates, something had to be done. This chapter explores the series of actions in the aftermath of death in the rural area known as Phondwane. The work is a result of a redirection and change of focus from my previous efforts to understand people’s everyday engagements with objects and materials linked to death, burial, and the ancestral world (Fredriksen 2011, 2012, 2016). Here I documented and discussed some aspects of ancestor containment and transport in the study area, seen against a

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more general sociopolitical backdrop. However, a shift of attention to certain specific sites for tragic events, predominantly sites along roads, where people seek to revisit the past and bring lingering spirits home made me aware of three aspects that I had previously somewhat overlooked. The first is that there is not only a spatial oscillation between rural and urban areas (see below), but also a deeply temporal one. To me, this illustrates, as White puts it, how “the ghosts of the old can be conjured up, palimpsestically, from within the uneven terrains of the new itself” (2001: 457). Second, a constant reengagement with the past in order to correct prior “mistakes” or mishaps requires containment of the ancestor spirits, and this activates a specific materiality, a range of objects and materials. But this containment is for the transport home and not for memorabilia at the site of death. This particular engagement with the material world articulates concerns with ancestral presence, notably the characteristic tendency among Zulu speakers in this part of South Africa to focus “problem solving” with regards to ancestors on gestures of respect by living homestead members. Curiously, in this particular regard, relatively less attention is paid to built environments and monuments for the dead. This contextspecific kind of detachment (see Fredriksen 2016: 157) means that the communication by which the living consult ancestors on various matters that relate to homestead and family should normally not take place at the various locations where these matters actually happen or are played out. As I will return to in more detail, ancestral presence is tied to specific places, but not to memorial constructions. Consequently, in the study area there are few, if any, wayside shrines (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Salle-Essoo 2014), “temporary memorials” (Doss 2008), or “grassroot memorials” (Margry and Sanchez-Carretero 2011). This detachment is of relevance for understanding the third and final aspect I will explore here, namely, that the transport home is not a reintegration of a free-floating unhappy spirit with the buried body in its grave. Although there are few visible memorials of bad accidents along the roads in northern KZN, this is not to say that objects of memory do not exist. They are just not found at the death sites or at the grave, simply because there is one particular place that is more important to the ancestral domain. This is the back of the great hut (indlunkulu) of the homestead, called the umsamo. Seeking to illustrate and exemplify the three aspects of time, materiality, and ties to the dead, I will in this chapter focus on the problem solving involved when facing the danger of nonbeing in an uncontained nonplace, by offering the ancestor(s) containment and safe transport to the umsamo at home. However, it is important to keep in mind that this is not only a concern for the dead. To contain and relocate spirits to “proper” spaces is just as much a protective measure for the living against unwanted intrusions from the otherworldly. From a theoretical point of view, the analytical attention on problem solving at problematic roadside death sites allows for an approach that connects different time layers and explores engagements between humans and nonhumans. In the introduction to a recent anthology on the social lives of spirits, Diana Santo and Ruy Blanes (2014: 23) argue that the more successful attempts at theorizing spirit mediation seem to be those that are able to focus on the spirits’ tangible effects, such as words, communication, and transmission of knowledge, thus allowing for spirits to exist at levels irreducible to others. Accordingly, the main aim of this chapter is to come to an understanding of communication between the living and the dead by being sensitive to local ways of engaging with the material world—

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with places, spaces, and spirits—and to the engagements through which people attempt to fill the voids (cf. Sørensen 2010) behind community members who have passed. The following discussion proceeds in four main steps. After a brief presentation of my fieldwork approach, I provide a brief outline of the sociopolitical background. This is followed by a description of the objects and materials that offer containment and transport of ancestor spirits, using examples from the Phondwane area. In the final section, I conclude with some open-ended reflections and relate these to certain challenges to future research.

Approaching Roadside Death Sites Not many South African families today are left untouched by tragedy along the main roads, and northern KZN provides no positive exception to the mortality rates. Many of the worst accidents have involved taxis that connect more rural areas to cities like Johannesburg and Durban. This traffic contributes significantly to the most recent time layer in the distinctly South African oscillation between rural and urban areas. Also, deeper down in the time layers, although still highly present to many travelers from rural areas, is the notion of the bridge as a place for crossing water, a potential peril well-known to readers of “classic” ethnographic accounts of Zulu customs and local practice. The Nyamaan Bridge, as a nonplace associated with uncontained ancestor spirits, is, in my opinion, an apt illustration of Michel Foucault’s (1984) notion of “heterotopia,” a heterogeneous space outside all spaces (see also Weiss 2007: 420). It may well be located in reality, but it is an Other space “which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us.” Such sites are characterized by their curious ability to relate to other sites, but “in such a way as to suspect, neutralize or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect” (Foucault 1984: 3). Here it is hard to overlook the death site as a dark, messy, and negative mirror reflection of the umsamo. And, moreover, heterogeneous spaces cut into particular slices in time, thereby opening onto what Foucault calls “heterochronies.” Interestingly, sites associated with death are recurring examples in this classic short text, not least because of their strange heterochronies of loss of life followed by sense of dissolution and disappearance (ibid.: 5–6). To me, Foucault’s “Othering” of spaces is instructive for carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in analytically creative ways that are sensitive to differences in notions of time and temporal dimensions of social life. Using the concept of “timescapes,” anthropologist Ton Otto notes that the initial, unavoidable lack of necessary understanding and the ensuing breakdowns in communication are in fact our analytical building blocks. These challenges force us to become aware of, and thereby formulate precisely, what it is that creates difference (2013: 66–67). Consequently, ethnographic field research has an inbuilt discrepancy between fieldworkers and their field that makes it a strong method to make time visible, not least because of these experiences of confusion and frustration (ibid.: 67–76). Accordingly, I approach death sites such as the Nyamaan Bridge, which may be seen as Other places that cut their own slices in time—sometimes deep slices, sometimes less deep, but always through several temporal layers—that mirror or reflect key relations between humans, ancestors, and things in the present. Importantly,

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at the same time these places reinvent or cast suspicion on the very same relations that they reflect, thereby opening up for variations in timescapes by different groups or actors. This approach builds on previous efforts to come to terms with how meetings between differing knowledges of the material world involve changes to peoples’ everyday engagements with their surroundings. My theoretical departure point is informed by Homi Bhabha’s (1996) postcolonial “border thinking,” involving a theoretical, epistemic leveling of the scientific outlook in its encounters with other ways of viewing the world. As outlined elsewhere (Jopela and Fredriksen 2015; Fredriksen 2016), Bhabha’s notion of “occupying the space of the unsatisfied” encourages the researcher to locate her/himself at the border between categories, always and continually in between. This is a perspective from below instead of a top-down (or perhaps trickle-down) approach. Importantly, this includes the recognition that local or “traditional” knowledges are no less subjected to historical and contemporary conditions than scientific insights. My approach is also inspired by anthropologist Nils Bubandt’s (2009) argument that we need to take the social and political reality of ancestral spirits seriously, not only as a research subject but also in the way that we conduct our research. Bubandt challenges the conventional idea about the bounded self as belonging only among the living. The self can extend and transcend the boundary between living and dead. This challenge calls for a critical attitude to certain underlying assumptions in ways of thinking within Western modernity. Two such assumptions are particularly relevant to us here: (1) that the spirit transport is about reconnecting the soul or spirit with the body in the grave, and (2) that it is only the living who has social and political agency. The significance of challenging the two assumptions became evident as Innocent and I got deeper into our conversations with Lwazi, his relative and neighbor Mzizi,4 who is the most renowned spirit mover in their rural area, and Mzizi’s mother.

Death and Temporal Oscillation Lwazi knew all too well about the Nyamaan Bridge death site. One reason was that he had family ties to the man who was killed in the last accident, about five years earlier, in 2009. Back then, he had not been involved in the ceremony for bringing the ancestor spirit to his homestead. He briefly visited the site shortly after the accident, but only in the capacity of being a relative of the deceased. He knew the local stories, though. The river crossing had been associated with death for a long time, going back at least as far as a battle or skirmish between clans in the nineteenth century. The many layers of oral memory at the bridge had made it a gravitating nexus. The site seemed to have a sinister ability to attract death more easily than most other places. Then, in 2011, it was decided by various practitioners of worship and traditional medicine that enough was enough. Local ministers called on church members and went on radio, and healers or ritual specialists (sangoma) and herbalists or witch doctors (inyanga) spread the word in the community. People were asked to come and collect the spirits of ancestors of their family or clan, in order to bring each to rest in an umsamo in a familiar homestead. Community members met by the bridge on a Saturday and addressed the spirits, and after one hour, they were done.

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It was on this particular occasion that Lwazi got involved as a practitioner. He is the only known inyanga in the area who knows how to make a medicine (muti) for moving ancestral spirits. And this is also the main reason why he took us to the bridge. Lwazi lives in the nearby rural area known as Phondwane. I have worked in the area since 2007, and got to know him and several other practitioners of traditional healing and medicine in 2010. That year Phondwane got electricity. Shortly after that, some elder members of the community began to protest against the use of electricity in the umsamo, on the grounds that loud sounds and flickering, flashing lights disturbed the spirits. This made me focus attention on the ways in which sensory experiences of the living formed part of continuous engagements with the ancestors, and how such experiential qualities were ascribed by the living to dead members of society.5 White (2010, 2011) identifies geographical oscillation as a key long-term undercurrent for understanding the present in northern KZN. By placing rural Zulu households within a sociospatial “necroculture,” he sees the reintegration of deceased family members in the umsamo against a three-layered culture-historical context. First, there is a layer extending all the way back to precolonial times, in which the key dynamic is marriage exchange involving cattle wealth and a primary focus on the homestead’s reproductive capacity (see, e.g., Armstrong et al. 2008; Berglund 1976; Guy 1979, 1987, 2005; Hall 1984; Huffman 2007; Kuper 1980, 1982; Ngubane 1977). This institutional organization came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century, and was subsequently overlaid by a colonial-capitalist articulation of the rural household as the home of fathers who were migrant workers, thereby characterizing it by the oscillating absence or presence of male family heads (White 2010: 508, 2011: 109). In this manner, the urban-rural separation was aligned with the work-home split. Moreover, this separation continued as a perpetuated geographical dualism that corresponded to distinctions in colonial and apartheid discourse—that between European modern urbanity and rural Africa defined by tradition and kinship. This means that, to this day, to many Zulu speakers the city remains a place of “whiteness,” while the rural area is “where the homes are” (see White 2010: 508–11). Consequently, the home in rural areas like Phondwane has become a space where acts of memory and longing by families of migrants keep the absent in mind. The present layer is, of course, the postapartheid era, characterized by neoliberal policies and an ensuing rise in mass unemployment (Barchiesi 2008; Weiss 2014). However, White (2010: 513–14) observes that the place of the dead in the rural home continues to be a two-sided matter, now saturated with renewed estrangement and paradox. On the one hand, the dead are still sources of aid and comfort, and thus the living want to keep them close, for example, in order to help improve their everyday lives. On the other hand, such new schemes are estranging or alienating to ancestors, potentially causing rupture in living-dead relations. In particular, the actions of the living may potentially undermine the dead’s spaces, most importantly the umsamo of a homestead. Broadly speaking, as noted by White (2010: 511–16), this new, postapartheid version of ancestral ambivalence means that the dead are sources of power relations characterized by anxiety and unsettled compromise. Consequently, the present status can be described as a form of “necropolitics” (see also Jopela and Fredriksen 2015; Fredriksen 2016) in which the rural household is the arena for ongoing human-ancestral engagement and negotiation. The

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crucial point is for spirits to move from a state of relative absence in undefined, insecure nonspace to a presence in secure, defined space. Rural families are more or less continuously seeking to solve the problem of absent, oscillating household members and the issue of their return as living fathers and sons or, to an increasing extent, mothers and daughters. Or, alternatively, when death has struck while being away, to have them back permanently as ancestral beings that will be engaged in continued communication. This brief historical outline suggests that this chapter is more than a status report from post-1994 South Africa and her perilous roads. We find the constant spatial movement between rural and urban areas mirrored in temporal oscillations that are less visible but no less constant. As indicated in the opening remarks of this chapter, there is a never-ending seeking to mend past faults and flaws in order to improve the present: a “bettering” of the present by revisiting the past. And within this nexus of movement in space and time we find that negative gravitating nodes such as the Nyamaan Bridge—heterogeneous spaces, to use Foucault’s term—are formed and gain significance when something goes terribly wrong and people die.

The Secret Recipe As a family member of the last victim at the bridge and a well-known inyanga, Lwazi was one of the first practitioners to be asked to help clearing the bridge site in 2011. As noted above, he is the only living inyanga in the area who has the recipe for a muti that can move ancestor spirits. The herbal powder is kept in a small calabash container (Figure 4.2), and prepared in his workplace (Figure 4.3). The way to use the muti is simple: you pour a small amount into your palm, point your hand in the direction of the place where the spirit is thought to roam, and address her/him in a gentle, friendly voice, encouraging the spirit to return home to the umsamo. Last, you blow the powder in your hand in the same direction.

Figure 4.2. The inyanga’s secret recipe. The muti is kept in this calabash container. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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Figure 4.3. Medicines in an inyanga workplace in Phondwane. In addition to various containers for herbal medicine, there are also animal hides and snakeskins brought by local hunters who know that such items and substances will be of use to the inyanga. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

While Lwazi does not reveal his secret recipe, there is no use in trying to conceal the most important ingredient. This is simply too well-known and is also used on its own to move spirits. The main means of transport is a twig from the tree Ziziphus mucronata, in English known as buffalo thorn. The tree is found in the surroundings of many a homestead in northern KZN, and in popular folklore, its twigs are well-known spirit carriers. The thorny twigs (Figure 4.4) are said to be able to catch or attach themselves to floating spirits, thereby providing material

Figure 4.4. The buffalo thorn (Ziziphus mucronata) with its thorny twigs. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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form and substance for transportation. When preparing to move amadlozi, a few twigs are cut. Relatives, often male and elderly, travel in pairs. They go to the site of death, and one of them addresses the spirit(s). This person carries the twig/spirit for the entire journey, and will communicate exclusively with them. The travel companion will take care of practicalities like asking for directions, organizing bus or taxi travel, and talking to fellow passengers. The spirit transport attests to the need for containment. Noncontainment in the wrong place is seen as a form of nonbeing, a nonexistence in a social vacuum. Interestingly, as I have already indicated, the ideal form of containment one seeks is not the realignment of spirit and body in the grave, as one would possibly assume from a conventional Western perspective. In rural areas such as Phondwane, the body of the deceased will normally be buried next to the homestead, but its spirit, the idlozi, should be brought to another location.

Decaying Memories Along with most issues of importance, the amadlozi are brought to the umsamo, where ancestral presence and powers are most strongly felt. One should behave and speak in a respectfully humble manner. Body gestures and tone of voice indicate that the dead are not only present and paying attention to what the living do, but are also actively involved in the lives of the living (Figure 4.5). Hence, the umsamo is the space for keeping, regaining, or obtaining situational control when

Figure 4.5. As a spirit returns to the umsamo a celebration is brewing. As White notes: “A yard should not be left to continue too long without the ‘smell’ of beer and the ‘noise’ of a feast, for these are sensory indices that prove to the watchful spirits of the dead that the home they have left behind still has honor and standing, making them proud of their heirs and predisposed to performing benevolent acts on their behalf” (2001: 461). The more traditional Zulu beer pot to the left is accompanied by beer bottles, wine, and liquor. Ideally the meat should be from slaughtered cattle, but this is expensive. Most of the time a goat, even a chicken, will have to do. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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facing new arrivals or strangers. In a typical rural homestead in northern KZN, the umsamo is the silent indoors, a shady, cool, slow, and serene space of the ancestors. This space is contrasted with the everyday life outside, exposed to noise, sunlight, rain, and constantly moving people. This divided attention is also found in the ways in which the dead react to various sensory experiences. On the one hand, the amadlozi are startled or annoyed by various electrical gadgets, such as flickering light bulbs or TV screens, blaring radios, or noisy cell phones. On the other hand, however, the amadlozi are positively attracted by ceremonial chanting and singing, and by the sharp, sour smell of fermenting beer, the smoky smells of burning charcoal, and cooking meat. Significantly, this contrast between silence and noise is of relevance for understanding how the amadlozi perceive the world of the living. Here we must also consider that there is a duality of silence at work. Outside the umsamo there is nondefined space where one faces loneliness and disconnectedness. Once inside the umsamo, however, the silence around the ancestors is one of content and peaceful connectedness. This particular contextual frame provides a distinct version of necropolitics that articulates serenity alongside remembrance and the pain of loss. Once in place in shady silence, the twig will start to dry up and dwindle. The stage of decay of the twig is parallel to the contained amadlozi’s relative position in the spirit world. The slow drying, dwindling, and decomposition of the twig’s leaves, eventually falling on the umsamo floor, is a form of resistance by life, gradually deteriorating. The visibly decaying twig becomes a way of measuring the new ancestor’s distance to this world (Figure 4.6). The most recent arrivals in the otherworldly realm are the ones to address and to bring matters to their elders on the other side, and so the

Figure 4.6. Decaying twigs in the umsamo. Photo by Per Ditlef Fredriksen.

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varying degree of decay of a row of twigs makes it clear who died most recently, and therefore who to address among the ancestors. As weeks, months, and years go by, the gradual material decay of spirit containment becomes a gradual loss of contact, in the form of shared sensory perception and memories, between the world of the living and the otherworld of ancestors. In this manner, the passing of time becomes available to the senses, and particular sensuous and material qualities constitute frameworks for the living and their everyday understanding of death. The very decay of the twig containing an ancestor spirit may thus be seen as a fusion of past, present, and future that would otherwise be hard to perceive in material form. Once reaching its destination in the umsamo, the decaying object of commemoration is not only tied to certain ancestors, thus making it accessible to human experience, but its state of decay also articulates the spirits’ dwindling grip on the everyday reality of the living. The more dried up the twig is, the more blurred and farther away the spirit is from the world of the living. During one of my long meetings with Mzizi’s mother, Ukuhlakanipha,6 this material way of “measuring” distance and relations between the two worlds became the main topic. Sitting in the umsamo of her homestead looking at the row of more or less dried twig leaves, I asked what she expected to find when becoming an ancestor someday. “In some ways I am an ancestor already,” she replied. “I am old. And when you are old you think and act like [an ancestor] before you become one. I speak to them every day.” For Ukuhlakanipha there was no clear divide between the living in this world and the dead in the next. She blurred the conventional assumption. There is no bounded self that belongs only in this world, as there is no bounded world exclusively for the living. The other world is present in this one where we live now, and she saw herself as already being in the world of ancestors. Ukuhlakanipha’s blurring of boundaries opened an unexpected pathway into understanding her ongoing, concrete, and everyday experience of death and time. To me, this insight forms a departure point from which to meet the challenge for researchers, as coined by Santo and Blanes (2014: 21), of how to “anthropologize” the invisible and intangible while moving beyond academic categories of “proof” or “evidence” toward notions that can express an otherness through diverse ways of seeing and sensing—while still being able to provide understanding. However, one particular aspect turned out hard to grasp in full, having been a lingering question since my very first interviews about spirit containment and transport in 2010. There was a certain lack of mutual understanding and ensuing frustrating “breakdown” that forced me to try to formulate precisely what the conceptual cavity or breach, to borrow Otto’s terms, consisted of. The question I asked was straightforward enough: How did they know when an attempt to move an ancestor had been successful or not?

How Do You Know? It turned out particularly difficult for me to grasp how one could tell whether a transport had resulted in a spirit being in the place where they had intended to move it, and when they would have to make another effort. Importantly, any attempt deemed unsuccessful was labeled as such by a sangoma. Invariably in these instances, the sangoma will point to the need to return to perceived errors in the

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past in order to correct or adjust them. This indicates her or his potentially conservative role, by providing means for control when facing external forces that could undermine or threaten the umsamo.7 But what were the specific indications that fueled suspicions that something had gone wrong, thus making people go and consult a sangoma in the first place? I asked Mzizi this question shortly after my first visit to Nyamaan Bridge. Mzizi has been the twig carrier in numerous spirit movements, including one in 2012 that Innocent and I were allowed to take part in and document (Fredriksen 2016). Having discussed this topic with us several times already, Mzizi smiled when I started once again probing into how he knew when it was a failure or a success. But this time, as he patiently went through the whole moving process with us, I had a distinct feeling of breakthrough. He helped me realize more fully the connections between time, memory, the specific material qualities of the Ziziphus mucronata twig, and the significance of dreams. The use of the twig not only relates to its thorns (see Figure 4.4), enabling the hooking of a floating spirit and an ensuing material containment. Also, this hooking becomes more difficult as the spirit ages and dwindles. The longer the spirit has been contained in the same twig and the longer the twig has been located in the same place, the more elusive is the spirit’s presence. As time goes by, and as new temporal layers of human experience and death are added, the spirit moves slowly but steadily deeper into the otherworld. The relative distance to this world increases. The problematic spirits at Nyamaan Bridge were in such a situation. It was, of course, here that Lwazi’s stronger medicine came into play. The twigs alone would no longer do the trick. Mzizi also explained how the same relative distance might be reflected in the importance given to dreams.8 He told us a story from the very same process of moving spirits that we had been allowed to take part in two years earlier. In May 2011, a border crossing when returning with cattle from Swaziland had gone terribly wrong. Swazi soldiers shot three men from Phondwane, two brothers and their uncle, under suspicion of cattle theft. The men were Mzizi’s brother and two nephews. The tragedy happened on the Swaziland side, only a few hundred meters from the South African border. The bodies were returned to the family shortly after, but the tension that followed made it impossible for the family to cross the border in order to bring home the spirits, all three still lingering at the death site. The first attempt was made about six months after the tragedy but was unsuccessful. Innocent and I took part in the second attempt about a year after the event, in June 2012. This attempt was successful. When I met Mzizi after the Nyamaan Bridge visit, however, he told us a part of the border crossing story I had not heard before, relating to how the family knew the first attempt had been a failure. The mother of the two brothers had dreamt that one of them had been standing outside her homestead, asking to be allowed to enter. He told his mother he was scared and wanted to go home. When consulted about this, a sangoma saw the dream as a definitive sign that the spirit was still roaming at the death site. Interestingly, Mzizi related this story to the passing of time after death. He said this young spirit was lucky because he had a mother that dreamt of him and could tell the rest of the family that something was wrong. Older, more elusive and faceless ancestors that are not dreamt about are harder to grasp, and it is therefore harder to provide containment and transport for them. And this is not only because they are difficult to sense for the living; their own sensuous capacity fades as they move deeper into the otherworld, thus drifting farther

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away from the living and forgetting more and more about how their life had been on the other side. The spirits of the young man and his two companions could not be contained and brought home because of their emotional state and their fading senses. “So why did you succeed that second time?” I asked. He responded, “I knew them well and was very careful. And it was more quiet this time.” Then he added, “But we were lucky. If that had not worked, we would have had to try [Lwazi]’s muti.”

Concluding Remarks: Necropolitics, Time, and the Real The examples of necropolitics discussed in this chapter made me reflect on the ways that the human condition is intertwined in the surrounding world, whether it be tangible objects such as materials, built environments, or landscapes, or less tangible aspects such as ancestor spirits. As anthropologist Michael Taussig has suggested, perhaps we can think about the human condition like theater, as “a configuration of very object-prone exercises in differentiated space, in which the thought exists in imagined scenarios into which the thinking self is plummeted” (1993: 33). To me, when regarding the opening scene by the Nyamaan Bridge in retrospect, and in particular the worry about a void that might never be filled, the people engaging with ancestor spirits can be seen as set in such theater-like scenarios of differentiated spaces. The death sites along the roads are dark, distorted mirror reflections of the ideal image of the umsamo at home. However, in addition to this “Othering” in space there is also a crucial temporal dimension. The oscillations I have explored demonstrate how people can engage the past through ancestors in order to improve the present they live in, and their prospects for the future. But there is also an important element of decay through time to take into consideration. The fading memories of past family members, and the relative distances between the living and those who have passed to the other world, can be measured by the material decay of simple twigs placed in a row in the umsamo. This is a useful reminder, as recently pointed out by Santo and Blanes (2014: 29), that by treating invisible, intangible, or inaudible phenomena through a pragmatic lens, it may become possible to treat personhood or selfhood as not always ending at the limits of body, mind, or conventional space-time. I am inspired by approaches that emphasize the importance of taking the social and political reality of ancestors seriously and treating them as real. As Bubandt argues: “Treating these spirits as informants is only counterintuitive because the category of ‘informant’ remains linked to conventional, philosophical idea(l)s about the bounded self” (2009: 296). In other words, the bounded, living, and breathing self is a context-specific Western construction that cannot be assumed to apply everywhere and at all times. Living humans are the “whos,” while places, things, animals, and members of the spirit world are the “whats.” This categorization leaves the dead outside the realm of the real, and thus not actors in political dynamics. For many communities in southern Africa and elsewhere, the categorization would leave out members of society who are fundamental to any decision making of importance (cf. Jopela and Fredriksen 2015). The events at Nyamaan Bridge, along with numerous other roadside sites in the study area, clearly illustrate the downsides of defining politics as the give-and-take of an exclusively living human club. To consider the reality of spirits challenges modern thinking’s tendency to “tidily organize our messy being into sealed and binary ontological com-

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partments” (Pétúrsdottir 2013: 47). A version of such categorization is the deep divide between the material and the immaterial, the tangible and the intangible, thereby constructing an arbitrary divide between what is seen as real and less real. I suspect many readers find this partition difficult to relate to personal experience. After all, as also remarked by Santo and Blanes (2014: 15), the attribution of agency to the nontangible and even nonhuman dimensions of life is more than mere philosophical speculation by scholars. It is quite natural for most people.

Per Ditlef Fredriksen is a professor in archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Norway, and a research associate in the Department of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. His research interests include contemporary archaeology and studies of historical ecology in southern Africa. Guided by a deep interest in the relationship between archaeology and anthropology, his work on contemporary rural southern Africa extends into critical heritage studies. He has conducted archaeological as well as anthropological field studies in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. Central topics are meetings between knowledge systems and ontologies, human-thing relations, and how the material world is engaged in death, burial, and ancestor relations.

Notes 1. Lwazi is a pseudonym meaning “knowledge” in Zulu. 2. Having worked with several scholars and gained extensive field experience since the early 1990s, Innocent Thobile Dadla is a local specialist on material culture and craft knowledges among Zulu speakers in KZN. I have collaborated with Dladla since 2010. 3. In Zulu ancestor spirits are commonly referred to in plural, as amadlozi. 4. Mzizi is a pseudonym meaning “helper” in Zulu. 5. The fieldwork drew inspiration from Jean-Pierre Warnier’s (2001, 2009) ethnographic approach. Informed by Foucault’s notion of “governmentality,” Warnier’s approach has a critical political dimension, thus enabling intimate human-nonhuman engagements to be framed within local and regional power dynamics. 6. The pseudonym Ukuhlakanipha means “wisdom” in Zulu. 7. An example illustrates the significant role a sangoma can play in such necropolitics. In one of our sessions, Mzizi explained that a sangoma must be consulted before and after any event involving ancestors. But, he added with a small laugh, you should never use a local sangoma who knows the family and its history. In other words, always make sure to find an outsider who cannot take advantage of detailed knowledge about the family’s relative position in the local sociogeographical and political landscape. 8. See works by David Chidester (2008a, 2008b) for comprehensive explorations of Zulu “dreamscapes.”

References Armstrong, Juliet, Gavin Whitelaw, and Dieter Reusch. 2008. “Pots That Talk, Izinkambaezikhulumayo.” Southern African Humanities 20: 513–48. Barchiesi, Franco. 2008. “Wage Labour, Precarious Employment, and Social Inclusion in the Making of South Africa’s Postapartheid Transition.” African Studies Review 51 (2): 119–42. Berglund, Axel-Ivar. 1976. Zulu Thought-Patterns and Symbolism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Bhabha, Homi K. 1996. “Unsatisfied: Notes on a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” In Text and Nation, ed. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter Pfeipher, 191–207. London: Camden House. Bubandt, Nils. 2009. “Interview with an Ancestor: Spirits as Informants and the Politics of Possession in North Maluku.” Ethnography 10 (3): 291–316. Chidester, David. 2008a. “Dreaming in the Contact Zone: Zulu Dreams, Visions, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century South Africa.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76 (1): 27–53. ———. 2008b. “Zulu Dreamscapes: Senses, Media, and Authentication in Contemporary Neo-shamanism.” Material Religion 4 (2): 136–59. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, and Maya de Salle-Essoo. 2014. “Saints and Evil and the Wayside Shrines of Mauritius.” Journal of Material Culture 19 (3): 253–77. Doss, Erika. 2008. The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture/Mouvement/Continuité, October, 1–9. Fredriksen, Per Ditlef. 2011. “When Knowledges Meet: Engagements with Clay and Soil in Southern Africa.” Journal of Social Archaeology 11 (3): 283–310. ———. 2012. Material Knowledges, Thermodynamic Spaces and the Moloko Sequence of the Late Iron Age (AD 1300–1840) in Southern Africa. Cambridge Monographs in African Archaeology 80. British Archaeological Reports, International series 2387. Cambridge: Archaeopress. ———. 2016. “Untimely Death and Spirit Mobility in a Southern African Border Zone.” In Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience, ed. P. Bjerregaard, A. E. Rasmussen, and T. F. Sørensen, 147–65. London: Routledge. Guy, Jeff. 1979. The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom: The Civil War in Zululand, 1897–1884. London: Longman. ———. 1987. “Analysing Pre-capitalist Societies in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14 (1): 18–37. ———. 2005. The Maphumulo Uprising: Law, War and Ritual in the Zulu Rebellion. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press. Hall, Martin. 1984. “The Myth of the Zulu Homestead: Archaeology and Ethnography.” Africa 54 (1): 65–79. Huffman, Thomas N. 2007. Handbook to the Iron Age: The Archaeology of Pre-colonial Farming Societies in Southern Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZuluNatal Press. Jopela, Albino, and Per Ditlef Fredriksen. 2015. “Public Archaeology, Knowledge Meetings and Heritage Ethics in Southern Africa: An Approach from Mozambique.” World Archaeology 47 (2): 261–84. Kuper, Adam. 1980. “Symbolic Dimensions of the Southern Bantu Homestead.” Africa 50 (1): 8–23. ———. 1982. Wives for Cattle: Bridewealth and Marriage in Southern Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Margry, Peter J., and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero. 2011. “Rethinking Memorialization: The Concept of Grassroot Memorials. In Grassroot Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death, ed. Peter J. Margry and Cristina Sanchez-Carretero, 1–49. New York: Berghahn Books. Ngubane, Harriet. 1977. Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine. London: Academic Press. Otto, Ton. 2013. “Times of the Other: The Temporalities of Ethnographic Fieldwork.” Social Analysis 57 (1): 64–79. Pétúrsdottir, Þóra. 2013. “Concrete Matters: Ruins of Modernity and the Thing Called Heritage.” Journal of Social Archaeology 13 (1): 31–53. Santo, Diana E., and Ruy Blanes. 2014. “Introduction: On the Agency of Intangibles.” In The Social Life of Spirits, ed. Ruy Blanes and Diana E. Santos, 1–32. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Sørensen, Tim F. 2010. “A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture.” In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. M. Bille, F. Hastrup, and T. F. Sørensen, 115–30. New York: Springer. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Warnier, Jean-Pierre. 2001. “A Praxeological Approach to Subjectivation in a Material World.” Journal of Material Culture 6 (1): 5–24. ———. 2009. “Technology as Efficacious Action on Objects . . . and Subjects.” Journal of Material Culture 14 (4): 459–70. Weiss, Lindsay M. 2007. “Heritage-Making and Political Identity.” Journal of Social Archaeology 7 (3): 413–31. ———. 2014. “Informal Settlements and Urban Heritage Landscapes in South Africa.” Journal of Social Archaeology 14 (1): 3–25. White, Hylton. 2001. “Tempora et Mores: Family Values and the Possessions of a Post-Apartheid Countryside.” Journal of Religion in Africa 31 (4): 457–79. ———. 2010. “Outside the Dwelling of Culture: Estrangement and Difference in Postcolonial Zululand.” Anthropological Quarterly 83 (3): 497–518. ———. 2011. “Beastly Whiteness: Animal Kinds and the Social Imagination in South Africa.” Anthropology Southern Africa 34 (3–4): 104–13.

CHAPTER 5

Narratives of Ebola Temporal and Material Changes of Social Riverscapes Theresa Ammann

Time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively reconfigured through each intra-action, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future. —Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

Introduction The Ebola virus entered Liberia in March 2014 and caused ruptures that would forever change the lives of many. By September, Maxwell, a forty-five-year-old drugstore owner, was forced to start working in an Ebola Treatment Unit (ETU) in order to sustain his family because Ebola had closed down his business. Days before, in the early morning hours of 21 August, Teta’s husband, George, had decided to seek help at an ETU after being plagued by fever and an upset stomach all night. This was the last time Teta, a thirty-six-year-old mother of four, would see him. About one month later, Grace, a twenty-seven-year-old market woman, fell ill with Ebola after having nursed her ill parents and brother for weeks. Only Grace survived Ebola, which made her the sole guardian of her brother’s five orphaned children. These three, unrelated cases testify to the varying ruptures caused by Ebola. In examining these ruptures and changing materialities—in the form of uncertainties, insecurities, and hardships—this chapter seeks to explore how Ebola altered people’s time—that is, their past, present, and future—and how it got under their skin. As this chapter will argue, Ebola either constituted a life-altering rupture or a possibility of death to those who came in indirect or direct contact with it. Through death, insecurities, uncertainties, and/or hardships, this contact altered the past, present, and future of Maxwell, Teta, and Grace and their materialities. Inevitably, their flow of time was altered as their lives were forever changed. I metaphorically compare this flow of their lives to river landscapes, or “riverscapes,” that have been forced to change their course to capture this interplay of changing times and materialities. This concept of riverscapes allows me to metaphorically illustrate how insecurities, uncertainties, and hardships caused by Ebola constitute material changes that caused them to realize the changes in their fabric of time and their lives. In order to assess Ebola’s ruptures, this chapter draws on Human Security principles to provide a more holistic understanding of insecurity. Human Security is a

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paradigm that was developed in 1994 by the United Nations (UN) Development Programme and expresses the realization that development should focus on the security of individuals rather than their states alone in order to realize peace and human rights (Haq 1994: iii). To distinguish between the UN paradigm and an individual’s experience of security, I will refer to the former as “Human Security” and the latter as “human security.” Human Security is a paradigm that goes beyond the mere survival of individuals to include the freedom to live their lives in dignity, free of fear and needs (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007). Security, thus, extends to people’s perceptions of danger, fear, risk, and uncertainty (Holbraad and Pedersen 2013: 7) within seven security subcategories: personal, economic, food, health, political, community, and environmental security (see Burgess and Owen 2004; Owen 2004). In this chapter, Human Security is retrospectively applied as a framework to reflect on and compare the impacts that the 2014–2016 Liberian Ebola outbreak had on Maxwell, Teta, and Grace. As such, Human Security allows me to assess the ruptures caused by Ebola, in the form of their daily struggles and future aspirations. In doing so, I hope to give insight into their experiences of time (temporal) and materiality (bodily) during and after Ebola. After contextualizing Maxwell, Teta, and Grace in their wider Liberian context, I will give a more detailed account of their lives and experiences of Ebola. Their cases are presented in such a way that the reader is brought “closer” to Ebola with each case. I first tell the story of Maxwell, a nurse, who dealt with Ebola on a daily basis while working at an ETU; this is followed by the case of Teta, who lost her husband to Ebola; and finally, I conclude with the story of Grace, who survived Ebola. Having presented their accounts, I will proceed by examining their differences and similarities in terms of their human insecurities and the temporal and material changes Ebola brought to their lives. In other words, how did Ebola change their lives, how did it get under their skin, and what traces of Ebola persist in their lives?

Liberia Approximately 4.5 million inhabitants populate Liberia, a country approximately three times bigger than Denmark and three times smaller than Norway. From 1989 to 2003, the small nation was torn apart by war, which continues to have lasting impacts to this day. According to the 2015 UN Human Development Index, Liberia currently is the twelfth least developed and most insecure country out of the world’s 188 indexed countries. This is evident in continued weaknesses in governmental and judicial systems, high corruption levels, economic downfalls, poor health conditions, food shortages, and a weak educational system (FFP 2011), all of which have only been exacerbated by the 2014 Ebola outbreak. I would like to situate Maxwell, Teta, and Grace in this context. They live in the outskirts of Monrovia, which continues to be marked by remnants of the war. On the way to their community, giant potholes—which young men on motorbikes carefully try to avoid as they drive people and their cargo from A to B—litter the few paved stretches of the main road. This main road is lined with stalls where market women artfully arrange their produce. Most people either live in brick houses with corrugated iron roofs or thatched mud huts of varying sizes, depending on their level of income and living standards. Compared to Teta and Grace, Maxwell owns the largest house, which he shares with nine of his family members, and is able

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to get electricity through his generator whenever he has enough money to buy petrol. Teta, in her slightly smaller, rented house housing six people, relies on her neighbors, sharing their electricity most nights of the week. Grace, her five newly adopted children, and husband rent a one-room house of roughly fifteen square meters. They have no electricity and rely primarily on “Chinese lamps,” standing torches, for light. While the three live in brick houses of varying sizes, this might soon enough change for Grace as a result of Ebola, since she is currently struggling to pay her rent. But I am getting ahead of myself; let me tell you their stories first.

Narratives of Ebola Facing Ebola: Maxwell Maxwell studied nursing in high school and later opened up a drugstore in his community. Things were going well for him and his family, but then Ebola came and people ceased to come to his drugstore out of fear that they might catch the virus there.1 Having to sustain his family, he found work at a Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF)–run ETU, the infamous ELWA 3 (Eternal Love Winning Africa, an interdenominational Christian organization active in over forty countries worldwide). After one week of witnessing the horrors there, he resigned. This was the first time he had encountered Ebola, and he was terribly afraid of contracting the virus that had all of a sudden “gotten a face” for him. “Imagine standing there. One person, two to three persons dying in front of you. Bleeding from the ear, the eyes, the nose. Diarrhea, vomiting. I help people to survive but I must survive, too.” MSF, in desperate need of nurses, called him and begged him to return. With financial problems mounting, a family to take care of, and a government-promised benefit for ETU workers, he decided to return to the ETU, where he was paid around 425 USD a month, a substantial wage by Liberian standards. According to a strict schedule, people worked in one-hour shifts. In this one hour, Maxwell shuffled around the tent cleaning up, checking on patients, and bringing them food and painkillers, all while enduring Liberia’s torturously sweaty heat in his full-body protective clothing. As he recalls, some days up to 50 people died in one day, and in total only 512 people left ELWA III alive. Throughout his time at the ETU, he was able to fulfill all his family’s needs, but he lived in constant worry that he might pass Ebola to his family. Consequently, Maxwell practiced several protective measures; for example, he took a hot bath every time he returned from work and changed his clothes, he wore a raincoat throughout the Ebola outbreak to avoid touching strangers in taxis and other public forums, he refrained from visiting people, and sometimes he abstained from sleeping with his wife. With the end of the Ebola outbreak, he returned to normal practices, but he continued to wash his hands frequently and avoided “touching people too much.” While Maxwell firmly believed that Ebola set back Liberia, he also saw the one good thing it brought: hygiene. In his opinion, only health workers used to occasionally wash their hands in pre-Ebola times, yet as a result of Ebola this practice became more widely adopted by ordinary Liberians. Maxwell himself integrated hand washing into his private life. However, business has only picked up slowly for Maxwell after Ebola, because people continued to be afraid to go to health facilities, where people were known to have contracted the virus. This means he felt more financially secure during Ebola, as he did not have to worry about be-

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ing able to provide for his family. Additionally, he was still waiting for the benefit the government promised all Ebola health workers. He insisted that government officials had secured the allocated benefits for themselves, and consequently, the corruption and incapability of the government angered him immensely. He believed Liberia could only go forward with help from the international community. When I asked him to compare Ebola and the war—as many of my other informants had done—he retorted with a question of his own: “If you could choose between HIV/AIDS and Ebola, which one would you choose?” While I pondered my answer, he replied that he preferred HIV/AIDS because, unlike Ebola, HIV/AIDS can be medicated and one can stay alive for quite some time without too much pain. This comparison led him to argue that Ebola is worse than war: In a war they can fire at you, you can run. In a war, they can cut off your hand, they can cut off your leg, they can fire at you, you can go to a hospital, you take a shower, you live. With Ebola, you die. No treatment. . . . And those that survive, they have problems now. Some can’t see clear, some are impotent.2 . . . So I would say, the war, you can run away from it. But Ebola, nobody can run away from Ebola. . . . During the war, when I heard, “Pow! Pow! Pow!” I didn’t go down that side, I ran the other way. That’s why I’m saying the war is better than Ebola.

Nevertheless, Maxwell was more affected by the war than Ebola, since he did not lose any relatives to Ebola. He is no longer afraid of Ebola, as he knows what to expect and how to remain safe. That being said, he was vehement about never setting foot into an ETU ever again. He had already risked his life without being rewarded adequately once before. Maxwell (Figure 5.1) felt Ebola destroyed his career options, since his shop was running well before the outbreak. “But not only me! All Liberians are victims of Ebola, it ruined their futures.”

Figure 5.1.  Maxwell, his brother, and a customer at his brother’s drugstore (from left to right). Photo by Theresa Ammann with permission of all parties.

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Grieving after Ebola: Teta Teta is a very warmhearted and positive spirit despite all the hardship she has had to endure. At thirty-six years, she has no formal education and sells lappas (traditional West African cloth) at the Redlight market. Since her husband, George, passed away due to Ebola in August 2014, she has been a single mother of four children, ranging from age nine to sixteen. George was a well-respected doctor, politically engaged, and taught nursing at the high school of his eldest daughter. Throughout the outbreak, he had been very active in promoting the “Ebola Is Real” campaign in their neighborhood, and the whole family had practiced protective measures, such as avoiding physical contact with people, wearing long sleeves and long pants, and washing their hands. It, therefore, remained a mystery as to why George became sick one day. When Teta asked him whether he had treated someone with Ebola, he replied that he was not sure but still told everyone to stay away from him as the symptoms were Ebola-like. That same night, George built a barrier of pillows between himself, Teta, and their youngest son, who used to share their bed with them. George continued to tremble while interchanging between vomiting and suffering from diarrhea. All night, Teta walked back and forth emptying his bucket. The next morning, George decided to go to an ETU. Teta, who had heard that people “disappeared” in ETUs, tried to convince him not to go because she was afraid she would never see him again. George reassuringly replied, “I will go and I will come back!” and then turned and walked off. This was the last time Teta saw George. He never returned, and neither did his remains or any of his belongings that he had on him that day. Whenever Teta told me this, she broke into tears. George’s body was burnt, a custom alien to Liberians, so Teta had nowhere to go and grieve for him. Nothing was left of him. The only thing that was given to Teta was his ETU death certificate (Figure 5.2). It wrongly stated that George died one month after his admission to ELWA 3, when he in fact passed away on 29 August. His death certificate, which was issued accordingly by the Liberian Ministry of Health, featured the same wrong date of death. Both documents continued to confuse Teta and her family. Following George’s death, Teta and her family were placed under a torturous month of quarantine where they not only suffered from their grief but also their isolation. “The whole time you sit here, you get up, you go, sit down over there, you come here, you lay inside, you can’t sleep, your heart [she beats her chest quickly in an imitation of a nervously racing heart]. FEAR! I was scared!” For twentyone days, they waited for someone to get sick. Fear ripped through them every time someone suffered from the slightest diarrhea, they washed themselves with very hot water, and carefully rubbed their armpits because they had been told that the virus hides in such places. While the ostracism of some of their neighbors nagged at them, one neighbor was particularly helpful; she drew water for them and hooked them up to her generator so that they could share her electricity at night. Teta was incredibly thankful to this family, but she also knew that they were only returning a favor because George used to tend to the woman’s ill family members. When the twenty-one days were finally over, some of the neighbors insisted that they extend their quarantine period, just to be sure. So they stayed isolated for another ten days. Even after that, people continued to avoid their family. Teta felt so ostracized that she continued to avoid people for another four months.

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TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN This is to certify that George Morrison was tested Positive of the Ebola Virus on the 21st day of August and was admitted at the ELWA-3 Ebola center. He DIED on the 29th day of September 2014. Figure 5.2.  George’s death certificates (all identifying information has been redacted). Photo by Theresa Ammann with permission of all parties.

Before his death, George had encouraged Teta to go to night school so that she could learn to read, write, and calculate. He used to provide for everything, and Teta’s market sales were just an additional surplus. They did not suffer hardship, all their four children went to school, and they always had enough food. Following George’s death, Teta struggled to support her family on her meager income alone. Lappa selling was not a reliable, steady income, so her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lisa, began to braid hair to help out. Additionally—like many other families—they began to make small snacks for sale, such as kayan.3 In short, they exhausted any possible option to sustain themselves financially. They did not receive support from the government. Teta could only send two of her four children, Lisa and her youngest son, George, to school. She stopped attending night school because she had neither money nor time. Sometimes, the family went to bed hungry, and their exhaustion was visible. How George could have become infected when he was so conscious of the virus—unlike the rest of the family, who did not take it too seriously in the beginning—remained a mystery that continued to rattle at their attempts to make sense of Ebola. One day, Lisa told me that she heard that those who went to the ETU were killed in an effort to prevent the virus from spreading. To do so, patients

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allegedly received a pill that made them vomit and “toilet,” in an effort “to flush out the virus.” Those with a strong resistance—immune system—survived this flushing process, while those with a weak resistance died in the process. When Lisa finished explaining this flushing process, Teta added, “Maybe, he had no strong resistance.” Teta told me that the war was not as bad as Ebola because she was able to hide with her family. “With Ebola you can’t move away from it! It always close! I’m afraid to touch my own mother! She afraid to touch me! Same with my children!” Hand washing remained a practice in the family even after the official end of Ebola, since Teta was afraid the virus might return. Unfortunately, her concern became a reality in mid-November 2015. Coincidentally, one day after Ebola returned to Liberia, I fell ill with a menial stomach bug and was told that when Teta and her family learned of this, they were deeply concerned for me. I visited them three days after my recovery to tell them that it had been nothing serious and that I had simply eaten too much well water with my garree.4 Teta seemed relieved and yet she did not hug or touch me as she usually did. Ebola had reerupted and her self-isolation had returned. George’s death left Teta financially but most importantly emotionally wrecked. She told me of her loneliness and how she and George used to walk everywhere together. George used to own a little drugstore in which Teta also sold her lappas, so they spent most days together.5 One and a half years after his death, Teta’s grief for her loved one was still heartbreaking. I found it tragic that this was the first time I met a woman in Liberia who told me about how faithful and loving her husband was. Theirs seemed to have been a true love story, without the happy ending. Her friends had encouraged her to move on, so when I asked her if she felt secure now, she replied, “Yes, I have to, for my children. They can feel it. They can feel my fear. That won’t help. They depend on me. So I need to be strong for them!” She broke into silent tears again while Lisa gently patted her hand: “Mama, leave it. Papa will not come back.” Teta replied between sobs, “I can’t forget it. I need to CRY, my head hurts me. My eyes hurt. My heart is hurting.” But Lisa sternly replied, “Too much crying will give you a high blood pressure or a different sickness. Because if you cry too much . . . If you die, then who will take care of us?” While small whimpering sounds escaped Teta’s mouth every time she gasped for air, Lisa sat there stoically, her eyes emptily staring into the distance as if she had locked the pain away somewhere deep inside herself. Lisa was scheduled to finish school the next year, so I asked about her plans. She told me Ebola had changed her mind: “I wanna be a medical doctor.” Her mother added, “That was her father’s dream.”

Surviving Ebola: Grace Grace is a big woman in her late twenties, and despite her—by Liberian standards— imposing height she seemed incredibly timid and withdrawn when we first met. She cast down her eyes to avoid eye contact as if staring into nothing left her more comfortable. When I extended my hand, she only shook it reluctantly. The customary Liberian “snap”6 was almost nonexistent and entirely inaudible, as she only laid her hand in mine lightly. Immediately, I regretted having shaken hands with her, as I felt like I “forced” her to do so. As our interview unraveled, I realized that it was not me Grace was afraid of. She was reluctant to let people close to her, since others continued to mistreat her for being an Ebola survivor and because she was petrified that Ebola might return. I learned that these fears had come to embody the mark that Ebola had left on Grace. As fate would have it, radios announced the

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return of Ebola on Dupont Road—approximately a fifteen-minute car ride from Grace’s home—the day after Grace and I first met. Before Ebola, Grace and her husband rented a small house. They lived there alone based on her selling clothes at the market and him running errands. In August 2014, around the peak of Ebola, Grace’s grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt suddenly died from Ebola. Shortly after, Grace’s parents and brother fell ill and came to her house so that she could take care of them. The community placed Grace’s house under quarantine; no one was allowed to leave the house, and they depended on the community to provide their food and water supplies. One after the other, Grace’s parents and brother died over the course of the next month, despite Grace’s continuous care. She had tried to protect herself by wearing long sleeves, but there had been little she could do. “They were sick! I can’t just leave them like that.” Before long, Grace began to show Ebola symptoms: Ebola can do crazy things to you, Ebola can make people crazy. The place that it touched me from [the] first were my legs. I couldn’t walk. My legs were . . . I was crippled, when I was walking my head would just be shaking . . . And the headache! Like somebody was knocking my head with a stick. My skin was burning hot, it hurt so much. . . . Whenever I drank water the Ebola would make me vomit too much. Sometimes I would take a bath, but my body kept on being so very hot. My skin would be too HOT. My stomach was running, if I didn’t vomit, I was toileting.7

Although her husband was the only relative left to take care of her, he was afraid to touch her since everyone else who had contracted Ebola in her family had died. She saw no other choice but to go to an ETU. In an effort to avoid an ambulance jam-packed with sick, vomiting, and diarrhea-inflicted Ebola patients, Grace took a taxi to the ETU on 11 October. She stayed there for two weeks, during which time she was unable to keep any food in her stomach. The people there took good care of her, changed her clothes every day, and brought her food three times a day and medication to ease the pain. Grace slowly recovered, but when she was finally released from the ETU, the people in her community continued to be scared of her. “They said I was still Ebola.” Grace had visibly changed; she had lost a lot of weight and her “whole face was black. Ebola can make people black. I was black!” One of her friends even told her that she thought Grace would not survive, but bit by bit, Grace recovered her strength. When we spoke, one year after her recovery, her body continued to remind her of Ebola through sudden bursts of pain. Grace was afraid to hug people or shake their hands and generally avoided both practices. She knew that she could no longer contract Ebola during a new outbreak, but she was afraid that the virus would “sit” on her and then move on to whomever she touched. Whenever someone came down with diarrhea, fever, or headaches—frequent illnesses in Liberia but also Ebola symptoms—Grace worried that the person might be sick with Ebola. Grace was one of the few of my informants who, when asked about their Ebola experiences, did not leap straight into comparisons of Ebola and the war. So when I told her that others had compared the two, she scoffed: Ebola is BAD. It’s not like war! Ebola is bad. Because when Ebola comes, when it come to your house, it will kill ALL your family members there. . . . If someone passes by, they don’t wanna touch you because they are afraid it will catch them. Ebola is worse than war. . . . Because, during the war, at least they could still go and find you, but Ebola is a sickness in your body. You’ll be SICK. . . . You’ll be SUFFERING in that sickness. Then you die slow-slow. With a gun, they can only shoot you

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down once. It will not be easy but you will not suffer. With Ebola, everybody runs from you. Nobody comes, they’ll be scared of you. People won’t come for you, they won’t come to the house and see you, everybody will be scared to come to the house.

Even one year after her recovery, Grace was unable to sell goods in her community because people continued to be afraid of buying her produce. People still came occasionally to point fingers at her and yell, “That person was Ebola patient!” Some stole from her, others merely ridiculed her. Even her own husband continued to be afraid of her. She began to go on long commutes to the Redlight market to ensure no one would recognize her. Grace occasionally shared post-ETU experiences and concerns like these with a woman whom she had met at the ETU. Ebola completely changed her plans for the future, as her brother left his five orphaned children in her care. Unlike Teta and Maxwell, Grace did not blame anyone; she was simply “hustling to get by” as she sat there with her body collapsed under the burden of having to live with the legacy of Ebola and the consequent daily struggles. Before Ebola, she had only her husband and herself to consider; now they were seven people in the house. She hoped that she would be able to send some of the children to school one day. “I brace myself that God will help me, God will give me the strength to take care of them. That I can be a good person for them.” The children were her only concern for the future. When I thanked her for telling me her story, I was surprised when she told me that she was happy to talk to me, because she had seemed timid throughout our discussion. At this point, she looked up into my eyes for the first time. “I just want to talk with someone.” Grace, a woman with five adopted children to take care of and a husband who continued to be afraid of her, was surrounded by people in her tiny house and yet utterly lonely.

Ebola’s Ruptures: Global Entanglements Ebola is a phenomenon that is constituted by the intra-action8 of the Ebola virus and human and nonhuman actors. In this sense, risks are social constructs of assembled beliefs, meanings, and logics (Lupton 2013: 30) and nonhuman actors. Ebola, therefore, did not become a risk until it came in contact with human and nonhuman actors. While Ebola is undeniably a virus that constitutes a risk to human life and well-being, most likely no matter the cultural setting, it is the belief in the value and importance of human life that makes Ebola a deadly virus that is to be feared. In fact, when Ebola first entered Liberia in March 2014, people did not regard the virus as a risk, as they had never encountered it before. It took many months until the government and local community efforts had convinced people of the real danger Ebola posed to their lives.9 As Maxwell pointed out quite correctly, “All Liberians are victims of Ebola, it ruined their futures.” Ebola not only caused ruptures in the lives of Maxwell, Teta, and Grace, but also in Liberia as a whole, the region, and the world. This is to say that the insecurities created by Ebola are not just created by the virus itself but also by its entanglements on global, regional, national, community, and family levels. Multiple global, regional, and local factors influenced the phenomenon of Ebola and, therefore, indirectly and directly the lives of Maxwell, Teta, and Grace. For example, with the spread of Ebola, economic and food insecurity became rampant for multiple reasons. Foreign industries withdrew their workers so that multiple economic sectors and adjacent service industries were closed. Consequently, the local economy collapsed as a result of the sudden loss of employment for thou-

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sands. Likewise, export and import ground to a halt as foreign industries were afraid their workers would contract the virus. However, since Liberia is heavily reliant on food imports—especially rice—food prices spiraled out of control, people were unable to buy food, and hunger became a widespread problem. At the same time, the virus traveled faster than the news and warnings about it. Most Liberians are illiterate, and consequently, warning text messages sent by the government to citizens went literally unread. Likewise, communication teams to inform people about Ebola were obstructed by Liberia’s poor road conditions. Other factors also eroded the relationship between the government and the people. People mostly see hospitals as a place where one goes to die, since governmental corruption remains high and the health system lies in shambles and is physically and financially inaccessible for most. For example, the John F. Kennedy hospital in Monrovia, abbreviated as JFK, is locally referred to as “Just for Killing.” Unsurprisingly, relatives are often seen as the only trustworthy source of care available. Consequently, many stayed home, where their loved ones gave their lives to take care of them, as was the case in Grace’s family. All these factors indirectly and directly influenced how Maxwell, Teta, and Grace experienced Ebola, which insecurities and uncertainties it created for them, and how it changed their lives. Table 5.1 seeks to give a Table 5.1.  Human Insecurities Caused by and Related to Ebola Maxwell

Teta

Grace

Personal

Changed future No longer fears Ebola (knows what to do) Unable to maintain pre-Ebola lifestyle

Changed future Continued fear of Ebola Grief Heartbreak Loneliness Exhaustion

Changed future Constantly afraid of Ebola’s return Timid posture and behavior Grief Loneliness Exhaustion

Economic

Community fears of health facilities continues to stall business Destroyed his career Economically insecure

Difficult to suddenly be sole breadwinner Can only afford to send two (out of four) kids to school Stopped own education/night school Daughter braids hair to help

Suddenly mother of five Unable to send children to school Food too expensive

Food

Mostly able to provide food Sometimes not enough food

Difficult to provide food Sometimes no food

Very difficult to provide Often no food

Health

Introduced hygiene measures into private life

Fear Mental health: great pain over loss Physically exhausted by struggles and sorrows

Changed body Fear Continued bursts of pain Physically exhausted by struggles

Political

Anger at government International community’s help needed

Only disrespect from MSF due to incineration of body No government help

Received no help from government Grateful for MSF’s ETU aid Blames no one

Community

Lost no one People still afraid of health facilities (incl. his)

Lost husband Ostracism during Ebola

Lost whole family Continued ostracism by community and husband Target of theft Can only sell outside of community

Source: Compiled by the author.

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comparative overview of their lives by organizing their described insecurities, uncertainties, and hardships through six of the seven human securities: (1) personal, (2) economic, (3) food, (4) health, (5) political, and (6) community security. Environmental security was omitted, since Maxwell, Teta, and Grace did not mention environmental concerns in relation to Ebola.

Social Navigation of Riverscapes The insecurities outlined in Table 5.1 highlight how Ebola changed the lives of Maxwell, Teta, and Grace to varying degrees. Ebola constituted a material-bodily experience (in the form of insecurities and potential death) that altered their lives and, therefore, their time. In referring to their lives as “riverscapes,” I want to metaphorically convey the temporal and material changes and the potentiality of death that Ebola brought about. If time is a river that flows, then time can never repeat itself in its exact entirety. The same can be said of life. Life is an unpredictable flow that—if seen from the perspective of the individual or flowing water—cannot be repeated. We cannot go back in time and change our lives, just as water cannot go back and change its flow. In this context, a catastrophic rupture, such as Ebola or a landslide, embodies that which alters our life or the flow of the river forever; both present and future are reconfigured. Death alters time and, therefore, inevitably inscribes itself onto matter, just as Karen Barad describes time as reconfiguring “through each intraaction” (2007: ix). This catastrophic event becomes a bodily and material experience, either directly or indirectly. It is in this way that Ebola’s ruptures rippled through Maxwell’s, Teta’s, and Grace’s lives. The closer they were to Ebola’s epicenter—that is, having contracted Ebola—the more of an impact Ebola had on their lives. Likewise, their perception of this change in time, or their lives, was perceived through the material changes surrounding them and the mental and physical effects that came to be etched onto their bodies. While this understanding of time might be critiqued as a Western, linear understanding of time, it remains open to other cultural interpretations of time and life. Riverscapes can also denote circular, never-ending interpretations of time, such as beliefs in an afterlife or reincarnations. In the riverscape example, the bed of a river might eventually dry up, yet its water will not merely evaporate into nothingness, but rather turn into rain and become the form of a different life and constitute another’s time and life. The insecurities created by Ebola constitute ripples in Maxwell’s, Teta’s, and Grace’s social seascapes, or riverscapes, through which they must navigate (see Vigh 2009 to read more about navigating social seascapes).10 The term “riverscape” is fitting because it symbolizes the temporal and material nature of life, but also because it describes the state of constant motion through which Maxwell, Teta, and Grace must navigate. This “way of surviving in uncertain circumstances,” which is referred to as dubria in Guinea-Bissau (Vigh 2009: 423), is termed “hustling” by Liberians. Maxwell, Teta, and Grace are all “hustling” to survive through a variety of strategies. For example, Teta has expanded her lappa sales to coal and snacks, and her eldest daughter now braids to make extra money. Maxwell, on the other hand, has joined his brother’s hospital-building venture. The brothers know that it will take them a long time to build the hospital without any governmental financial assistance. Without the needed connections to governmental officials, they are

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eager to embellish their list of donors with international names. And lastly, Grace has been forced to sell her lappas outside of her community.

Ebola’s Temporal and Material Changes It seems that—at least when comparing these three—the better off the person was before Ebola hit the country—especially financially and educationally—the less affected they were by the ripples of Ebola.11 So, Maxwell, who received the best education—he is literate and educated as a nurse—and lives in the biggest house, suffered least from human security–related repercussions. His riverscape was merely shaken up. His life became more complicated, but his riverscape’s waters, albeit choppy, flow along their foreseen path. He did not lose anyone to Ebola, nor did he contract the virus. The comparative financial stability he experienced before Ebola as well as his ETU job allowed him to support his family throughout Ebola even though commodity prices increased. “After” Ebola, he no longer feared the virus, as he knew what to expect and how to protect himself. However, Ebola closed down his business, which led to a post-Ebola struggle to support his family at the same level as he had in the past. In turn, this created occasional food insecurities his family had not faced before. It is not surprising that he has channeled his frustration and fear into anger toward the incompetence of the government. He felt betrayed and abandoned. This abandonment was also experienced by Grace (and Teta), but unlike Maxwell she is not only placed at the other end of the spectrum in terms of her pre-Ebola well-being, but is also closest to the epicenter of Ebola’s ripples. Her life was radically changed by Ebola. Her riverbed was fundamentally altered, as Ebola forced her to live a life she never thought of living. Ebola took away her family and made her a mother of five overnight. This left her insecure in terms of finances and food. She continued to be ostracized by her husband and community, and her consequent loneliness, exhaustion, and timidity continued to embody Ebola. Her behavior, bodily changes, and the continuous afterpains embodied the material changes that engulfed her. Unlike Teta and Maxwell, Grace had not even reached the point of wanting to blame anyone or anything for her misery. To her, Ebola was still an ongoing struggle that she dealt with on a daily basis. Teta, on the other hand, found herself in between these two. Her riverbed was altered, as she no longer had her husband to support her, and while she did not contract Ebola herself, she was forced to navigate through its aftershocks. She continued to be afraid of Ebola and shaken by heartache and loneliness. Suddenly the sole breadwinner of the family, she explored other possible financial ventures, but this left her (and her family) physically exhausted. Her daughter Lisa, on the other hand, tried to fill her father’s shoes both mentally and physically. She provided emotional support to her mother, contributed to the family budget, and even changed her school plans to take up the same profession as her father. These alterations of their lives inscribed Ebola on their bodies, minds, memories, relations, professions, and inevitably their time. After Grace had recovered from Ebola in the ETU, she returned home “black” and “dry.” And while these markers quickly disappeared and Grace returned to her usual skin complexion and physique, other visible remnants persisted. Like the aftershocks of an earthquake, Grace’s body continued to be randomly shaken by headaches and sudden bursts of pain. These constant and yet unpredictable physical reminders of Ebola

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haunted her on a daily basis and reestablished the hold Ebola maintained on her. Likewise, the virus marked her psychologically, as loneliness and fear continued to bend her body into a timid posture and behavior. Unexpectedly becoming a mother left Grace physically exhausted, since she was constantly “hustling” to provide food and save up for school fees. While Teta did not contract Ebola, her experience was similar, as her body continued to be “shaken” by the mental pain over the loss of her husband. All that was left of him was an incorrectly dated death certificate. Loneliness, fear, and heartache were only a few of these psychological marks, while the physical marks were expressed in her exhaustion over having to be the sole provider for a family of five. Lastly, Maxwell was lucky enough to escape both contracting Ebola and the loss of relatives to it, and yet, the fact that Ebola crippled his business created hardships for him and his family. Losing his previous security level meant that he suddenly had to worry about things that had never been worries before. In comparing their cases, one particular commonality stands out. Their comparisons of Ebola and the war demarcate two of the most significant traces of Ebola: loneliness and the fear of touching a loved one. All of them describe the loneliness that Ebola brought upon them. While Maxwell was affected more by loneliness during Ebola, as he tried to stay away from his family in an effort to keep them safe, Teta’s and Grace’s loneliness continued. While Teta was alone without her husband, Grace continued to be ostracized by her husband and the surrounding community. For all three, Ebola’s persistent traces continued to temporally and materially ripple through their lives (and thus, time) as it permeated their bodies, minds, memories, relations, and professions.

Ebola’s Ripples The ripples of Ebola’s rupture influenced human securities by rippling through Maxwell’s, Teta’s, and Grace’s times, lives, and riverscapes. While their insecurities following Ebola might vary, they all have one thing in common: the bodily/ material nature of Ebola’s impact has forever altered their past, present, and future, and therefore their lives. The moment we realize that Ebola has changed our lives, this particular change has already passed; it lies in the past. And yet, at the same time, the change is ongoing; it constitutes our present. Likewise, seeing that it has changed the riverbeds of our lives, it has altered our future. Ebola took people’s lives and, therefore, inevitably brought their time to an end; their present and future were eradicated. For everyone who survived, Ebola changed their past, present, and future through all the insecurities, uncertainties, and hardships it created. These insecurities, uncertainties, and hardships—which embody Ebola—altered time and inscribed themselves onto the bodies, minds, and relations of Maxwell, Teta, and Grace. While Ebola has painfully revealed Liberia’s dysfunctional health system and widespread political distrust, its materiality has entrenched itself in the country’s fabric—for example, in health-related, social, political, or economic terms—and old wounds of the war were reopened. No one could escape Ebola. Everyone was “touched” by Ebola and, consequently, had to live and deal with Ebola’s ripples. Much like gravitational waves unnoticeably ripple through our space-time, Ebola’s ripples continue to alter social riverscapes seemingly invisible to the unknowing

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eye. And as time goes by, Liberians return to their newfound and yet old normality. As for Maxwell, Teta, and Grace, only time will tell where their rivers will carry them.

Theresa Ammann is a postdoctoral candidate in Human Security at Aarhus University, Denmark. In her PhD, she argued for a PostHuman Security approach in Security Studies by drawing on Ebola- and war-related experiences of periurban Liberians. She has previously written about “The Importance of Trust in Peacebuilding” as exemplified by the Ebola outbreak and published on Ebola’s threat to human security and peace. Her current project focuses on restorative justice and conflict mediation in Denmark. She is also a coordinator of the Gendering in Research network at Aarhus University.

Notes   1. This fear was not restricted to Maxwell’s drugstore, as many people had unknowingly contracted the virus from Ebola patients at such health facilities during the Ebola outbreak. Even once Liberia had been declared Ebola-free in September 2015, fears of health facilities persisted.   2. These aftereffects of Ebola are known as “post-Ebola syndrome.”   3. A crumbly mixture of ground peanuts, rice, and sugar.   4. Ground cassava mixed with water, milk powder, sugar, and topped with roasted peanuts.   5. Shortly after George’s passing, their shop was ransacked by robbers; Teta lost all her goods and was no longer able to afford the shop’s rent.   6. A Liberian handshake requires both parties to snap their middle fingers.   7. “Runny stomach” and “toileting” both refer to diarrhea.   8. For further reading on “entanglements” and “intra-action,” see Barad (2007).   9. Maxwell actually mentioned to me that skepticism prevailed in some remote communities that had not been affected by Ebola in 2014. 10. To metaphorically describe social environments, Vigh proposed the notion of “seascape” rather than “landscape” in order to better reflect the unpredictability, constant change, and different forces at play (e.g., wind and waves) in social environments. 11. While this might be a sheer coincidence, the few informants who had neither contracted Ebola nor lost any loved ones were predominantly literate and believed in the virus’s existence.

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. London: Duke University Press. Burgess, Jens Peter, and Taylor Owen. 2004. “Editors’ Note—Special Section: What’s ‘Human Security’?” Security Dialogue 35 (3): 345–46. FFP (Fund for Peace). 2011. “Country Profile: Liberia.” Www.Fundforpeace.org. http://fundfor peace.org/global/states/ccppr11lr-countryprofile-liberia-12f.pdf (accessed 5 December 2015). Haq, Mahbub ul. 1994. “Human Development Report 1994: New Dimensions of Human Security.” United Nations Development Program. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/ reports/255/hdr_1994_en_complete_nostats.pdf (accessed 15 September 2011). Holbraad, Martin, and Morten Axel Pedersen. 2013. Times of Security: Ethnographies of Fear, Protest and the Future. New York: Routledge. Lupton, Deborah. 2013. Risk. New York: Routledge.

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Owen, Taylor. 2004. “Human Security—Conflict, Critique and Consensus: Colloquium Remarks and a Proposal for a Threshold-Based Definition.” Security Dialogue 35 (3): 373–87. Tadjbakhsh, Shahrbanou, and Anuradha Chenoy. 2007. Human Security: Concepts and Implications. London: Routledge. Vigh, Henrik. 2009. “Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation.” Anthropological Theory 9 (4): 419–38.

PART II

Materialities of Death

CHAPTER 6

“Saving the Dead” Fighting for Life in the Siberian North Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård

Imagine a world in which everything grows faces with large mouths, sharp teeth, and eyes that stare back at you. If you do not see the web of glowering gazes directly, you might sense them as a shadow in the corner of your eye. Or you may hear the sound of grinding teeth, craving human flesh in the darkness of the night. This the world of the Siberian Chukchi, for whom hunting and being hunted are the basic conditions of life. And yet, there is more at stake than simply filling one’s stomach with juicy flesh. Predation not only signifies survival but also reproduction: when eating, one incorporates and assimilates prey, thus transforming it into one’s own class of being. Hence, predation is the principle means of expanding one’s own life-form at the expense of other life-forms. Above all, this force of predation becomes fearfully present at times of human death. Since a dead person’s body is immobile and defenseless, it works as a magnet for hostile predators that will try to eat and abduct it. The Chukchi mortuary ritual is, therefore, primarily a technology for protecting the deceased against predation and thereby preserving him or her within their own class of beings. This chapter explores how the Chukchi conceptualize death through a study of their mortuary ritual. As mentioned in the introduction to this volume, the question of the nature of death is intimately bound up with questions about the nature of time. We will show how the ritual treatment of the deceased body among the Chukchi in a very concrete and material sense seek to bend the flow of time into a circular movement of continuous human rebirths. However, there is a twist to this circular movement, since time for the Chukchi is also experienced as time reversed.

The Chukchi and Their Cosmos The Chukchi is a Siberian indigenous population of around sixteen thousand people. Some of the Chukchi people have moved into larger villages or cities and engage in various lifestyles, but the focus of this chapter is on the part of the Chukchi population who live mainly from large-scale reindeer herding in the tundra lands. Their main area of occupation is the Chukchi Peninsula, what is also called the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, but a group of Chukchi moved into northern Kamchatka during the nineteenth century, where they mixed with the local population of Koryak. Both ethnic groups are quite similar in their genetic makeup, language, and cultural traditions (King 2011; Slezkine 1994: 3). Both languages belong to the so-called Paleosiberian group, both groups practice ritual blood sacrifice as their

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primary means of ancestor worship, and both believe in the rebirth of the soul and perform various forms of shamanic practices. Unlike most other indigenous peoples of Russia, the Chukchi of northern Kamchatka were never Christianized (Willerslev 2009: 693). In addition, their inclusion within the Russian empire happened very late. After continuous wars with the Russian intruders during the Czarist period, the Chukchi were largely left to themselves until after World War II, where they were collectivized by the Stalinist government and subjected to the same socialist programs as the rest of the populations of the Soviet Union (Kerttula 2000; Willerslev 2000, 2012: 119). What is quite unique about the Chukchi of the village of Achaivayam, where the authors have collected the data for this chapter, is that they, despite the Soviet collectivization, secured a large herd of private reindeer that continued to be at the center of their ritual life, including the mortuary rituals. According to the Chukchi, death does not mark an end point of life, but rather a new state of existence. After a physical death, the name-soul of the dead person travels to the ancestral realm and becomes an ancestor, living a life virtually identical to the ways the Chukchi reindeer herders live in this realm. Thus, the ancestors too are herding reindeer, going hunting, marrying, carrying out sacrifices, and so on. However, everything is—from the perspective of the living—turned upside down and inside out. Winter and summer are reversed, so that the moon becomes the sun of the ancestral realm, just as right becomes left, small becomes big, and old becomes young. Time is also reversed and becomes the opposite of forward-running time: now and then, before and after are thus turned on their heads in the ancestral world. Likewise, what is experienced as a brief instant here becomes a prolonged period of time there, so that, when people ingest fly agaric mushrooms and “travel” to the world of the ancestors, they may report being away for months although only a few hours have passed in this realm (Willerslev 2009: 696; Figure 6.1).

Figure 6.1. Chukchi male in a trance on fly agaric mushrooms, after having played the drum. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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When a Chukchi infant is born, the first thing the parents ask it is “who has returned?”—meaning which deceased ancestors have returned in the child. Various forms of divinatory techniques and dream interpretations are then used to establish the child’s incarnated personality and proper name. A child can contain a number of ancestor souls within it, but one is predominant, and it is that ancestor’s name that must be given to the child (Figure 6.2). The name and soul are regarded as one and the same, and it is considered to be of paramount importance for the child’s future well-being that it is given its proper name. For the Chukchi, no life and its associated name is ever lost; it continues to exist through continuous incarnations (Willerslev 2013: 80). This is not to claim that the people disregard the reality of death. They are fully aware that death marks a particular state of being, just as death is most often experienced as a painful loss among the living. Yet, death is not conceived of as an end point, but rather as a transitional state of being in between the realms of the living and the ancestors. However—and this is the crux of the matter—while the dead are not really dead, there is no guarantee that they will be reborn within their own class of beings. Every deceased runs the risk of being eaten and thus abducted into an unfamiliar life-form, which the Chukchi denote tannit, meaning “alien”—a word that has clear associations with danger, hostility, and even warfare (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 1). When abducted by an alien life-form, a person leaves the circle of human rebirths. This implies death in an absolute sense (ibid.: 5), since the person is now absorbed into a different kind of bodily form with all that this entails in terms of an alien culture and cycle of incarnations. Since the amount of soul-stuff within the cosmos is understood to be limited in number, we are effectively dealing with a struggle over “limited resources,” and thus every life is important in the fight for survival and reproduction. Securing a deceased against predation is, therefore, essentially about safeguarding the flow of Chukchi life within time, defined as it is

Figure 6.2. This five-year-old Chukchi boy is a chain-smoker, because he is an incarnation of his grandfather’s brother, who was a chain-smoker. The boy has taken over the deceased’s name and character. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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by a circular continuation of the return of ancestral names within one’s own class of beings.

A Fearful World of Predator and Prey The Chukchi call themselves lugora verlat, meaning the “true people,” while everyone else are called tannit. Tannit are potentially evil and include human beings from other societies, but also those spiritual enemies who are invisible to the ordinary human eye. All beings with an evil character are categorized under the umbrella term ke’let. The Chukchi explained to Waldemar Bogoras, the classic ethnographer of the Chukchi people, that ke’lets most often are invisible enemies that beset them from all sides and whose mouths are always gaping, ready to eat them (1904–9: 253). They might sneak up on you as you pass by their invisible camp on your reindeer sledge or when you are lying asleep. Ke’let are sometimes described as being huge as giants and with monstrous features, but they can scale themselves down and become smaller than a snowflake, which allows them to hide in between the hairs of one’s reindeer clothing or sleeping bag. You will then unknowingly carry them into your own family camp. A few days later, people will start becoming ill and possibly die. Sometimes, however, ke’lets can take on the form of visible objects or persons, which make the world no less scary. While the ke’lets may lurk everywhere, who is considered a ke’let to whom depends on the eyes that see: while the ke’let, from the viewpoint of an ordinary Chukchi person (if he or she can see them), will have grotesquely distorted faces with gaping mouths, this is not so from the viewpoint of the ke’let. They see themselves as ordinary human beings, who live in societies similar to those of the Chukchi, keep reindeer, marry each other, have children, and go hunting. To them, they are the ones who are truly human, while they see human beings as prey animals. Consequently, the “infrahuman perspective” of all classes of beings in the cosmos is profoundly human: everybody, whether human, animal, or spirit, sees him- or herself, along with his or her own class of beings, as human beings, while everyone else is seen as potential predatory enemies. It is one’s body that determines who is seen as friend or foe. In other words, who you are and how you perceive the world around you all depends on the kind of body you inhabit (see also Viveiros de Castro 1998; Willerslev 2007: 82).

Dealing with the Dead Body When a person dies, they are placed in their home. The dead are not really dead in the sense that they can still hear, feel hunger and thirst, and possess emotions. However, a person in this state comprises a life that is potentially open to becoming either benevolent or destructive, and can, if not treated properly, turn into a ke’let and start devouring the people around them. For this reason, a dead person is in need of immediate caretaking, containment, and protection, so that the life of this particular person can continue after death through a new birth. All the precautions regarding the deceased body are concerned with how to direct them into taking the desired form of life, namely, that of a Chukchi ancestor. If this fails, the deceased is said to “completely die.” Bogoras explained it in this way: “The most dangerous are the completely dead. They are beyond being re-born into

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this world, and hence they become evil spirits in the other world. They live on the very border of the country of the deceased people and walk along the water with the ke’let” (1904–9: 517). As a precaution, no sadness must be shown, and thus no one sheds tears. It was explained to us in this way: “When the bereaved are crying, a huge ice mountain appears on the road, which the deceased then has to climb. That is bad, he might never reach the ancestors, but die on the road” (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 9–10). To please the deceased and secure his comfort, the body is placed on a reindeer skin in the center of the house, with the head resting on a pillow. A crucifix and a stone are placed on the chest. The crucifix is regarded as a powerful symbol that has much the same effect on the ke’let as it has on vampires in our part of the world, keeping them at bay. The small stone puts an enormous weight upon the deceased and ensures that he or she does not stand up and begin to consume the people around them. In addition, the deceased is surrounded by a small group of women, who are placed strategically along each side of the body to make up a kind of protective “fence” around the dead person. Enel’vit, which is a spirit food, mostly consisting of a mix of fur from a white rabbit and reindeer fat, is placed in the window of the room to feed the spirits in the hope that they will act as helpers for the deceased instead of predatory enemies. The deceased’s body and face are covered with a blanket to protect his or her skin from the light of the sun. Sunlight is considered a source of life, and while the purpose of the mortuary ritual is to regenerate the life of the deceased, preventing sunlight from reaching them is a way of enforcing the separation of the dead from the realm of the living and preparing them for the long journey to the ancestral realm, where our sun is the moon and vice versa. There everything is the same as here, yet quite the opposite.

Enhancing the Deceased’s Body through the Death Suit The deceased normally stays in their house for three days while all the preparations for the soul-journey are taking place. During those days, a death suit is completed. The death suit serves as the proper container for the deceased person’s journey. Preferably, the suit is almost ready-made from one’s private reindeer early in one’s life, so that it only needs minor adjustments after death. It is then the responsibility of the female villagers to finish sewing the suit. In the event that a death suit has not been made, and if the deceased does not possess any prepared skin from a private reindeer, the women are forced to find a solution. If skins from another family’s herd are used, the women must burn the edges of the skins to cover their real ownership. However, this is dangerous. The death suit, when made from one’s private herd, “function as an earmark to show the ancestors which family the deceased belongs to; and if they see through the deceit, the ancestors will tear the clothing into pieces and dismiss the deceased newcomer as a thief” (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 13). Chukchi women used to have facial tattoos made for the same purpose of identification by the ancestors when arriving to their realm. However, during the 1960s, the Soviet authorities banned this practice, and at present, there are only a few elderly women left in Achaivayam with facial tattoos. Still, some women will have a small tattoo made under their chin after they die, which then turns into a full-fledged tattoo when they reach the afterworld. If a woman arrives in the ancestral world without a tattoo, the ancestors may cut her face with a spear. Like-

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wise, the dead may face severe consequences from the ancestors if they discover that he or she is not dressed in a suit made from his/her own reindeer (ibid.: 13–14). The purpose of the death suit is to give the deceased a new, enhanced body as well as a new perspective on the world. Thus, the clothing is not simply a garment to cover the body. Rather, it is a new body (Pedersen and Willerslev 2012; Willerslev and Ulturgasheva 2012). The death suit then becomes a technology through which the deceased can carry out particular other-than-human tasks (cf. Viveiros de Castro 1998: 482). Thus, a dead Chukchi person is, through the suit, endowed with particular qualities that enable him or her to endure the journey and reach the realm of the ancestors. The suit, being made entirely from reindeer skin, functions as the body of a reindeer, which is resilient, durable, and offers a perfect shield against the cold. Additionally, a “tail”—which wipes out the deceased person’s footprints—is sewn onto the bottom of the parka’s back, as a way to protect the deceased from being tracked by ke’let (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 14). In addition, various protective charms and other personal belongings make up part of the deceased person’s full equipment: a knife, a spear or walking stick, yukola (dried salmon), old-fashioned fire tools, resin, bells, sewing equipment (for women), and a cup, plate, and spoon. The yukola is for feeding the many dogs that the dead will encounter on their way. The bells are for scaring off the ke’let, who fear the sound of metal. The resin is to be chewed by the deceased to “close his mouth” upon encountering the ancestors, who all want them to gossip about their shared relatives in this world (ibid.: 14–15). So, all these things assist the deceased on their long journey.

Dressing the Dead While the deceased’s death suit is being finished, guests are visiting the deceased. They bring tea, sugar, candy, tobacco, and other luxuries to his wife, which she then serves for the guests. If the deceased is a woman, it will be her close female relatives who will serve the guests. The guests place packets of cigarettes on the dead person’s stomach. When they later wish to smoke, they help themselves from this pile of cigarettes, indicating that the deceased acts like a good host who asks them to join him for a smoke. The atmosphere is polite and relaxed yet tense. The atmosphere serves to reflect a situation that is perfectly normal, and thus sorrow and fear must be suppressed. Exposing one’s sadness would be dangerous, as previously mentioned, as it may encourage the deceased to hang on to this realm. The wife or other close relatives of the deceased are busy throughout the day, cooking boneless meals and boiling water for tea. Tea and food are served to both guests and to the deceased, who is still treated as a living person among the living. However, while the guests consume the material aspects of the food and tea, the deceased consumes only its soul-stuff. On the third morning, the dead body is dressed in the death suit. It is only the women who are allowed to participate in dressing him, so the men retreat to the outdoors. The dressing is a dangerous affair due to the deceased person’s status as a potential ke’let, and the women dressing him face the risk of attack. They therefore disguise themselves by imitating ravens: they put on feathers made of hay and croak like ravens (Figure 6.3). In this way, they ensure that they themselves will not be held responsible for any potential anger caused. However, the raven is

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Figure 6.3. The deceased is being dressed in his death suit while the women are imitating ravens. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

also the creator and trickster figure in Chukchi mythology. His name is Ku’urkil, or the “self-created one” (Bogoras 1904–9: 315). The raven has great transformative powers, and by becoming ravens, the women inherit these powers and are able to shift the deceased from one being to another by changing the body. The women also sew the dead person’s hood together so that he is blindfolded and does not recognize any of the people who participate in the ritual from this point onward. Since the ancestral world, as previously described, is considered to be one in which everything is turned on its head, and the deceased has to know that he is going to become an ancestor, he or she is dressed opposite to what is normal: the left boot is put on the right foot and vice versa, the same goes for the mittens. Furthermore, his spear and walking stick are made in miniature because small things turn big on the other side. When the dead person is fully dressed in the new body, everyone present says goodbye by walking around him or her in the direction of the movement of the sun. As they walk over the legs, everyone kicks the knees three times with the back of their feet while roaring like bears. The bear is the strongest, both physically and spiritually, of animals and the only creature strong enough to fight off any ke’let. By imitating the bear, the bereaved signal to the deceased and other potential dangerous beings that they are powerful creatures who are not easily overcome in a battle. The deceased, and his/her future life, is then contained with a lasso wrapped around the torso and moved out of the house. The corpse is then taken to the cremation site at the sacred hill, next to the village. The elderly people refer to the hill as Appapo, which is the Chukchi word for “grandfather.” The women keep a watch over the dead and murmur a melody for him, while the men collect the firewood for the pyre and stack it.

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The Destruction of the Body Traditionally the deceased would be placed on a sledge with one or two draft reindeer attached to it. The deceased would then be connected to the reindeer with a lasso, as if he himself had caught them. They would then be stabbed in the right side so as to die a slow death, and whipped so that they would kick their legs and thus drag the sledge in high speed to the ancestral realm. Due to the separation between villagers and reindeer by up to 150 kilometers of tundra, this is rarely done nowadays. For most people, both the reindeer and sledge are enacted with surrogates. When building the pyre, which replaces the sledge, two huge poles are laid out on the ground. They are said to be sledge runners. The reindeer that are sacrificed for the deceased’s transportation have the substitute bodily form of a zioziat, a small reindeer made from the third stomach of a reindeer stuffed with fat from the intestines. The zioziat is cut into two halves. Each half is placed under the runners to make the sledge run smoothly. Another woman places three smooth river stones between the runners at the northern end, ensuring that they end up being underneath the deceased’s head when he is later placed on the pyre. These stones are a substitute for his face, signifying his eyes and mouth (Lykkegård 2016; Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 20). When the pyre is finally finished, the deceased is placed on top with his head facing to the north (Figure 6.4), because there is a hole in the sky just beneath the Polar Star, which you pass through when entering any of the other worlds is (Bogoras 1904–9: 307; Siimets 2006: 147). The Polar Star is referred to in the local language as the “Immobile Star” (Chukchi: Iluk-eer) or the “Nail Star” (Chukchi: əlqer-eer) (Siimets 2006: 147) and is seen both as the home of the creator as well as the center of the universe (Bogoras 1925: 212). The ritual participants retreats

Figure 6.4. The deceased is being cremated on the pyre. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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to a nearby bonfire, and the deceased’s children sit with their back to the fire as they are forbidden to look at the corpse from this point onward. The sight might tempt them to follow him to the other world (cf. Ziker 2013). In general, everyone is strictly encouraged not to look at the body on the pyre during the whole cremation, except for the two men attending to the fire and a couple of wise, often elderly women who keep an eye on the procedure (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 20). Two women imitating ravens step up onto the pyre, and while imitating the sounds of the bird they cut open the dead person’s stomach. This marks the beginning of the necessary destruction of his physical body, which will enable his soul to move out and to be refleshed on the other side. Since the ritual destruction of the dead person’s body is dangerous and might turn him into a ke’let, it is something that needs to be carried out in a hurry. Therefore, as soon as their performances are done and the smoke from the fire is heavy enough to hide them, they throw their raven bodies into the flames and quickly jump off the pyre. They then purify themselves hurriedly with the ashes of another small fire to chase away any ke’let that might have attached themselves to them. They then join the rest of the participants. The fire carries out the destruction of the dead person’s body, which is the purpose of the cremation. In earlier times, and further north, where firewood is limited, the dismembered body of the deceased is left on the tundra for the ravens to consume (cf. Bogoras 1904–9; Sverdrup 1939). In his classic study of death and mortuary rituals, Robert Hertz considers the difference between a sudden destruction and a slow one in relation to the worldwide belief that the body has to be destroyed to enable the soul of the living to pass from this world to the next: “The destruction may be sudden as in sacrifice, or slow as in the gradual wearing-away of the consecrated objects deposited in a sacred place or in a tomb” ([1960] 2004: 46; see also Willerslev et al. 2013). By cremating the deceased, the destruction of the body proceeds much quicker than natural decomposition. This is wished for, since the person, until his/her body is destroyed, is earthbound, with all the dangerous implications this entails. In Achaivaiam, the Chukchi sometimes express a fear of dying outside of their territory, since the open-air cremation is prohibited in many places and the proper rituals cannot be carried out. This, they explain, will disable one from continuing within the Chukchi circulation of life, and as mentioned, one’s soul will therefore be overtaken by some different life-form, and their name-soul will be lost forever. While the majority of the participants are sitting with their back to the fire, a few men and women carefully observe the behavior of the fire and smoke, as they can foretell the destiny of the deceased. If the smoke is black or uneven, it may be an indication that the ritual has been unsuccessful and that the deceased will endure some kind of trouble on his journey. Likewise, the way the fire eats into the deceased’s clothing is intensely observed. If the death suit burns rapidly off in big patches, it will indicate that the ancestors have recognized him as a thief of other peoples’ reindeer skins and are tearing his clothing apart (Figure 6.5). Since in the ancestral world time is turned on its head, at least from the perspective of the living, the ripping off of the clothing, which is something that takes place at the end of his journey, is observable in this world even before his journey has begun. Here we see how the participants in the mortuary rituals navigate the knowledge of two different time-spaces that coexist, albeit in different cosmological realms. It may appear as if the future is predicted, since the end of a journey

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Figure 6.5. Participants are sitting with their backs to the pyre, while a few women keep an eye on the fire and on how the deceased is burning. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

can be observed before it has begun, but in this case, the future is not exactly the future: it is rather a glimpse into a time-space that takes place simultaneously, but in which time is experienced in reverse. As the fire consumes the deceased’s body, the group of participants becomes almost ecstatic. They begin playing a game called the “game of coal” (Chukchi: inaykeletok), during which they take on the identity of ke’let. Men and women hunt and capture one another and color each other’s faces black with coal. This is one more example of shape-shifting, which enables the change of the deceased’s life-form to take place. The ke’let, as the consumers of human souls, are temporarily assisting in the destruction of the deceased’s bodily form and thus his life’s continuation on the other side. During this whole séance a few elderly women sit with their backs to the pyre and sing songs to further promote a successful journey (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 23–24).

Purification The cremation ritual is an event that connects, and in many ways collapses, two realms that are otherwise supposed to be separated: that of the living and that of the ancestors. Although this is necessary to allow for a successful transference of the deceased from one world into another, it is of paramount importance to ensure that these realms are separated again. If not, the deceased may stay in this realm and walk the streets of Achaivayam looking for relatives to bring with him or her to the other side. Thus, the minute the pyre has burned down, or even slightly before, the living must leave the place. Each participant brings home a twig

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to burn. The twig becomes a visible manifestation of the carrier’s soul, and thus a secure way to contain it and take it home. As they leave the same way they came, everyone passes two women seated on each side of the road. The women cleanse the participants by touching them with alder twigs as they pass by (Figure 6.6). When the last participant has passed them, they close off the ritual site by planting small twigs into the ground and placing stones in front of them. In the inverted world of the ancestors, these will be experienced as impermeable woodlands and peaks, and this whole installation will prevent the deceased from following in the footsteps of the living (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016: 24–25). Thereafter the participants will return to the deceased’s previous home, where they will be further purified. All the participants are given a sip of water, and as they enter the house, a small amount of water is strewn across their backs. The two women who acted as ravens will go through a more extensive cleansing. A fish in a water-filled dish functions as a scapegoat; the remaining raven qualities are put into its mouth, and after it has swum around, the fish will be destroyed by cutting off its head, after which it is hammered onto the wall of the house. Then the two women once again cleanse their hands over the smoke of the bonfire, and they are given a bracelet of bearskin through which they are once more given the enhanced body of a bear, the only being capable of defeating a dead person who has turned into a ke’let. A final meal is served, this time with bones, before everyone retreats to their own homes.

Figure 6.6. Two women sit on each side of the road and cleanse the participants by touching them with alder twigs as they pass by. Photo by Rane Willerslev.

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The “Second” and “Third” Burial In communities in which death is a temporal transformative state, just as with the Chukchi, the cremation is normally not a final act of the mortuary rituals, nor is it sufficient in itself (cf. Hertz [1960] 2004: 42). The close family of the deceased must return to the cremation site the following morning. This can be compared to what Hertz refers to as the “second burial.” The cremation would then equal what Hertz refers to as the “first burial,” which is characterized by removing the flesh and thereby the identity of the deceased. The “second burial,” he wrote, deals with the bones in order to give the deceased a new identity among the ancestors (ibid.: 72, 197). “The ‘second burial’ is furthermore marked by a great feast during which the remains of the deceased are recovered, ritually processed and moved to a new location” (Huntington and Metcalf 1979: 13). The “second burial” must be done carefully. One begins by throwing a stone where the pyre stood in order to scare away any ke’let. The ashes and pieces of bone, together with the three stones placed between the poles that formed the foundation of the pyre, are gathered by sweeping them together with branches. Then they are encircled with a lasso, which is said to “catch the place” of the ancestors. Then the participants have tea next to the encirclement as a last gesture toward the deceased, before the participants leave the ritual site just as carefully as they did the previous day. At this point the body containing the life force of the deceased has been utterly destroyed, the meat has been separated from the soul, the relationship with the deceased has been closed with a last goodbye meal, and he should now be ready to endure his long journey to the ancestral realm. Traditionally the “second burial” would conclude the mortuary ritual, but it would originally include a reindeer sacrifice (Bogoras 1904–9). However, due to the social changes that have taken place since communism took control in the 1940s, this is not possible today. During this period, when the nomadic herders were forcibly collectivized and their reindeer were converted into state farm animals (Kerttula 2000; Willerslev 2012), they slowly moved into the Soviet-built villages, including that of Achaivayam. Today, therefore, a large part of the Chukchi population of Achaivayam are only part-time nomads, and the physical distance to the herd has caused their mortuary rituals to be incomplete. Therefore, a “third burial,” tentyk, was invented (Lykkegård 2016), which shows the utmost importance of the correct performances of these rituals. Tentyk is a communal finalization of the mortuary rituals. The private herd is driven close to the village. For each of the year’s deceased people, a lasso is created, similar to that of the second burial, constituting the world of the ancestors. First a twig is caught with the lasso, and then the loop is enlarged into a circle. The twig is placed in an upright position and represents the souls of both the living people and the reindeer, who enter the world of the ancestors temporarily. It is by no means an accident that the lasso is formed as a circle. A circle can be seen as both timeless and time-enclosing space (Cirlot 1962). Inside the lasso you have ancestor time (Lykkegård 2016: 202), which as previously explained is time reversed from our time. The ancestral world, however, is made manifest within the world of the living, which in a very concrete way shows the simultaneous coexistence of the two time-spaces. Three river stones are once again made to stand in for the deceased, and are placed in each circle. By placing the deceased within the ancestral realm, a similar phenomenon of “future telling” as the one on the cremation site takes place. The deceased person is directly placed within the ancestral

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world, before his journey has begun. Again, this is an example of multiple times coexisting. Here, however, there is an observable manipulation of events: placing the substitutes for the deceased within the realm of the ancestors may seem impossible, because we know that the reindeer sacrifice at this ritual is crucial for the possibility of the journey. At this point, the reindeer has not yet been sacrificed. Placing the deceased within the ancestral world is a way of making use of the knowledge of ancestral time—which from our perspective is runs backward—so that the arrival happens before the beginning of a journey. Placing the deceased within the ancestral world is thus a way of manipulating time-space and thereby making the success of the journey a reality before it has even begun. When the deceased have been placed in the circle in the substitute form of three stones, the participants place their offerings for the ancestors, biscuits, tea, tobacco, yukola, sweets, and bread, within the lasso (Figure 6.7). A number of reindeer from the private herd are then sacrificed, one, two, or more for each deceased person, depending on their individual wealth. Some of the meat is boiled for human and ancestral consumption. The part offered to the ancestors is cut into tiny pieces and placed within the lasso. In the ancestral world, were everything is experienced opposite to how we perceive it, the tiny meat pieces will be seen as huge lumps of meat. The meat, which is not immediately eaten, is distributed but never to the close relatives of a deceased, as they are not allowed to carry home meat from the sacrificed reindeer.

Figure 6.7. The ancestral world bound within a lasso full of offerings at the annual mortuary ritual, tentyk. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

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All the vital “soft parts” of the sacrificed reindeer, their stomach, intestines, blood, hoofs, nose, ear, and tail, are placed together in a grave dug in the ground. The men then create a reindeer convoy by placing the antlers with the skull, the left femurs, jawbones, and the first cervical bone in a line on the ground (Figure 6.8). The reindeer skulls and bones are placed according to their real life placement within the herd, so that the lead reindeer gets to lead the convoy that will finally take the deceased people on their journey toward the ancestral world. The whole arrangement is directed toward the north, which, as already described, is the direction in which you find the entrance to the ancestral world. From the time of their deaths until this moment, the people that have died since the previous year’s tentyk have been waiting for their reindeer. Only now, through the sacrifice of their reindeer, can the deceased people actually begin their journey to the ancestral world and their name-souls rejoin the ancestors. Their journey should be successful, as the participants of the ritual have already placed the deceased people in the ancestral world. In the ancestral world, they will stay a lifetime before they again return to this realm through yet another death that will mark yet another cycle of rebirths.

Figure 6.8. The reindeer convoy made of antlers with the skull, left femurs, jawbones, and the first cervical bone at the tentyk. Photo by Jeanette Lykkegård.

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Conclusion: The Continuation of Life in Time Among the Chukchi every person is considered the embodiment of at least one deceased ancestor, whose name he or she is given and will be addressed by. In this sense, the lives of the ancestor quite literally pass through the incarnated person’s life, and thus time becomes—in an important sense—a circle of endless repetition. However, within this circularity exists an experience of forward-running and backward-running time simultaneously. To the living, time is experienced as following a forward-running circular movement, in which the past is always present through reincarnated ancestors. For the ancestors, however, time flows in the opposite direction. To them our time reversed is experienced as moving forward. The Chukchi mortuary rituals puts this at the forefront and makes use of it, thus revealing that the arrow of time is not absolute but rather observer dependent. It is possible for the deceased to take on both the time perspectives of the living and the dead by means of his or her specially designed death suit. It is also this suit that protects them on their journey to the ancestral world and ensures that the Chukchi way of life is sustained in time, now, in the past, and in the future.

Rane Willerslev is the director of the National Museum of Denmark. He was the lead researcher of the research project “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time,” on which Mirrors of Passing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Death, Materiality, and Time is based. He is also the author of Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (University of California Press, 2007) and On the Run in Siberia (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He is the editor (with Christian Suhr) of Transcultural Montage (2013); (with Ton Otto) of “Value as Theory” (special issue of HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2013); and (with Dorthe Refslund Christensen) of Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual (2013). Jeanette Lykkegård is a PhD scholar at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. Her current research is on contemporary Chukchi lifeways in northern Kamchatka, with a special interest in existential questions of “how to live” and consequently how to die. Her research concerns social engagement between humans and nonhumans and the Chukchi understandings of living, nonliving, dying, and sustaining life.

Note Both authors have contributed equally to this chapter. In addition, the two authors have provided a more extensive description of the Chukchi mortuary ritual in the journal Siberica (Lykkegård and Willerslev 2016).

References Bogoras, Waldemar. 1904–9. The Chukchee. Jesup North Pacific Expedition 7. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ———. 1925. “Ideas of Space and Time in the Conception of Primitive Religion.” American Anthropologist, n.s., 27 (2): 205–66. Cirlot, J. E. 1962. A Dictionary of Symbols. New York: Philosophical Library.

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Hertz, Robert. (1960) 2004. Death and the Right Hand. London: Routledge. Huntington, Richard, and Peter Metcalf. 1979. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kerttula, Anna M. 2000. Antler on the Sea: The Yup’ik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. King, Alexander. 2011. Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia. London: University of Nebraska Press Lykkegård, Jeanette. 2016. “The Third Burial: Passing between Worlds and Point of Transformation among the Siberian Chukchi.” In Materialities of Passsing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience, eds Peter Bjerregaard, Anders Emil Rasmussen, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, 187–206. London: Routledge. Lykkegård, Jeanette, and Rane Willerslev. 2016. “Regenerating Life in the Face of Predation: A Study of Mortuary Ritual as Sacrifice among the Siberian Chukchi.” Sibirica 15 (2): 1–39. Pedersen, Morten, and Rane Willerslev. 2012. “The Soul of the Soul is the Body: Rethinking the Concept of Soul through North Asian Ethnography.” Common Knowledge 18 (3): 464–86. Siimets, Ülo. 2006. “The Sun, the Moon and the Firmament in Chukchi Mythology and on the Relations of Celestial Bodies and Sacrifices.” Electronic Journal of Folklore 32: 129–56. Slezkine, Yura. 1994. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sverdrup, Harald. 1939. Among the Tundra People. San Diego: University of California Press. Viveiros de Castro, E., 1998. “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3): 469–88. Willerslev, Rane. 2000. Hunting and Trapping in Siberia. Copenhagen: Arctic Information. ———. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2009. “The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death among the Siberian Chukchi.” American Ethnologist 36 (4): 693–704. ———. 2012. On the Run in Siberia. Trans. Coilìn Òhaiseadha. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2013. “Rebirth and the Death Drive: Rethinking Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ through a Siberian Time Perspective.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, Studies in Death, Materiality and Time 1, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 79–98. London: Ashgate Publishing. Willerslev, Rane, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, and Lotte Meinert. 2013. “Introduction: Taming Time, Timing Death.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, Studies in Death, Materiality and Time 1, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 1–16. London: Ashgate Publishing. Willerslev, Rane, and Olga Ulturgasheva. 2012. “Revisiting the Animism versus Totemism Debate: Fabricating Persons among the Eveny and Chukchi of North-eastern Siberia.” In Shamanism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood in the Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia, ed. Marc Brightman, Vanessa Elisa Grotti, and Olga Ulturgasheva, 48–68. New York: Berghahn Books. Ziker, John P. 2013. “The Fire Is Our Grandfather: Virtuous Practice and Narrative in Northern Siberia.” In About the Hearth: Perspectives on the Home, Hearth and Household in the Circumpolar North, ed. David G. Anderson, Robert P. Wishart, and Virginie Vaté, 249–61. New York: Berghahn Books.

CHAPTER 7

Death, Rebirth, Objects, and Time in North American Traditional Inuit Societies An Overview Matthew J. Walsh and Sean O’Neill

When storm clouds gather round you . . . just remember that death is not the end . . . —Bob Dylan, “Death Is Not the End”

The ethnographic record of northernmost North American indigenous societies is rich in its descriptions of the complex beliefs and practices regarding death, the afterlife, and journeys undertaken by souls after death, burial practices and materials, and concepts of time reckoning (many of which defy Western perceptions of linear past-present-future temporal structure). Materiality is an important part of all cultural systems, and its interplay with death and death-related practices is an integral facet of anthropological studies. In the North American Arctic, material expressions relating to death were particularly distinctive because within traditional animistic Inuit cosmologies, nearly all things—from people and animals to features of the landscape and portable man-made and natural objects—were believed to possess iñua, or spirits/souls that provided them with sentience, personhood, and intentionality, indeed, a “life” of their own. Aqikhivik, one of Knud Rasmussen’s Caribou Inuit (Harvaqtôrmiut) informants, related this best: In the olden days, things were very different from what they are now. Everything had a soul, everything was more alive. When a caribou had been eaten, the meat grew again on the bones . . . The houses were alive, and could be moved with everything in them, and the people as well, from one place to another. They rose up with a rushing noise into the air and flew to the spot where the people wanted to go. In those days also, newly drifted snow would burn. There was life in all things. Snow shovels could go about by themselves, could move from one place to another without having to be carried. This is why we now, when in solitary places, never dare to stick a snow shovel into the snow. We are afraid lest it should come alive and go off on its own. So we always lay snow shovels down in the snow, so that they do not stand up. Thus all things were alive in the olden days. (Rasmussen 1930: 82–83)

This concept suggests that studies of materiality among Inuit societies should take into account the extension of subject-object dichotomies far into the realm of perceived human social relationships, rather than relegating them to purely mechanistic or material-economic domains (e.g., Miller 2005). The materiality of things,

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in traditional Inuit contexts, is in fact far more than the materiality of things themselves, but is the materiality of nonhuman persons, to use A. Irving Hallowell’s (1960) parlance. As for time, nowhere more so than in the circumarctic are concepts of time as dynamically expressed against a backdrop of extreme cycles of fluctuating climate and biodiversity, seasonally protracted/constricted nights and days, and dramatic phenomena relating to light, dark, and periods of extended twilight and aurora. These extremes have influenced the life- and deathways of Arctic peoples in dramatic ways for millennia, as have the stark, expansive landscapes of the region. As discussed in the introduction to this book, death takes people out of the flow of time; but in so doing, it also serves to punctuate time for others. In fact, we propose that the taking of one’s own life could be a way of decisively and extremely punctuating one’s own time and that of others, in order to delimit depression, which could be seen to be a lived experience where time itself is not marked out satisfactorily, one where each day, month, and year flows into the next, seemingly indistinguishable from one another in an endless fugue, with no sense of growth, satisfaction, or closure anywhere along the way. Here we provide an overview of ethnographic data regarding time, death, and the materials associated with death in select traditions in the North American Arctic, as they were recorded for seven indigenous societies across the region, roughly from west to east: the North Alaskan Iñupiat (previously “Eskimos”), consisting of the coastal Tagiugmiut (alt. Tareormiut) and the interior Nunamiut, the Inuit of the Mackenzie Delta,1 and the Copper, Netsilik, Caribou, Iglulik, and Baffinland Inuit (Figure 7.1).2

North Alaskan Iñupiat

Figure 7.1. Map of the study area showing relative locations of the indigenous societies discussed.

The range of Iñupiat traditions spans the entirety of the Alaskan Far North, well over a thousand kilometers east to west as the crow flies. At the time of European contact, the groups dwelling along the coast made up various interconnected, kinship-based settlements rather than distinct societies. Inhabitants of the region shared a common language (dialects of Inupiaq) and distinct boundaries between communities were fuzzy at best, since there was a good deal of intermarriage and mobility across much of the region. Here we rely primarily on data for specific regional subgroups of both coastal and interior peoples, focusing our attentions on the most detailed ethnographic sources available and necessarily generalizing between Tagiugmiut (“people of the sea”) groups and Nunamiut (“people of the

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land” or “inland people”) groups within the much broader range of “North Alaskan Eskimos” (Spencer 1959, 1984: 323). The Nunamiut concept of time is tripartite, with three epochs: itchaq imma (very early days), iŋilagaan (early days), and ipani (personal remembrance) (Gubser 1965). It is interesting to note here that these are all in what we would call “the past tense.” Itchaq imma is described as an “earliest period” shrouded from genealogical reckoning that recalls the existence of mammoths and other megafauna, including fantastical creatures such as giant, man-eating shrews, and is centered on the mythical endeavors of a creator figure, Aiyagomahala, who created the first Nunamiut people and animals. This period is also that of a hero-giant named Kayaktuaguniktuu, who aided the people and animals (who were also personified) and delivered the Nunamiut from the “people killers” of the interior. It is also the timing of the appearance of an anthropomorphized Raven figure, a Promethean trickster, who was believed to have ended a great flood and brought light to the Nunamiut, among other exploits (ibid.: 29–43). Iŋilagaan describes the more recent past since the mythical times of itchaq imma and the era of European contact, including narratives of conflict between the Nunamiut and their Northern Athapaskan neighbors and the introduction of Western trade goods and religion into the Far North (ibid.: 43–60). Ipani includes the period of one’s own memory and experience. In an environment of extreme diurnal and nocturnal seasonality, the passage of time is necessarily conceived of relative to the time requirements and constraints of essential activities. For instance, John Murdock (1892: 38) observes that “men sometimes spend 24 hours tramping through the rough ice in search of seals, and we knew of instances where small parties made journeys of 50 or 75 miles on foot without stopping to sleep.” Expounding on this, he goes on to present the “impossibility of learning the age of any individuals in the absence of any fixed method of reckoning time” (ibid.: 39). It would appear that people did not “age” in the same standard, numerically preconceived progression as in the West; fitness told its own story. Along these lines, Nicholas Gubser (1965: 192) observed that “the term ishuilaq (without end) refers to time” and that traditional Nunamiut conceptions of time recognized its passage but did not generally concern themselves with too much consideration of the future, since this was recognizably difficult to see. Rather, the future was not anticipated, but met with a confidence in the knowledge and memory (i.e., ipani) of what had worked in the past to succeed in the present. Exceptions to this were reflected in the recognition that dreams may predict events of the near future and that visions (often induced through shamanry and achieved with the aid of helping spirits) might allow “insights into the future” (ibid.: 207). The passage of time also played a key role in the observation of proscriptions and other considerations—for instance, with milestone successes in hunting or trapping, the successful individual may be required to drink from a “specially made cup for four days if the animal were male, five days if the animal were female,” or similarly to wait a prescribed number of days before cleaning a pelt in order not to offend the deceased animal’s iñua and to ensure future successes (ibid.: 208–9). The souls of living and nonliving things—the iñua—were considered timeless, conceived of as having always existed and to continue existing into the future, forever (ibid.: 200). Traditionally, it was believed that at the time of death, the iñua (soul), taganiŋa (shadow), and ishuma (where memory dwells) leave the body and the individual passes away, but the iñua continued to exist (ibid.: 217). Robert Spencer (1959: 252) notes of the deceased’s spirit that the “uneasy notion that

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something might return” was a common concern, and the malicious actions of a shaman were often at least considered as an unnatural cause of death. The iñua of deceased ancestors were considered beneficial helper spirits to their namesakes, and this name-soul tradition often figures in other parts of the circumpolar region (Gubser 1965: 206; Walsh et al. 2017). Death, as Wendell Oswalt (1967: 206) describes among Alaskan Inuit, “was a family affair.” Treatment of the deceased’s body differed between the more sedentary coastal groups and more nomadic inland groups. In sedentary contexts, the body was removed from the place of death, wrapped in a deerskin or other cover, and placed outside and away from the settlement, where it would inevitably be disposed of by the elements and scavengers; in some cases, bodies were elevated on low scaffolds to keep scavengers at bay (Murdock 1892: 424–25; Spencer 1959: 253). In cases of death in nomadic contexts, the body was left more or less on the spot, on the ground surface, extended in a shallow dugout if ground conditions allowed for digging, or placed in a natural crevice if such a feature presented itself, and the group moved on (Oswalt 1967: 207). Murdock (1892: 424–45) offers anecdotal evidence that at Point Barrow the dead were laid to rest with the head facing east, and at least some form of east-west orientation of the body may have been common; Vilhjálmur Stefánsson (1919: 187) corroborates this and notes that among the interior peoples, fear of the dead affected a lack of burial arrangements and a general disdain from association with the physical remains of the deceased. In any case, personal items such as weapons, used clothing, and ornaments were generally left with the body and were often intentionally broken; it was presumed that these items should be avoided (Figure 7.2). Common practice may have allowed for the confiscation of certain valuable objects from the dying individual before death occurred, thus avoiding the necessary disposal of such items with the body. Some possessions, such as “boats, extra clothing which had never been worn, dogs, and the like,” passed to inheritors (Spencer 1959: 253). Gubser described the burial practices: In earlier days, after a few hours, perhaps, the deceased person’s relatives dressed him in fine clothes, handling his body very carefully. They placed him on high, dry ground, covered him with caribou hides, and put a knife or other small, useful object near his body to pay respect to his departed iñua. An umialik may have had a larger item such as a sled placed near his body. If there were time, his relatives might pile a few rocks over him. (1965: 217)

Measures were taken to keep the spirits of the dead from returning, presumably to haunt the living or otherwise cause misfortune. Spencer (1959: 253) relates an event occurring with the removal of the body from the place of death: “a man walked behind brandishing a knife. He was called ‘the cutter,’ his action was ‘cutting,’ kivluktuat; it is said that he frightened away the spirit of the dead—‘he’s cutting the death so it won’t return.’” At the settlement of Tigara at Point Hope, Froelich Rainey (1947: 278) recorded a tale describing a burial rite: One person carrying the shoulder blade of a whale knocked on an outside corner of the house where he [the deceased, a man named Algarak] had died, while another with a stone hammer tapped the inside of the same corner. This was repeated at each corner and four times on the rim of the skylight. The rite was performed so that the spirit (inyusuq or ilitkosaq) would go to its proper destination.

So, while all the major time categories for these groups were in the past tense, there clearly was a concern for what would happen in the future.

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Figure 7.2. Grave goods from Point Hope, Alaska. “Ivory, Bone, and Stone Objects— Ipiutak Burials”: (1) snow goggles; (2, 3) buttons; (4) bird bone tubes; (5, 6) “Unidentified Implements . . . possibly part of a ground squirrel snare”; (7) ivory scoop; (8) unworked amber; (9, 10) jet plates; (11–15) labrets; (16) perforated brown bear jaw (one of four specimens found across three burials). From Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey (1948). Anthropological Papers of the AMNH, Vol. 42, Plate 48. Image provided by the American Museum of Natural History; Neg. #319302.

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Death was followed by a period of mourning. As with other observed milestone rituals, the duration of mourning was determined by the deceased’s sex— four days for male and five days for female (Gubser 1965: 217–18; Murdock 1892: 424; Rainey 1947: 271, 278; however, Spencer 1959: 253 gives a reverse of this). During this time unnecessary work was halted or reduced as prevailing conditions allowed. Clothing was often, but not always, disposed of at the end of the mourning period, which was not extended over a long period of time. Long-term grief was mitigated by beliefs regarding the eternal existence of iñua, making the passing of life merely a transition of forms rather than a full forfeiture of being. Rites of death and burial practices where entwined, as elsewhere, with materiality, and the belongings of the dead were often prepared (e.g., broken) to remain with the abandoned body of the deceased—their association to the individual at the time of death making them unclean and even dangerous for the living to possess (Figure 7.3). In many cases burial in the ground was simply impossible given frozen ground conditions (e.g., Lyon 1824: 276), and in many environs immolation was equally unfeasible due to lack of sufficient fuel. Likewise, lack of materials for the construction of scaffolds also negated the possibility of elevating the body. By necessity, disposal of the physical remains of the deceased remained a functional rather than a ritualized process. The pragmatism at which death appears to have been dealt with may also be a reflection of the harsh realities of life in this region of the Arctic; also, the practice of allowing only broken or less valuable goods to be left with the body is a common motif across the seven groups in this chapter. Again, we argue that the functional requirements of living in the harsh environment necessitated the keeping of the best technologies for survival among the living. It occurs to us that this may have significant implications for ethnoarchaeological interpetation conducted in other circumpolar regions and in the rest of the world.

Mackenzie Delta Inuit During the period of European contact, the population center of this region was within the mouth of the Mackenzie Delta, and adjacent settlements were in such close contact as to seemingly form a permanently inhabited regional community comprising satellite settlements (Stefánsson 1919: 23–24). Groups migrated into and out of the larger delta region on occasion (an area of over twelve thousand square kilometers), making recurrent contact and trade with North Alaskan Iñupiaqspeaking neighbors to the west and Copper Inuit neighbors to the east relatively commonplace (Smith 1984: 347). These close ties to neighbors on either side of the delta are also evident in the dialects spoken in the region (Jenness 1928; Swadesh 1951, 1952). Early ethnographic data regarding categorical conceptions of time among the various Mackenzie Delta Inuit groups is sparse, but what exists shows a system of reckoning both space and time as interconnected phenomena (Cruikshank 1990). This is well illustrated in Murielle Nagy’s (2006) contemporary examination of some linguistic and narrative aspects of Mackenzie Delta (Inuvialuit) time reckoning, where she notes that place names acted as mnemonic devices—“anchor points of history” that brought to mind not just the places themselves and knowledge of the immediate surrounding environment, but also temporal contexts associated with those places, that is, the times at those places when things had occurred. Nagy

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Figure 7.3. Grave goods from Point Hope, Alaska. “Tigara Types, Sewing Tools, Clothing, and Ornaments—Tigara Burials”: (1) snow goggles; (2) antler brow band; (3) carved ivory polar bear; (4–7) tooth pendants; (8, 9) perforated amber beads; (10, 11) ivory thimble holders; (12) possible needle case attachment found with specimens 11, 15, 16, and 21; (13–16) ivory bodkins; (17) bird bone needle; (18) drinking tube; (19, 20) needle cases; (21) unidentified ivory objects; (22) ivory mounting; (23) bag handle; (24) wooden ladle with “ivory carvings on handles are embedded in the wood.” From Ipiutak and the Arctic Whale Hunting Culture by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey (1948). Anthropological Papers of the AMNH, Vol. 42, Plate 92. Image provided by the American Museum of Natural History; Neg. #319515.

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observes that time was traditionally not a teleological count of days, but a relative and very personal state of being, a consciousness of one’s own existence—of being awake in the present, and remembering the past. Like their neighbors to the west, among the Inuvialut, the future (as such) was not much considered, but rather the past was hallmarked as a series of lessons of potential value for the present. Turning to death, Derek Smith (1984: 355) describes burial by “placing the corpse on the ground, usually on the top of a low hill near water, and covering it with driftwood.” Other graves were constructed of oblong piles of stones deposited over the corpse, with the resulting hollow often filled with gravel (Stefánsson 1919: 157). But, by the ethnographic period, burial traditions of the Mackenzie Delta inhabitants had already begun to see significant influences from their Alaskan neighbors, and one of Stefánsson’s (1919: 162) informants described the wrapping of the dead in skins or cloth, as well as the placing of the body in a box and then onto an elevated platform in the manner of the Nunatama (interior peoples). An example of such a raised burial was observed by Stefánsson in the Mackenzie Delta in September 1906. Murdock (1892: 426) concurs: “The bodies seen by Dr. Richardson in the delta of the Mackenzie were wrapped in skins and loosely covered with driftwood.” The deceased’s possessions (such as personal adornments like men’s labrets, kayaks, sleds, etc.) were deposited with the body and then generally avoided, but even this tradition had begun to undergo change by the time ethnographic accounts began to be collected. Labrets, a common feature of men’s facial ornaments, were always removed from the lips of the deceased, whether they accompanied the burial or not. One of Stefánsson’s (1919: 158) informants noted, of the practice of depositing the deceased with their possessions, and particularly illustrative of the practical and flexible canon of such practices, “that nowadays if a man has two rifles, one good, one poor, they put the poor rifle in the grave and keep the good rifle. He thinks perhaps this was different a long time ago; then they put both rifles on the grave.” But here again, we note the need for efficient technology reserved for the living, at the expense of the dead. Similar to the North Alaskan Iñupiat, a vaguely realized name-soul tradition seems to have been in place, but children were given the names of deceased relatives between one and three years after being born, and the concept seems analogous to the North Alaskan perception that the inherited name invoked the namesake ancestor as a helper-protector rather than as a genuine reincarnation of the deceased relative (Stefánsson 1919: 158), although Smith (1980: 354–55) hints that there may have been an underlying name-soul association, as children named after the deceased were often afforded “the respect previously accorded their namesakes.”

Copper Inuit The westernmost of the so-called Central Eskimo, the Copper Inuit roamed over a large expanse of tundra and Arctic coastline. The annual round was highly seasonal, distinctly divided between terrestrial summer fishing and hunting and exploitation during the winter of sea ice resources. Groups aggregated in loose bands depending on the times of year and economic activity. Some temporal taboos existed in correlation with the seasonal extremes of light and dark. For instance, it was prohibited to sew garments during the long dark of the polar winter (Jenness 1922: 182–83), and common prohibitions were observed regarding any overlap between the uses of land and sea animal resources,

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such as against cooking or consuming deer meat and seal meat or fish together, or against cooking deer meat while camped on the sea ice. No mention is given in the ethnographic accounts of the Copper Inuit to a conception of time as a delimiting phenomenon per se, though Diamond Jenness (1922: 235) points out the patient nature of the Copper Inuit as a people, suggesting that “patience instilled in them by hunting becomes engrained in their very natures and permeates all their social life.” Rather than “lacking” a categorical or teleological conception of the passing of time, flexibility to the vicissitudes of its passage was far more practical an adaptation to Arctic conditions. Of the imminence prescribed to death, Jenness (1922: 171) states that, among the Copper Inuit, melancholy thoughts of death seem to be always hovering in the penumbra of the Eskimo’s minds . . . Yet in their minds there seemed to be no anxious dread of death weighing them down, no passionate clinging to life, only a profound resignation and melancholy calmness in the face of the inevitable issue.

These sentiments were echoed in a pragmatic sense of reckoning the future. Illness and death were invariably believed to be the result of malicious spirits or the disapproval of an offended soul of some person or animal, and thus such souls were consciously and very persistently conciliated (ibid.: 172–73). The deceased was typically wrapped in deerskins. In summer, the corpse may have been left inside a hut or tent and the camp was straightaway abandoned. Alternatively, the body could be deposited outside, presumably laid out a short distance away from the location of death and possibly atop some promontory. In some cases a cairn of stones was erected or a windbreak of stones and sod was built up around the corpse (Jenness 1922: 173–74); but Jenness admits to not having personally witnessed a death or burial and posits that burial cairns were a practice of an earlier people and not the agenda of the Copper Inuit. If death occurred while on the ice, the body was laid out in the snow and protected from the elements by a makeshift windbreak until it could be carried onto land and disposed of at a point above the high-water mark. In some cases it was simply left on the ice. The orientation of the single burial that Jenness (ibid.: 175; Figure 7.4) Figure 7.4. The grave of the Piuvlik Eskimo Haviron (d. April 1915) at Cape Lambert. Photo by George H. Wilkins (1916). Alternate photo to that included in The Life of the Copper Eskimos by Diamond Jenness. Grave of Haviron near Cape Lambert, Northwest Territories (Nunavut), George Hubert Wilkins, 1916. Canadian Museum of History, 37163.

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observed at Cape Lambert suggests at least that the body was set with the head facing east, resting on a folded pair of pants, and that a number of personal utensils had been deposited near the body. The “shades” of the dead were believed to frequent the locality of death or deposition; thus, such places were avoided, as were the items left there. Some or all of the material possessions of the deceased were summarily broken (i.e., “killed”), citing that “the man is dead . . . and wants to have his implements dead also” (Jenness 1922: 174). Such items were deposited with, or a short distance from, the body. In some cases, as with particularly valuable articles, a miniature copy of the item was left as proxy—again, the practical material value of the item to the living outweighed the need of the dead of the genuine article; besides, it was believed that the deceased could enlarge the miniature items as they wished (ibid.: 176). As a rule, the better-quality tools and paraphernalia were reserved for the living. Existence of the deceased after death seems to have been a constant unknown, with a vague underpinned notion that the individual had traveled to some other unfamiliar place or was perhaps even still alive elsewhere. In some cases this place was given as an actual community or country far removed from the vicinity of the living relatives, and in other cases the dead were thought to be at far more exotic locales such as on the moon (Jenness 1922: 177). Two aspects of Copper Inuit beliefs surrounding death appear inconsistent with those of their neighbors to either east or west. Among those other groups the souls of the dead were generally benevolent protector spirits to the living, and ancestor-to-descendent rebirth came with an attendant name-soul ideology. However, among the Copper, there was a general attitude that the shades (tarrak) of the dead were typically malicious, knowing “no bounds of time and space,” and in no uncertain terms were to be avoided, especially when traveling alone. In some cases, the malignant spirits of the dead were believed to cause bad weather, or even death itself (Jenness 1922: 180–81). Of rebirth, Jenness (ibid.: 177) notes with some consternation that he could find no “trace of the belief (existing more or less vaguely at Barrow and elsewhere) that the souls of the dead are reincarnated in their descendants, or in the children of friends and relatives.”

Netsilik Inuit On the annual temporal scale, two seasonal distinctions were broadly recognized by the Netsilik, the summer phase and the winter phase, each with characteristic migration patterns and subsistence regimes; namely, the summer was punctuated by a move to inland hunting and fishing locales, and winter was a relatively long period that revolved around sea ice occupation and the hunting of seals thereon (Balikci 1970: 23). Netsilik concepts of the afterworld consisted of three realms: Agneriartarfik, a beautiful land bountiful in food and pleasures, located in the sky and inhabited by the best of hunters and those who had died a violent death; Aglermiut, another joyful place of plenty, deep beneath the tundra; and a less desirable underworld beneath the earth’s crust and inhabited by the noqumiut, the spirits of lazy hunters who “are perpetually hungry, idle, and apathetic,” and by those women who “would not endure the suffering of getting tattooed” (Balikci 1970: 214–15; Rasmussen 1931: 316–19).

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Of traditional concepts surrounding death and burial, Rasmussen (1931: 263) notes that the soul was believed to linger around the body of the deceased for a fixed term, four days for a man and five days for a woman; during this time (nägten˙Eq) the body was kept indoors and no work may be undertaken, even to the extent of preparing food; other restrictions were also to be observed such as hunting restrictions and special etiquettes, as well as taboos against eating certain foods, personal grooming, cleaning utensils, allowing dogs to gnaw the bones of animals killed during the mourning period, and holding song feasts (ibid.: 264–65). After this period, the body was seen merely as a vessel that was no longer in use and was removed from the dwelling through an alternative exit, never the genuine entrance. The body was moved a distance from the village and deposited, uncovered, on the ground, clad only in underclothes and wrapped in skins (as was Haviron’s burial among the Copper Inuit). Stones (called ilo˙fra, “that in which something has been”) or blocks of snow, depending on the season, were placed at the head and feet, but no other covering was made and the body was left to the elements and scavengers. Rasmussen (ibid.: 264) describes the orientation of the body facing east, and the face looking west, in order that the deceased may make the action of turning themselves “towards the light; if this is not left to him to do he might easily become a ghost.” In another similarity to Copper Inuit burial customs, the deceased’s possessions accompanied them in deposition, as did miniature renditions of various implements that they may have parted with before death. After the mourning time had elapsed, the group broke camp and moved to a new district. While at the place of interment, it appears to have been common practice to walk around or circle the burial “in the direction of the sun” (Rasmussen 1931: 264). Franz Boas (1907: 517) notes that the Netsilik did not visit the graves of their dead, nor did they talk to the deceased. One curious example of shamanry regarding burials is given by Rasmussen (1931: 299), in which a clever shaman, angry with a man, smuggled a trout caught by the man’s nephew into an old grave with the intention of causing the nephew to grow ill and die, since it was believed that “the soul cannot tolerate that a man’s game comes in contact with graves or anything connected with the dead at all.” This illustrates the powerful relationship conceived between the souls of animals and those of humans and the perceived opposition between anything associated with the dead and the health of the living. Unlike their Copper Inuit neighbors, name-soul traditions were quite conspicuous among the Netsilik, and Balikci (1970: 149, 200) specifically associates this practice with reincarnation and the inhibition of infanticide.

Caribou Inuit The southernmost of the “Central Eskimo,” the Caribou Inuit roamed a wide interior expanse of “Barren Grounds” tundra west of Hudson Bay, and its northwestern coast (Arima 1984). Vulnerability to starvation, especially during the lean months of spring, presented a constant threat that could be triggered just by the delay in the migration of a single caribou herd (e.g., Birket-Smith 1929: 136). Apparently, for anyone, the passage of time in this southern periphery of the Arctic can be quite deceptive. Kaj Birket-Smith (ibid.: 50) describes how “the consciousness of time and space vanishes” in the desolate, empty landscapes of the Barren Grounds winter. Tradi-

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tionally, the track of time was measured on the hooves of migrating caribou; other, nearly imperceptible cues of seasonal change were provided by the appearance and disappearance of migrating birds, the slow breakup and reformation of ice, and lengthening periods of light and dark. Birket-Smith (ibid.: 300) wrote about the Qaernermiut (the northernmost of the Caribou Inuit) view of death: “They look death in the eyes with such stoical calm that, in the case of the passing away of others, they almost seem to be heartless.” This indifference in the face of death was still accompanied by numerous strictly observed taboos regarding the passing of the living and etiquette surrounding it. After the period of mourning, purification rites were undertaken to “put things in order again,” but after this period there were apparently no restrictions or even hesitations to speak of the dead or invoke their name, as appears elsewhere in the region (Rasmussen 1930: 63). Of naming and the deceased, BirketSmith (1929: 282) observed that children were named after those who had recently died in the community, not definitively suggesting name-soul traditions per se, but certainly indicative of a controlled continuity between generations across time. Traditionally, the sledge used to convey the body to its final resting place was left atop the grave. Graves were made by stacking stones around and atop the body, sometimes forming a coffin-like enclosure and covering the pile with a skin; in other cases stones were arranged in a ring shape around the corpse, the resulting exposure facilitating bodily deterioration and thus helping to “hasten the release of the soul” (Birket-Smith 1929: 302). Grave goods were commonly deposited in Caribou Inuit burials. Birket-Smith (1929: 303–6) describes a number of these, stating that “both the Qaernermiut and the Coast Pâdlimiut . . . give the dead some of his possessions with him in the grave and expressly explain that they are for his use in another life.” There does not seem to be an etiquette present here, similar to that employed north and west, of replacing valuable or useful items with miniature proxies, but this may be due to a lack of the usual restriction against the living touching or using such items. Elsewhere, items were not left with the body under the assumption that “the dead might use the objects to do harm to the living” (Birket-Smith 1929: 303). Clearly, regarding both burial strategies and the deposition of grave goods, some variation was common (see e.g. Figures 7.5 and 7.6). Situated at the southernmost margin of the North American Arctic, the inhabitants of the Barren Grounds developed traditions regarding the dead and the treatment of the dead that appear very similar to those of their northern neighbors, but reflecting an even greater plasticity and practicality than anywhere else in the North American Arctic. Many practices parallel traditions elsewhere in the higher latitudes, the likenesses between concepts seeming clear in generality but more diverse in detail or dogma. Like their northern neighbors, the Caribou Inuit believed in a spirit of the air, Hila (i.e., Sila), as well as in a moon being, the servant of their inland version of Sedna, called Pinga, who received the souls of humans and animals upon death and could return a soul back to the earth if a person had lived a good life (Rasmussen 1930: 50–51). Burials were made both covered and exposed, regardless of the extant availability of stone. Grave goods tended to be deposited with the dead, but were not accompanied by commonly associated ideologies regarding their handling by the living or the replacement of particularly valuable items with miniature proxies. Burial orientation seems in sync with the east-west orientation of the body seen in adjacent regions, as do variations of

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Figure 7.5. Grave under a canoe. From The Caribou Eskimos by Kaj Birket-Smith. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

Figure 7.6. Grave with raised pole. From The Caribou Eskimos by Kaj Birket-Smith. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

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mourning periods between three and five days based on the sex of the deceased. At a glance, Caribou Inuit traditions surrounding the passage of time, death, and the materials and ideologies attached to them seem somewhat of an aggregation, with some modification, of other Arctic forms.

Iglulik Inuit The Iglulik (i.e., the Iglulingmiut, Aivilingmiut, and Tununirmiut, etc.) inhabit(ed) the lands adjacent to the northwesternmost coastlines of Hudson Bay. While terrestrial hunting for caribou, polar bears, and musk oxen were in places very important seasonal activities, the subsistence strategy was principally marine-based for much of the year. As for deep time, Guy Mary-Rousselière (1984: 441) asserts that “the world always existed, but daylight came from the cry of the raven: qau! qau! ‘light.’” According to Mary-Rousselière (ibid.), the dead were believed to reside in a number of places, some in the earth in a purgatory-like underworld made up of four levels. Sedna—takanna˙luk, “the one from below”—dwelt in the lowest of these realms. Women who died in childbirth, those who died violent deaths, and those who died by suicide were referred to as ullu ymiut, “inhabitants of the daytime,” and were believed to reside in the sky after death. At the place of deposition, the deceased was covered with stones in a coffinlike configuration so as to not leave rocks lying directly over the body (Boas 1907:

Figure 7.7. Caribou Eskimo women: “Left: Kibkarjuk, Igjugarjuk’s other wife, one of my best story-tellers. Right: Huwakzuk, who was said to have turned black in the face because one night she slept beside a corpse.” From Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos by Knud Rasmussen. Image provided by the National Museum of Denmark.

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516). Boas (1964: 205) supposes, based on the length of graves observed, that burials were made with the legs doubled up in similar fashion to the practice observed among the Caribou Inuit. George Francis Lyon (1824: 259, 268) observed that the body was removed from the snow hut through a window and then the body of the deceased was laid on its back and covered over by blocks of snow (in winter) or rocks (in summer) and thereafter left to the predations of scavengers with little or no visible consideration from the living. The cyclical nature of life and death, beyond a linear model of time, was considered among the Iglulik as both incomprehensible and without question. The resoluteness with which the people met death is understandable in light of their conception of the eternal existence of the soul and the constant recycling of souls maintained through the faithful adherence to complex systems of taboo in nearly all regards of life. Paraphrasing his translator, Aua, Rasmussen (1929: 60–61) puts it best: “When at the end of life we draw our last breath, that is not the end. We awake to consciousness again, we come to life again, and all this is effected [sic] through the medium of the soul.”

Baffinland Inuit The Bafflinland Inuit occupying the southern and central portions of Baffin Island were distinct enough from their neighbors to justify a cultural division by ethnographers, though groups (Boas’s “tribes”) of various sizes were considerably mobile and territories likely fluctuated quite a bit in response to productivity of hunting grounds and so forth (e.g., Boas 1888, 1901, 1907; Brody 1976; Damas 1963; Kemp 1984; Wenzel 1981). The souls of the dead went to Sedna’s (i.e., Nuliajoq) abode, Adlivun, where they were made to stay for a year, lying next to and being pinched by her father, Anautalik. A heavenly afterworld of plentiful game and fair weather where everyone was happy without end was located in the sky and referred to as Qudlivun (“the uppermost ones”). Those who lived a good life or who died as the result of accidents or suicide went to Qudlivun. A series of underworlds were also conceived of. Adlivun (“a country farthest below us,” e.g., hell) was but one of these realms, but sources differ as to their cosmological geography and distinct names (e.g., Boas 1964: 181). A dead body was also often covered with stones. After the initial deposition and covering of the body carefully with a vault of stones so as to not leave any resting on the corpse itself, no maintenance was devoted to the grave and scavengers were not overtly dissuaded from devouring the dead. Generally, the personal property of the deceased was destroyed or deposited at the grave, but Boas (1964: 172) offers that some articles (“the gun, harpoon, sledge, dogs, kayak, boat, and tent poles of the man and the lamp and pots of the woman”) were up for inheritance, while others accompanied the deceased to the grave. Grave goods deposited with the body depended on the activities undertaken by the deceased and were largely “held in great respect and never removed, at least as long as it is known to whose grave they belong” (ibid.: 205). In some instances, at least, again miniature likenesses of certain items were deposited in place of the real thing. Burial customs appear similar to those observed elsewhere in the region, including a three-day mourning period after which the hut was abandoned, as well as a complex of observed taboos of various kinds, many involving food consumption

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and preparation restrictions. A number of months after the death, the grave might be visited, during which an offering of food was made to the deceased.

Concluding Remarks As noted in the introduction to this volume, death and time are deeply interconnected and integral features of the human experience. In the case of the groups observed here, through synthesis of ethnographic description, it is obvious that death was not thought of without an association with an afterlife for the soul, and in fact the future destinies of these souls could be planned by ritualistic measures taken by the living. In this sense, as proposed in this book’s main thesis, the dead may or may not be truly gone, but their deaths are of great significance to the living—because it is a profound way for them to mark their own time, and lived experience. That the dead are so useful to the living is also a way for the dead to live on with a purpose, as it were. Our awareness of death necessitates a notion of time, inasmuch as there must be a conceptual end to each individual’s journey in the body that experiences the ultimately finite sensations of life. But what of the manipulation of a notion of time that allows for a perpetual present? For example, temporal reckoning in traditional Inuit societies accounted for a present that allowed for future and past as mere header and footnotes in a cyclical dialogue between ancestors, their descendants, and the dynamic, living world, without a need for ultimatum. In the Inuit context of death, possessions of the deceased became not just potentially valuable commodities as the physical objects that they are (e.g., boots, ornaments or tokens, hunting tools, weapons, sledges, etc.) in an environment where proper equipment is literally a key to survival; as possessors of iñua, they were also the living concomitants of the deceased and as such remained in a state of viduity that is difficult to reconcile. Offerings left with the dead, especially those that were broken upon deposition or were otherwise proscribed as unclean for further use by the living, were not only left as tokens of tools for use in the afterlife, but their iñua were in fact abandoned or sacrificed—the living objects were made attendant to the deceased. Overlaid on these material sacrifices at the time of death was a rationale that—as important as the dead might be for the reason stated above—some materials were simply not to be squandered on them. New objects of hard to come by materials like wood and soapstone were often crafted in miniature and left with the dead, creatively and symbolically fulfilling the twofold task of sacrifice and survival. A common theme runs throughout this chapter—that of the impermanence of the material world. Embedded in the examples given is the ideal that the body was considered a vessel for the soul that, at death, faced disintegration without much deterrence attempted by the living. This was not irreverence on the part of the living, but rather a pragmatic application of their ontology. The physical remains of all living things (in a landscape where, for example, even rocks were conceived of as alive, possessing iñua) were observed to eventually bear the ravages of time. The “incomprehensible” soul persisted—one form traveling to an underworld and another potentially being recycled back into the world of the living. While traditional Inuit conceptions of the animated world, with its omnipresent spirits, monsters, and unseen malevolent forces, has often been ethnographically described as quintessentially superstitious, the pragmatics underlying death and the ways in

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which it was confronted in Inuit societies were in fact characteristically practical, and underpinned by the exigencies of Arctic life. Empirically, traditional Inuit conceptions did not overthink entropy as an unnatural phenomenon—clearly, over time all things could be seen to disarticulate; the materials of this world, from stones to bones, eventually wore to dust and less. Phenomena that remained seemingly untouched by time—the frigid windblown sea (i.e., Sedna), the air from breeze to tempest (i.e., Sila), the moon and stars, though constantly moving and changing, but always returning to predictable form—simply came to be the indigenous phenomenology of the North American Arctic. As describe for the Chukchi of northeastern Siberia by Rane Willerslev and Jeanette Lykkegård (chap. 6, this volume), navigating the fragile relationships between the living and the dead in the hostile Arctic environment, and the obvious, inescapable effects of time on the living world, was managed by strict (yet in seeming contradiction, flexible) adherence to myriad taboos and proscriptions, very often directly associated with consumption or refraining from consuming some resource, be it food, material possessions, or even souls/iñua or time.

Contemporary Considerations and Final Thoughts Of note, similar concepts regarding a specific form of death—suicide—are encountered across the circumpolar North. Contemporarily, instances of suicide have become epidemic throughout traditional communities throughout the Arctic (Redvers et al. 2015), from among the Sámi in Norway (Silviken et al. 2006), across Siberia (e.g., Vitebsky 2006; Willerslev 2009), throughout the North American North from Alaska to Nunavut (Bjerregaard et al. 2004; Kirmayer, Boothroyd, et al. 1998; Kirmayer, Fletcher, et al. 1998; Kral 2013; Wexler et al. 2008), and throughout Greenland (Bjerregaard and Lynge 2006; Leineweber et al. 2001). Youth suicide rates in indigenous communities—regardless of where in the circumpolar region— are in fact staggeringly higher than those in nonindigenous communities. This is no doubt in large part because socioeconomics in the aftermath of colonialism have bred pervasive hopelessness, depression, and substance abuse in indigenous communities, and these have significantly impacted suicide rates. Specifically in regards to native peoples, such symptoms of cultural identity loss are common and well-established factors attributing to abnormally high rates of self-violence (e.g., Beck 1986; Beck et al. 1990; Hicks 2015; Kral 2003, 2013; Kral et al. 2011). However, the demographics of contemporary suicides in Arctic communities seem to reflect a mirror image of those recorded in the early circumpolar ethnographies. Ethnographically, it was the elderly or infirm that sought a preemptive end to their own lives. Presumably and often explicitly, this was so as not to be a hinderance to the living in an environment that was harsh enough to maintain a living in, without having to support those that could no longer contribute. Direct references to such acts abound in the ethnographic literature (e.g., Balikci 1960: 11, but see also Hicks 2015 for a refutation of Balikci’s claims; Batianova 2000: 155–56; Boas 1964: 615; Bogoras 1904–9: 561–62; Bukharov 1883: 284–85; Coon 1974: 329–30; Jochelson 1908: 759; Kennan [1871] 2007: 214–15; Rasmussen 1931: 144; Sarychev 1802: 109; Wrangell 1842: 121–22). However, in the modern Arctic, suicide has become an epidemic of youth, particularly among disenfranchised males in adolescence and early adulthood. Thus, it is important to not point to this phenomenon as one rooted in a continuity to the traditional or ethnographic past.

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As stated, it is highly likely that suicides among the young in indigenous Arctic societies is primarily the compound result of socioeconomic and psychological depression brought on by generations of failed colonial acculturation and the endemic loss of traditional social identities—and the group cohesion they so often provided—in small, tight-knit, and extremely isolated communities (Kral 2012). Among hunter-gatherers in the past, self-sacrifice (e.g., taking one’s own life or requesting that it be taken) may have indeed been an altruistic act at times. But, in modern reality, such urges and actions form out of despair, indifference, and a general sense of hopelessness (Beck 1986; Beck et al. 1990). Among indigenous youths, who may see their prospects at achieving, for example, a valuable education, lucrative employment, or what they perceive to be a successful or happy life regularly undercut by poverty and a general lack of opportunities and mobility, the value of time, life—and thus death—and materiality can easily come to be viewed with institutionalized indifference (e.g., Gilchrist et al. 2007). Through this lens, what is the importance of time if our place in it is linear, static, fleeting, and likely to be forgotten quickly? In societies on the very fringes of a growing materialist/ postcapitalist society, what indeed is the value even of material objects if they have no meaning, no anima—no soul? And what is the point of life if there is no hope? As this chapter illuminates, many traditional peoples across the Arctic recognized suicide as a noble way out of burdening the family—what Jean Malaurie (2007: 137) refers to as going out with “ancient dignity,” and what Willerslev (2009) contends is the making of the “optimal sacrifice” in choosing voluntary death. Rather, in the contemporary arena, traditional concepts of time, death, and materiality come into sharp focus against the backdrop of colonialism and the scars it has so often brought to bear on indigenous peoples. The relationship between socioeconomic disequilibrium and loss of cultural identity with one’s concepts of self, of well-being, and of place within family and community cannot be overstated, untangled, or ignored. Time is unseeable, despite its inevitable effects. As a transition between states, death skirts the conceptual line between the empirical and the unknowable, between the finite material world and the infinite immaterial. Human materiality is altered by both death and time, but it is also contingent on the whims of the living, from which material objects are conferred value. As material reflections of a life lived, individual possessions become symbols of agency—the exponents of personal proclivities, of daily tasks and every activity in between, from the mundane to the spectacular. As things possessing iñua, material objects—possessions—were valuable companions into the afterlife; but through obvious reflection by the people who were ushering out the dead, these became all the more valuable to those living.

Acknowledgments We thank Sophie Seebach and Rane Willerslev for inviting us to participate in the volume Mirrors of Passing as part of the “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time” research project headed by Rane Willerslev in cooperation with the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo. The American Museum of Natural History, the Canadian Museum of History, and the Danish National Museum were each generous in providing the images that accompany this chapter; we greatly appreciate their support. We gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the Arctic Research Centre (ARC) and the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University (AU). Support for

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this research was made possible by ARC and AU, and this work is a contribution to the Arctic Science Partnership (ASP).

Matthew J. Walsh received his PhD in anthropology from The University of Montana, specializing in archaeology. He has worked as an archaeologist throughout much of the North American West, including Alaska and British Columbia, as well as in the Russian Far East and Chilean Patagonia. At the time of this writing, he is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Arctic Research Centre (ARC) at Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research focuses on the evolution and transmission of cultural adaptations in the circumpolar North. Sean O’Neill received his PhD in archaeology from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Formerly a member of the University of Cambridge, he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Arctic Research Centre (ARC) at Aarhus University, Denmark. He is also founder/publisher at the Two Towers Press, a private press in East Anglia, and serves as coeditor (with Rane Willerslev) for the academic book series Culture, Environment and Adaptation in the North for Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group in England.

Notes 1. Ethnographically documented traditions attributed to the Mackenzie Delta Inuit are suspect in that it has been largely observed that as a society at the time of major ethnological work they were highly influenced by North Alaskan groups to the west to such a degree that many beliefs and practices are synonymous. 2. Terms and spellings used in the text are generally carried over from the relevant ethnographic accounts to which they refer. Rather than attempt to navigate the considerable synonymy applied to the indigenous populations here discussed, we have purposely remained general in our use of the term “Inuit” to denote the inhabitants of the North American Arctic, but in some cases have included the term “Eskimo” as it was originally used ethnographically.

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Kral, Michael J. 2003. Unikkaartuit: Meanings of Well-Being, Sadness, Suicide, and Change in Two Inuit Communities. Report submitted to the National Health Research and Development Programs, Health Canada. ———. 2012. “Postcolonial Suicide among Inuit in Arctic Canada.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 36 (2): 306–25. ———. 2013. “‘The Weight on Our Shoulders Is Too Much, and We Are Falling’: Suicide among Inuit Male Youth in Nunavut, Canada.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27 (1): 63–83. Kral, Michael J., Lori Idlout, J. Bruce Minore, Ronald J. Dyck, and Laurence J. Kirmayer. 2011. “Unikkaartuit: Meanings of Well-Being, Unhappiness, Health, and Community Change among Inuit in Nunavut, Canada.” American Journal of Community Psychology 48: 426–38. Larsen, Helge, and Froelich Rainey. 1948. Ipiutak and the Arctic Whalie Hunting Culture. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 42. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Leineweber, Markus, Peter Bjerregaard, Cor Baerveldt, and Paul Voestermans. 2001. “Suicide in a Society in Transition.” International Journal of Circumpolar Health 60 (2): 280–87. Lyon, George F. 1824. The Private Journal of Captain G. F. Lyon. Boston: Wells and Lilly. Malaurie, Jean. 2007. Hummocks: Journeys and Inquiries among the Canadian Inuit. Trans. Peter Feldstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Mary-Rousselière, Guy. 1984. “Iglulik.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic, 431–46. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press. Murdock, John. 1892. The Point Barrow Eskimo. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institute Bureau of American Ethnology. Nagy, Murielle. 2006. “Time, Space, and Memory.” In Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography, ed. P. Stern and L. Stevenson, 71–88. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Oswalt, Wendell H. 1967. Alaskan Eskimos. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing. Rainey, Froelich G. 1947. The Whale Hunters of Tigara. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Rasmussen, Knud. 1929. Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, vol. 7, no. 1. Denmark: Gyldendals Forlagstrykkeri. ———. 1930. Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, vol. 7, no. 2. Denmark: Gyldendals Forlagstrykkeri. ———. 1931. The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921–24, vol. 8, nos. 1–2. Denmark: Gyldendals Forlagstrykkeri. Redvers, Jennifer, Peter Bjerregaard, Heidi Eriksen, Sahar Fanian, Gwen Healey, Vanessa Hiratsuka, Michael Jong, Christina Viskum Lytken Larsen, Janice Linton, Nathaniel Pollock, Anne Silviken, Petter Stoor, and Susan Chatwood. 2015. “A Scoping Review of Indigenous Suicide Prevention in Circumpolar Regions.” In “Suicide and Resilience in Circumpolar Populations,” special issue, International Journal of Circumpolar Health 74 (1): 27509. Sarychev, Grigorii A. 1802. Puteshestive flota kapitana Sarycheva po severo-vostochnoi chasti Sibiri, Ledovitomu moriu I Vostochnomu okeannu, v prodolzhenii vos’mi let. Vol. 2. St. Petersburg: Johann Carl Schnoor. Silviken, Anne, T. Haldorsen, and S. Kvernmo. 2006. “Suicide among Indigenous Sami in Arctic Norway, 1970–1998.” European Journal of Epidemiology 21 (9): 707–13. Smith, Derek G. 1984. “Mackenzie Delta Eskimo.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic, ed. D. Damas, 347–58. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution. Spencer, Robert F. 1959. The North Alaskan Eskimo: A Study in Ecology and Society. Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 171. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution. ———. 1984. “North Alaska Coast Eskimo.” In Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 5, Arctic, ed. D. Damas, 320–37. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution.

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Stefánsson, Vilhjálmur. 1919. The Stefánsson-Anderson Arctic Expedition of the American Museum: Preliminary Ethnological Report, vol. 14, pts. 1–2. New York: American Museum of Natural History. Swadesh, Morris. 1951. “Kleinschmidt Centennial, III: Unaaliq and Proto Eskimo.” International Journal of American Linguistics 17 (2): 66–70. ———. 1952. “Unaaliq and Proto Eskimo, II: Phonemes and Morphophonemes.” International Journal of American Linguistics 18 (1): 25–34. Vitebsky, Piers. 2006. The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. Walsh, Matthew J., Sean O’Neill, Felix Riede, and Rane Willerslev. “A Soul by Any Other Name: The Name-Soul Concept in Circumpolar Perspective.” In “The Forging of Cultures in the Circumpolar North: A Comparative Perspective,” ed. D. Veldhuis, P. Tejsner, and R. Willerslev, special issue, Journal of Cross Cultural Research. In review. Wenzel, George W. 1981. Clyde Inuit Adaptation and Ecology: The Organization of Subsistence. Mercury Series, Ethnology Service Paper 77. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada. Wexler, Lisa, Ryan Hill, Elizabeth Bertone-Johnson, and Andrea Fenaughty. 2008. “Correlates of Alaska Native Fatal and Nonfatal Suicidal Behaviors, 1990–2001.” Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 38: 311–20. Willerslev, Rane. 2009. The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death among the Siberian Chukchi. American Ethnologist 36(4): 693–704. Wrangell, Ferdinand. 1842. Narrative of an Expedition to the Polar Sea, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, and 1823. New York: Harper and Brothers.

CHAPTER 8

Transforming and Creating Multiple Worlds Strange Attractors in the Mongolian Landscape Malthe Lehrmann

Walking around the Mongolian landscape, you quickly find yourself in the presence of sacred stone cairns, which are called ovoos (oboo). On each ovoo, all sorts of things such as coins, vodka bottles, candy, crutches, bones from precious animals, and tsagaan idee (“white food” such as yak cream, milk, curd, and white bread) are heaped up. People go there to pay their respects to the spirits inhabiting the ovoo and to make sacrifices to gain their favor in future endeavors. The ovoo is generally regarded as a cultural fixed point, a place where kinship, clan bonds, political order, and relationships with the spirits of the land and dead ancestors are established. So the ovoo is regarded as a cultural congregation, a representation of a well-established cultural schema shared by both the dead and the living, and it helps to organize the temporal order of nomadic life. This puts the ovoo into a social context, which enables it to “carry” meaning in terms of symbolizing ideas about death, time, and cosmology without being these things in and of itself. However, what if we change the perspective to that of the ovoo and how different people, spirits, and things “enter” through the ovoo? What implications would this approach have for the questions of death, time, and the “cosmo-logic” of actual things such as the ovoo? And what would such a theory of artifacts that cross boundaries between the living and the dead look like? In this chapter, I will study the ovoo as a way to explore what is moving and static, invisible and visible, in terms of the nomadic cosmology in Mongolia and how this influences people’s relationships with the world of the dead. As I was told repeatedly throughout my fieldwork in Mongolia, speaking of the dead is something people do not wish to do out of fear of upsetting the spirits and disturbing their rest. Therefore, engaging with this question from the perspective of the ovoo became a way to approach this taboo and to get insights into people’s experiences of time and death through the material property of the ovoo itself. I will argue that the ovoo has an ambivalent and uncanny nature that resists any form of complete order and that demands that we rethink former interpretations of the ovoo, which have been largely symbolic in their approach. We need, in other words, to think with and through the actual materials of the ovoo instead of about and around it.

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The House of the Mountain Lord Ovoo means to “heap up” or to put in a pile, and comes from the verb Obooloh (Hangin 1986: 386). The ovoo is thought to be inhabited by deceased ancestors and the spirits of nature. The spirits resting here are the gajryn ejed (the master of the land) and the lus (dragon spirits). In Mongolia, every ovoo is different in terms of its shape and size, only sharing the characteristic stone assemblies and differently colored prayer flags and scarves (which are called hadags). They are located on mountain peaks and hills, but can also be found along roads, and their name is determined by their location (see also Lindskog 2010). The biography of the ovoo is immense and confusing in the sense that every single ovoo has a history of its own; often a tragic or traumatic story is linked to the landscape where the ovoo is built, and the stories are many and varied. Only once did I hear a story regarding the origin of the ovoo per se. I was at a shamanic gathering, and I started talking with one of the shaman’s daughters, who also happened to be the shaman’s assistant. While her father and twenty other shamans were being possessed by their ongons (spirits) on a little hill not thirty kilometers from Ulaanbaatar, I asked her why the shamans had chosen this place to have their gathering and if the nearby ovoo had any special significance (Figure 8.1). She just shook her head and said, “I do not know this ovoo, but every ovoo was built by the soldiers of Chinggis Khan. On their way home from war, they laid a stone on every mountain top for each soldier they had killed, to honor the dead.” During my own fieldwork in Bulgan Aimag and in the Ger district, I never encountered this story again. Quite significantly, laypeople and shamans would emphasize that they did not know who built the ovoo in the first place, and told me that the ovoo was therefore very old and powerful. The only thing certain was

Figure 8.1.  Ovoo outside Ulaanbaatar. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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that the ovoo was the house of a mountain lord, although it was not always clear which lord. Interested in getting to know this unknown characteristic of the ovoo, I started to look for a newly built ovoo as my primary field site with a view to further exploring this unknown and uncertain character of the ovoo.

Living Landscapes With a population density of one and a half persons per square kilometer, Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated states in the world. In the countryside, the population is one person per square kilometer. Most people live in the cities and towns, while the rest of the population is spread over an area four times the size of the U.K. During the Soviet regime the city came to represent industrialization and education, whereas the countryside was something to be organized and civilized (Humphrey and Sneath 1999: 301). After the Soviet era, the nomadic lifestyle is now viewed as something traditional, romantic, and even mystic (Højer 2007). As a place famous for its white food and beautiful landscape, Mongolians regard Bulgan Aimag as a very rich and prosperous place. Bulgan Aimag is also considered a Buddhist stronghold renowned for their ovoo lama, and it was he who had attracted me to the area. It was therefore something of a surprise to hear that shamanic ovoos were popping up everywhere in the Aimag, and that shamanism was growing strong here (see for example Figure 8.2). My concern here is therefore not to analyze the more prestigious ovoos, such as those located on eight mountains decreed sacred by the government.1 These ovoos are all at locations at which there are big sacrifices every year involving grand Buddhist ceremonies. I wish instead to discuss the materiality of the more common ovoo and what the ovoo signifies in relation to death and time.

Figure 8.2.  Shamanic ovoo in Bulgan Aimag. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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The Construction of a Field Site The following accounts consist of extracts from my observations and encounters camping next to a common sam ovoo (road ovoo) and sleeping in people’s gers (felt tents) near the ovoo. Besides being located next to a road like all other sam ovoos, in many ways, the ovoo I found looked rather strange compared to the other ovoos in Bulgan Aimag and ovoos I had seen on my way there, not to mention the ovoos described in the literature on the matter. In these accounts, the ovoo is a place for anchoring oneself and stabilizing relations with the spirits in an otherwise ever-changing landscape of cosmological chaos (Empson 2011, 2014; Pedersen 2011, 2014). Instead of the single round shape or ger-like shape you normally see, this ovoo consisted of three minor ovoos forming a triangle, with a bigger ovoo placed in the center of this triangle. Together the four ovoos formed a mandala, consisting of the ground and three sides. By choosing this specific shamanic ovoo, I wish to call attention to the revived forms of ovoos in Mongolia that have not yet been considered in the literature on the matter. Quite significantly, all the literature I encountered has explored and emphasized the connection of ovoos to Buddhist cosmology (Bawden 1958; Heissig 1980; Humphrey 1995 Lindskog 2010; Pedersen 2011). But the new revived forms of ovoos that are currently appearing in Mongolia suggest that we give the ovoos a closer look, as they might prove to be more and perhaps something other than what consensus on the matter has been so far. I will suggest that the ovoos are about cosmic encounters, where people and the dead constantly re-create the ontological ground that shapes the nomadic landscape.

The Ovoo as a Cultural Congregation Until now, the anthropological approach has been to put the ovoo into a social context, which only enables the ovoo to “carry meaning” as a symbol or index of more important themes such as political structure or religious organization, but not to be that meaning in any direct material sense. All of these accounts richly describe what goes on during the ovoo ritual, through a thick symbolic description, mainly focusing on the sacrificial elements and their wider social and cultural implications. The ovoo is therefore regarded as a cultural fixed point of social organization, where kinship, clan bonds, political order, and relationships to the spirits of the land come together and are established (Bawden 1958; Heissig 1980; Sneath 2001, 2007). Looking at the shamanic ovoo of my field site, it seems pretty clear that this strange-looking ovoo represents a gap in the literature describing the ovoo as an ordered whole. Similar to the anthropologists Christopher Evans and Caroline Humphrey’s study of material transformation as structures of timelessness in regards to four large, ancient ovoos in Inner Mongolia (Evans and Humphrey 2003), the ovoo that I discuss here could be said to signify uncertainty and doubt. As Evans and Humphrey note, the lack of records of a single origin of the ovoo makes the ovoo stretch into the unknowable past (ibid.: 10). A realm of uncertainty, I wish to argue, lies inherent in the ovoo itself and its intrarelational material properties, which create a cosmic mesh of intensities of mutual being, consisting of interactions between the living and the dead. Thinking of the ovoo as merely a monu-

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mental structure of either timelessness or a cultural order is neglecting the more ambivalent and uncertain traits inherent to the ovoo. But before we deal with this argument, we need to address two recent ethnographic accounts of the ovoo, which function as the starting point for my further discussion of the ovoo and its material properties.

Singularity and Multiplicity Following the Deleuzian distinction between smooth and striated space, in her book Harnessing Fortune (2011) Rebecca Empson describes how people are distributed through materials and therefore need fixed places like ovoos to reassemble themselves—to hold on to something. Morten Axel Pedersen refers in the same way to the ovoo as a place that fixates people in an otherwise boundless nomadic void of multiplicity (2007: 316), a cosmological landscape that comprises not a single relational totality but several wholes that are mutually encapsulated (Pedersen 2016: 223). Empson and Pedersen explore the tension between multiplicity and singularity in trying to understand what they refer to as the “nomadic void” (Empson 2011; Pedersen 2016). What is in focus is the perception of what is hidden and what is visible, what is moving, what is transforming, and what is stable in terms of how nomads engage with the landscape. They conclude that this process is due to an ontologically different way of seeing the world. People are faced every day with a world that consists of constant transformation and uncertainty, which is why they need fixed places like the ovoo to anchor themselves, so as to maintain a good relationship with dead ancestors and spirits of the land (Empson 2011 260; Pedersen 2009: 150). Drawing on the analogy of sailing, Empson and Pedersen go on to explain the nomadic movement as such: a way of sailing through the landscape where things such as the ovoo are viewed as a center of sorts in an otherwise unmarked space (Empson 2011; Pedersen 2011). The ovoo help people organize themselves. The ovoo is then seen as a beacon helping people to navigate in the nomadic void (Pedersen 2009: 148). Now, if liability and transformation simply are the ways people rationalize and perceive the world consisting of dead ancestors, spirits, and humans, as Pedersen and Empson are suggesting, what is the implication for the ovoo ritual going on, on a daily basis? How are we to understand this attractor,2 this “stop” in a constantly fluid nomadic void? And how are we to think of materiality in this boundless, not fully constituted universe? In pursuing this question, I am interested in the following: How can we think of the ovoo as part of a nomadic boundless world and at the same time a fixed singularity, which seems to resist ideas of a cosmologically boundless world? How can we account for the material properties of the ovoo and the more discursive imaginative realm produced by people around the ovoo? By venturing beyond symbolic functionalist representations of the ovoo, I want to focus on what the ovoo can teach us about death, and what other ways of thinking about death the ovoo instantiates through people’s daily interactions with it. In short, what do death and time look like from the perspective of the ovoo? Such an approach has to start from the ovoo itself and the daily activities going on around it.

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The Infinite Knot “To throw stones on the ovoo is just something Mongolian people do, it is tradition.” This was the response I received when I asked people why they were throwing stones onto the ovoo. After nine days with the same kind of answer, I turned in frustration to Erdene, who was sitting in our little camp next to the shamanic ovoo. He patiently walked me through the small ritual, describing the different elements and their meaning without lifting his head from the chessboard in front of him, which had become a much-needed time killer while we waited for people to visit the ovoo. He told me that people’s offerings have different forms. One type of offering is zooglohin tahil, which means general food. This will typically be dairy products, sweets, and incense. The second type is ongolohin tahil, which is food that pleases and has the sameness of the ovoo spirit. There are three categories: ulaan tahil (red offerings), consisting of meat, tsagaan tahil (white offerings), consisting of dairy products, and har tahil (black offerings), consisting of vodka (Figure 8.3). The sequences in sacrificing to the ovoo are as follows. First, you pick up three stones with your right hand. These stones are said to represent one’s family members and to give them fortune (hishig). Second, you start to walk nar zuw (sunwise3) around the ovoo while throwing the stones one at a time with your right hand. While walking around the ovoo three times, people say a prayer: Ovoonii ekh ni tanidaa olznii ih ni manidaa / Uliin eh ni tanidaa Ulzii buyanaa hairla. This roughly means: “I offer much of this cairn to you / I ask for much of the gain for me / I offer much of the mountain to you.” Then when you have thrown the three stones and are still walking around the ovoo, you are supposed to repair the ovoo by replacing stones that might have fallen down and perhaps by removing any broken glass or plates. Though Erdene’s textbook explanation was of great help in understanding this little daily ritual and something we would do every time we encountered the shamanic ovoo and other ovoos in Bulgan, it was also constantly contested and contradicted by people’s activities and nonactivities, which meant that the ovoo ritual took many different shapes during my stay there. The ovoo was located next to a road, so many people drove past either honking their horn three times or throwing rice out of the window. Some people would drive around the ovoo in their car, while others did not seem to care at all, and still others would say that whenever they saw an ovoo it reminded them of the spirits and they would feel its honorable presence and silently pray in respect while driving past it. But for one reason or another, all these people had something to say about their actions and were clearly affected by the ovoo’s presence. One day, two local herdsmen walked by and offered some milk to the ovoo because they had to go and illegally collect wood in the nearby forest. Talking to the two men, it became clear that they actually did not really know what to think of the ovoo. It was not clear if it was a real ovoo or not, but as they assured me, it was better not to take any chances and potentially upset the spirits of that ovoo. In the face of the shamanic ovoo, arguably, former accounts of the ovoo ritual (Bawden 1958; Sneath 2007) are highly culturally deterministic, describing the ovoo as a form of cultural congregation from which it is possible to determine the web of meaning the ovoo is a part of, leaving no room for doubt. This idea of the ovoo as cultural congregation seems highly contested, if not by the mountain lords themselves, then by the people attracted by the ovoo.

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Figure 8.3.  White food sacrifice. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

Fractured but Whole As I was camping next to the ovoo, people crossing its path explained the ambivalence and their fear regarding the shamanic ovoo. The two illegal woodcutters told me that ten years ago, the local ovoo lama had built an ovoo not far from here and had told them the importance of worshipping the ovoo. One of them even had a calendar showing when to do the rituals. This new shamanic ovoo was strange to the two men; it was built by two young shamans from the city of Bulgan, but

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they said that they still had to pay it respect, because they did not want to risk the wrath of the potential spirit living in the ovoo. When a local herdsman came by our camp, he told us to come and stay in his ger, as sleeping next to the ovoo could be dangerous because of the spirits. Many of the people who came by the ovoo said the same thing: the ovoo was strange and maybe not even real, but it was still potentially dangerous. When we asked the father in one of the households we stayed at about the shamanic ovoo, he suddenly became very tired and angrily said he did not care about that ovoo. The ovoos were something the lamas had told them to build, he said, adding, “I do not know of this shamanic one and I do not care.” A local hunter from the city of Bulgan told me that the new shamanic ovoo was needed to restore the balance between people and the angry spirits. A former ovoo, located one hundred meters from the new shamanic ovoo but which had fallen into disrepair, had been built by the locals to pay respect to a dead Russian soldier; but when asked about the new ovoo, the hunter said, “Before the old ovoo was big but now it is small and broken. Maybe the shamans took the spirit of the old ovoo into the new one when they built it?” A woman in a car who did not perform any ritual said, “This is not a real ovoo. If you want to do real ovoo research go to the big one in Bulgan city, this ovoo is too young, it is a simple ovoo!” According to these accounts, ovoos do indeed interlink social dimensions such as politics, way markers, and traditional cultural heritage. They are also artifacts that are capable of real actions; they can harm people or bring them fortune. Yet people had many different and sometimes contradicting stories about the shamanic ovoo, its function, and its origin. Erdene mentioned several times that it was like a house for the mountain lord, but that it was also an index of the mountain lord. In this way, the ovoo can be seen as a living thing, in the sense that it needs food and stones to keep strong, to keep the mountain lord strong. Empson’s and Pedersen’s approaches do actually toy with this idea of things and landscape as having a direct impact on people. But instead of pursuing this relationship further, they withdraw only to let things such as the ovoo get us closer to people and certain political orders, and we are only to understand the ovoo through these people, as a sort of representation of what the ovoo is all about.

To See or Not to See: A Paradox of What Is Invisible and Visible In their representation of the ovoo, Empson and Pedersen have recourse to the Strathernian notion that man cannot tolerate being a part of an infinite network of motion, but needs to define his world in terms of “stops” or “cuts” (Strathern 1996). To Empson and Pedersen, the ovoo is precisely such a stop (Empson 2011: 81; Pedersen 2009: 149). But as we have seen and as will become clearer in the following description of the shamanic ovoo, this explanation does not seem to let us off the hook in terms of explaining the ovoo as an attractor, where the invisible and visible world collapse onto each other. This puzzling movement from fixed to motion and singularity to multiplicity cannot be conceptualized within Empson’s and Pedersen’s metaphysical version of the Strathernian need to cut the floating network one is in. I want to argue that the past and the present of the ovoo and the landscape to which it belongs have no definite divide or obvious “cutoff” point. By following the ethnographic facts, the question we seem to be left with is how can

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what is invisible and visible be distinct modes and at the same time present in one of the same thing, as is the case with the ovoo? My point is that things are never literally what they seem, but potentially something more, because things like the ovoo cross boundaries between the world of the dead and the world of the living. As such, the question of how a thing can be a fixed singularity and at the same time display multiple dimensions such as ancestral worlds of the dead is still unanswered. And we may ask: How can the ovoo be a fixed singularity in a multidimensional, not fully constituted nomadic void? Of what sort of material world(s) is the ovoo then a part?

A Multilayered Assemblage Looking at the ovoo itself and its many layers of stones on stones and endless numbers of prayer flags and hadags, the described uncertainty visualized itself in the many stones on stones being layered up. You could only hint at the next layer between the stones, but never see the whole thing. The hadags tied around the wooden pillars added to this creation of uncertainty. There simply seemed to be too many perspectives at play to form one singular view of what the ovoo was supposed to signify. Instead, when asked, people would stick to telling me about their own sacrifice of stones or food, and talking about their personal relationship to the ovoo. Everything else about the ovoo seemed highly uncertain, if not potentially dangerous. From all the different activities going on around the ovoo, the ovoo was constituted by these characteristics and relations to people: fortune giver, dangerous, kinship, shamanic, simple, house of the mountain lord, real, not real, and aggressive. In this way, the ovoo indeed came to condense an extended network as Pedersen and Empson would have it, following Strathern’s notion of stops; different groups of people would interact with the ovoo in different ways. The relationships the ovoo is engaged in take many forms, hosting different people and their intentions, and because of this, the ovoo stops being a single term, but an operator between people, the landscape, and the invisible spirits and dead ancestors. In this regard Pedersen and Empson are right when they state that the ovoo symbolizes people’s relationships to the land; but from all the different relations, people’s relationships to the ovoo have a more ambivalent form and ambiguous character than Pedersen and Empson make it to be. They focus on the way people create stoppages in networks, creating fixed places for the sake of being. In this sense, regarding the ovoo as a fixed place is one way of claiming that people are adding culture to nature. By intervening in an otherwise nomadic void, people intervene with a presiding flow, turning it into a place of fixation for people to connect to the dead ancestors and spirits of the land. This analytical argument indeed forces the question of how a movable nomadic void can be turned into a fixed singularity for the invisible to be seen. For such an invention to be made a form of ownership is needed, but as we have seen, people disagreed about when the ovoo had been created, or had no idea when it had been created. Ownership of the ovoo was therefore hard to come by. In the following, I want to pay attention to all the many different things the ovoo consists of and how they are all part of one and the same thing: a single ovoo, even though these things also represent separate entities in themselves. As such, these assemblages of things arguably create a multidimen-

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sionality that generates the ovoo’s ability to display the invisible realm of the spirits for people to interact with. So the question is, how can the ovoo emerge out of the nomadic void of which it seems to be very much a part? How does it become possible to make entities out of an unlimited flow of multiplicity?

A Strange Attractor Vodka, sacred prayer flags, silk scarves (hadags), toy snakes, stones, wood, plates, sweets, stray dogs, flies, iron swastikas, milk, crutches, pee, animal feces, birds, incense, bonds, and bones. These are all things to be found on the ovoo. They are irreducible entities as much as they are part of the ovoo as a whole. Going back to look at the stones and other things used in the ritual, these things are, according to people, transformed into a selfish wish for good fortune and at the same time make the ovoo grow stronger, adding to its power. At present, it is a reciprocal relationship: I give you stone and food and you give me fortune. But at the same time this relationship goes beyond the single sacrifice and becomes part of another relationship, one in which the ovoo grows stronger and therefore attracts more people and therefore more sacrifices.4 It is a form of bargain, as Humphrey notes, where people are in an exchange relationship with the ovoo (1995: 159). The temporal event of giving stones and other things such as food to the ovoo goes beyond the giver of the sacrifice, involving other people, ancestors, and the mountain lord, connecting them to the event in an unintended manner. When people see one another’s sacrifices on the ovoo, they do not know the intention behind it. All people are left with are the material remains of former sacrifices heaping up from several generations of wishes. These remains, such as the stones, take on a rather liquid nature as they pile up and settle on top of each other, making it impossible to see the stones underneath, forming an unpredictable unity. As such the ovoo both creates and mediates different temporalities, making them coexist. People’s many wishes did not only adhere to the stabilization of the present; nor did they only maintain a linkage to the past ancestors. Instead, they created something new at the ovoo that was not there before. Instead of being a contained spatialization of time, these wishes materialized through the many sacrifices, hence reflecting a process of transformation juxtaposing different temporal configurations.

Creation through Material Decay Containing transformable and ambiguous elements, the ovoo is transformable and ambiguous itself. The ovoo therefore becomes a fragmented thing constantly in a state of being created. We are presented with an infinite chaos of selfish wishes inscribed in stones, vodka, white food, prayer flags, toy snakes, candy, toy dolls, and so forth. People are attracted to the ovoo, a mixture of conscious subjects knowing that they need to sacrifice to the ovoo, but the more abstract idea of why is left out. In this sense, the ovoo very much works as a tool to accomplish concrete objectives such as driving, hunting, and collecting wood safely, bringing on rain or curing loved ones from sickness. But the ovoo is indeed a complicated

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tool that constantly needs repairing and food to function. The ovoo is therefore in a constant process of “being-ready-to-hand” (Willerslev 2007: 151), and every day people re-create it by adding to its many layers of stone and prayer flags. This ready-to-hand state of the ovoo does not merely point to a pragmatic sense of being-in-the-world (ibid.: 149), but also hints at the very reality of which the ovoo is a part. The stone, prayer flags, hadags, decaying white food, and vodka bring to the fore more dimensions of reality than those that are immediately visible. To see the ovoo as a whole becomes impossible as layers upon layers are added to the construction. Seeing all the decaying things on the ovoo and falling down the mountainside made it difficult for people to know when the ovoo began and when it finished. When asking people about it, they could not determine a clear boundary for the ovoo, and in many cases they were not interested in doing so. The ovoo could in this sense be said to resemble what Mary Douglas referred to as “dirt out of place” (1966: 36), as the decaying elements on the ovoo escape any clear-cut categorization. For Douglas, dirt is ambiguous and anomalous, causing anxiety through disrupting classification systems and the “normal” ordered relations that one understands the world through. It blurs, smudges, contradicts, or otherwise confuses accepted classifications (ibid.). To people in Bulgan, the ovoo was indeed an ambivalent artifact that people did not know the full meaning of, because something was constantly left out, making the ovoo rather ambiguous to people in its present. However, whereas Douglas seems more concerned with the social ordering happening through the elimination of dirt along the binary axis of dirt and ordered society, the ovoo did not seem to have any clear-cut boundaries or margins (ibid.: 4). Douglas’s reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to nonbeing, life to death. As already mentioned, this more static structural approach to understanding the ovoo in terms of different binary categories like order and chaos, invisible and visible, life and death, appears ill equipped to deal with the material and more metaphysical implications of decaying things on the ovoo and its wider implications for people living in its presence. Instead of being out of place, the ovoo seemed rather simultaneously destructive and creative, periodically creating a sense of order where people could engage with cosmic forces. As opposed to Douglas’s more static understanding of the category of dirt in a rigidly structured world, in the ovoo’s case, the decaying (noncategorical) thing is not just “matter out of place” but a vibrant structure that embodies a power to combine the world of the dead with the world of the living. I will get back to this point later and show how the decaying things on the ovoo, rather than separating, mediate a relation between chaos and order, life and death, but first we need to address the construction of the shamanic ovoo in order to establish how the decaying things of which the ovoo consists, rather than drawing a distinction between “dirt” and ordered society, is transforming and enabling a cosmic encounter between humans and the spirits, which creates its own uncertain order of things.

Continuous Multiplicity From all these various accounts it became clear that the shamanic ovoo in one way or another forced its way on people, making itself present to people and affecting their daily lives. In this sense, it intruded constantly in the landscape and

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Figure 8.4. Fire shaman performing a shamanic drum session. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

forced people to relate to it. The ritual offerings of stones, food, and other materials can arguably be seen as a way of stabilizing the network, to make a stable relation between people and spirits resting in the ovoo possible, but this stoppage only seems to apply for a short period of time before uncertainty and possible danger reemerges. As such, the ovoo resists ideas about boundaries through its infinity of intrarelationships, making it an artifact suspended between an immense and a transcendental state of being. Part of the ovoo stays in view, but its effect on people, spirits, and landscape cannot become completely visible, as it stays unknown and rather ambiguous, constantly proposing contradictions in terms of what is hidden and what is visible. The ovoo manifests itself on the backdrop of a nomadic void; it springs from this void, sharing its multiplicity. Its unknown starting point is creating and transforming both worlds into existence for people, ancestors, and spirits to communicate with and relate to. It certainly cannot be reduced to its singular/fixed ready-to-hand state, as every single stone and prayer flag on the ovoo has significance and helps to form the worlds of which the ovoo is a part. In other words, we need to think of the ovoo as a continuous multiplicity rather than a fixed entity locked within a binary system of invisible-visible, order-chaos, and boundaries-boundless categories. To follow this line of thought, I will now turn to how this shamanic ovoo was built, as this will help us to understand this stoppage in an extended network and how people deal with the constantly present spirits of the land. As Ludovic Coupaye writes: “It is through the observation and recording of sequences of technical steps undertaken by people themselves, while paying attention to local explanations and discourses, that one can understand technology in a non-metaphorical sense”

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(2009: 135). The following account is based on several interviews with a young shaman called Temujin, who built the ovoo back in 2009.

To Build Infinity and Beyond In 2009, Temujin’s grandmother fell seriously ill, and Temujin, who had just been cured from his shamanic sickness (he had been lame and half blind for many years, and only by becoming a shaman could he be cured), decided to become a shaman to help his grandmother retrieve her soul from heaven. After becoming a shaman, he asked his ongon (spirit) what to do to help. It told him to find a mountain to build an ovoo, which would later become a meeting point for his ancestors. First Temujin decided to build the ovoo on top of a mountain, but he thought the mountain was too aggressive, so he then chose the steppe outside the city of Bulgan to build the ovoo. Another important reason for him to build the ovoo was to protect the environment from pollution. Everyone is allowed to sacrifice, but only tsagaan idee (white food). No black offerings were allowed on the ovoo, as shown by a big sign in front of the ovoo (although this was not followed strictly, as the presence of numerous vodka and beer bottles indicated). When I asked him about the triangular design of the ovoo, he told me that the ovoo was strong because of its ancient design. This design had been provided by his shamanic mentor, who had consulted his ongon, a register spirit. This spirit knew all dead spirits and had talked to one of Attila the Hun’s closest shamans, who revealed the design.

How to Build a House for the Dead First Temujin had to get stones from mother earth to form four circles, one of them bigger than the others. The stone circles formed a triangle, with one circle in the middle. To make two circles the stones were put down, moving around the circle clockwise. Then four poles were chosen, one of them longer than the others. The longest one was placed in the center of the stone circle. The stone circle placed in the middle was the biggest ovoo and represented the hangaj 5 of the owner and the eye of the sky. The three other wooden poles were then connected to the middle one, again in a sunwise manner from left the right. They represented a left arm (the white sky), a right arm (the dorlig 6 sky), and a head (the red sky). The four poles were then tied together with white and blue hadags connecting all the elements of the ovoo (Figure 8.5). The colors were chosen by his ongon (many other colors were present at the ovoo, put there by different people). In between the three corners and the center of the ovoo, twelve “baby” ovoos were placed to grow, and around all of this was a fence to keep out women (it was a male ovoo) and to keep people from leaving trash, such as plastic bottles. The name of the ovoo is Husugtun, which means “respect,” as in a respectful way of greeting the ovoo. As Temujin kept saying, “It is a very old type of ovoo, dating back to Attila, eleven generations of my family and the time of Chinggis Khan, maybe from 1290.” The physical ovoo itself was from the Ull district in Hövsgöl and had been transported to Bulgan by his relatives. When I asked him about the process of building the ovoo, he said that every new ovoo means a new ritual because the ongons are different and want different things. No ovoo is ever the same.

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Figure 8.5. White and blue hadags connecting the different elements of the ovoo. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

Figure 8.6.  Temujin making a ritual. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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Plural Cuts in Infinity Following the technical process of building the ovoo, the many different sequences and operations in creating the ovoo can be said to be like a flow of semiotic transformation, with the creation of the ovoo being inscribed in other materials as it takes form. Coupaye writes that by “following the technical process of making things, we can by following this particular moment unwrap it and show the logic driving people’s actions” (2013: 133). But if there was a new process every time a new ovoo was created, how was I to follow any consistent logic of technical process when it seemed to have a different meaning every time? What sort of semiotic modality (Keane 2013) or symbolic system (Douglas 1966) could this be described as? If surely there was a specific logic related to the relational network of which the ovoo is a part, it was a logic very much defined by inconsistency, not a stable idea of the sign in a Saussurian sense (Saussure 1959: 67). As mentioned earlier, the ovoo seemed rather different from Douglas’s distinction between dirt and order. Oscillating between different understandings of where thought or perception reside, the ovoo encompasses tensions at its heart between chaos and order. Not unlike Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival, which he describes as a grotesque figure, a phenomenon in a state of change and incomplete metamorphosis (1984: 304), the ovoo seems to resemble the same kind of display of excess and grotesqueness, a communal performance with no boundary between performers and audience (ibid.). However, where Bakhtin is concerned with the social fields of power and hierarchy in his analysis of the grotesque figure, I suggest that we, in order to fully grasp the implications of the ovoo’s grotesqueness, need to shift focus from social power structures to the metaphysical implications in Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque. According to Bakhtin, the grotesque figure holds an ambivalence by virtue of transition and becoming, which are mediated through reverse poles such as newold, birth-dying, and beginning-ending (ibid.). The grotesque figure thus characterizes the biological cycle of changing phases in nature and human reproduction and is a bringer of both life and death. The grotesque figure seems to bring us some of the way in understanding the ovoo’s tension between order and chaos as a transitional becoming, where the many decaying sacrifices on the ovoo give life to the ovoo, making it strong and capable of granting wishes and fortune. Like the carnival, the ovoo creates a situation in which diverse intentions interact, breaking down the space and enabling contact between the living and the spirits. The ovoo subverts and “recycles” materials that are available in the Bulgan Aimag and liberates them from their original meaning, making them a part of the grotesque assemblage of things on top of the ovoo. In this way, the ovoo seems to make it possible to open up new interpretation of what the elements might signify. It creates the chance for a new perspective and a new order of things by showing the relative nature of all that exists and lowering the spiritual and abstract to the material level. In the sense that the ovoo was constantly being created as an artificial composite of heterogeneous elements chaotically thrown together, creating a space or gap in between the natural world and the denaturalized spirit world. The decay of all the organic materials on the ovoo was the very transformational source of this. As a grotesque form of materialism, the ovoo, in its distorted material reality, is incorporating multiple perspectives and intentions extending between an invisible and visible world. In this way, the ovoo appears in a twofold contradiction: a double reality that makes the ovoo an ambivalent and contradictory artifact, creating inverse uncertainty among people attracted to it.

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Returning to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque figure, as well as his concept of polyphony (Bakhtin 1973), the ovoo can be said to represent a polyphonic sign (ibid.): an assemblage of many different intentions and ideas, where the chains of significance have more of a mobile character. But, in contrast to Bakhtin’s idea, this polyphony is inscribed into the very materiality of the ovoo and is not just a semiotic and discursive concept working on the material world, as Bakhtin uses it in his analysis of social hierarchy. Instead, we seem to be left with a grotesque materialism that is defined by a distinct metaphysic, meaning that this polyphonic state inscribed into the materials of the ovoo creates a form of immanent materialism where the material ground of the ovoo internally produces the symbolic ends that transcend it. What this means is that the ovoo is offering a different interpretation of dirt as matter and symbol, or what I in this chapter have framed as the relation between the visible and invisible. The indispensable Western distinction between these categories is simply not at work in the case of the ovoo’s materiality. As such, to fully understand the ovoo, we need to think beyond Mary Douglas’s structuralist tension between material and conceptual evidence. Doing this, the ovoo is both within and beyond the visible world—in it, but not entirely of it, simultaneously pervading it and surpassing it, which makes it invisible and visible at the same time. As such, the immaterial world of spirits is produced through constant ambivalent material means. This ethnographic fact opens up to a different metaphysical reality, where decaying ambivalent sacrifices on top of the ovoo become the very condition for creating a space for the living and the dead to interact.

On the Temporal Order of Chaos This inconsistent technical process in creating the ovoo and the constant process of repairing and adding to it undoubtedly resist the idea of one process of creation as well as the very notion of the ovoo as only being a singular thing. In terms of the age of the ovoo, Temujin gave three different dates, stating that it was very old. In my view, these irregularities concerning ownership, origin, and people’s irregular worshipping seem to propose or enforce a different question. If there is no end to the creation of the ovoo, due to the fact that it is timeless and in a constant process of creation and repair, can the ovoo even be regarded as a thing at all, and if so, what thing would that be? If anything, in this light the ovoo could then be seen as a technical process, in which people create and transform a platform from which they can perceive multiple worlds consisting of the dead and the living—worlds, as we have already seen, that seem to hold a lot of uncertainty and ambivalence. Utilizing the young shaman’s explanation, the ovoo also seems to be able to move, as it was brought from Hövsgöl Aimag to Bulgan Aimag. This fact only seems to add to the ovoo’s uncertain origin. Even though the ovoo was built in 2009, Temujin still argued that the ovoo was very old and had its origin in several historical periods. As this seemed quite contradictory, it left me wondering if the sense of time according to the ovoo might have to be rethought. It seemed that movement between different points in time, from the point of view of the ovoo, was analogous to moving between different points in space. Like a dimension door, the ovoo was bending time and space by manipulating the varied ways it could sustain and reflect more

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than one dimension and at the same time appear as one ordered artifact. It lends evidence to the uncertain and distant past tied to the ovoo and the difficult nature of tracing its creation, and more importantly, it contests the idea of the ovoo as merely a fixed place. As stated earlier, past and present did not seem to have a definite divide, but stuck to the many different layers the ovoo consisted of. Time as seen from the perspective of the ovoo did not flow as beads on a string, following each other chronologically through space, but rather formed a continuous multiplicity, which arguably is best conceived as a mesh of different intentional paths and not a container of fixed and static relations to the spirits and the dead. If we consider this temporal multiplicity in regard to death, from the perspective of the ovoo it is not a question of being-toward-death that is at stake but more a question of beingwith-death that shapes the experience of time. This means that in order to understand the future and their place within it, people constantly had to connect to the world of the dead, a connection very much defined by possibilities but also danger. Going back to the ethnographic paradox at hand: the understanding of the ovoo’s simultaneous singularity and multiplicity and its highly ambivalent character. If we follow this logic, I argue that the ovoo can just as well be seen as a transforming and multilayered artifact as well as a fixed singularity and bounded entity, marking time as a continuous multiplicity. As we have seen, these relationships between spirits and humans, vodka bottles, and white food place the ovoo at the center of connections dealing with fortune and misfortune and possible danger for the people living in the present of the ovoo, but at the same time the ovoo very much appears to have a certain beacon-like effect on people, attracting them to it, stabilizing their reality, if only for a short time. So, the ovoo is not a fixed and bounded singular object, but a growing one. It is organic and vibrant, shaping different temporal settings and dimensions for the people, spirits, and dead an- Figure 8.7. The ovoo as an organic meshwork of humans, materials, and cestors around it (see Figure 8.7). spirits. Photo by Malthe Lehrmann.

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A Thing in a Not Fully Constituted World So far, what we seem to have been left with is a rather complex and diverse temporal discontinuity between the ovoo’s different modes of being. As we have seen, there appears to be a lack of origin myths connected to the ovoo, and different techniques in maintaining the ovoo seem to be performed constantly on an everyday basis. This supports ideas about a general lack of an all-embracing cosmological order in Mongolia (Pedersen 2007). However, the lack of a neat cosmological order did not keep people in Bulgan Aimag from imagining different possible origin stories. This apparent discontinuity between what is and what potentially could be can be seen as what Pedersen regards as an ad-hoc way to create particular and heterogeneous agencies, due to confrontations with mysterious events (ibid.:145). This issue of dealing with the uncertain mysterious elements between nonhumans and humans is relevant to understanding how people in Bulgan perceive the ovoo, and more importantly what sort of qualities and abilities seem to make the ovoo such an ambivalent artifact. As I have tried to show in this chapter, it is very difficult to talk about the ovoo as a state of linear, logical processes because the ovoo’s ambivalent nature obscures and escapes attempts of regularity and order. To see the ovoo in only one light proves difficult, as something necessarily will escape this “stop” or notion of fixation. Instead, I wish to suggest that, by contrast with Pedersen’s and Empson’s distinction between a singularity and multiplicity, with the ovoo representing order, we might have to think of the ovoo more as an asymmetrical and decentered artifact consisting of textures and substances that represent a multitude of dimensions and voices. The human and spirit worlds that emerge from the life of the ovoo can then be seen as products of relations that cross lines between the dead and the living, forming a structure of continuity and possibilities. Time and the cosmos are then created through the ovoo’s intrarelationships, making the cosmos somewhat open-ended. People’s futures emerge from and in relation to the ovoo and its specific geometry of absent origin. In this way, the future of the living seems to always be indebted to the dead. Where this material polyphony is challenging is in determining how meaning can be said to be constituted. It is a metaphysical, conceptual problem between the conscious and material world. Following this analysis, the ovoo forces us to rethink the very notion of what is hidden and what is invisible in relation to dead ancestors and spirits of the land. This leaves us with the question of determining how we are to talk about the ovoo’s materiality consisting of several dimensions, including spirits, people, and a nomadic void. This void can be said to hold the possibilities of reality, a reality that seems to constantly produce uncertainty regarding what there is and what there is not, making room for cosmological interpretations. What sort of reality the ovoo represents can therefore only be seen in the light of the nomadic void’s endless possibilities. Like the nomadic void, the ovoo is not fully constituted, but is part of a constant transformation and risky possibilities involving the interplay between a multiplicity of worlds both visible and invisible. What we are left with is a sort of grotesque materialism that reflects a phenomenon in constant transformation: an unfinished alteration of growth and becoming with the indispensable trait of ambivalence. In the texture of the ovoo, we find transformation, decomposing, and procreating elements, with no beginning and no end. Ideas about the dead ancestors and spirits become manifest on the backdrop of the ovoo’s material property, making people’s relations to the dead as much a question of transforming and creating

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multiple worlds as of showing respect for the dead ancestors and spirits and protecting oneself from potential harm. As such, the notion of death, seen from the perspective of the ovoo, spins on an ongoing ontological doubt of what there is, which forces people to constantly reestablish their understanding of life and death through rebuilding the ovoo, which in turn produces a certain temporal experience, forming an intrinsic connection between people and the dead for a short time within an open-ended cosmos of opportunity. This is a temporal experience formed by doubt and uncertainty regarding what there is, with people constantly being forced to orientate themselves toward the potential yet uncertain agency of the dead.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have tried to account for the ovoo’s lack of cosmic closure, its material property, and what this entails for the questions of time and death seen from the perspective of the ovoo. The ovoo is a temporal conjunction of domains, which makes it an ambiguous artifact. At the same time, it is important to stress that this discontinuity that takes place is not a discontinuity between nature and culture, as Empson and Pedersen would like to see it when pointing at the duality between singularity and multiplicity, where people cultivate the land in different ways. I wish to suggest that it is rather a matter of discontinuity of being, where the very texture of the ovoo is part of what makes it highly ambivalent and ultimately not fully constituted for the human eye. This implies that if we are to speak of the ovoo, instead of being a single absolute thing, it is more a differential plural entity whose “thingness” consists of being both a single artifact and multiple assemblages of people’s different reciprocal relations to the spirits and dead ancestors manifested through a jumble of different things thrown on top of each other. This generates an ontological doubt regarding what exists, which opens up ideas about the cosmos and the relation to time and nonhumans in an open-ended way, which constantly needs to be reaffirmed through interactions with the ovoo. In this way, the ovoo can be seen as a contradictory, not ready-made and completed artifact. The collapsing of worlds onto the ovoo is contradictory to the fixed, finished, and completed idea of the ovoo. In this regard, nothing is infinitely stable; everything is in a constant process of becoming. This concept of transformational infinity leads me to suggest that the ovoo is not a function of the world but comes to express a minor version of this nomadic world, where transformability and uncertainty simply are the modes of being. Ontological doubt, therefore, is the very thing that informs ideas about time and the material property of artifacts such as the ovoo. As the ambivalent and contradictory nature of the ovoo does not set it apart from the living world, but very much includes the ovoo in the living world, so does death. This creates an open-ended world of continuity and possibility where the future is always indebted to the dead that surround the living.

Malthe Lehrmann is a PhD student at Aarhus University and has a master’s degree in visual and material culture from UCL, London. His current project focuses on the relationship between cosmology and politics in Mongolia, where he studies self-proclaimed reformists’ attempts to change the political and cosmological reality of the country. His research interests focus on how people practice cosmo-

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logical shifts and how they work toward new cosmologies and escape the old. He is particularly interested in exploring how people informed by various social and cultural imaginaries practice and materialize new political subjects by working for and toward a cosmological end in order to create new cosmo-politics.

Notes   1. Bogd Khan Uul, Altan Oboo, Burhan Haldun, Otgontenger Uul, Khan Höhiin Uul, Sutai Hairhan, Altan Höhiin Uul, and Suvraga hairhan.   2. Here I refer to the term “attractor” as the nonlinear portion of a system’s movement, representing the state to which elements within the system are drawn (Mosko and Damon 2005: 17).   3. In Mongolia, the sun has traditionally been the way to keep track of time. Therefore, they say sunwise instead of clockwise.   4. Here I follow Marcel Mauss’s definition of the word: “Sacrifice is an act of giving that is necessarily reciprocated” (2002: 20, emphasis added).   5. Connection to nature and respect for nature.   6. Has the power to shoo away bad energy and things.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. R. W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis Publishers. ———. 1984. “The Grotesque Image of the Body.” In Rabelais and His World, 303–67. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bawden, Charles R. 1958. “Two Mongol Texts Concerning Obo Worship.” Oriens Extremus 1: 23–41. Coupaye, Ludovic. 2009. “Ways of Enchanting.” Journal of Material Culture 14 (4): 433—58. ———. 2013. Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Yams, Art and Technology Amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea. New York: Berghahn Books. Douglas, Mary. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Ark Paperbacks. Empson, Rebecca. 2011. Harnessing Fortune: Personhood, Memory, and Place in Mongolia. Oxford: British Academy/Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. “Portioning Loans: Cosmologies of Wealth and Power in Mongolia.” In Framing Cosmologies: The Anthropology of Worlds, eds Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 182–99. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Evans, Christopher, and Caroline Humphrey. 2003. “History, Timelessness and the Monumental: The Oboos of the Mergen Environs, Inner Mongolia.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 13 (2): 195—211. Hangin, John G. 1986. A Modern Mongolian-English Dictionary. Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies. Heissig, Walther. 1980. The Religions of Mongolia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Højer, Lars. 2007. “Fravær af viden, viden om fravær: Magiske effekter i det postsocialistiske Mongoliet.” Tidsskriftet antropologi 53: 43–58. Humphrey, Caroline. 1995. “Chiefly and Shamanist Landscapes in Mongolia.” In the Anthropology of Landscape, ed. E. hirsch and M. O’Hanlon: 135–62. London: Routledge. Humphrey, Caroline, and David Sneath. 1999. The End of Nomadism?: Society, State, and the Environment in Inner Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2013. “On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Trans­ duction.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (1): 1–17. Lindskog, Bengt. 2010. “Collectivity in the Making: Homeland, Belonging and Ritual Worship among Halh Herders in Central Mongolia.” PhD diss., University of Oslo.

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Mauss, Marcel. 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Routledge. Mosko, Mark. S., and Fred H. Damon. 2005. On the Order of Chaos: Social Anthropology and the Science of Chaos. New York: Berghahn Books. Pedersen, Morten. A. 2007. “Multiplicity without Myth: Theorising Darhad Perspectivism.” Inner Asia—LA English 9 (2): 311—28. ———. 2009. “At Home Away from Homes: Navigating the Taiga in Northern Mongolia.” In Boundless Worlds: An Anthropological Approach to Movement, ed. Peter W. Kirby, 135— 152. Oxford: Berghahn Books. ———. 2011. Not Quite Shamans: Spirit Worlds and Political Lives in Northern Mongolia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2014. “Transitional Cosmologies: Shamanism and Postsocialism in Northern Mongolia.” In Abramson and Holbraad, Framing Cosmologies, 164–81. ———. 2016. “Moving to Remain the Same: An Anthropological Theory of Nomadism. In Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology, ed. Pierre Charbonnier, Gildas Salmon, and Peter Skafish, 221–47. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Saussure, Ferdinand D. 1959. Course in Feneral Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library. Sneath, David. 2001. “Notions of Rights over Land and the History of Mongolian Pastoralism.” Inner Asia 3 (1): 41–59. ———. 2007. “The Decentralized State: Nomads, Complexity and Sociotechnical Systems.” In Socialising Complexity: Structure, Interaction and Power in Archaeological Discourse, ed. S. Kohring and S. Wynne-Jones, 228–44. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. “Cutting the Network.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2 (3): 517—35. Willerslev, R. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 9

The Dead among the Living Materiality and Time in Rethinking Death and Otherness in Lowland South America Clarissa Martins Lima and Felipe Vander Velden

Introduction The relationship between the dead and the living has always been the object of special attention for researchers working on indigenous populations in lowland South America. The absence of lineages or of extensive genealogical memories, along with practices that, in spite of their diversity, indicate the obliteration of the dead as one of the common denominators among these groups, culminated in the already classic conclusion by Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (1978) that, in this part of the world, the dead are Others. This is to say, they are another kind of people, not without a posthumous existence, but whose treatment should be likened to that saved for affines and enemies, that is, those marked by distrust and avoidance. Those who were kin in lifetime are subjected to a process of “alienation” from social life into death, turning into the maximum expression of alterity. Put in a different manner, the effects of such a dread toward dead people and the subsequent distancing from their presence among the living can be perceived in different practices that follow a death in the indigenous villages of lowland South America. These practices include different ways of dealing with materiality—the relinquishing of houses and, sometimes, entire villages where a death occurred, the destruction of personal belongings of the dead, and, after a while, the gradual deconstruction of genealogic memory by forbidding the mention of the dead person’s name until the subsequent “forgetting” of the deceased. As suggested by the editors of this volume, these are some of the various ways to cope with materialities that evince the strong connection between time, matter, and the dead in native South American societies. In this chapter, we will consider a set of practices regarding the dead in two quite different indigenous peoples in Brazil (the Karitiana in the Amazon and the Xukuru in the semiarid northeastern region) in order to suggest that this ethnographical commonsense image about death and the dead in lowland South American societies cannot completely account for all the manners Amerindian peoples think about and engage with the afterworld. Our main intent is to show that the dead are not always merely Others. On the contrary, there are many instances that the very material presence of the deceased is essential for the living to carry on with several important matters. This becomes particularly outstanding when we look at materialities that, related to or directed at the dead, enact temporalities that

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work, among other things, to constitute the links between social groups and their territories. And these very same practices remind us that territory itself is materiality, one made of—and able to build—permanent bonds between the living and those that no longer exist. Thus, what we present here is the possibility to rethink the connections between the dead, materiality, and time from the vantage point of the territory inhabited by two native South American peoples.

Waking Up the Dead in Lowland South America This ethnographic scene, taken as common in all South America outside of the Andean region, emerged in the 1980s within Brazilian ethnology. It surfaced as a reaction to the problems caused by the studies of the indigenous populations in the Americas using the analytical tools developed long before, between the decades of 1940 and 1960, inspired by the approach to African societies, particularly by the British structural-functionalist anthropologists. Anthony Seeger, Roberto DaMatta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1979) classically argued that the simple transposition to tropical South America of explanatory concepts imported from Africa (lineages, descent, etc.), where the dead or ancestors have a central role, would produce distorted images of indigenous South American societies, so often described—not without difficulty—as fluid, loose, flexible, or a collection of absences, almost as if the “society” itself was nonexistent. Joanna Overing Kaplan, in a special symposium during the XLII Congrès International des Américanistes in 1976, had already sensed a similar problem regarding the methodology applied to the Amazonian ethnology (Kaplan 1977). The challenge at the time was how to describe these societies through concepts that could appreciate all their specificities—which necessarily implied rethinking the place of the dead and the effects of their absence in the formation of these universes. Rather than posed in terms of what is lacking, it should be phrased as what this absence produces. In fact, there seems to be several effects. Distancing the dead, for instance, erasing the past permanently, would relegate them to the indistinct time of the myth to which, in many cases and ways, they seemed to return. An image of a world inhabited by the dead often mirrors one that is drawn from the myths of origin: a moment in which humans, animals, spirits, and gods resemble and connect to each other, beyond their differences and beyond the perpetual circulation, in this here and now, of all creatures through the positions of prey and predator in a great chain of beings. Similarly, in the absence of deep genealogies (because the deceased are, or should be, obliterated), kinship would be projected laterally or concentrically, centered mainly on the affinity that is continuously negotiated and that projects itself into the future instead of being based on inherited consanguinity. And that, therefore, expands its threads toward the past. Even potential ways of accumulation, in this setting, would be eventually limited by the avoidance of the dead. Nothing should remain from those who left because all things from the former living become terribly loaded with danger and a kind of impetus en route to death itself, what many Amerindian cosmologies translate into a nostalgia so intense that it could conduct the living to a ravishing impulse to join the deceased. That would happen especially because the recently dead are believed to suffer from an almost unbearable solitude, so intense that they could not help but be forced to search for the company of their living loved ones, in a dangerous attempt to (re)unite two

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universes that become incompatible starting at the moment of death. That is to say, “the stench of death,” as Joanna Overing (2006) remarked, would impregnate everything in the surroundings and require its elimination. Death stinks, as Pierre Clastres (2000) reminds us among the Aché-Guayaki people in Paraguay, and its unbearable odor would be forever untenable to those who remained. In this sense, the dead, or rather the idea of the dead as the Other, have a fundamental role in the prevailing characterization of South American societies as timeless, equalitarian, or immutable. Nevertheless, an alternate set of ethnographical evidence—those, indeed, apparently obliterated from the construction of classical ethnographic images—demonstrates that the generalization of this thesis for all the peoples of such a vast region may have been somewhat hasty. It may leave aside, while converting itself into a motto, central issues that deserve more investigation concerning the place of the dead and their effects on social structures and practices (Chaumeil 2007). Even when the idea of the conspicuous absence of the dead seems to sustain itself, the treatment of them as an indistinct class of beings—in an always present reduction of sociological diversity of the living to an opaque collective of identical creatures that, in the end, become analogous to the beings to which the living opposes themselves (animals, spirits, and gods)—has led to a series of mistakes. Last but not least, it has relegated death studies to the same limbo that convention says to be the place for these groups, not taking into consideration that, even when alienated from social life, the dead play active and specific roles in the Amerindian sociocosmologies. Not only do the dead take part in these sociocosmologies, but they also extensively affect them (Taylor 1993). Therefore, an entire collection of ethnographic materials points to renewed means of thinking the inexorable presence—distinct from the “presence of the absence” as put by Carneiro da Cunha (1978)—of the many kinds of dead in the daily chores of the living, from the more irrelevant everyday activities to those of ritual, political, or cosmological importance to the native societies of lowland South America. Such materials allow us, now, a reevaluation of creative connections between death, materiality, and time in a region that takes us beyond the rigid opposition between the living and the dead, thereby leading us to new ways of thinking about history, politics, productive tasks, the constitution of bodies and persons, and the relationships between the multiple categories of beings with whom humans share the world. A view of the data collected among two very distinct and spatially apart indigenous populations (even though both located in Brazil)—the Karitiana in the southwest Amazon and the Xukuru in the semiarid northeast of the country—provides a brief glimpse into these new ethnographic and analytical possibilities brought by acknowledging the presence of the dead in the daily labor of the living. The crucial significance of the connection between the dead, time, and the materiality of the land or of the territory can be perceived in both ethnographic cases presented. Moreover, it can also be translated into the constitutional guarantee that, in Brazil, one can define the indigenous territories as land traditionally occupied, meaning the territory shared by the living and those who came before them.

Potsherds of Spirits: The Karitiana The Karitiana (Yjxa, in their own language) are a small indigenous population of around 330 individuals dispersed in five villages in the state of Rondônia, located

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in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon, near the Bolivian border. They speak the only language still alive of the Arikém branch of the Tupi linguistic family. Along with the linguistic affiliation, they share with other Tupian populations many social practices and cosmological conceptions. We know this through historiography, thanks to the descriptions of coastal Portuguese America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (the Tupinambá), and, in anthropology, due to the ethnographic work by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (among the Araweté), Carlos Fausto (among the Parakanã), and many others. However, they also distinguish themselves in many important aspects, which make them unique in the cultural landscape of the lowlands of South America. The Karitiana say that a person “has” four “souls” or “shadows,” depending on the way they translate their native term psam’em into Portuguese (almas or sombras). Their evidence for such a belief resides in the fact that the human body, when under diffuse sources of light, projects its shadow in four directions. They are not very clear about the status of these souls in a living human being, nor does the issue seem to be of interest to the Karitiana. In any case, the shadows seem to be only indicators of the presence of the souls; but because they are produced they point to the fact that we are not dealing with a notion of an immaterial, inherently invisible or incorporeal soul, as is recognized in the Judeo-Christian conception. Probably we are facing a notion of the soul as a body or a double, a would-be body, so to speak, because the soul only exists—or, in this case, the souls only exist—after death, when they leave the body and each one follows their specific fate. The dualism of body-soul does not seem to operate here—at least, not on the bodies of the living— just like it happens all over the indigenous Amazonia (Vilaça 2005). The idea that a soul may leave a body in certain pathological conditions exists (although, in this case, the Karitiana never specified which of the four souls would do this). However, this notion is falling into disuse due to the massive increase in evangelical conversion and the virtual disappearance of shamanism, at least in practice. It is said that in death the “blood lifts” (ge ambo). What is left of blood in an aged body—a soft body, indeed, because it is almost totally composed of water and very little blood—“gets spread,” say the Karitiana, and ascends to the sky, where it is devoured by the sun that, infuriated by death, bears a headdress made of red macaws’ tail feathers identical to the ones that, in the past, were worn by Karitiana warriors in their war expeditions. Death, sun, and blood are connected, and for this reason, every time someone dies the afternoon sky is colored by reddish clouds, thereby giving direct evidence that the deceased’s blood ascended and infuriated the sun, making it red as if covered by blood, like the ancient warriors, who in the old times would bathe themselves in the blood of enemies killed in combat. This mirrors the way people nowadays bathe themselves in the blood of the tapirs (Tapirus terrestris) slaughtered in the forest to have “good health.” But this is the destiny of only one of the souls that detach themselves from the body at the moment of death: the one that is received by the sun, in a process that seems to be a contemporaneous transformation of a circuit that would approximate the Karitiana’s eschatology to those of other Tupian peoples, from which there is only scattered information. It is told, then, that Botyj, the creator of all things in the world, who lives in one of the celestial plateaus, devours the dead like “pieces of canned meat,” saved in an enormous “depot” in the sky, in a very interesting echo of the famous “cannibal gods,” the Maï, from the Araweté (Viveiros de Castro 1992). Another soul, called psam’em birit, who is said to inhabit

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“the air”—the first celestial layer above the earth—seems to retain the individuality of the former living. As an example of this kind of soul, there are the auxiliary spirits that help the only Karitiana shaman still alive: his relatives, like Yjtamama, or João Capitão, his grandfather. The other two kinds of souls have different destinies, all of them on the same plateau inhabited by the humans, or on the first celestial plateau immediately above it. Those are practically disconnected from all human bonds.

Remembering the Dead’s Names and Places It seems, based on the description thus far, that among the Karitiana the dead are Others. The practices imposed when a death occurs confirm that the dead should be removed. Above all, it is important to be cautious so they do not perceive the living and leave them in peace. Therefore, the places attended by the dead should be avoided (see figure 9.1).1 Also, the hair of close relatives is shaved or, at least, trimmed—to keep the deceased, insane with nostalgia, from pulling the hair of the living, causing them intense headaches. For about a week, the villages fall into a deep silence: no music, conversations occur only in low voices, and children are reprimanded if they yell, so as not to call attention to the dead. People refrain from going out at night, because the deceased, leaving their grave,2 circle the village in the shape of a monstrous jaguar—a transformation of psam’em opoko, another of the freed souls after death— ready to devour the unwary. Nevertheless, all these actions seem to refer only to the recently deceased. It is as if it were necessary to distance themselves from the dead at a first moment—one of confusion, in which the newly deceased is compared to a child,3 trapped in the ambiguous situation of wishing the company of the relatives who, in return, seem to believe in the danger of being devoured by the former living relative, now transformed into a jaguar.4 Or at least, in the need to distance oneself from certain aspects of the deceased or of one of the four souls that disperse after death. In this sense, a strong ambivalence prevails, one that is certainly connected to the multiplicity of souls. The dead seem to be simultaneously themselves and Others; the danger they represent to the Figure 9.1.  A recent grave in the outskirts of a Karitiana village. ones remaining in this world resides not Note the bowl at the left, turned upside down by the spirit that, so much on the alterity of the dead, but during the night, left the grave and drank the chichi. Photo by Íris Araújo, 2013, reproduced with permission. rather on the fact that the dead miss their

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living relatives and ardently wish for their company. The problem is that the dead, more than Others, continue to exist as relatives, at least on the first days after their passing. Pierre Clastres, once more, seems to have solved the issue. He argued— perhaps inspired by Freud (Freud [1917] 2009; see introduction, this volume)—that the danger of the dead take root in melancholy, in the will to be again joined with those on the other spectrum and that points to an uncontrollable desire to die too. After some time, however, the dead as individuals are shunned but not forgotten. In this regard, they cannot be, given two fundamental institutions of this society: the chieftainship and the naming system. Actually, the chieftainship position that the Karitiana denominate as “traditional” (byyj) is inherited, passing from father to sons and daughters. Subsequently, there are long lines of chiefs recognized over time by their names. These are names that come from a finite stock (in the indigenous language) and alternate between generations. For example, a child will be named after his grandfather, if a boy, and her grandmother, if a girl. These children will be the “new I” (eu novo) or “a renewed I” (eu renovado). Notice that this does not mean the transmission of substance—because it is passed from father to children, which for the Karitiana is literally called “semen” (‘it). It means the transmission of names that seem to carry something of the persona or of the individuality from the forefather. In any case, what is truly important here is that virtually all may be remembered, even though the images from the past are, largely, always a repetition of the present, since the names are always the same. Nevertheless, one cannot forget those who have passed because they continue to exist in the ones who, today, bear their same names. All the classic statements repeated by Americanist ethnology about the radical alterity of the deceased, recent or not, seems to be at stake due to the multiciplicity of fates imposed by the splitting of the Karitiana dead into four distinct “souls” or “shadows.” The sojourn of the dead into the daily chores of the living has taken on many fine contours of meaning in the last years, in the context of the fight of the Karitiana for the recuperation of an important part of their ancient, traditional territory—formed by tributaries of the right margin of the Candeias River, by its turn one of the headwaters of the huge Madeira River—that was excluded from the indigenous land officially demarcated in 1976, a place where all the present-day individuals older than fifty were born. In fact, to remember the old places of residency—that are too, in many cases, the places where their forebears are buried— involves remembering the names of those dead and buried in specific locations. In this way, the Karitiana started to locate, by means of expeditions to the territory they expect to annex, dozens of places recognized as “the so-and-so cemetery,” locations whose existence could only be guaranteed—even juridically—by the precision they are able to identify them, using the memories of the Karitiana of today. It is not enough, then, to find a place; it is necessary that this be “the place of someone.” Many of these places are points in which some particular dead people were buried and their graves could be located through small depressions on the terrain, in the middle of dense woods,5 almost always located on the external limits of the areas formerly occupied by the collective living spaces of the villages (Figure 9.2). The dead, then, are not and cannot be forgotten, and the dread of old cemeteries—in the face of the menacing presence of the dead’s “spirits”—found among other indigenous Amazonian groups (Fausto 2014; Vilaça 1992) is not manifested

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Figure 9.2.  Cizino, the last Karitiana shaman, pointing to an old grave in the forest. Old graves can be recognized by small depressions on the ground scattered around ancient human sites. Photo by Felipe Vander Velden, 2011.

so strongly here. Indeed, the structures built on the graves that house the dead (see Figure 9.1 above) are very material evidences of their striking permanence, just like the depressions in the ground that remain as time goes by. The Karitiana want some of the graves to be opened and studied by archeologists, so the mortal remains may effectively prove that the places were, at some point in the past, inhabited by their ancestors. Moreover, it is fundamental to know who is or who are the dead buried there, and even to know who were those who lived in that place, where in the past stood a village. The memory of the dead, however, seems only possible because of the change in the Karitiana’s naming system, by the incorporation of names in Portuguese. In fact, if the names in their native language formed a finite stock recycled over alternating generations, the names in Portuguese are never repeated: there has never been two Karitiana individuals (man or woman) sharing the same name, and today the couples experiment with odd compositions to name their children in original ways. This phenomenon—that we could regard as a kind of “warming up,” in Lévi-Straussian terms, of Karitiana’s history and to the emergence of a certain individualism—seems to be in operation among the Karitiana at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, given that people today recall the names in Portuguese of those who passed in the 1910s, like João Capitão

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(Cizino’s grandfather; see Figure 9.3; Cizino is the last Karitiana shaman) and his son, Antônio Morais, the great leader who conducted the Karitiana to permanent contact with the whites during the 1940s and 1950s, whose burial place, Myn’emo, is well-known and considered very special.

A Landscape of Broken Souls The dead can link the Karitiana to the territory in yet another way. One of the four “souls” (psam’em), called psam’em pyyt, keeps the appearance of the person when alive, but unlike other “souls,” it does not induce “nightmares” or “shock.” Psam’pyyt, as understood by the Karitiana, leaves the place of death, appearing in distant locations from those with whom the alive individual used to have a relationship (relatives, friends), asking them for sex in exchange for food. A living person who accepts such a swap will die, because this “soul” cannot offer “living” food. Once the “shadow” of the food is taken, it is considered dead and should not be tasted by the living. It is also said—and this is the point of interest here—that these spirits fall ill, suffering from the same disease that killed them when alive, and die “as people” (alive), then becoming scraps of broken pottery, often found in the forest Figure 9.3.  A Karitiana man in a photo taken in 1912 in a seringal (rubber plantation) on the Jamari River. He was (Figure 9.4). Actually, walking through the sites identified by the present-day Karitiana as João Capitão, of old Karitiana villages, in the Candeias River’s Cizino’s grandfather. In this picture, it is possible to note valley—especially and regrettably in those areas the cranial deformation practiced by the Karitiana until where the soil was already churned by agricul- the 1970s. Departamento de Arquivo e Documentação tural and pastoral activities—it is usual to come da Casa de Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, reproduced with permission. across an infinity of assorted potsherds, another certain indicator of the indigenous presence in this region. But, in a way of speaking, this is a special indicator, considering that the bond between the ancient pottery and the Karitiana of today is not viewed under a technical or cultural correlation, which could be, for instance, confirmed by an archaeological study. A study could tell us, for example, if the material, the technology, or the shape of these fragments are, or are not, identical to the ones employed in the pottery made by the Karitiana nowadays. The link, as a matter of fact, passes by the dead as an ultimate mark of one of their manifestations: the ceramic sherds are a sign that the Karitiana lived there in the past, because their dead lay there on the ground, materially, in the form of broken pottery left over. In this sense, virtually the whole world could be seen as a Karitiana’s territory, or at least those regions where the broken pottery may be found in the soil. Thus, the dead ensure the fixedness of the native territory through their continuous presence in it, inasmuch linking the past and the present. “Life” after death, in this case, comes only to confirm the totalizing impulse of the indigenous ontologies.

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Figure 9.4.  A young Karitiana leader shows the potsherds found on the site of an old village. These are “the shards of spirits.” Photo by Felipe Vander Velden, 2011.

Between Forebears and the Departed: The Xukuru We can take the same relationship between the dead and the territory as a starting point for a reflection on the presence of the dead among the Xukuru. This indigenous group inhabits a semiarid region in Pernambuco, a state in the Brazilian northeast. The Xukuru had to deal with the effects of their contact with the whites since the early days of colonization: their land was usurped, their tradi-

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tions forbidden, and their language extinct. Despite such violence, they managed to remain on the land where they were first contacted, resisting and fighting for their land until, at the turn of this century, they had their territory delimited and the nonindigenous occupiers expelled. Currently, they amount to nearly eleven thousand people located in twenty-four villages scattered along their territory. They speak Portuguese exclusively and define themselves, for the most part, as Catholics, although “Catholicism” here is something very much diverse from the orthodox definition. For that matter, it is intriguing that the group has remained in the region, particularly if we consider that they kept fighting against and being victims of great truculency. The urge to stay and fight, it is said, was motivated by the desire to remain in the place where their forebears (antepassados) lived and, above all, on the land whose true owner is Our Lady of the Mountains (Nossa Senhora das Montanhas). The saint, they affirm, is the “mother of the people Xukuru.” In a sense, they have fought to stay next to their dead. The generic term “dead” demands an initial clarification, so that one can make sense of the many beings inhabiting the Xukuru cosmos. In general, it is acceptable to say that the dead and the living are in opposition, among the Xukuru, through the matter that composes the living and is absent among the former: the dead are spirits, while humans are a sum of matter and soul—“spirit” is the name given to the soul when it no longer inhabits a body. But the relationship between matter and soul is far from the dual configuration underlining Western thought. The impulses of the matter, that which is not inert, affect the soul, and the caring of the soul affects the matter, the soul being able to control the matter’s impulses. In turn, the mere spiritual condition of the dead offers them a capacity to inhabit more than one place at the same time; freed from the matter, the dead become multiple beings. Beyond the condition of purely spiritual that distinguishes the dead from the living, the Xukuru understand the dead as a relatively diverse class of beings, thought and experienced in their specificities. Therefore, they cannot be denominated in a generic term. The dead then exist as saints (santos), forebears (antepassados), enchantments (encantos), entities (entidades), departed (finados), and bad spirits (espíritos ruins), each one equipped with specific potentialities and establishing no less specific relationships with the living. These beings manifest themselves in particular places, are mobilized in distinct situations, and, not less important, inhabit different times, even though commonly they are all in time (no tempo). In order to explore these aspects, one must start with the relationship of the Xukuru with Our Lady of the Mountains and their forebears.

The Dead from the Past in the Present Our Lady of the Mountains is a saint who carries plenty of oppositions that mark her constitution. She was found in mythic times by forebears who were not able to discern if what they found was an adult or a child. Although made from wood, she is considered at once human and dead. Since the Xukuru define saints as humans that died without sin, then to be dead is a condition of being a saint. However, she is alive, as they emphasize. After all, she is necessarily someone from the past that remains alive in the present, continuously affecting it (Figure 9.5). The existence of the forebears is not less ambiguous. Despite being the children of Our Lady of the Mountains, they are the ones who found her over a tree

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Figure 9.5. Our Lady of the Mountains. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2015.

stump. In this sense, they are then her predecessors. They are, simultaneously, the origin of all humanity—when there was no distinction among the human groups— and of the Xukuru people specifically. The forebears are dead but also alive in the woods that cover part of the territory. Like Our Lady of the Mountains, the forebears are beings of the past active in the present. Besides these ambivalences that mark their existences, there is a tropism that is common to both saint and forebears. Our Lady of the Mountains, as described by the Xukuru, refuses to leave her land, from the time she was found until today. All the attempts in this direction were fruitless: the saint always returned to her place of origin, as if land and saint could not exist in isolation. In fact, everything that exists there, on the land of Our Lady of the Mountains, is thought of as part of the saint herself; all that is born and grows on the land is fruit of her existence. In the same way, the saint does not live in the absence of her land. The same is valid for the forebears that in death keep living in the saint’s land, the place they also inhabited when alive. This is not, so to speak, only in a spiritual modulation, but by means of their own bodies’ materiality. Planted in the earth, they become the fertilizer that gives origin to subsequent generations. In this regard, Our Lady of the Mountains and the forebears blend themselves into the territory: they are the earth, while at the same time they are on the earth. Hence the choice of the Xukuru, siding with the dead, may be thought of in different terms. As was already stated, there is a connection established between the Xukuru, Our Lady of the Mountains, and the forebears. And that happens, mostly, through the land: for being born on the saint’s land they become her children, and they are connected to her because inhabiting this land is also, somewhat, to be inhabited by the saint. They consider themselves relatives of the forebears since they see themselves as branches (ramos) of the same trunk (tronco), from which continuity is granted, fairly, by the fertilizing bodies planted in the land. Thus, the

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connection of Our Lady of the Mountains and the forebears with the land establishes among the Xukuru the boudaries of the group as such, defining them and singling them out from other groups: a Xukuru, they say, is someone who was born and raised there—in the land of Our Lady of the Mountains and the forebears. There is still another aspect of this connection that simultaneously form them as persons and as a group, and which contributes to the Xukuru remaining on the land. As already mentioned, Our Lady of the Mountains and the forebears are, at the same time, dead and alive. They are dead because this is what distinguishes them from contemporaneous people; they are alive because they possess an existence that influences people’s daily lives. More than that, they are a very particular kind of living dead: they are relatives and they should be treated as such, under the risk of an irreversible destabilization in the Xukuru world if this relationship were conducted in any different way. It is imperative, then, to take care of the dead and, consequently, to take care of the land. In reality, this caution goes beyond gifts for the blessings received from these beings. It is, rather, an everyday care that involves chats, visits, food preparation, and, especially, candles, many lighted candles, to assure these beings live in light and are not undermined by the bad spirits that also populate the Xukuru’s cosmos. It is necessary to remember the deceased in the same way it is necessary to care for the familial relationships among the living in the village, so that these relationships perpetuate themselves.

A World with the Dead Within With the definitive repossessing of the indigenous territory in the beginning of the 2000s, this attention to the saint, the forebears, and the land was finally possible again. Nowadays the Xukuru meet weekly in a clearing in the woods (Figure 9.6)

Figure 9.6. The Xukuru participate in a toré, a ritual to engage in a dialogue with the forebears. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2015.

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Figure 9.7. Images of many saints in a Xukuru home. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2013.

to communicate with their forebears, who in situations like this are referred to as enchantments (encantados), pointing to a variation in the forebears’ denomination. Annually, there is also a celebration in honor of Our Lady of the Mountains. Moreover, there is daily engagement with both entities, be it on the lajedos (rock outcroppings), in the woods, or in the church built for the saint in the time of the forebears. These are places where, in a more intense way, their presence materializes, even though communication is also possible inside houses, enhanced by certain materials—such as pictures of the saint or belongings recognized as having been used by the forebears. The objects act simultaneously as effective presence as well as a representation of those beings. In the same way, there is a fundamental connection between the deceased and certain materialities. The relationship the Xukuru establish with other saints is a good example of this process and is replicated among the different kinds of dead (see Figure 9.7 below). Saints, according to the Xukuru, are people who lived in a time prior to the forebears—in Jesus’s time—the marks of whom are also visible in the villages’ landscape. And saints have lived lives without sin—something that people there assured us is not possible nowadays. At death, the saints went to live next to God, and from him they received the consent to help people whenever it is needed. In each house of the village one can notice a proliferation of the saints’ images, a way for the residents to maintain an active relationship with these beings. These images were, say the Xukuru, made and left behind by the saints themselves. Following this logic, while each saint is one, they are also each of the

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images inhabiting the houses. Just as with Our Lady of the Mountains, who as the owner of the land leaves something of herself in it, or with the forebears, who left imprinted in the land marks of their existence and even fertilize it with their bodies, the saints repeat this pattern of connection with their images. In this last case, it is through the matter of the images to whom people address their queries. It is through communication with the images that saints can hear them being called to act in the world of the living. As with Our Lady of the Mountains and the forebears, the saints are from a past that inhabits the present. However, this dynamic not only concerns the dead from remote times, those whose time among the living in this world is unknown. The Xukuru’s villages are also inhabited by those who died more recently. These are called finados (departed), contemporaneous to those still living in the present. They form a category oscillating according to the age range of their interlocutors. The same person may be referred as finado (departed) by an eighty-year-old and as caboclo velho—another variation of the dead that will not be approached here—by someone, let’s say, who is in their twenties, indicating that only the former shared the same time with the deceased in question. In any case, it was and still is also for the departed that the Xukuru chose to remain in their lands. Indeed, the departed, among the dead, are the ones that demand special care, because they are more easily corrupted by the bad spirits, with harmful implications mainly for their close relatives. Besides, the departed are a constitutive part of the way kinship is operated in the Xukuru’s world, acting as points that articulate relationships between families (famílias). These relationships are not always reinforced by the living, but that does not necessarily mean that they did not exist, since they can be invoked in given moments. The forgetfulness of the departed, or their abandonment, would have, in this regard, consequences for how kinship is conducted by the Xukuru, creating an effective emptiness where today the emptiness is only apparent, considering that the world is crowded with spiritual beings. Just as the other kinds of dead can be in more than one place simultaneously, the same occurs with the departed, though with somewhat diverse implications. When asked about their posthumous destiny, the Xukuru answer that, in death, a person stays in a place that was reserved for him or her by God, waiting for the Last Judgment. In addition, they miss their loved ones and the materialities that marked their existence when they were alive. Because of this, the departed can be found in their belongings too (which are kept by their closest relatives, as can be seen in Figure 9.8), and even in the places they liked to stay. This leads occasionally to the fact that entire houses of dead people can sometimes be kept intact. Last, the departed may be found in cemeteries, at the location where they were buried, even if, according to the Xukuru, only the matter remains there. But, to say that only the matter remains there is also a way to say that the departed as a whole are there too, as far as the part and the whole are relations that, when one is dealing with the dead, do not stop oscillating. For this reason people often assert their wish to be buried in the village where they live. When questioned about the reason for this wish, they explain that it enables them to stay closer to their loved ones—living or dead, since family members are buried next to each other—an arrangement that could also help to solve any business they may have left behind. Therefore, the dead do not remain static, let alone freed of the effects of the passage of time. If the Xukuru universe may be described as one populated by a series of dead considered potentially beneficial, it is equally true, as already pointed out, that they

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Figure 9.8.  Toys and bed of a dead child, Xukuru village. Photo by Clarissa Martins Lima, 2012.

also live alongside bad spirits (espíritos ruins), which makes living in the Xukuru’s villages somewhat dangerous. Unlike the other dead people, with specific designations according to the time they lived, the bad spirits receive only this generic name, no matter in which time (tempo) they have lived. They have roles in symmetrical opposition to each of the dead categories described so far, having as such distinct abilities. In general, they are seen as people who, in life, did evil things and, at death, continue acting the same way. They do not have any kinship with the village and should be avoided. They are the so-called Others, which does not prevent them from being present and affecting the world of the living. Just like the other dead, they materialize in specific places inside the villages—particularly the crossroads and close to bars, but also in the surroundings of cemeteries. In some cases, they are simply in the wind, searching for a living body to act through. When someone behaves in a different manner than usual, drinking in excess or provoking fights in the villages, people invariably assume that this person was captured by one of these spirits and is acting on his or her behalf. This is more recurrent nowadays, since, if we follow the Xukuru accounts, the farmers, after their expulsion from the occupied land, left behind a series of bad spirits. These spirits chose to have relations with the Xukuru as a punishment for their repossessing the land. This is a misfortune with which they must deal daily,

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protecting themselves by means of connecting to good spirits. Such is one of the battles fought in the spiritual world that is very palpable and particularly feared among the living. The dead are in time (os mortos estão no tempo), say the Xukuru. This statement has a series of meanings, with which this brief digression about the existence of the dead in this universe can be concluded. First, it is important to note that time (tempo) is a term used by the Xukuru to talk, simultaneously, of time and space. Thus, to say that the dead are in time may be a way of expressing that they are in the landscape and in all places, given their ability to be in more than one place concomitantly. They are invisible to the eyes of the living but are right there next to them, sharing space with them. On the other hand, time also reminds us that the dead, or rather, each of the beings that this terminology embraces, are always in only one time, that in which they lived and which differentiates one from another. In turn, if the living are not capable of occupying more than one space at time, when they deal with each one of the dead, they are able to occupy and experience the many times that coexist in their landscape. This should be done always with care, in face of the risk of, when living another time, not being able to return to one’s own time. That is so because to inhabit a time is also to be a specific kind of person—living or dead—whose mark is left imprinted on objects and on the landscape. The challenge resides, then, in keeping times and people in their proper places.

Conclusion Two themes stand out in this brief incursion into the world of the dead in two indigenous groups in lowland South America that, in almost everything else, are very different from each other. First, the nexus between death, time, and materiality that becomes evident in the relationship of these groups with the land or the territory. In the case of the Karitiana, the dead remain in the landscape, in the form of named, visible, and recognized cemeteries (named after those who perished and were buried there and that represent, many times, the shaman’s auxiliary spirits) or as potsherds evidencing their presence in the past. In the case of the Xukuru, distinct categories of the dead are, just like the living, connected to the earth, some of them (like Our Lady of the Mountains, the forebears, and the relatives buried in the villages’ cemeteries) being fundamental to the constitution of the very bond between the Xukuru and their territory. What seems to be the case here is that the dead cannot be taken away or completely alienated because their presence is necessary to the continuity of life on a soil that is, always, very specific: the Karitiana territory, the Xukuru territory. Second, both cases presented here, Karitiana and Xukuru, make clear that, even if for distinct reasons, there are many kinds of dead, putting in question the current equation in the region in which the dead are the Others. Some are, in fact, Others, but some are not. Therefore, our findings refuse the simple equation—repeated ad nauseam by much of the Americanist ethnology—of the dead as the Other. The world of the dead and its effects on the world of the living are exceedingly more complex—and this is clearly perceived even in the ethnography that contents itself in pointing to the dead’s alterity. Far from demeriting these works and their authors, since they present some crucial issues about the the dead in indigenous America, what we argue here is that some dimensions of the question were not

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properly described and considered. We defend, in a nutshell, a more careful reconsideration of the position and nature of the dead in this part of the planet. Taken as a whole, these two subjects bring us to a more general aspect of the study of the dead. Since the famous study by Robert Hertz (1960), the dead are considered a pathway to understanding the social world as far as they can be a faithful or inverted representation of the world of the living. So, the dead stop being or having a reality in themselves and are converted to a mere projection of certain predefinitions of what social life is, in which spiritual beings are only figurations of a preestablished order. In other words, what the dead people have to say speaks solely about the society of the living. What we have suggested in this chapter is that the Karitiana and the Xukuru, each one in its own way, points in a different direction, which problematizes exactly this inert position relegated to the dead. The dead are not interesting only because they offer one way to understand the social world of the living, but because they have an existence of their own: one that is multifaceted and composes the world of the living and interlaces with them, acting on various of their domains (see Christensen and Willerslev 2013). This leads us to conclude that the living and the dead cannot be thought of as closed compartments or as onlookers into worlds where only one category may be the protagonist. Instead, this chapter—through the analysis of singular territorialities created by material practices related to death and to different kinds of dead, which also produce distinct temporalities that are visible in (precisely because they perpetuate, not obliterate) the relations between the living and the dead—advocates, at least in the South American lowlands, for the idea of a world with the dead, and not one apart from them.

Clarissa Martins Lima is PhD candidate in social anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, and guest researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. She has been doing research among the Xukuru do Ororuba people (northeast Brazil) since 2009, working with topics such as materiality, time, and the presence of the dead. Felipe Vander Velden is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil. He holds a PhD in social anthropology (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2010) and is currently a guest researcher in the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University (Denmark). He has been developing research among the Karitiana and other native peoples in southwestern Brazilian Amazonia since 1999, and is author of Inquietas companhias: Sobre os animais de criação entre os Karitiana (Alameda Casa Editorial, 2012) as well as of several articles in anthropological journals.

Notes   1. In the past, it is said that the houses were abandoned, which could imply the abandonment of entire villages, since the Karitiana lived in collective homes (until around 1970). Today, they live in houses made of durable materials (wood or masonry) in fixed villages, so they don’t move or destroy them, but usually avoid the room of the deceased.   2. Event marked by the fact that the gourd of chicha (a drink made of manioc) left in front of the grave is found empty in the morning after the burial, drank by the deceased during the night.

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  3. The dead are “soft” like children and need to be guided by other spirits, which are their already departed kin. With a very white appearance, the dead are said to “not have blood,” just like newborns, who in the beginning of their lives still have little blood available in their bodies.   4. Even today, jaguar’s teeth are put in the mouth of the deceased, as if composing a feline jaw. It is also said that in the moment when the soul leaves the body, one should sing the “jaguar’s ballad” and at the same time keep some distance from the coffin to avoid colliding with the soul, which leaves the body abruptly.   5. These depressions are caused by the dirt deposited over the graves, which collapse over a period of time. The Karitiana bury their dead in ample graves, covered by wood logs, which in turn are covered with dirt. The dirt is not supposed to touch the bodies, since it would attract the giant armadillo (Priodontis maximus), an infamous Amazonian scavenger that the Karitiana also associate with thunder. When a death occurs, one can hear thunder in a cloudless sky, caused by an immense armadillo whose shell forms the celestial vault visible from the ground.

References Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela. 1978. Os mortos e os outros. São Paulo: Hucitec. Chaumeil, Jean-Pierre. 2007. “Bones, Flutes and the Dead: Memory and Funerary Treatment in Amazonia.” In Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger, 243–83. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Christensen, Dorthe, and Rane Willerslev, eds. 2013. Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing. Clastres, Pierre. 2000. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians. New York: Zone Books. Fausto, Carlos. 2014. Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1917) 2009. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” ed. Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Tierry Bokanowski, and Sergio Lewkowiez, 19–32. London: Karnac Books. Hertz, Robert. 1960. “A Contribution to the Study of the Collective Representation of Death.” In Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney Needham and Claudia Needham, 29–88. London: Routledge Library Editions. Kaplan, Joanna Overing. 1977. “Social Time and Social Space in Lowland South American Societies.” In Actes du XLIIe Congrès international des américanistes, vol. 2, 9–10, 387–94. Paris: Société des Américanistes. Overing, Joanna. 2006. “The Stench of Death and the Aromas of Life: The Poetics of Ways of Knowing and Sensory Process among the Piaroa of the Orinoco Basin.” Tipiti 4 (1–2): 9–32. Seeger, Anthony, Roberto DaMatta, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 1979. “A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indígenas brasileiras.” Boletim do Museu Nacional, Série Antropologia 32: 2–19. Taylor, Anne-Christine. 1993. “Remembering to Forget: Identity, Mourning and Memory among the Jivaro.” Man 28 (4): 653–78. Vilaça, Aparecida. 1992. Comendo como gente: Formas do canibalismo Wari’. Rio de Janeiro: EdUFRJ. ———. 2005. “Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 11: 445–64. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1992. From the Enemy’s Point of View, trans. Catherine Howard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

PART III

Life after Death

CHAPTER 10

Making Presence Time Work and Narratives in Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Work Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik

In my deceased grandmother’s living room, several neatly framed photos covered the wall. One of these photos was extraordinary for me to look at when I was a child: it pictured a baby lying on its side with its eyes half open. I loved looking at this photo; probably because it was a baby and I could immediately relate to it. But also because I could not figure out if the baby was awake or asleep. One day I asked my grandmother who it was, and she told me it was her baby sister Rigmor, who died at the age of eight months. A photographer came to the house and took the picture before the funeral so that the family could remember her and keep her in the family. My grandmother inherited the photo from her mother and always kept it visible in her home. —Dorthe Refslund Christensen; see Figure 10.1

Introduction During the last decade, there has been a development in mourning practices in Denmark and the rest of the Western world. These practices challenge dominant ideas of how to mourn: they instigate ways of dealing with loss in which the twentieth-century modernist letting go of the dead paradigm is replaced by a new grief paradigm, continuing bonds. In many ways this new paradigm constitutes a revitalization of traditional, romanticist death strategies, according to which relations to the deceased do not end but are instead reworked and altered in order to hold on to the deceased and move on with the dead as an integrated part of personal and social life and development (see Klass et al. 1996 Stroebe et al. 1994; Walter 1999). One of the fields where this development is perhaps most visible is in the grief work (Lindemann 1944) of bereaved parents. Expectant parents usually await their child with hope and plans and reflections on how to share their life and future with this new child. As such, the child opens the parents’ perspective to a new future, a span of time or potentiality, to certain narratives: being parents, being a family, and raising a child. When a child is stillborn or dies at a very young age, this death extinguishes all hopes for this particular child and all the good things envisioned for it by his or her family. But in addition, the world itself changes radically for the bereaved parents.

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In this chapter, we offer a new perspective for understanding the grief work that bereaved parents engage in at the Danish website Mindet.dk by understanding this work within the conceptualizing framework of time work, narrative, and ritualization (see Christensen and Sandvik 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). We analyze the way in which parents produce and maintain individual memorial pages for their dead children and engage in exchanges with other bereaved parents, and we argue that in doing so, they are engaging in ritualized time work, the aim of which is making presence and living on with the dead: making presence, of both the absent child and of the parenthood that is existentially and socially challenged when a child dies, and living on with the dead as parents and as a family. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the materialization of the child and of physical elements usually related to a living child’s world as well as the world of a dead child is a basic element in the various strategies of making presence.

Mindet.dk: A Brief Presentation Over the past ten to fifteen years, a variety of websites have appeared on the Internet that facilitate the process of mourning and commemoration for bereaved people who have lost their loved ones (children, lovers, spouses, siblings, parents, friends). These sites offer a service to closed groups of mourners on social network sites like Facebook and Instagram dedicated particularly to commemorations and peer-to-peer support (see Hård af Segerstad and Kasperowski 2015). Facebook profiles of people are kept after their death by friends and/or relatives and turned into memorials, and Facebook Rest in Peace profiles are created after a person’s (e.g., a celebrity’s) death in order to celebrate his or her contributions to the world and stand united in the social mourning process (see Klastrup 2015). Websites like MuchLoved.com are designated sites for building online memorials, and Mindet. dk belongs to this last category of websites (mindet means memory in Danish). Mindet.dk was established in 2000 by a private person as a “place for those we have known, loved, and lost.” In 2008, the website and its roughly 230 memory profiles were taken over by the Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad (The Christian daily), which—during its ownership—has added to the original format by posting articles on pastoral care, grief work, and so forth. Since 2008, we have been engaged in field studies on this website: following, documenting, and analyzing a number of personal memorial pages for dying children before, at, or shortly after death. This chapter is based on these systematic studies. In May 2016, the Danish company hoej.dk A/S bought and relaunched Mindet.dk. Since our fieldwork was conducted prior to this relaunching and many of the profiles no longer exist, and because the material is considered sensitive by the parents whose grief work we document in the following, we have chosen not to make references to each memorial. However, such documentation can be found in previous articles (see Christensen and Sandvik 2013). Mindet.dk is an online forum for all those who experience loss and grief in relation to the death of spouses, parents, grandparents, children, and friends. However, the work we are presenting here focuses solely on the grief work performed by parents of dying children before, at, or shortly after death. On Mindet.dk, the bereaved do their grief work by designing online memory spaces for their loved one(s): by displaying photographs and poetry, by narrating stories, and by expressing grief and longing. They mark red-letter days such as

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birthdays and death days and difficult times such as Christmas and family holidays by lighting online candles for their dead, and they express empathy for others by lighting the same kind of candles for other people’s loved ones. They share their personal experiences in various debate forums, and the website offers services such as a calendar displaying anniversaries and a variety of guestbook facilities attached to each memory profile. Furthermore, Mindet.dk offers a variety of articles and links to online and offline resources concerned with grief work. The individual memory profiles on Mindet.dk consist of a front page with the option of displaying pictures, texts, and small animations, and the profile can be customized by choosing among predefined background pictures or by uploading the user’s own picture/graphic material. Each profile may have various archives containing diaries or pictures and stories from the funeral, the burial site, and so on, and each profile comes with a calendar for displaying red-letter days and a guestbook for others to post greetings and comments. Beside these functionalities, the website includes a “Light-a-Candle” function, which may be used for short messages, such as a mother lighting a candle for her dead child at bedtime, or a relative or another member of the Mindet.dk community sending a greeting on a red-letter day. Mindet.dk also includes a “Forum” for debate on a variety of topics dealing with loss and grief. This forum plays an important role in constituting Mindet.dk not just as a place for individuals’ processes of grieving, but also as a place for peer-to-peer compassion and caring between people sharing similar experiences and going through the same processes of striving to recover their lives. As stated by a mother of a stillborn daughter: “Mindet.dk has helped me to find someone to talk to—someone in the same situation as me. It is good to know that I am not the only one to feel loss and sorrow, and it is good to hear how others feel and how far they have come in their process of grief and be able to help them.”

Time and Materiality: Absence and Presence Sociologist Michael G. Flaherty approaches time not as something objectively given, but as something subjectively experienced. People are not subject to time. Instead, Flaherty suggests that their being-in-the-world, among other things, involves temporal experience and the doing of time, or time work. Flaherty points out that rather than looking at time as “situationally given . . . we must see that the individual strives to control or customize how time is experienced” (2011: 132). According to Flaherty, a distinction can be made between six different analytical temporal categories: duration, frequency, succession/sequencing, (optimal) timing, allocation (distribution), and taking time (ibid.: 12). In an elaboration of Flaherty’s six temporal categories, which we have applied in previous analyses (see Christensen and Sandvik 2013, 2015), we suggest here a seventh category, making presence, which is above the first six or potentially traverses them. The practice of making presence can include each of the other six categories, but might also consist of a combination of two or more of them. Flaherty analyses “to what extent and in which ways . . . individuals purposefully construct lines of activities or social situations in order to create or inhibit diverse forms of temporal experience” (2011: 11). This is exactly what we intend to show in the case of Mindet.dk. Basically, we claim that the grief work at Mindet.dk can productively be understood as time work; and that by engaging in different kinds of time work, the bereaved parents

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Figure 10.1. Photo of Rigmor (private photo).

are eventually transforming the temporal collapse instigated by the child’s death into new possibilities of living through a renarration of past, present, and future. The parents do this, as we will demonstrate, by narrating the life and death of the lost child and by performing parenthood, both of which are organized in close relation to time. In other words, doing time is the process of renarrating life, enabling parents to reorganize their own basic narratives and reconstruct their cosmological and temporal order and adjust to a new future. One of the reasons why the memory pages of stillborn children are so interesting in relation to a time perspective is that these children had hardly any time among the living. This seems to lead to two interrelated strategies among the parents. First is the need to materially document not only the short story of their child, but also the fact that this child was actually physically present. This kind of documentation has been widely known and used in Europe and the United States, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, involving taking pictures or making drawings of dead children (and others) prior to the funeral. The photo of Rigmor on Dorthe’s grandmother’s wall bears witness to this tradition (Figure 10.1; see also Linkman 2011). This tradition became less common during most of the twentieth century, but seems to become more widespread again, not least on dedicated websites like Mindet.dk. The memorials recorded here are full of very detailed, explicit photographs and drawings of the dead children and tufts of their hair and handprints/footprints. Especially the use of very explicit photographs have been debated and contested, not only by outsiders, but also by other bereaved parents of dead children inside online grief communities, objecting to the pain that such explicit photographs causes and thus in a sense returning to the

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letting go paradigm: “We do not want to be reminded!” (Christensen et al. 2017). Anders Gustavsson points out that such “photographs may be thought shocking by outsiders, but they have undoubted therapeutic function for the parents” (Gustasson 2011: 156–57). The second of these two interrelated strategies that we observe on Mindet.dk involves parents giving (mediated) physicality to their child by representing it visually, thereby giving the child a digital form and making it possible to maintain an intimate relationship. This kind of physical representation is well-known in anthropology, and we would argue that non-Western cultures’ animations of the dead are echoed in today’s online bereavement practices in which the establishing of digital bodies of substitution seem to build on the same animation rituals.

Narrative The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur understands narratives as major life metaphors employed by people: narratives are devices for understanding both our collective history (who we are, what we stand for) and our individual, autobiographical stories. Narratives enable us to make sense of the various occurrences we encounter in our lives, to unfold our very existence and the conditions and possibilities we live under. As such, we understand our lives by transforming them into narrative entities structured by well-known elements, such as beginnings and ends, organizing whatever we encounter into chains of events, or plots: “A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativity” (Ricoeur 1980: 171, emphasis in original). The very logic of the plot is to produce meaning. As we will demonstrate, the logics of recollecting and repeating events are at play at Mindet.dk to an extensive degree. The cyclic actions performed when it comes to marking red-letter days such as birthdays and death days, or the almost automated lighting of candles at bedtime, demonstrate the need for creating narrative structures that ensure that the mourners can develop and keep alive memories and relations to the dead child, thereby keeping them present. So the stretching of time is not something that takes place between a beginning and an end; it is a stretching of time to ensure duration (Flaherty 2011), to make the moment last, as becomes evident in this inscription from a child’s grave: “You gave us a day which lasts forever” (see Christensen and Sandvik 2014). We understand our lives through the use of narratives, and this operation also connects to our temporality, our memories, presence, and expectations, and thus to the basic human condition of being tied to/part of a plural unity of past, present, and future. According to Ricoeur, time does not just pass by; it is something that we make, and is explicitly evident in expressions such as “having time to,” “taking time to,” “wasting time,” and so on (1980: 173). The concept “now,” for instance, does not necessarily imply chronological or linear thinking, claiming that the present is intrinsically different from the past, but might instead be understood with Heidegger and his idea that “saying now . . . is the discursive articulation of a making-present” (Heidegger 1962: 469; quoted in Ricoeur 1980: 173). This performative time-making may be used to describe a key component in the time work at play at Mindet.dk, namely, that life, or the present, is reestablished as a meaningmaking entity by reworking and retelling the past. This is done in order to reinvent the future, thus transforming it into something other than a paralyzing factor, and

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by applying the subjunctive aspects of ritualization, inscribing the loss and memories of the child and its potential future as a bearable part of the life to be.

Ritual Adam Seligman and colleagues argue that what ritualizations basically do is create a subjunctive, an “as if’” or “could-be” universe (2008: 7ff.), and this shared subjunctiveness is not restricted to the religious realm but is rather a fundamental way of negotiating our very existence in the world. In continuation of these ideas, we regard ritualization as a performative mode that can both point to certain aspects of life and create modifications, differentiations, and demarcations in the sociocultural world, and at the same time can negotiate the very premises of the social while performing itself within an experimenting and metareflexive framework. So even though ritualization might be about meaning, it is not about expressing or acting out an already fixated meaning—instead, it depends on the experimentation with meaning itself and the idea of the possibility of there being any meaning after the event of a child’s death. This, furthermore, points to ritual as a social or relational practice. Ritualizations might be performed individually, but they deal with the world and with being-in-the-world as one human being among others. In ritual, humans reach out in both abstract and concrete form. This is crucial at Mindet.dk, where the experiments with signifying structures and the social roles of the parents (how to move on, how to face friends and family, how to have fun with colleagues at work, how to be a parent to a dead child) are constantly mirroring other parents. Anthropologist Catherine Bell has defined ritualization as “the simple imperative to do something in such a way that the doing itself gives the acts a special or privileged status” (1997: 168). Ritual points to itself in a way that lifts it above other sociocultural practices. Ritual is not only doing something at random, but also doing something that is believed to be important or crucial in a staged way. The ritualizations performed by bereaved parents at Mindet.dk are dependent on demarcations of space and time, that is, the making of a designated space and time for performing grief that also segregates it from other aspects of social life (“In here I can spend time with my ‘angel,’ outside I have to play the role of employee, for instance”). In fact, one might argue that the demarcations that segregate the practices at Mindet.dk from everyday life at the beginning of life after the death of the child are indeed a precondition for moving on. According to Seligman and colleagues, it is precisely the difference between life and ritual that makes ritual strong and desirable as a performative mode (2008: 29–30). Mindet.dk is perceived as a place by its users, and is characterized by having marked entrances or individual links leading to segregated “locations” (the individual memory profiles) separated from the rest of the site (and the web). These designated places include a marked difference between an inside and an outside defined by personalized design such as background texture, imagery, colors, and use of text, pictures, drawings, and so on. It does not take a log-in to visit memories and light candles, but a log-in and payment are demanded for building and maintaining individual memorials. By logging into Mindet.dk, individuals step into the designated space-time in which they can “legitimately” spend time being preoccupied with their loss and their reflective process of mourning. In this sense, Mindet.dk serves as an intensification device, a time-place for becoming immersed and focused.

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The Death of a Child as a Collapse of Time The grief work performed at Mindet.dk is complex and diverse. We suggest, as our point of departure, that the death of very young children distorts time utterly. The future envisioned by the parents disappears while the present is folded into the past, leaving the parents in some kind of nontime or temporal void. To understand what this means, let us describe the situation of the bereaved parents with a focus on temporal aspects. Due to the death of the child, the situation facing the parents has changed from being parents to be to not being parents to be. Their main narrative in preparing for parenthood to be has been broken into pieces, and this causes a narrative collapse that may best be characterized, we suggest, as a situation where the direction of time is frozen somewhere between the present (death of the child) and the future (family life envisioned), thereby rendering the immediate past (preparations for child) meaningless. As parents-to-be the parents created a common history of themselves wanting a child and preparing themselves for having one (past), while the future means actual parenthood, the wonderful new time to come when the couple become a family of three (or more). The immediate past was a preparation stage at which the parents-to-be bought the stroller, changing table, baby clothes, and toys, decorated the nursery, and so on, in order to prepare for the child’s arrival and the future. The birth of the child will justify all the material and narrative expectations and preparations. What happens when the child dies—whether as a stillborn child or very early in life—is that this awaited future disappears. It appeared in the parents’ narratives, but has now been rendered meaningless. All the actions indicating that the child is the only natural succession of all the parents’ efforts are violently cut off, rendering the preparations—however successful—pointless. Therefore, not only does the child disappear, but with its death the meaning and signifying structures of life and the future also disappear. A child represents a huge amount of potentiality, of potential reality. When the child dies, potentiality itself vanishes, and nothing can be fulfilled according to the existing narratives. All talk of the possibilities of a meaningful life is rendered impossible for the moment. It is, of course, important to note here that it is not the future as such or in itself that disappears, but the future in this version, contextualized and qualified through the production of these particular narratives. The future does not disappear, but it loses the meaning ascribed to it by the parents: not only have they lost the child, they have also lost the roles and functions of being parents. They have been transformed from being parents-to-be to being parents who did not come into being after all. Following from this, we argue that the aim of grief work on Mindet.dk, for instance, is (1) to produce strategies for establishing and documenting the child as a being with a material body and surrounded by a social world (parents, family, etc.) and establishing and maintaining its presence through documentation; and (2) to perform parenthood over the child, thereby making yourself present in the social world as parents. Parenting this baby in remediated ways becomes crucial in the ways parents live on both without and with their child and perform parenthood in a number of ways (Christensen and Sandvik 2014, 2016). The parents transform themselves from not being parents (circumstance following the child’s death) to being parents, although to a dead child.

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Three Modes of Grief We have observed three different modes of grief work that can be identified at Mindet.dk, and we use these modes as focal points in the following to make our analytical points. In one sense, the first two modes are chronological, in that the first is indeed prior to the second. However, these first two modes are also interwoven, and the third is mutually inclusive with the first two. We use the word mode instead of phase in order to distance ourselves from the—within psychology, palliative care, and so forth—still dominant stage-based model of grief (see Walter 1999). A stage model of grief was originally introduced by Erich Lindemann (1944), and was displayed in his three-stage model for grief management: (1) emancipation from the bondage to the deceased; (2) readjustment to the environment in which the deceased is missing; and (3) the formation of new relationships. This model has inspired influential works on grief such as those of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1969). Our point is that while phases succeed and replace each other over time, modes are recurring and often blend into each other. The three modes are: 1. Making presence: establishing the child’s earthliness, belonging, and materiality/basic narratives 2. Keeping presence: continuously producing narratives of belonging 3. Performing parenthood: integrating the child into everyday life Most of the memory profiles for stillborn and dead children are established within a few days after death. While the parents, at this point, seem to be almost overwhelmed with grief, two other basic characteristics are discernible: first, life as the parents expected it to be has been turned upside down; and second, the parents are preoccupied with trying to understand what happened and how things went so wrong. In the first mode, establishing a memory profile at Mindet.dk, these basics are dominant, and chronologically speaking they often seem to be the first action taken after the creation of the profile. The parents have a narrative ready while expecting the child. As pointed out above, this narrative consists of expectations, ideas, and matrices of happy family life. With the unexpected death of the child, this narrative must be replaced. This does not happen at once. But it starts immediately after death and changes over time, although making and keeping presence is the underlying imperative. Eventually events will be turned into a narrative plot structure (see Ricoeur 1980). However, it seems as if one of the first activities of many parents at Mindet.dk is to establish a provisional, retrospective, and coherent narrative, the aim of which is to encapsulate the traumatizing and paralyzing narrative (the death of the child) by (re-)creating its explicit and brutal ending. This is often done by producing very detailed accounts (containing pictures and detailed descriptions of the moment of death) that in terms of time work seem to be attempts to stretch time and may be seen as a first step in the process of making presence. Second, and most importantly, the narratives at Mindet.dk, both the long ones in the first mode and the shorter ones accompanying the lit candles, are not simply reformulations of the past in the form of imaginary narratives. Rather, they are small narratives that turn prototypical, everyday life experiences into memory-like narratives. The provisional narrative is produced in a variety of ways and often in combination, as a textual presentation accounting for the different parts of the events

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leading up to the death of the child. These narratives can be very extensive, including detailed accounts of the hour-to-hour development and unfolding of events, detailed descriptions of the child’s diagnosis and medical conditions and events during the birth, sometimes even presented as if narrated by the dead child itself. While some are critical about whether the health care staff handled the events as well as they could, others are calmer in their narration of the events, almost as if the right plot will reveal a proper reason “why”: an understandable, if not bearable version of the events leading to death, or something that will, as a starting point, move the parents from standing in the middle of events to having moved past them, chronologically speaking. The parents have been told by others that their child has died, and now they are creating a structural framing within which they can say it themselves: “This is my baby, and my baby is dead.” For instance, in a memorial commemorating their triplets (three boys), the parents wrote a thorough narrative of the troublesome fertility treatment, the pregnancy, and giving birth, with events being organized by narrating, sequencing, and stretching time in relation to the conception, pregnancy, and birth—and in relation to the death. The three sons are also documented by photos and drawings both alone lying in a bed and together with the parents. Some texts consist of poetry, written by the parents or a relative or friend, while others are the lyrics of songs (for example, various lullabies, songs that the mother has sung for the child during pregnancy, popular songs that are thematically relevant in some sense, like Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” or Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”). Whereas the extensive narratives are accounts of events, these poetic pieces seem more like attempts to capture a feeling, a sense of something precious. There are examples of parents who have written the text of a song they used to sing for their child during pregnancy on the memory page; others picked a line from a song and had it carved on the gravestone and then document it on the website through photographs of the grave. No matter what the form and structure might be, what seems important in terms of doing time is the way these narratives focus on the sequencing of events and on the timing of death and the related events. Part of this process is about coming to terms with the loss of the child and producing some kind of provisional closure; but at the same time there is also a strong sense of making the child present by documenting the child and giving it some kind of material presence, however short a life it had: photos and drawings of the children and tufts of their hair and footprints/handprints are very common. As long as the narrative moves on, the child is within reach, or (for children who are not stillborn but who live for a certain period of time) the narrative might bear witness to people (relatives, health care staff, and others) who have been influenced by the strong will or attitude of the child concerned. This can be exemplified by the memory profile of a child who died at the age of three after fighting a terminal disease. This particular memory profile harbors the narrative of a child with the quality of living and enjoying life despite terminal illness and suffering. It provides detailed descriptions of the course of events from birth to death, including failed heart operations and numerous hospitalizations. The main focus is on the child’s strength and love for life even when he is encapsulated in life-supporting technologies. As the mother concludes the story: “A small yet fantastic human with a great personality has left us, Heaven has gained a new star, we have lost a superman.” Besides the textual performances at Mindet.dk, the site also features photographs or drawings of the dead child, his or her grave (always referred to as the

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child’s garden), and more material documentation like tufts of hair, handprints, and footprints. It is very important to note that these material representations of the child are not only tragic and sad. The parents are also full of pride and love, even joy, that this beautiful baby was bestowed upon them. Like all new parents, the parents at Mindet.dk need to share the joy over their newborn and receive compliments—and they do receive plenty of compliments from other parents, who, for instance, in the guestbook or when lighting a candle, will write: “How lovely your princess is with her dark hair” or other appreciative statements. In addition to establishing the child as a real person that was actually here for a while, however briefly, the existence of Mindet.dk and the narrative and performative actions of the parents seem to have yet another aim. They serve as devices for establishing the parents as parents of a wonderful baby. This aspect is supported by the repeated ritualization of lighting a candle, as analyzed in the second mode. In conclusion, what characterizes the first mode is largely what we will call creating the child’s presence. When it comes to stillborn infants and children who die very young, there are not many memories to begin with, but memory-like narratives are produced at different levels. First, there is documentation that turns a very short life (if any) into a thoroughly narrated life (or moment in time) in order to change a narrative that you cannot make sense of (the paralyzing “why”) into a narrative that you can relate to and cope with and integrate into your life—past, present, and future. In this process, the foundation for a creative agency is laid for further life and narratives of the future. The narrative is processual and relational. Second, the dead child is turned into a human agent existing in a parallel universe that can be approached in a dialogic way, and is often used as a positive force or even superhuman agent (guardian angel, confessor, etc.). Very often we observe these acts of keeping present in relation to lighting a candle and writing diary-like texts where accounts are made of various events happening in and around the family, for instance, apologetic messages that confess to the child that the parents—although they have been fighting to keep things together—are now going through a divorce. One mother wrote a text thanking the dead child, approached and named in the text as the family’s guardian angel because it has kept its protecting hands over the family, who have miraculously survived a serious car accident. Whereas the first mode described above follows a relatively short time span after the death of the child, the second mode, keeping presence, has no ending. After the first big step into Mindet.dk, the repeated ritualizations are initiated. These seem to aim at hanging onto the child—not as a person who was here briefly and left the parents devastated, but rather as a person who is in fact still here and can be kept present in close connection to this life through the performance of certain rituals, such as the lighting of candles, and at the same time, ritualizations in which the mother actively negotiates her being the mother of somebody. In addition to lighting candles, some parents keep the child present more systematically, for instance, through a certain subpage on the memorial termed “the passing of the year,” where one mother writes updates for the child on the family’s activities (summer holidays, birthdays, Christmases with lots of candy, and narratives about how wonderful it would have been for the child to be there and for the mother to share this with the child, had it lived). At Shrovetide, this mother wrote: Spring came—or at least, that’s what the calendar says. Spring starts with Shrovetide. I would have loved to dress you up. Maybe you would be a princess or a small teddy girl. We should have been to the riding ground and seen all the children

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and horses dressed out. To mark Shrovetide, I have put bright yellow flowers on your grave and made this page. When spring has passed and a new season starts, this page will change. Everything we would have done together and everything you should have experienced through your childhood, I will give you symbolically. Know that you are my beloved child that will always have the lead in my heart. You will always be part of me and be with me in my everyday life. Your small feet have forever left a trace in my heart.

The French philosopher Claude Romano (2009) has some very strong reflections on death and bereavement. He makes the crucial point that in bereavement, where the cataclysm of death is felt by a human being, it is not because we have lost the other (and to Romano we are only humans insofar as we are ourselves to “another”); rather, it is because when the other dies we are no longer needed by him or her, and in this process we die not only for the deceased but also for ourselves (ibid.: 115). So losing a child is losing the constitutive role as a parent, and thus the parents of the existing narrative die. Performing the rituals at Mindet.dk, we argue, is to a great extent about reclaiming yourself as a parent.1 When a mother at Mindet.dk refers to herself as, for example, “Camilla, mother of Lucas,” this is more than anything else about claiming the right to be a mother even though your child has died. The sensed collapsing of her role as the mother of Lucas, because Lucas died, leads to a repeated narrative (see Ricoeur 1980), with Camilla repeatedly performing her motherhood by claiming the right to motherhood and performing herself as a (good) mother, for instance, by “tucking in” her child at nighttime by lighting a candle at Mindet. dk to tell the child “goodnight.” This is one way of meeting the challenge of the empty future, performing and trying out in a ritualized fashion how to create new narratives and how to inhabit them, and most importantly, perhaps, how to grow into being a parent even though your baby is dead. There seem to be two dominant and interrelated strategies for performing good motherhood at Mindet.dk: through the lighting of candles you both demonstrate to other mourners that you care about your child, and “reassure” your child repeatedly that she or he will never be forgotten, as you engage in the narrative process of inventing new memory fragments, as documented in the mother’s writing on Shrovetide above. This is particularly strong in the case of stillborn children. Instead of remembering things that have happened as the time has passed and the child has grown older, things that could have happened in the lifetime of a stillborn child are narrated in little episodes, for instance: “Today we went fishing. Couldn’t help thinking that a boy like you would have loved that.” These repeated practices—narrative stretching time—reflect both duration and frequency in the concept of time work (see Flaherty 2011), because the more frequently they are performed, the more the child is kept present. At the beginning of the mourning period in particular, most candles are lit at night as a ritual telling the child goodnight and tucking her or him into bed. However, as with many other rituals, this ritual must also be repeated because the order established through the lighting of candles is not permanent. The parents concerned start suffering and missing the child almost immediately, calling for new rituals to be performed (see Seligman et al. 2008: 30). However, there is some progression in these rituals; and there are some structures that seem inevitable if the parents are to move on with their lives. While many texts accompanying the lighting of candles are very intimate, very intense,

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and apparently very authentic at first, we find it to be a tendency that a certain routinization occurs over time. Some parents begin posting their goodnight greeting with the same text night after night, and this “mantralization” (Christensen and Sandvik 2013: 114) stresses that in this frequently repeated ritualization there is no semantic meaning in the ritual—it is performing the action itself that carries significance. At the same time, we find in this mode some postings that are more objective, such as, “It is your father’s birthday today—we had grandma over for coffee,” with the child being turned into some kind of online friend or even a kind of confessor or human diary. Even though there is still a lot of pain under the surface when candles are lit on red-letter days or at Christmas, a certain calmness becomes dominant. This might suggest that the practices at Mindet.dk largely become part of everyday life and are integrated into all kinds of mundane practices where the child’s presence is cherished (Christensen and Sandvik 2016). We can see that some of the parents seem very aware of how important these ways of keeping the child alive are, not only at Mindet.dk but also outside the site. One mother refers, in the forum, to herself having made a Christmas ornament (a glass bulb with the child’s name and date of birth) to be hung on the tree symbolizing the dead child so that she can be part of the family Christmas in a low-key but nevertheless central way, with the family singing to the child around the tree. To sum up: in the first mode of ritualizations at Mindet.dk, the parents’ time work consists of making the child present though stretching time, imparting duration to the narrative of the child’s short life, sorting out the succession of events regarding the child’s life and death process, and thereby negotiating “what happened” and, not least, appropriating death and materializing it by being the ones to say: our baby died but it is present. In the second mode, the child is kept present through frequently repeated ritualizations of lighting a candle or other actions. This stresses how Mindet.dk leaves a space for performing negotiations of new narratives and life practices, while still trying to find one’s feet in the world and, not least, negotiating the future position of the child and the role of being a parent. The third mode, being a parent, is dominant in both modes one and two as a way of keeping intimate relations to the dead child and performing (re)mediated parental practices. Eventually the child becomes increasingly integrated into the everyday life of the parents and family, and is therefore present although absent.

Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship The reason for opening this chapter with the personal story of the dead baby Rigmor hanging on the wall in Dorthe Refslund Christensen’s grandmother’s home is that this photo, in various ways, puts the themes and findings of our work on Mindet.dk in interesting perspective. It points to the fact that the traditions around making a dead child present are not something resulting from the use of social media and personal websites. Instead, these new practices—analyzed in this chapter using Mindet.dk—constitute a remediation of previous cultural practices that are in themselves, as we have shown, still a very common way of materially documenting a dead child through the display of photos, drawings, and so forth. It is true that the medium used for this purpose has changed, but the desire and need to make present what is so painfully absent is the same. However, at the same

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time, when it comes to keeping the dead child present, traditions have developed radically: in 1910, when Rigmor was born and died, dead children were often replaced (not only in Denmark and Scandinavia but throughout Western Europe) by new children with the same name. Dorthe’s grandmother was the second Rigmor born in 1912. This suggests that the broken life span of the dead child was replaced by the life of a substitute child. Most often dead children (unless they were heirs of kingdoms, dynasties, etc.) were not even buried; and even if they were, this was done discreetly, without a grave or stone of their own. This means that even though dead Rigmor was kept present by being hung on the wall, she was substantially replaced by her successor. The idea was basically to suppress the memory and grief by creating a material replacement. In the practices we find at Mindet. dk and on other memorial sites, as on children’s graves and in a large number of private practices of bereaved parents, we find no traces of the idea of substitution by later siblings of the deceased. The name of the dead child is not used for children born subsequently, and the dead child is integrated in the family as a separate individual (see Christensen and Sandvik 2016). The parents we have studied online and offline, when mentioning their children, include their dead child as an integrated part of the family and, as we have shown with Mindet.dk, develop parental practices that make sense for them in order to keep their lost child in their ongoing lives. As the former slogan of Mindet.dk goes: “Death ends a life, not a relationship.” Even so, despite the existence of new ways of expressing and sharing death, new practices, and changing paradigms, losing a child and keeping the dead child alive through various practices in everyday life is still in our Western societies perhaps the most taboo social situation one can face (see Christensen et al. 2017). Despite the fact that the continuing bonds paradigm and the notion of living on with the dead rather than living on without the dead are increasingly spreading in our society and are communicated in mundane ways through newspaper articles, TV documentaries, and a multitude of social media sites, our research material contains numerous stories of parents expressing the silence and discomfort or, in some cases, alienation they are met with even from close friends and relatives when talking about their dead child and the way they care and keep the child present in their continued lives.

Dorthe Refslund Christensen holds an MA in the history of religions and Arabic language and culture and a PhD from Aarhus University. She is an associate professor in the Department of Scandinavian Studies and Experience Economy, Aarhus University. Her research focus is, among other topics, death and bereavement, especially in relation to bereaved parents’ mourning practices online (websites, dedicated memorial sites, social media, etc.) and offline (grave, burial, and everyday practices in cemeteries as well as practices in peer-to-peer groups, in the family, etc.); social media communication around the death of TV and other celebrities, with a particular focus on which kinds of communications and sharing of intimacies are stimulated by the death of celebrities; and transformative ritualized practices related to the body, health, and self-improvement. Kjetil Sandvik holds an MA in dramaturgy and aesthetics and culture and a PhD from Aarhus University. He is an associate professor in the Department for Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on strategic cross-media communication, new media, and storytelling related to

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organization and network communication, political and public communication, marketing, journalism, science, and cultural communication, as well as the impact of social, mobile, and networked media on our lives and experiences of the world, and the role of such media in relation to death and dying and particularly concerning grief processes among bereaved parents.

Note 1. In our work, we refer to mothers rather than parents in analyzing parental grief work because in all the profile work, candle lightings, and so forth we have observed over the years, we have noticed only one father being an active and explicit part of the actual grief work at Mindet.dk. He established his own grief space on the memorial, “Dad’s corner,” in which he writes to his dead boys and displays photos of the memorial tattoo of three stars he bears—three stars that were also carved on the gravestone. Gustavsson refers to bereaved mothers as “broken mums” (2011: 144), that is, mothers whose identity as a parent has been complicated by the death of their children and whose loss and grief seem difficult to articulate. Tony Walter confirms that in all cultures women have the role of those who mourn on behalf of others (1999: 119).

References Bell, Catherine. 1997. Ritual Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Christensen, Dorthe Refslund, and Kjetil Sandvik. 2013. “Sharing Death: Conceptions of Time at a Danish Online Memorial Site.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 99–118. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. ———. 2014. “Death Ends a Life Not a Relationship: Objects as Media on Children’s Graves.” In Mediating an Remediating Death, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik, 251–72. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. ———. 2015. “Death Ends a Life Not a Relationship: Timework and Ritualizations on Mindet. dk” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21 (1–2): 57–71. ———. 2016. “Grief and Everyday Life: Bereaved Parents’ Negotiations of Presence across Media.” In Media and the Mundane: Communication across Media in Everyday Life, ed. Kjetil Sandvik, Anne Mette Thorhauge, and Bjarki Valtysson, 105–18. Gothenburg: Nordicom. Christensen, Dorthe Refslund, Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Dick Kasperowski, and Kjetil Sandvik. 2017. “Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Communities: De-tabooing Practices or RelationBuilding Grief-Ghettos?” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 6 (1): 58–72. Flaherty, Michael G. 2011. The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Gustavsson, Anders. 2011. Cultural Studies on Death and Dying in Scandinavia. Oslo: Novus Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. New York: Harper & Row. Hård af Segerstad, Ylva, and Dick Kasperowski. 2015. “A Community for Grieving: Affordances of Social Media for Support of Bereaved Parents.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21 (1–2): 25–41. Klass, Dennis, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven L. Nickman. 1996. Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief. Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis. Klastrup, Lisbeth 2015. “I Didn’t Know Her, But . . .”: Parasocial Mourning of Mediated Deaths on Facebook RIP Pages.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 21 (1–2): 146–64. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. 1969. On Death and Dying. London: Routledge. Lindemann, Erich. 1944. “Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief.” American Journal of Psychiatry 101: 141–48. Linkman, Audrey. 2011. Photography and Death (Exposures). London: Reaktion Books.

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Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 71: 169–90. Romano, Claude. 2009. Event and World. New York: Fordham University Press. Seligman, Adam B., Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennet Simon. 2008. Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. New York: Oxford University Press. Stroebe, Margaret, William Stroebe, and Robert O. Hansson, eds. 1994. Handbook of Bereavement: Theory, Research, and Intervention. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walter, Tony. 1999. On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

CHAPTER 11

The Multiple Identities of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby The Case of the Sámi Skulls Susan Matland

Introduction What happens to a person’s social identity when they die? How do their histories and the circumstances of their death influence our interpretation of them as persons, their worth? Additionally, what types of relationships develop between the corpse, the mourners, and the social identities of the dead through time and place? Archaeologist Chris Fowler defines personhood as “the condition or state of being a person, as it is understood in any specific context. Persons are constituted, de-constituted, maintained, as well as altered, in social practices through life and after death” (2004: 7). When one addresses the ideology of personhood, one generally associates it as being connected to a living being. Upon death, other aspects of personhood can develop; these may be associated with the body and be understood in new contexts. Birth and death represent significant changes, causing, as well as enabling, these issues of personhood and bodies to become much clearer, and perhaps problematic. Sociologist Robert Hertz is attentive to the change and redefinition of relationship(s) between the deceased’s personhood (soul), the corpse, and the living during mortuary events. He proposes that it is through mortuary events that the social being of the deceased acquires another status, allowing them to move into the realm of the dead (1960: 58, 77), and at the same time these events influence the deceased’s affiliation within a given group or society (Metcalf and Huntington 1991; Robben 2004). It is the connection that previously existed between the living, and now the dead, that enables the social identities of the deceased to continue “as a site for meaningful relationships between the living and the dead” (Hallam et al. 1999: 126). This relationship can be seen as a gradual social death where the transformation of the deceased’s personhood (the social person) into an afterlife and the realm of the dead occurs over time (Hertz 1960: 81). This redefining or continuation of the deceased’s personhood can be interpreted as an attempt to maintain a bond that fits into our newly readjusted concept of them as dead. Because of this we can say that the deceased’s “personhood is contextual and shifting” (Fowler 2004: 8). In response to this, human beings have developed a variety of religious, as well as social, frameworks in which one’s relationships with the dead are addressed and realigned, for example, through funeral rituals. However, what happens to a person’s personhood when their physi-

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cal remains become museum objects? Here there occurs a transformation where a person’s personhood becomes blurred through an indexation of material culture. These are remains that have been removed from one social context and placed within another, often alienated, social context. At the same time they have often been denied the mortuary rituals that society expects, and frequently requires, in redefining their relationship to the dead. Thus there transpires a change in the expected flow of events and time. In this transition from a living being, to a corpse, to a museum object, a person’s personhood can change radically. In this chapter I will focus upon Hertz’s three relationships—between the corpse and the multiple identities of the dead, between the personhood and the living, as well as between the living and the corpse—in order to examine the numerous identities that Aslak Jacobsen Hætta and Mons Aslaksen Somby, of the Sámi indigenous people of Norway, have had since their execution by decapitation on 14 October 1854: from family members, to rebellion leaders, to museum objects, and to family members again. I will give a brief history of how these two persons became some of the most well-known historical figures and repatriated cases in Norway’s recent history, and also how the perceptions and constructions of their identities have changed over time. At the same time, I will address how they transgressed the line between being curated objects and being dead. Hætta’s and Somby’s notoriety is connected to their involvement in the Kautokeino Rebellion of 1852, in which they were instigators of the rebellion that resulted in the killing of the local sheriff and merchant. The rebellion was suppressed by local Sámis, and those who were involved were arrested. In the aftermath a lengthy trial followed, and Hætta and Somby were sentenced to death for their role in the rebellion; they were executed in 1854. Following their execution, their decapitated heads were sent to the Department of Anatomy (Anatomical Institute) at the University of Christiana (Oslo).1 After a number of failed requests from the families for repatriation of Hætta’s and Somby’s skulls, in 1997 the University of Oslo agreed to repatriate their skulls for burial. A ceremony and burial, in which the skulls were symbolically reunited with their bodies, was held on 21 November 1997 in Kåfjord.

Museums and Anatomical Institutes Traditionally museums, through their collection of material cultures, act as a framework in interpreting and presenting indexes of history. For centuries museums2 have become the main custodians of human remains, which have been collected mainly in the name of science and humanity. A number of museums, ethnographical collections, and physical anthropological collections were built upon the ideological framework that it was important to collect items from cultures and groups of people who then were thought to be dying out (Bolton 2003: 43; Haas 1996: 7; Peers and Brown 2003: 1). In this manner, these cultures would be preserved. Others were built with the primary goal of proving differentiation, together with racial origins of ethnic groups, in an attempt to justify, or prove, cultural and biological evolution (Walker 2000: 7). Additionally, some anatomical collections were formed for medical and anatomical training. It has been estimated that there are as many as 600,000 individuals in collections worldwide (Quigley 2001: 3), while in the United States alone it has been determined that as many as 300,000 to 2.5 million human remains of Native American descent are housed in museums and

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other collections (Simpson 1996: 176). These remains, primarily skeletal, have been accumulated in a variety of manners. Some were attained through archaeological excavations; others were received as gifts or bought, while a number were acquired as unclaimed bodies, bodies of executed criminals, or through the plundering of graves. Additionally, museums, as well as other holders of such collections, saw human remains as a commodity and have exchanged, sold, or bought rare and unusual skeletons, as well as bits of skeletons, in an attempt to build up a comparative anatomical collection. Norway was no exception to this, and by the mid-1850s researchers in Norway were actively engaged in the ideology of race and its origins (Evjen 1997: 9; Schanche 2002: 103), with the Sámi people taking center stage in this ideology. The Sámi are the indigenous people of northern Europe, inhabiting Sápmi, which today encompasses parts of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia. It was primarily the theory that the Sámi people were the remaining race of a northwest European Stone Age culture, the original population of Scandinavia, which created a demand for skeletal material, and then mainly skulls, from Sámi graves (Schanche 2002: 103). Therefore, in an attempt to build up a comparative collection for this type of research, graves throughout northern Norway were opened and skeletal material was collected, regardless of the objections of families or others (Evjen 1997: 8; Schanche 2002: 102). In addition to material gathered from graves, skeletal material from criminals was represented in the earlier collections, as they were regarded as having lesser rights than other individuals in society and were not allowed to be buried in a churchyard until the passing of the Norwegian Criminal Code of 1842 (Evjen 1997: 8). Grave plundering in the name of science continued in Norway until the late 1930s. Kristian Emil Schreiner, professor of anatomy and department head of the Department of Anatomy (Anatomical Institute) at the University of Christiana, had a keen interest in historical anthropology and the origins of the Sámi people. From 1914 to 1939 he, as well as his students, systematically collected skeletal material from Sámi graves (Schanche 2002: 100). Schreiner could justify this plundering with the Churchyard Act of 1897, which allowed the excavation of human remains under the condition that they were to be reburied after necessary investigations had been carried out, something that rarely happened. In addition, there was a prevalent ideology that, in general, the Sámi people of the north were inferior to the ethnic Norwegians, and on the whole were treated with little respect (Andresen 2007: 135; Levy 2006: 138). Therefore, any resistance to the plundering would most likely have been disregarded. As Audhild Schanche (2002: 101) rightly points out, Schreiner would in all probability not have been able to plunder graves in southern Norway as he did in the north, because here the local population was proportionally Norwegian, and therefore their ability to protest was greater. By the 1930s, the Anatomical Institute’s collections comprised approximately 2,500 skulls: 2,000 of Nordic descent and 500 from the Sámi population (Evjen 1997: 9). The latter was the largest in the world at the time (ibid.). This collection would later be known as the Schreiner Collection.

Norway’s Current Guidelines on Skeletal Material At present Norway lacks legislation that primarily addresses the handling of human remains. Nevertheless, the Cultural Heritage Act of 1978 protects all objects

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that are pre-Reformation (prior to 1537), including burials, human remains, and also Sámi finds that are older than one hundred years (Cultural Heritage Act of 9 June 1978, no. 50). The majority of human remains from archaeological excavations are covered by this act. The five university museums, located in Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger, Tromsø, and Trondheim, are responsible for the storage and management of human remains uncovered through archaeological excavations. A portion of these remains are housed at the Anatomical Institute alongside the Schreiner Collection. In 2004, there were approximately 7,300 registered human remains at the Anatomical Institute, of which about 15 percent were of Sàmi origin (Ekern 2004). Post-Reformation burials are protected by the Burial Act of 1996 (Kulturdepartementet 1996). This act states that all graves can be reused if no restrictions have been defined after twenty years. For example, a family may wish to retain a family plot or grave beyond the allocated twenty years. In addition, abandoned churchyards can be reused after forty years, but only after any human remains have been reburied in a common grave at a functioning churchyard (ibid.).

The Story of Aslak Jacobsen Hætta and Mons Aslaksen Somby Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby are historically known through their involvement as leaders in the Kautokeino Rebellion of 1852. Before this, they were most likely much the same as other reindeer-herding Sámi of northern Norway at the time. On the evening of 8 November 1852, a group of thirty-five men and women, along with twenty-two children (under the age of thirteen), made their way to Kautokeino with the intent to burn down the primarily Sámi settlement, kill all who were not of Læstadian faith (a conservative Lutheran movement), or unwilling to convert to Læstadianism, and destroy everything that was associated with the nonbelievers and those they felt were allied with them (Zorgdrager 1997: 310). Other Sámis they encountered on their way to Kautokeino, and who refused to join their cause voluntarily, were beaten and abused (Aarseth 2000: 13; Zorgdrager 1997: 311). The outcome of the rebellion was the plundering and burning down of a merchant’s home and trading post, and the deaths of the local sheriff, Lars Johan Bucht, the merchant and liquor dealer Carl Johan Ruth, and two of the rebels, Marit Rasmusdatter Spein and Ole Aslaksen Somby. Reverend Fredrik Waldemar Hvoslef was whipped, and his family, along with Ruth’s family, was taken hostage; all were later freed by a group of Sámis from Kautokeino and the neighboring village Àvžži, who stopped the rebellion (Christensen 2012: 58; Dancus 2014: 131; Zorgdrager 1997: 327). The origin of the Kautokeino Rebellion has been widely debated. Some have said the rebellion was a result of the Læstadian Christian revival movement, that Hætta and Somby were mentally ill, or that the rebellion was a reaction to the loss of their winter reindeer pastures due to the closing of the Norwegian-Swedish border (Aarseth 2009; Andresen 2007; Dancus 2014: 131; Zorgdrader 1997). Others saw it as a response by those being oppressed by the Norwegian colonial powers, and possibly as a reaction toward a previous event regarded as unjust persecution by the local authorities. Earlier that year, twenty-two Sámis, among them Aslak Hætta, had been found guilty of disturbing a church ceremony and taking God’s word in vain (Brox 1997; Dancus 2014: 132; Zorgdrager 1997: 252). Needless to say, the rebellion most likely was the result of, among other things, a long conflict that had reached its tipping point.

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Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby were identified as the ringleaders of the rebellion and instigators of the killing of Bucht and Ruth, and along with three others (Lars Hætta, Ellen Skum, and Henrik Skum) received the death penalty (Aarseth 2009: 14; Dancus 2014: 131; Zorgdrager 1997: 387, 482). The other rebellion members received verdicts ranging from short jail sentences to lifelong penal labor, while four were acquitted, and three died before the conclusion of the trial. Bishop Daniel B. Juell requested that the death sentences be altered to lifelong penal labor. This was granted for Lars Hætta, Ellen Skum, and Henrik Skum, but not for Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby (Aarseth 2009: 14; Dancus 2014: 131; Zorgdrager 1997: 387, 482). The reasoning behind not granting Bishop Juell’s request for a pardon for Hætta and Somby is unknown. However, it has been speculated that Reverend Hvoslef was against granting them a pardon, arguing that the attacks were premeditated (Aarseth 2009; Andresen 2007: 132). Hvoslef, who had a profound influence upon the decisions of the local court as well as the Supreme Court, had a central role during the rebellion, the trial hearings, and execution. He had had a close relationship with both Bucht and Roth, and during the trial he was the prosecutor’s main witness; at the same time, he was the prison chaplain to those on trial (Zorgdrager 1997: 389). One can conclude that he was not an impartial witness. Later, he was responsible for escorting Hætta and Somby to the execution scaffold (ibid.). On 14 October 1854, Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby were executed at Elvebakken in Alta by decapitation (see Figure 11.1). Death by decapitation was reserved for murderers, war criminals, traitors, or those who committed capital crimes, and was abolished by 1905 in Norway (Vaale 2004: 24). At the time executions were primarily carried out in public as a show of power and used to retain moral order (ibid.: 14). After Hætta and Somby were executed, their bodies were buried outside the Kåfjord Church graveyard near Alta, while their heads were sent to the Anatomical Institute, where they became a part of the anatomical collection. It is unclear who decided to send their heads to Oslo, or why they were not buried in consecrated soil. Traditional burial rituals would have most likely been forgone, as bodies of criminals were treated with less bodily integrity than what would be due to others. However, one can speculate that Reverend Hvoslef had an active role in this decision. One reason for his behavior can be interpreted as a statement to the Sámi people: a show of power associated with the Norwegian assimilation policies of the time. However, due to the volatility of the situation within the Sàmi community, this action could be seen as an additional repression from the Norwegian powers, and it had the potential of inviting a greater animosity within the community. No matter how one interprets this act, it was a clear signal of Hvoslef’s personal feelings in regards to the Sámi people in general, and specifically toward Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby. Hætta’s skull would travel further than Oslo. In 1856, in order to expand the anatomical collection, his skull was traded for two Inuit skulls with pharmacist Alfred Benzon from Copenhagen, Denmark (Schanche 2002: 110; Uniforum 1997). This treatment of their bodies was not only a physical violation upon them, but Figure 11.1.  Executioner Samson Isberg’s axe used in the also a violation of their personhoods. They execution of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby in 1852. Norsk were denied the expected social rituals that Rettsmuseum. © M. Bolstad, 2016.

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would have ensured their transition from one state to another, and their skulls were treated as objects of commodity. In 1976 relatives of Aslak Hætta requested that his skull be returned for burial, only to be informed that the Anatomical Institute was in possession of Mons Somby’s skull but not Hætta’s (Schanche 2002: 110). Almost ten years later, in 1985, Mons Somby’s grandnephew, Niillas A. Somby, petitioned for the return of Mons Somby’s skull for burial. In response to the appeal, the Anatomical Institute requested legal help from the Directorate for Cultural Heritage, the Norwegian Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, and at the time the Ministry of Church and Education (now Ministry of Education and Research), without receiving an answer (Holck 2000: 43). Therefore, the University of Oslo engaged Professor Erik Røsæg, from the Faculty of Law, in order to consider the legal aspects of the petition (Aarseth 2000: 14). Røsæg concluded that Somby’s skull should be repatriated for burial, both on legal and moral grounds, citing that the original inclusion of Somby’s skull in the institute’s collection was against the Norwegian Criminal Code of 1842. Through the Criminal Code of 1842, it became law that executed persons be buried. The reasoning was to insure that these persons were buried in consecrated soil (Bull 1996: 274; Movsisian 2013: 247). The only exception to this was if the family of the deceased agreed to release the body, or parts of the body, for educational purposes, and then only for a limited time before they were to be buried (Bull 1996: 275). Therefore, the assimilation of both Somby’s and Hætta’s skulls into the Anatomical Collection in Oslo was unlawful at the time (ibid.). Reverend Hvoslef, along with the executioner and other authorities, was surely aware of this law. Røsæg further determined that since no other relative of Mons Somby had requested his skull to be repatriated for burial, Niillas A. Somby, as a direct descendent, was entitled to receive his skull for burial. However, the Anatomical Institute disagreed with this decision, stating that Niillas A. Somby was not a direct descendant of Mons Somby, since the nearest family connection was approximately two hundred years ago, and for that reason, by law, was not entitled to his skull (Bull 1996: 275; Holck 2000: 43; Sellevold 2002: 59). Additionally, the institute argued that the skull was of scientific value and therefore refused to allow it to be repatriated (Sellevold 2002: 59). Although the university had undertaken an internal investigation into the legal legitimacy of Niillas A. Somby’s request, he never received a response to his inquiries, and shortly after rumors started circulating that the skull had been stolen (Bull 1996: 276). Around 1995 it became clear that Mons Somby’s skull was still housed at the Anatomical Institute, and an informal request was once again made for its return for burial (Bull 1996: 276). As with previous requests, this was also rejected, but this time with the argument that his skull had been the property of the Anatomical Institute for over 140 years and therefore they had a legal right to it. They further argued that Somby had been a brutal murderer whom someone was trying to make into a martyr (ibid.). In 1996, the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, on behalf of the families, officially requested that both skulls be repatriated for burial. Talks that were held between the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, the University of Oslo’s administration, and the Ministry of Church and Education (now Ministry of Education and Research) led to the Anatomical Institute agreeing to repatriate Mons Somby’s skull to the Council of Sámi Heritage Management for burial (Aftenposten 1996; Schanche 2002: 110). At the same time, the university appointed a committee in order to locate Aslak Hætta’s skull (Schanche 2002: 110). Upon its repatri-

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ation temporarily to the leader of the Council of Sámi Heritage Management as a representative of the family, Mons Somby’s skull was stored at the Kautokeino Open Air Museum (Guovdageainnu gilišillju), pending the repatriation of Hætta’s skull (Aarseth 2000: 14). As mentioned earlier, Aslak Hætta’s skull had been traded for two Inuit skulls with pharmacist Alfred Benzon from Copenhagen, Denmark. The committee appointed to locate Hætta’s skull finally was able to find it in the Panum Anatomical Collection, situated at the Medical Institute at the University of Copenhagen (Schanche 2002: 110; Uniform 1997). From there it was quickly extradited to Norway. In a ceremony on 21 November 1997 Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s skulls were buried as near as possible to where the graves of their bodies were believed to be located, as there was no record as to where outside the churchyard their bodies had been buried in 1854.

Transformation from Human Remains to Museum Object The retention of human remains, regardless of the reasons, can be highly problematic and contentious. Human remains are often seen as a source of scientific knowledge, which will benefit all, and museums frequently see themselves as the most knowledgeable custodians of this material. Moreover, it is not unheard of that some museum employees, because of this, frequently regard the collections as their own personal property. This ideology is often used to justify the manner in which remains are displayed, studied, collected, and handled by museums. Most likely because of this behavior, the handling of human remains by museum professionals has repeatedly been interpreted as being carried out in a detached, disrespectful manner, resulting in human remains being redefined as objects, supposedly with no personhood. This objectification, or contextualization, of human remains within a museum is often an unconscious act, primarily due to the practices that are carried out during the acquisition of an item into a museum’s collections. In short, this process involves a number of mechanical stages that among other things often involves the labeling, cataloguing, conserving, and storing of the remains. Through each of these stages, different museum professionals play a role in the depersonalization, transformation, and redefinition of the personhood of human remains. Registrars will provide a catalog number, allowing one to follow the human remains through its life as part of the collections. A curator will fill out catalog information that is deemed relevant at the time of accession: place acquired, type, condition, and so on. A conservator will undertake the cleaning and packing of the remains for, among other things, storage. Eventually these remains can be utilized in a number of research projects or exhibitions, or remain in a box in storage, virtually forgotten for posterity, or until someone deems them interesting. Additionally, expressions such as “cultural objects,” “cultural property,” “artifacts,” “collections,” and “specimens” are often used to label human remains, and are sometimes seen as a depersonalization of the remains. In their own manner, all these phrases, professionalizing, and terminology usage affect how both museum professionals, as well as laymen, relate to human remains. Because of this, these terms can often be offensive to those who claim affiliation to the remains. The inclusion of human remains (the material body) within a museum context radically changes the relationships between the material body, the mourners, and

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the soul (Hertz 1960). The manner of acquisition, along with the treatment of human remains in the museum context, fundamentally changes the passage of the deceased’s social identities by disrupting their expected normal transition, through funerary rituals, to the realm of the dead. This disruption can be interpreted as allowing the remains to become redefined as a material object with a new identity (as index of an indigenous group/physical anthropology), without connection to their original identities. At the same time, the remains acquire additional, foreign identities defined by museum professionals. Within a modern framework, it is easy to make judgments on the social norms and morals of past generations. Still, in a discussion on the ethics of the treatment of human remains, one has to remember that what is considered respectful treatment varies from country to country, cultural group to cultural group, religious belief to religious belief, person to person, and can change over time. Lynne Goldstein and Keith Kintigh (1990: 586) define the ethics of the treatment of the dead as a cultural construction, while Tristram Besterman sees ethics as “an expression of social responsibility” (2006: 431). A number of museums have adopted the International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics, which has its own paragraph addressing the storage and handling of human remains (ICOM 2002: 19). Likewise, the respective museum professions have distinct professional codes or guidelines of ethical conduct to which they should adhere, regardless of whether the museum itself has these or not. Museum ethics are not fixed; they are changing and evolving “in response to the shifting values of the societies which they serve and to which they are accountable” (Besterman 2006: 431). Thus, through their contact with human remains, their interpretations and analyses, museum professionals, curators, registrars, conservators, and archaeologists and physical anthropologist, bring their own cultural norms, attitudes, religious affiliations, and biases to their fields of study. Does this mean that museum professionals are unaware that these objects were once living persons? Historically there is no doubt that many professionals regarded human remains as purely scientific objects, and the ethnic groups from which they originated as primitive, simple people. However, one can question the dogma that they consciously handle human remains in a disrespectful manner. I would assume that the majority of professionals who currently are responsible for the care of human remains within a museum would not see themselves as intentionally relating to the remains in what many would consider a disrespectful, unethical manner. Their rationales for how human remains are managed are based upon a need to be able to identify individuals, as well as objects, within a larger context, allowing them to be stored in a manner that is both respectful and practical. This is not to say that there are still museums that have not adequately addressed their handling of human remains. Nevertheless, in order to insure their own social integrity, as well as those of the remains, over the years there has emerged among museum professionals a greater awareness of, and concern for, the prevailing ethical debates surrounding the retention and handling of human remains, as well as repatriation of these remains. Mary Leighton (2010) found in her work with archaeologists that the usage of terminology in defining their awareness of how they relate to human remains is not as rigid as one might believe. When talking about human remains they interchangeably discuss them as objects or as persons with an identity (ibid.). Similar findings from a Norwegian museum establish that among those who work with human remains there is a prevalent awareness that the remains in the collection

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had at one time been living persons; because of this these remains are not treated as typical artifacts, but are seen as being “something between a person, a corpse, and something sacred” (Matland 2008: 40). For some people, human remains tell stories about individuals, and it is through studying this material that one begins “to know these people on a personal level, and sometimes they affect us deeply” (Baker et al. 2001: 71). This association to the body on a personal level was expressed by a museum employee in Norway: With the thought that what this person has lived, has been, it has been someone for somebody, then there starts something or another form of feelings in me which say that one treats this person in a certain way. It is not just a thing; it is something else which requires a little better treatment, requires that we think differently. (quoted in Matland 2008: 38)

This sense of connection was summed up by another employee from the same museum: “It is not a normal job, because it is not a common artefact; you can feel it in the room; that there is almost a vibration between those who work there and the artifact” (ibid.). Here the museum employees talked interchangeably about human remains as objects/artifacts and as having a presence/personhood. Because these remains affected them on a personal level, we can say that a relationship developed in which the remains were embedded with an identity, a personhood. If we follow this argument, one could maintain that the treatment of Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s skulls would have reflected the current social norms of a given period, as well as those of the individual handling them. In a Hertzian sense, the relationships between the museum professionals, along with the index of the corpses, are created by the treatment of the skulls. In this context, the skulls have been catalogued and allocated numbers, allowing the transformation of their personhoods into objects; therefore they can be redefined as not being socially alive. As a result, the personhoods of Hætta and Somby are residents in the land of the living and the dead: at once animate and inanimate.

Repatriation: The Journey Home The majority of human cultures engage in some type of ritual in connection to the treatment of their dead. These rituals are influenced by the deceased’s cultural affiliation, the mourners’ relationship to the deceased, as well as the deceased’s social position within the society (Hertz 1960; Metcalf and Huntington 1991). There is not one particular or correct way to treat the dead at different times, in different places, and in different cultures (Goldstein and Kintigh 1990: 586). Some indigenous peoples feel that they are linked with each other, the dead and the living, as well as with the past (Hanna 2003: 245; Walker 2000: 18). These beliefs often lead to the need and requirement for the living to care for the well-being of the dead, and the passing of time is viewed as insignificant to their duties. Therefore, the aspiration to obtain human remains retained in museums can be seen as a continuation of the desire to lay ancestors to rest, as well as to give and receive respect as part of their duty (Blake 2007: 368; Hubert and Fforde 2002:1). The last few decades have seen an increased demand upon museums by indigenous peoples, as well as other groups, who seek repatriation of their cultural heritage, be it human remains or artifacts. No matter how or why anatomical collections of

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indigenous peoples were created, they play an important role in forming the identities of indigenous groups along with their communities. The human remains act as a link to the past, enabling these groups to claim legitimate moral and cultural stakes in forms of ownership, as well as control over their cultural heritage. At the same time these remains become a cornerstone in the retaining and reclaiming of parts of their social identity (Bolton 2003: 46; Blake 2007: 368; Henderson 2006; Smith 2004: 408). In addition to the aims of achieving cultural identity, some have used human remains, along with their repatriation, for political reasons ranging from land claims to focusing media attention on the plight of those reclaiming the remains (Smith 2004: 408; Zimmerman 1994: 211). Others have used repatriation for their own gains or as an attempt to right previous historical wrongs (Jones and Harris 1998: 256; Sullivan et al. 2000: 239). Risten Sotti, great-granddaughter of Aslak Hætta, believes that the repatriation of Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s skulls would not have happened fifty, forty, or even thirty years ago, probably because the families still felt the stigma of their relationship to those involved in the rebellion of 1852. It is through the social processes that developed during the 1970s that there grew an awareness of indigenous peoples and their rights; among other things, Sámi youths were educating themselves outside of their traditional roles, thus enabling them to take a stand (pers. comm., 2015). Although one can argue for the rights of the Sámi community in the repatriation of Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s skulls, the Anatomical Institute’s refusal to acknowledge that the family had a legitimate claim (both morally and legally) is not unexpected. Seen from the viewpoint of the gatekeepers of this material, those who felt they were protecting the material for the good of society under the mantle of knowledge, the whole process surrounding the request for repatriation must have felt threating and foreign: a threat that could have far-reaching consequences if allowed. One must remember that it had only been six years previously, in 1990, that the federal government in the United States passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). NAGPRA required museums and institutes that were federally funded to identify human remains within their collections and inform the indigenous groups of their holdings, with the intention of repatriation. This law has had profound consequences for how human remains are viewed by professionals, indigenous peoples, and laymen throughout the world. It can be assumed that the Anatomical Institute was aware of NAGPRA and was wary of similar procedures being undertaken in Norway. This might, to some extent, explain some of the discourse from the Anatomical Institute during this period. Nevertheless, as a direct result of this repatriation, the University of Oslo, along with the Norwegian Sámi Parliament, has established a number of guidelines for the usage and management of the remaining Sámi human remains at the Anatomical Institute (Sellevold 2010: 158). These guidelines limit access to the remains; at the same time they require approval of the Sámi Parliament in order to undertake research on the same material. As a result, the Sámi’s rights to govern their own human remains are acknowledged. Hertz would argue that through repatriation for burial, human remains (here represented by Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby) once again acquire portions of their original personhood, and are given restitution into society through a mortuary act. It is through the act of reburial that new rituals, which play a role in defining new identities, often emblematic, political, and personal, are constructed.

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Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby: Social Memory, Social Identities The repatriation of Somby’s and Hætta’s skulls not only had a strong symbolic and political meaning for a group of people, but historically it allowed a sense of closure for some. The Kautokeino Rebellion has been a subject of taboo within the Sámi community in Kautokeino until recently, with some of the families feeling marginalized and shamed by the stigma of being related to known criminals. Adriana Margareta Dancus describes this taboo as being “an embodied cultural memory that could not be forgotten . . . the rebellion is a felt experience, an affective memory rather than a cognitive realization” (2014: 133). Adolf Steen (1965: 3) mentions that relatives of Mons Somby deliberated changing their last name, as it was linked to a murderer. Kirsten Berit Utsi (great-granddaughter of Aslak Hætta) in an interview with the newspaper Nordlys told how not only she and her mother, but her children, lived with hearing that they were from the “killer family” (Hansen 2008). Risten Sotti (pers. comm., 2015) acknowledged that the subject of Aslak Hætta and the Kautokeino Rebellion was taboo in the family: “There was a lid on the subject . . . no one wanted to talk about it. There was a feeling of shame.” During the process of reclaiming Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s skulls for burial, the families deliberated whether the graves should be moved from Kåfjord to Kautokeino, even though the location of the graves was unknown. However, they decided that this would be unethical, and that the symbolic meaning of the graves remaining in Kåfjord, where they were originally placed, was important. Additionally, the families felt that one should not embellish on history, and a relocation of the graves would alter their historical significance (Risten Sotti, pers. comm., 2015). Elizabeth Hallam and colleagues argue that corpses “have personal histories, and these are always emergent within longer-term historical processes” (1999: 5). Malin Masterton and colleagues (2010: 343) feel that a person’s identity is tied up in the narratives that evolve around them, having no end—regardless of whether the person is deceased or not. The changes to a person’s identity are gradual, happening over time as new narratives emerge and are linked both to the deceased’s identity at death, but also to their physical remains. This can certainly relate to the multiple identities of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby; as leaders of the Kautokeino Rebellion, there are many political as well as social aspects connected to the treatment of their bodily remains. These men were executed by decapitation because of their involvement in the rebellion, as was decreed by the law at the time. Their bodies were buried outside the churchyard fence and not in consecrated soil; this was in spite of the fact that they were Christians, and the Criminal Code of 1842 states that executed persons are to be buried in a churchyard. This act can be interpreted as a stigmatization of them as criminals, while at the same time insuring that they were socially removed from society. Through the denial of mortuary rituals, along with sending their heads to become research specimens in Oslo, an environment was created in which their personhoods were in constant fluctuation. Hertz acknowledges that death not only encompasses a person’s bodily death, but also the death of the social person through a gradual transformation in the “collective consciousness” (1960: 77). Over time, Hætta’s and Somby’s remains have had a multitude of social identities and personhoods that were defined during the various stages of their lives, deaths, and final burial. These narratives were connected to their social identities as family members, designated leaders of the Kautokeino Rebellion of 1852, criminals, anatomical specimens, political symbols of wrongs righted, and once again family members. It is through these areas

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of exchange that their social identities are understood and defined. Due to the circumstances of Hætta’s and Somby’s death, along with the stigma surrounding it, the family, as well as the community, was unable to fully banish them from the land of the living to the realm of the dead until the final rituals were carried out through the reuniting of the physical remains: the skulls with the bodies. It has been eighteen years since the repatriation of their skulls, which ended in a burial ceremony (see Figure 11.2). Has the families’ feeling of shame ended? Has the repatriation, along with the burial, allowed the Sámi community a sense of closure? For the family members, and the Sámi community in Kautokeino, whose social memory of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby has been altered drastically during this process, one can say yes. Risten Sotti felt that for the older generation there was a pressing need to lay this to rest. Additionally, she felt that the younger generation had not been as concerned with the shame label as her parents’ generation had. Now the older generation has moved on; Sotti’s mother, the last grandchild, died in 2014. For the younger generation, the feeling of peace and closure they obtained with the repatriation and burial ceremony was important (pers. comm., 2015). Were Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby embedded in the identity/personhood of martyrs, as the Anatomical Institute feared? Had they been used as a tool to right an injustice felt by the Sámi people, partly due to the Norwegian assimilation policies of the early nineteenth century? A tentative answer to this would be no. There have not been any monuments raised at their graves or in Kautokeino. The gravestones themselves are simple granite stones engraved with their birth and death dates (see Figure 11.3), and in 2015 the graves were overgrown and unkempt (Pulk and Nystad 2015). However, because of their families’ persistence in wishing to

Figure 11.2.   Aslak Hætta’s temporary grave marker. © World Heritage Rock Art Centre— Alta Museum, 1999. Photographer: Heidi M. Johansen.

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Figure 11.3.   Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s gravestones. © Alta kirkekontor, 2008. Photographer: Gunnar Tangvik.

have their remains repatriated, they brought the discussion of the retention of human remains, and also the rights of indigenous peoples to the self-management of these remains, to the awareness of policy makers. Moreover, as a direct result of this, guidelines have been put in place for the future handling of the remaining Sámi human remains located at the Anatomical Institute.

Conclusion For Hertz, funerary rituals are the manner in which society is able to acknowledge the deceased’s change in social standing and identities, while at the same time enabling a location of the deceased in the realm of the dead. However, by placing the deceased’s remains within a museum setting, an interruption in the usual continuation and transformation of their social identities occurs, changing them into “objects.” Unfortunately, the families of Aslak Hætta and Mons Somby were not able to perform the rituals that normally would have been carried out at the time of their deaths. It took 143 years before the rituals could be performed. It was through the repatriation and the symbolic reuniting of their skulls with their bodies, wherein family members were able to perform long-awaited mortuary rituals, that Aslak Hætta’s and Mons Somby’s personhoods received a new narrative that allowed for closure and a completion of their transition. During the previous 143 years, their bodies had been dishonored: decapitated, and denied a Christian burial by being buried outside the church graveyard. Their

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skulls had been viewed as commodities, handled as scientific objects, and used in a social/political battle between scientific knowledge and the rights of their families as well as the indigenous Sámi community. Interestingly, it was after their deaths that they had a greater impact upon the Sámi community in Kautokeino, and the indigenous Sámi people as a whole, than when they were alive. They have played a major role in addressing the manner in which human remains, primarily those of indigenous peoples, are managed in Norway.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to Risten Sotti for her agreeing to be interviewed, as well as Hans Hadders and Nancy Frank, who have read and commented upon drafts of this chapter.

Susan Matland holds a postgraduate degree in archaeology from the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Master of Science (MSc) in death and society from the University of Bath, England. She is currently working on the research project “Cremation Practices in Norway: Regulations, Changes, Challenges and Innovations.” Matland was previously employed as a department head at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway, and is now currently managing director for the Norwegian University Museums’ IT organization, MUSIT.

Notes   1. Now known as the Institute of Basic Medical Science/Department of Anatomy (Anatomical Institute), University of Oslo.   2. Here I will be using the broad term for “museum,” which also includes anatomical collections stored in research institutes, medical institutes, and universities.

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CHAPTER 12

Media, Ritual, and Immortality The Case of a Masculine Hero Johanna Sumiala

Human beings are resourceful and every culture has attractive ways of imagining a world in which the dead are really still alive. —Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone

“Skiing Legend Mika Myllylä Has Died,” announced Iltalehti, a Finnish tabloid newspaper, in a headline on its website on 5 July 2011. Myllylä was found dead in his apartment in Kokkola, Finland. He was forty-one. The cause of death was later found to be an accident. A few hours later, the paper updated the story under the headline “The Trooper Repents,” in which Myllylä’s skiing career was condensed into just a few lines. The article recalled the doping scandal at the 2001 World Championships in Lahti, Finland, and his subsequent breakdown, defining the arc of his life and framing his death. Endless Agony (Finnish: Loputon tuska), the Press Photo of the Year in 1997, taken by Hannes Heikura, was chosen as the accompanying photo. It shows Myllylä training in a bog in Haapajärvi in the province of Oulu, where he grew up. In this chapter, I examine the ritualization of the death of Finnish cross-country skiing hero Mika Myllylä. I give special emphasis to the aspects of time and materiality and how they are used to portray Myllylä as an immortal in the Finnish media. Glennys Howarth, a prominent figure in contemporary death studies, argues that “relationships between the living and the dead and how the dead are remembered depend upon cultural representations of mortality in each society” (2007: 19). Howarth’s idea proves useful in considering time and materiality in the case of Myllylä’s death. The relationship between the living (the public) and the dead (Myllylä) takes place in a temporal and ritualized continuum created by the media. As Rane Willerslev, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, and Lotte Meinert (2013: 2) observe, “rituals establish a temporality through actions with material objects in a set space. These social technologies help create ‘the time of the dead’ in an explicit, performed and material way.” In this chapter, I argue that as a sports hero, Myllylä was made immortal in the media over the course of time as the result of certain time work, in which people “preclude, craft and produce certain temporal experiences” (Flaherty 2011, quoted in Willerslev et al. 2013: 5). Looking back at Myllylä’s death, his immortalization had already begun in the media in the heyday of his celebrity. It gained a new layer after his doping scandal and was crystallized by his tragic death. Hence, the media’s story of his immortalization is about the changing relationship between the public and their hero, performed in a certain temporality and associated with certain material representations and their ritualized performances in the media.

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In the media accounts, a photograph and testimony were used to enhance the ritualization surrounding Myllylä’s death. By ritualization, I refer to Catherine Bell’s (1992) idea of ritual as a process rather than a single event entity. In Bell’s thinking, ritualization is a temporal practice that evolves over a period of time and involves different parties, whom she calls ritualized actors. These actors compete with each other over the possibility to define and redefine the meanings associated with a given ritualized practice. In the case of Myllylä, journalists and other content producers played a key role in ritualizing his life, and consequently his death. The role of the public was to take part in this process as readers and commentators, and thus to enforce the ritual narrative of immortalization. The case of Mika Myllylä invites the study of death as a public event in the Finland of the 2000s. It also serves as a ground to reflect upon the nature and purpose of the ritualization surrounding death in today’s media-saturated society; how this ritualization functions in contemporary Finnish media publicity; who the key actors are in the ritualization of death and what kinds of cultural effects the ritualization may have on how we understand and interpret death as a part of life and culture in society; and how individuals are made immortal in the media (cf. Hallam and Hockey 2001; Hockey 2001; Richards et al. 1999; Sumiala 2014b; Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti 2005). My approach to the media material in my study is ethnographic. By media ethnography, I refer, in short, to an approach where the world of media texts and images is viewed as a reality and world of its own, which can be followed and traced in an attempt to understand the different practices of ritualization as they appear in this reality (cf. Peterson 2005). My fieldwork thus takes place in the world of texts and images (i.e., representations) (see also Ortner 2006). This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, I discuss death in the media and related anthropological interpretations of the ritualization of death in a media-saturated context. In the second part, I examine the ritualization of Myllylä’s death in an empirical light, tracing how the ritualization has been manifested and circulated over time in different media materials.1 My research concentrates on three time periods and their related events. The first period is centered on the construction of the Myllylä hero myth in the Finnish media in the late 1990s. The main impetus here is Heikura’s photo of Myllylä training in a bog in the region where he grew up. The next episode is centered on the “testament” published by Myllylä after he was caught doping at the World Championships in Lahti in the winter of 2001. The last phase and chain of events centers on Myllylä’s death and the media coverage it received in the summer of 2011. In my empirical analysis, I pay particular attention to Heikura’s photo and the circulation and longevity of Myllylä’s testament in the Finnish media. I interpret these material objects and their circulation from one medium to another as a temporal practice that plays an integral part in the ritualization and subsequent immortalization of Myllylä in Finnish media and society. In the third and last part of this chapter, I return to the questions raised by Myllylä’s death in relation to the ritualization of death in the public space and the meaning of immortality in contemporary Finnish society and culture.

Death Rituals in the Media In today’s world, we increasingly encounter death in and through the media. News, current affairs programs, and reports are filled with stories of death and suffering in

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different parts of the world, including wars, raids, terrorism, and accidents (see, e.g., Hanusch 2010; Seaton 2005). We also come across death in fiction and popular culture. Movies, advertisements, and popular music deal with death in numerous ways. Death metal, for example, has established itself as a musical genre even in colloquial speech. Vampire, horror, and suspense movies and TV series such as Six Feet Under bring death into our living rooms and shared public spaces. In media studies, the research that has touched upon ritualization has mostly focused on large-scale media events and disasters, such as the 9/11 attacks or school shootings (see, e.g., Couldry 2003, 2012; Liebes 1998; Liebes and Blondheim 2005; Pantti and Sumiala 2009; Rothenbuhler 2010; Seaton 2005; Sumiala 2013; Zelizer 2005). What these inquiries have in common is an intention to understand the media and the connected phenomena (in this case death) from cultural perspectives. They have often concentrated on analyzing the role of journalists and journalistic practices in the ritualization of death. Tamar Liebes and Menahem Blondheim (2005) write about the ritualized “disaster marathons” created and maintained by journalists, where the constant flow of suffering depicted by the media detaches the viewers and readers from daily life and transfers them, in Victor Turner’s (2007) terms, to a liminal phase. A second key observation concerns the effects of the media revolution on the ritualization of death in the media. For example, in the Finnish school shootings in Jokela and Kauhajoki, the ritualization of death was produced not only by professional journalists but also by ordinary users of social media, who established and circulated “light a candle” messages of various kinds and uploaded different mourning or memorial videos to YouTube. This state of affairs has set the hierarchies connected with rituals into motion (see, e.g., Sumiala 2014a; Sumiala and Tikka 2011). The media shape the practices of death rituals. In the anthropological literature, death rituals are seen to consist of a number of elements: rituals preparing for death (e.g., last rites/sacrament), rituals preparing the body (e.g., washing the body), funeral rituals (services, cremation, laying the body down), mourning rituals (books of condolences, flowers, candles, mourning clothes), and memorial rituals (eulogies, anniversaries, visiting the grave) (cf. Hockey 2001: 185–211; Robben 2006). In the media, death rituals are typically mourning, funerals, and memorial rituals (cf. Eyre 2001; Sumiala 2013). After a person dies, people may bring candles and flowers to symbolically significant locations. Images of these actions then proceed to circulate in the media. This happened, for example, in connection with the death of Swedish minister Anna Lindh. A sea of flowers and commemorations was born at the site of her murder, near the NK department store in Stockholm (Sumiala-Seppänen and Stocchetti 2005). After the mass killings in Norway in 2011, numerous mourning and memorial videos created by ordinary users started to appear on YouTube (Sumiala 2014a). State funerals are another familiar form of public funeral circulated by the mainstream media (Dayan and Katz 1992). A recent example of this is the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa in 2011. The tabloid media sometimes participates in the funerals of celebrities. Global examples of this include the funerals of singers Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. Among the typical memorial rituals are recollections of the celebrities by their friends and acquaintances. In these mediatized death rituals, both journalists and ordinary people play an important role. In the professional media, journalists orchestrate the course of the rituals by carefully selecting their shooting angles and the way they write about and present the death rituals (Hanusch 2010). Using

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social media such as YouTube or Facebook, so-called ordinary people are also able to create and maintain different ritualized practices (Sumiala 2013). On Facebook, when a person dies, his or her “wall” may turn into a shrine of eulogies and photos, where friends can post their condolences (see, e.g., Giaccardi 2012). The time and space of death rituals are being redefined. In the media, death is ritualized at the same time and with different outlets in several locations. In today’s digital environment, news of a public death spreads from one medium to another practically in real time, which enables the public to participate in the mediatized death rituals by following many different media sources simultaneously. We can watch TV while we read online versions of newspapers and international news stories, or we can look into social media to see what is being said in regard to the death of the person in question. Our participation in death rituals is no longer bound to location either. In 1997, people were able to take part in Princess Diana’s funeral both on location in London and through their home TVs or computers (see, e.g., Walter 1999). The audiences of death rituals are hence simultaneously fragmented and ubiquitously spreading. The media also serve as an archive, storing the past. The Elävä arkisto archive of the Finnish Broadcasting Company as well as YouTube offer the possibility to repeatedly relive, for example, the funeral of former Finnish president Urho Kekkonen or the murder of John F. Kennedy (see Sumiala 2013). Following this course of thinking, Myllylä’s death crossed the news threshold because he was a person who had already received a significant amount of media attention when he was alive. He had a public history and his life as an athlete was lived on a public stage, first as an admired sporting hero and then as a fallen athlete whose private life and alcohol-hazed escapades were followed by the tabloid papers and entertainment media. His life also ended on the public stage. Paradoxically enough, it was the media that, in the end, put the different times of his life together, making Myllylä immortal in Finnish society, someone who overcame his own mortality and who will be remembered by future generations. As our society has become increasingly mediatized (Lundby 2014), the media have taken a larger role as the definer of publicity. Today we can reasonably ask whether an event or phenomenon is in fact public if it has not been noted in some channel of the media. From the perspective of ritualization, the media interest surrounding Myllylä’s death was not born in a vacuum, nor was it without history. As a public media event, it had its own history and narrative arc on the public stage, against which the life and death of the individual skier should also be examined and interpreted. Various strata of shared cultural memory are also intertwined in this narrative, associated with places such as the bog or the forest or with an action such as skiing.

A Hero Is Iconized in the Media The Glorious Past The first episode in the ritualization of Myllylä’s death is exemplified by the press photo from 1997. In Hannes Heikura’s award-winning photo Endless Agony (Loputon tuska), Myllylä is featured as an athlete struggling against exhaustion in a bog in Haapavesi, the region in northern Finland in which he grew up (Figure 12.1). A story published on 6 March 1998 in the digital version of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper describes it as follows: “The photo published in the main news section

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Figure 12.1.  Endless Agony by Hannes Heikura. © Hannes Heikura/Helsingin Sanomat.

‘reaches symbolic proportions in portraying a sportsman’s struggle to grow stronger.’” In captions and headlines, Myllylä’s heroism is associated with untiring and relentless training. The photo is connoted with mythical symbolism of uniquely Finnish perseverance, the bog, and masculinity. On the same day, but in an another Helsingin Sanomat story, Heikura, in an interview with the journalist Antti Majander, describes the shooting situation in the following conversation: What motivated you to go to the bog? . . . “For me my photograph speaks of what motivates a man to go to the bog,” Heikura remarks. “The conditions were extreme: it was raining, horizontally, so even shooting the photo was difficult.” On the way to the shoot, the reporter had said that Myllylä would sink up to his waist in the bog. Heikura assumed that Myllylä would have some supporting staff around, a service crew or something. “But he drove out there alone, parked his car alone. We hiked two kilometers through clear-cut forest and such. When we finally made it to the bog, Myllylä shot off right away. Suddenly he was already far away—and he really did at times sink into the bog to the point that not much of him remained in sight.”

The photo of Myllylä in the bog was already familiar to media audiences before it won the award in the beginning of 1998. The same photo had also won the Fuji Finland Press Award in the sports photo category in the autumn of 1997. Published on 20 September, the photo was given a large amount of space in the breaking news section of Helsingin Sanomat. Following Allan Sekula’s (1986) insight, historical photos, as material objects, can be interpreted as part of the imagined visual archive of a given community. This imagined visual archive consists of imagery of the community’s past heroes,

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leaders, and other important figures. The archive is the place where the past and present of the community meet. According to Sekula, all images must one way or another take their place in this imagined visual archive and the moral and communal hierarchies it entails. Alongside the community’s ideal imagery, the imagined archive also includes a “shadow archive,” that is, imagery portraying individuals the community considers as criminals, insane, or diseased. It is interesting to reflect on Heikura’s photograph of Myllylä in light of Sekula’s interpretation. After it was published, Endless Agony became part of Finnish hero imagery, both its past and present. The photo circulated from one medium to another, and this repetition reinforced the cultural associations of Myllylä’s importance as a Finnish hero. The references to the bog and masculinity are themes shared more broadly in Finnish culture and literature. The best-known example is probably Under the North Star by Väinö Linna, with its opening words: “In the beginning there were a bog, a hoe and Jussi.” In the past, skiing has been strongly linked to Finnish national identity, and the sport carries strong connotations of heroism. One of the heroic images in this imagined visual archive is that of the “unknown soldier” from the Finnish-Soviet Winter War, skiing in thick snow in unbearably cold temperatures and wearing an all-white uniform for camouflage. However, Myllylä’s life history changed the place of this image in the visual archive of the Finnish collective memory. When the Lahti doping scandal was revealed, Heikura’s photograph crossed over to the shadow archive, in Sekula’s terms. A new present was created in the collective imagination surrounding the image. The heroic image became a criminal image, causing Myllylä to be regarded in a different light, as a lonely man who has lost the respect of the community and is sinking into a bog. This image was also reinforced by another material object that began to circulate in the media: the testament to the people of Finland that Myllylä wrote and made public after he was caught.

The Fall and the Testament As the doping scandal at the Lahti World Championships in 2001 continued to receive publicity, Myllylä changed his public life story as a glorious hero and published his remorseful testament. His testament, published in different media, scripts a new past for him, which was repeated at various stages of his life after the scandal. Even by the standards of athletes’ public apologies, Myllylä’s testament is notable for its repetitiveness, sentimental style of expression, and the use of religious and mythical language. Myllylä’s testament follows: My Testament to the Finnish People: This is a testament that I thought I’d never have to write. I am faced with deep sorrow. My heart is broken and there are no words to describe the pain I’m in. A large part of my world was shattered on February 28th, 2001, when I heard, to my shock, that the doping test I had taken at the World Championships in Lahti was positive. The worst nightmare of my life has begun. I have always in my life tried to take responsibility for my own actions and anything that has to do with my life; and that is what I’ll do now as well. As a top athlete I should have found out for myself and been aware that the substance I was given would lead to a positive doping result. Now I will have to pay a high price for this huge mistake. There are many questions running around in my mind, but no matter how hard I try to fight back, I cannot change what happened. I believe that God wanted this to happen to me.

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And Myllylä continues by apologizing to the people of Finland: From the bottom of my heart, I want to apologize to the people of Finland, and the whole sporting community, for my mistake. At the same time, I offer my humble thanks to all the people who have supported me over the years. Next to my family, you have helped me to persevere. Now, if ever, I need support.

The confession ends with inner reflection: Sport gave me a lot, but it also took a lot from me. Now there is no hurry. The battle is over. It’s time for a new life. A long time ago, when I first sunk my foot in the Tervaneva bog, a great adventure began in my life, which eventually led to this endless agony. I have sunken and risen, time after time again. Thousands of liters of sweat and tears are now colored by sadness. It is from there that I also draw the strength, which will help me overcome these trials as well. Once more, the mystical call of that quiet Tervaneva bog carries into my ears. Humble, grateful, and lonely, I will now wander back there against the wind for one last time, kneel down, admit my defeat and ask for peace in my soul. In Haapajärvi, on 6 March 2001 Mika Myllylä

The testament received a lot of publicity and aroused a great deal of discussion in the media, not least for its style. Literary critic Vesa Karonen from Helsingin Sanomat presented an analysis of the testament, its contents, and the metaphor of the bog in the paper’s sports section on 8 March 2001: From the Bog You Came What did Myllylä leave to the people of Finland? In juridical terms, a testament is a legal procedure where the testator one-sidedly determines how his legacy should be handled after he has died. Fortunately, Mika Myllylä is alive. But what did he leave in his “testament” to the People of Finland, that is, us?

Antti Majander, the journalist who had interviewed Heikura in 1998, begins his analysis by making a biblical reference: The word testament is also associated with, besides legal vocabulary, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. News that the doping test was positive came as a shock, or as Job’s news, if you may. Who gave him the substance? “I believe that God wanted this to happen to me,” Myllylä writes. So God is testing the king skier like He did with Job in the Old Testament.

In the next part of his analysis, Majander’s focus turns to Myllylä’s moral stance in this confession: In his testament, Myllylä confesses that he made a mistake. He regrets that he didn’t find out for himself that the substance he was given “would lead to a positive doping result.” The confession is very skillfully formulated. The skier did not take the substance but was “given it.” Myllylä tells the people of Finland that “there are many questions running around in my mind.” He doesn’t give answers to any of the questions that may be running around in the mind of the said people. Instead, he speaks of his sorrow and shock. He describes his suffering in a style that reminds of Finnish tango: “My heart is broken and there are no words to describe the pain I am in.” So his legacy to the Finnish people is his suffering.

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Then, Majander returns to the religious interpretation: The testament reminds of a Christian confession and its following absolution. In the beginning, there was a bog and Mika Myllylä, a little boy who grew up to be a big skier. At the end of his testament the skier who got caught (= was given a substance that would lead to a positive doping result), returns to bog. In the Bible, sinners don’t do their penance training in bogs but go to the desert to fast. The bog is Mika Myllylä’s Finnish lair of penance. The author of the testament pays no mind to the Finnish colloquialism: “Go to the bog” [get lost]. He wanders there to the loneliness of a Finnish man, to find peace in his soul. The bog is his legacy to himself. There, and not in front of the public or the media, he kneels down. His solitude gives him bog credibility.

The analysis ends with reference to Finnish cultural history and the myth of eternal return. Myllylä’s retreat to the bog can be compared to the last verses of the poem Elegia by Eino Leino: “Like a dying beast I crawl to the peace of my cavern.” Vesa-Matti Loiri has sung it in a tone pathetic enough to befit this situation. But the roots of the “mystical call of that quiet Tervaneva bog” lie deeper in the national tradition. At the end of the Kalevala [national epic], Väinämöinen, the strayed hero, leaves his people but assures them: “I will be needed again . . .”

Karonen, the literary critic, includes an aspect of time in his analysis, interpreting Myllylä’s testament in the Christian framework. An unclean past is brought to the present in the testament, and the audience is invited to bear witness to Myllylä’s past mistakes. Myllylä pleads to the people for their forgiveness. A new future is to be written, and the past must be let go. The testament and the photo Endless Agony now begin to signify the sporting hero sinking into the bog of public disgrace and humiliation. A new present is created for the fallen hero. However, pity and understanding are also offered in the media. The news is contemplated in an editorial in Helsingin Sanomat, which increases the weight of the phenomenon in the national imagination. On 9 March 2001, editor in chief Erkki Pennanen analyzed the Finnish doping scandal from the perspective of national reputation in an editorial titled, “Finland’s Lost Reputation in Skiing.” At the end of the editorial, he describes the reactions of “the nation” toward the apprehended skier as an expression of Finnish identity: Mika Myllylä’s “testament to the people of Finland” must have hit a note with just about every friend of skiing in the country, i.e. a majority of Finns. As has been pointed out, the caught skiers are not criminals, after all. The nation now shows mercy toward the wrongdoers. It forgives its heroes more easily than the coaches and leaders. The nation realizes what a high price they will have to pay for their actions, retroactively.

A couple of days later, on 11 March, the discussion and commentary continued in the sports pages, where Juhani Syvänen wrote a column headlined “TwoFacedness Problem in Sports.” In the article, Syvänen reflects on the events of the doping scandal and the athletes and other actors involved in a rather ironic tone. The column refers to Heikura’s press photo and Myllylä’s testament: Mika Myllylä has published his testament and even been recommended to become a lay preacher. A number of other fallen athletes have found their calling in the

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field. Another piece of joyous news awaits for Myllylä too. The Tervaneva bog, his familiar training site, might well be adjoined to Natura [ecological network of protected areas] and can, as it stands, become a popular site of pilgrimage. It is also a good sign that most of the caught athletes have found the courage to come out of their hideouts. Myllylä, however, is not ready for it. A caterpillar band blocks the road leading to his house, proclaiming that the man wants to still keep his distance to the world outside.

Myllylä’s testament can also be interpreted as a public confession, which in itself is a ritual. Michel Foucault (1998) sees confession as one of the central power structures of Western culture, with its roots deeply embedded in the history of Christianity. It could be said that the history of the Western confessor has advanced from the confessional to the doctor’s and therapist’s offices, and from there to the TV studio, newspaper headlines, and social media posts. But however we perceive the context of confession, it always has a certain cultural model from which it can be recognized. Confession always presupposes a confessor, who needs to confess, and an absolver or judge (Sumiala 2013). Myllylä chose the media as his place of confession. The publicity received from his doping verdict was highly visible, which likely increased expectations of a public confession. Various media actors as well as the audiences following the media became the demanders and recipients of the confession. After it was published, the confession immediately gained public attention and evoked strong reactions. It touched and addressed people, but it was also met with indignation by many voices in the media. For example, the online version of Ilta-Sanomat published a story headlined “Myllylä’s Testament Leaves Nobody Cold,” which reported that the public was “shocked” by the testament. A group of writers and other public figures were also asked to comment on the confession. Writer Arto Paasilinna remarked that “Myllylä’s text appeals to even the thickest-skinned person,” while writer and politician Arvo Salo regarded the testament as “a pompous manifest of self-pity.” Riitta Uosukainen, at the time the Speaker of the Parliament, commented that Myllylä had bared his deepest emotions in the testament. In the media, Myllylä’s confession was turned into an event, where the act of confession was of prime importance and not the confession itself. From the perspective of the media, it was not as important what Myllylä confessed to but rather that he confessed in a public space controlled by the media. In view of ritualization, this can be seen as an act through which the media strengthened its role as a ritual actor with the capacity to construct schemas from the surrounding culture (confession as a historical and cultural practice) and bring them into new environments beyond their original contexts (e.g., church, courtroom), reshaping them into new public events (cf. Bell 1992). The precondition is that the confessor, in this case Myllylä, is himself willing to take on the role of public confessor that is offered to him by the media, and that he will thus offer up his confession to be shared in the public confessional (cf. Sumiala-Seppänen 2001). The time aspect is noticeable in Myllylä’s media confession. Myllylä wants to leave his past behind and move forward with his life. The media and audiences reacting to his confession use the moment to reflect on the past and the new present of the fallen hero. All in all, the media format brings this historical ritual practice of confession into the contemporary experience, hence bringing history and the present into a new type of mediatized dialogue with each other.

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A New Present: Death Venerates the Hero The last stage of ritualization relates to the news coverage of Myllylä’s death. Myllylä died at home on 5 July 2011, ten years after the doping scandal in Lahti. His death received a vast amount of publicity in different media. The news report published by the digital version of Helsingin Sanomat included Heikura’s photograph of Myllylä training in the bog. On the following day, the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat addressed the topic with headlines such as “Myllylä’s Testament Touched People’s Hearts Ten Years Ago” and “IS Readers Recall Myllylä—When the National Anthem Played, I No Longer Felt Cold.” Both stories were accompanied by Heikura’s photograph. The YLE TV (Finnish Broadcasting Company) morning show featured Myllylä’s death as its main topic, repeating the narrative of Myllylä’s arc of life by ritually highlighting both the photograph and the testament. Mourning and memorial videos were uploaded to social media (e.g., YouTube) on the day Myllylä died and in the days that followed. Some of these videos included the familiar photograph of Myllylä in the bog. Many of them also contained references to Myllylä’s testament. The usernames (e.g., ergga48) indicate that the videos were made by ordinary YouTube users rather than by professional journalists. The videos, as well as the emotions awakened by Myllylä’s death, inspired many comments on YouTube. One example is (username) Habient’s reflections on the video “In Memory of Mika Myllylä—Broken Hero 1969–2011,” which was uploaded to YouTube on 6 July, one day after Myllylä died. The uploader’s username was finnfellow, and the video has been viewed over forty thousand times to date (reviewed 13 September 2016). Habient writes: Myllylä only started to succeed internationally after he joined the chemical war of skiing. But the public demanded success and Mika made their wishes come true. . . . Mika confessed to doping before he died. I respect his confession. A sensitive person, a man of conscience. My idol in my youth!

Ritualization and Symbolic Immortality in the Media The death of a sporting hero touches audiences foremost on a symbolic level. Heroes are always creations of their communities. The community ascribes to them qualities that it perceives as pursuable and venerable (see Campbell 1968). With a sporting hero, these qualities may include relentlessness and battle will, that is, a will to test one’s own limits. When looking up at their hero, the community sees him as an embodiment of its ideals. In Myllylä’s case, the story of the struggling “trooper” testing his physical limits in the bog turns into a tragedy of a lonely man sinking into the bog of shame, with no choice but to humble himself publicly and apologize. Being caught doping has created, in Victor Turner’s (2007) terms, a liminal phase, where heroism is replaced by shame and public humiliation. The confession does not, however, acquit Myllylä. His life continues to waver in publicity ten years after the doping scandal. His tragic life following the scandals (drinking problems, arrests, divorce) finally ends in his public death. Endless Agony and the testament rise to the fore as material objects of death embedded with symbolic meaning. Both professional journalists and ordinary media users participate in the ritualization of Myllylä’s death. Public personages also play a significant role. Their task is to give voice to the sorrow and loss produced

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by Myllylä’s death. The mainstream media recruit other celebrities and sports icons to reminisce about Myllylä’s public life and death. The words of ski jumper Matti Nykänen, “I lost a brother” (Iltalehti, 6 July 2011), skier Juha Mieto, “Myllylä was a great artist deep down” (Ilta-Sanomat, 5 July 2011), as well as public condolences by countless other Finnish and international athletes, are emblazoned in headlines. The publicly displayed grief of public personages over Myllylä’s death reinforces the perception of Myllylä as a tragic Finnish heroic figure. The significance of Myllylä’s death is underscored by his inclusion in Helsingin Sanomat’s “Ajasta iäisyyteen 2011” list of important deceased people. The list consists of nine names, also including Osama bin Laden, Steve Jobs, Muammar Gaddafi, Václav Havel, and Elizabeth Taylor. By ritualizing Mika Myllylä’s life and death, the media makes him immortal. According to Zygmunt Bauman (1992), the idea of immortality is connected with the fear of death as a final destruction, which is shared by all communities. The media offers a cultural means to overcome this fear by keeping a deceased person present in our shared media memory. Myllylä lives on in our cultural memory in material objects such as Heikura’s photo and Myllylä’s testament, which are circulated by the media. In their article “Symbolic Immortality,” Robert Lifton and Eric Olson ([1974] 2006: 34) distinguish different modes of symbolic immortality. Of them, the mode of experiential symbolic immortality appears to best describe the construction of immortality in and through the media. In experiential symbolic immortality, continuity of life is produced in the collective “spiritual rapture”—in this case caused by Myllylä’s death—within the community. The place where the ritualization of death happens is publicity, which extends all the way from national publicity in Helsingin Sanomat (a leading daily newspaper) and the popular tabloids to various social media applications. In the ritual control over death, the role of journalists is crucial, but so-called ordinary people also get to participate in the collective bereavement in and through the media by sending in their comments, uploading videos, or otherwise participating in the ritualization of a public death by following its coverage in different media. As Bell (1992: 8) points out, without participants, rituals disappear and lose their significance. The time work (cf. Flaherty 2011) in the ritualization of Myllylä has special significance here. In the media narrative that is condensed around two material objects, a photograph and a testament, the story takes viewers from Myllylä’s glorious past to his violently broken present as a fallen hero, eventually reglorifying his tragic fate through his death. Finally, Mika Myllylä’s public death calls for reflection on the significance and purpose of the immortalization of death in contemporary Finnish society. Viewed from an anthropological perspective, death rituals can be seen to help individuals and communities to perform the time work in death and transfer a biologically dead member of the community to another category: symbolic immortality. Second, death rituals can be interpreted as helping individuals and/or communities cope with the cultural and societal consequences caused by death (Sumiala 2013). In this case, a new present is created after Myllylä’s death. As a top athlete, Myllylä lived his life as an actor on the public stage, both in the highs of his career and the lows of his private life. From this category of a public personality he passed, upon his death, through the media to another category. Publicity made him symbolically immortal. This passage occurred through collective ritualized bereavement and remembrance of the key moments in his life history. The ritualization of Myllylä’s death in the media also inspires reflection on the cultural consequences and ef-

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fects of immortalizing Myllylä. His public death is not only a question of an individual athlete’s fate in life. Through his death, society is offered the opportunity to ask itself questions about its present, that is, about contemporary Finnish culture, identity, masculinity, and heroism. The discussion on Finnish cross-country skiing and prohibited substances is ongoing. An extensive feature on this topic was published in September 2012 in the monthly supplement of Helsingin Sanomat under the headline “Tracks of Blood” (Verijälkiä). A documentary film, When Heroes Lie (Sinivalkoinen valhe) by Arto Halonen, which looks at the history of doping in Finnish cross-country skiing, premiered in movie theaters in 2012 around the country. Heroes are always creations of their communities, which associate with them heroic qualities that extend beyond those of ordinary mortals. These qualities are regarded as pursuable and venerable. One possible way of interpreting the need to immortalize Myllylä in the media is to surmise that Myllylä’s life and death revealed something about contemporary Finnish society and the dilemma between the ideals it has exalted as heroic and the reality of pursuing them. From this perspective, we may consider that the media did not only make Myllylä immortal but also turned him into a martyr, whose death makes society consider the cruel inconsistencies in its heroic masculine ideals and their implications in the present’s mediatized reality.

Johanna Sumiala is an associate professor (docent) and university lecturer in the Department of Social Research/Media and Communication Studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research fields include media sociology and media anthropology. Sumiala has authored and coauthored several books, articles, and special issues on the topics of media, death, and ritual both in English and in Finnish. She is currently writing a new book on media society, The Social Life of Public Death in Ritual Events.

Note   1. My data mostly consist of material collected from the digital versions of the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper (Finland’s leading daily). I also supplemented the data with material from the online versions of the Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti newspapers (tabloids) and material from the YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Company) Elävä arkisto online archives. In addition, I gathered data from YouTube using the search words “Myllylä” and “death.”

References Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford University Press. Dayan, Daniel, and Elihu Katz. 1992. Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Couldry, Nick. 2003. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge. ———. 2012. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Eyre, Anne. 2001. “Post-disaster Rituals.” In Grief, Mourning and Death Ritual, ed. Jenny Hockey, Jeanne Katz, and Neil Small, 256–66. Buckingham, U.K.: Open University Press.

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Flaherty, Michael G. 2011. The Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1998. Seksuaalisuuden historia: Tiedontahto, Nautintojen käyttö, huoli itsestä. Helsinki: Gaudemus. Originally published in 1976 and 1984. Giaccardi, Elisa. 2012. Heritage and Social Media: Understanding Heritage in a Digital Culture. London: Routledge. Hallam, Elizabeth, and Hockey, Jenny. 2001. Death, Memory & Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Hanusch, Folker. 2010. Representing Death in the News: Journalism, Media and Mortality. Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. Hockey, Jenny. 2001. “Changing Death Rituals.” In Hockey et al., Grief, Mourning and Death Ritual, 185–211. Howarth, Glennys. 2007. “The Rebirth of Death: Continuing Relationships with the Dead.” In Remember Me: Constructing Immortality—Beliefs on Immortality, Life and Death, ed. Margaret Mitchell, 19–34. London: Routledge. Liebes, Tamar. 1998. “Television’s Disaster Marathons: A Danger for Democratic Processes?” In Media, Ritual and Identity, ed. Tamar Liebes and James Curran, 71–84. London: Routledge. Liebes, Tamar, and Blondheim, Menahem. 2005. “Myths to the Rescue: How Live Television Intervenes in History.” In Media Anthropology, ed. Eric W. Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman, 188–98. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Lundby, Knut, ed. 2014. Mediatization of Communication. Handbooks of Communication Sciences 21. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Eric Olson. (1974) 2006. “Symbolic Immortality.” In Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader, ed. Antonious C. G. M. Robben, 32–39. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Merridale, Catherine. 2000. Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia. London: Granta. Ortner, Sherry B. 2006. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham: Duke University Press. Pantti, Mervi, and Johanna Sumiala. 2009. “Till Death Do Us Join: Media, Mourning Rituals and the Sacred Centre of the Society.” Media, Culture & Society 31 (1): 119–35. Peterson, Allen Mark. 2005. Anthropology & Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millenium. New York: Berghahn Books. Richards, Jeffrey, Scott Wilson, and Linda Woodhead. 1999. Diana, the Making of a Media Saint. London: Tauris. Robben, Antonius C. G. M. 2006. “Death and Anthropology: An Introduction.” In Robben, Death, Mourning, and Burial, 1–16. Rothenbuhler, Eric. 2010. “Media Events in the Age of Terrorism and the Internet.” Jurnalsim si communicare 5 (2): 34–41. Seaton, Jean. 2005. Carnage and the Media: The Making and Breaking of News about Violence. London: Penguin Books/Allen Lane. Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3–65. Sumiala, Johanna. 2013. Media and Ritual: Death, Community and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. ———. 2014a. “Mediatization of Public Death.” In Lundby, Mediatization of Communication, 681–99. ———. 2014b. “Ritualising Public Death in the Nordic Media.” In Mediating and Remediating Death, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik, 91–109. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. Sumiala, Johanna, and Tikka, Minttu. 2011. “Imagining Globalized Fears: School Shooting Videos and Circulation of Violence on YouTube.” Social Anthropology 19 (3): 254–67. Sumiala-Seppänen, Johanna. 2001. Nomadit Rippituolissa: Medioidun uskonnon moraalisen järjestyksen dynamikka (post)modernin television ja kulttuurin kontekstissa. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto.

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Sumiala-Seppänen, Johanna, and Matteo Stocchetti. 2005. “Mediated Sacralization and the Construction of Postmodern Communio Sanctorum: The Case of the Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh.” Material Religion: Journal of Objects, Art & Belief 1 (2): 228–49. Turner, Victor. 2007. Rituaali, rakenne ja communitas. Trans. Maarit Forde. Helsinki: Summa. Originally published in 1969. Walter, Tony, ed. 1999. The Mourning for Diana. Oxford: Berg. Willerlev, Rane, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, and Lotte Meinert. 2013. “Introduction.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 1–16. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. Zelizer, Barbie. 2005. “Finding Aids to the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic Public Events.” In Rothenbuhler and Coman, Media Anthropology, 199–209.

Figure 13.1.  Katharina. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

CHAPTER 13

The Temporality and Materiality of Life and Death in a Sepik Village Christiane Falck

One day in 2013, seventy-year-old Katharina (Figure 13.1) and I were talking about the end of my fieldwork, which I conducted in the Nyaura (West Iatmul) village of Timbunmeli in the middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea. She asked me where I would go to afterward, and I replied that I would go to Germany first to visit family and friends and then to Denmark to study before returning to my university in Australia. Katharina asked whether I planned to come back to Timbunmeli, which I answered with a yes. She said: “I do not know, will I still be alive when you come back to Timbun, or . . . ?”1 Then she added perkily: “I’m already old. Maybe I will die and see you there?” Katharina started to laugh when I looked at her, baffled, not knowing what to say except that I hoped she would still be alive upon my return. In Timbunmeli many people believed that I was a dead person from the village who had returned to her family in a white body. I lived in the village from December 2012 to January 2014 and again from November to December 2014 to conduct fieldwork.2 During this time, several people approached me with their hope that I could set them in contact with dead relatives. What is death? Western secular understandings grasp death as the end of human existence. For the philosopher Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1993, [1962] 2001), death is the end of human Being.3 The character of our Being is “being-in-theworld” and “being-with”—it ends with death. In Heidegger’s philosophy, the dead are no longer in the world, nor are they anymore with others. Only a “corporeal thing” (Körperding) remains of what the human was. According to Heidegger, our own temporality is a defining feature of our Being. It is the inevitable and irreversible progression of life toward death that characterizes our Being as “beingtoward-death.” For the Nyaura, however, death only ends the visible form of existence. Being is continuous. While Heidegger understands death as the finitude of Being, the Nyaura do not. Spirits of the dead live in an invisible realm of people’s lifeworld that in Timbunmeli has become identified with whiteness. From there the dead can act on people’s lives, and it is from there that they can return to the living in a white body. Katharina’s joke was hinting at her belief that after death her spirit would go to one of the “white men countries” (waitman kantri) I had referred to and that there she could see me again. For the Timbunmeli, the sphere of the dead is a place of happiness and peace, filled with white men’s amenities that make life easier. The sphere of the living, on the other hand, is perceived as a place of hardship and struggle. Although the

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sphere of the dead is invisible and difficult to access for the living, it is to the dead’s sphere that the Timbunmeli look in anticipation for a better life; it is to the dead that the living turn to receive answers to demanding questions of their lives. In the following I want to explore the temporality and materiality of life and death in Timbunmeli. I argue that the time of the living is also the time of the dead in Timbunmeli and that their materiality is connected—their Being is intimately linked. Death does not end “being-in-the-world” or “being-with” others. Unlike Rane Willerslev and Sophie Seebach (see introduction to this volume), I suggest that we do not need to turn to fiction, mythology, literature, or films to learn about life after death in Timbunmeli, but can look at people’s practical engagement and conversations with the dead. In Timbunmeli, I suggest, experiences derived from interactions with the dead are part of people’s lives and influence their lived reality. There, villagers have developed different practices and techniques to build on their relations with the dead that aim at materializing them and their powers and accessing them as a source for help and in fact for change. This existential intentionality the Timbunmeli have influences the way people interpret and appropriate new things that only recently have become part of their lifeworld, including myself, the anthropologist. In the first section, I will discuss aspects of the local concept of personhood and the constitution of people’s lifeworld as being made up of a visible and invisible sphere belonging to the living and the dead, respectively. In the second section, I will provide an analysis of how local understandings of the temporality and materiality of life and death play out in mortuary rituals when bodies, objects, and practices are employed to materialize the dead. Next, I will present the appropriation of a new technology in people’s lifeworld, which villagers use to connect the visible and the invisible and materialize the presence of the dead. In the fourth part, I will discuss a defining aspect of the materiality of the dead in Timbunmeli—their whiteness—and the consequences that arose out of this perception for me as a supposedly returning dead person.

The Visible and the Invisible The village of Timbunmeli is situated on an island in the southern end of Lake Chambri on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Timbunmeli’s approximately 650 inhabitants are part of the river people commonly referred to as the Iatmul in anthropology. Iatmul groups see themselves as being related in language, culture, and descent, and trace their origin back to a mythical place called Mävi-mbi-t, situated in the Sepik plains. However, the West Iatmul’s self-designated name is Nyaura—referring back to the Nyaura clan, which founded their first village, Nyaurangei (the place of the Nyaura). Part of the Nyaura lifeworld is not only the visible world that humans inhabit, but also an invisible realm populated by potent spirit beings.4 It is perceived as being more powerful than the human realm and as being the source of everything that exists. Gregory Bateson ([1936] 1958: 230), an anthropologist who conducted research among Iatmul societies in the 1920s, noted: “It is said secretly that men, pigs, trees, grass—all the objects in the world—are only patterns of waves” (ibid.: 237). He described different “planes of existence” in the Nyaura cosmos that are inhabited by humans or spirits. Similarly, Eric Silverman (2001: 22) describes for the East Iatmul in Tambunum that spirits inhabited a concealed world and humans

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would live on the surface of reality. With that the Iatmul’s cosmology conforms to Daniel Miller’s characterization of “an underlying principle to be found in most religions,” namely, that “materiality represents the merely apparent, behind which lies that which is real” (2005: 1). In the beginning of the Nyaura cosmos there was only water. Then ground appeared; it was a mythical being, the crocodile Kavakmeli, who split into two halves and thus created sky and earth (see Wassmann 1982, 1988, 1990). People’s ancestors emerged from a hole in the ground and started to migrate into the world. To this day, human bodies are conceptually related to the ground, and it is to ground that their bodily matter returns after death. While human bodies belong to the visible part of people’s lifeworld, their life spirit (kaik)5 relates to an invisible part of the world, traditionally called Undumbunge (the place of the dead) and nowadays also called heaven. Undumbunge was created by an ancestral being called Ki-bbi-nbange, the agent of death (Wassmann 1982, 1991). Ki-bbe refers to the cold that crawls up a dying body, and bange is the local term for skin/body. When people feel seriously sick they often state that they feel cold or that a cold is crawling up their arms and legs. Spirit mediums also described a cold sensation spreading over their bodies for situations in which a spirit of the dead was about to possess their bodies. According to a Nyaura myth I recorded, Ki-bbi-nbange was annoyed by the noise and behavior of people in his village and thus left to found his own place, Undumbunge. To hide it from human intruders, he used magic. Villagers in Timbunmeli say that humans do not have the eyes to see the dead or their realm—a fog obscures their view. Nowadays Ki-bbi-nbange is also reinterpreted as being Jesus/God, who overcame death. My interlocutors say that the mythical figure went to the place of the dead alive—and so did Jesus when he ascended to heaven. Jesus died for the sins of humankind and Ki-bbi-nbange also left his community behind, repelled by its behavior. With the influence of Christianity, a reinterpretation process took place in which Christian theology was accommodated to local cosmology (see Falck 2016, 2018). Although the spirit realm is invisible to the human eye, it has a powerful materiality of its own—it is more potent and powerful and it is filled with amenities that make life there more comfortable, happy, and peaceful. While the living and the dead dwell in different realms, those realms are not exclusive domains (Van Heekeren 2004: 104) but part of the same existential space (see also Telban 2001, 2013 for the Ambonwari)—they are interconnected. The place of the dead can be envisioned like a parallel world that is part of the same time and space as that of the living. From there, the dead, especially the recently deceased,6 are experienced as exercising influence on people’s lives; they are part of the same now as the living. Good relations with spirits of the dead, and nowadays God and his spirits, are considered important for well-being, wealth, and power. Spirits of the dead can assist humans in their undertakings by communicating in dreams, visions, spirit possessions, or nowadays on the phone. But, as we will see later on, they can also bring sickness and death to people when angered or when being instructed to do so by magical spells. A spirit may then trick the life spirit of a person into leaving its human body and hinder its return. If not counteracted in time, the human will die, since her/his material body cannot live without its invisible spirit and vice versa. With death, a life spirit turns into a spirit of the dead (undumbu) and becomes part of the invisible realm as a breath of wind.

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It is from the place of the dead that life comes and goes—changing from an invisible to a visible form of existence and back. The temporality of life and the temporality of death are two sides of the same coin. Like Jadran Mimica (1988: 99) has described for the Iqwaye, for the Nyaura “death is immanent in the process of life. It is not its ontological opposite but its very part.” When the door to the place of the dead opens, the life spirit of a baby may enter the womb of a conceiving mother, or the spirit of a dying person may leave the realm of the living and enter the place of the dead. Today many people believe that God bestows them with their life spirit—it is understood as a breath of wind like that which God, according to the Bible, has blown into the nostrils of Adam to flow through the body. After death, God takes it back to stay with him in heaven. Since the connection to the invisible is crucial for people’s lives, people have developed different techniques to communicate with invisible beings and materialize their powers. Traditionally, magical spells, divination rituals, and offerings were means to communicate with spirits. However, since a charismatic movement swept the Sepik area during the 1990s, spirits of the dead have also started to possess villagers’ bodies to provide them with messages and help. In the following, I will present parts of customary mourning rituals in which the influence of charismatic Christianity is also noticeable. Prayers and spirit possessions were part of the organized practices that accompanied the death of a little girl, Nelcy. I suggest that the ritualized practices surrounding Nelcy’s death can be studied as a key to the local understanding of temporality (Willerslev et al. 2013: 1). “Rituals establish a temporality through actions with material objects in a set space. These social technologies help create “the time of the dead” in an explicit, performed and material way” (ibid.: 2). As we will see, the dead are part of those practices in Timbunmeli—the time of the dead is also the time of the living.

Nelcy’s Death Nelcy, a girl around the age of ten, died on the night of 30 April 2013. She was buried the next day. Nelcy had been considered a good person; she was well-known for being considerate and quick to help and share things with others. Her death was perceived as a tragedy in the community, and people were wondering about the circumstances of her death. On the morning of her day of death, Nelcy felt hot and told her mother, Ellis, that she would like to sleep. Ellis was smoking fish over the fireplace in the house when she suddenly saw how the body of her daughter cramped. Immediately she thought of malaria and took her daughter outside into the water of the lake to cool her feverish body. But it was no help—something else must have befallen Nelcy. Ellis took her daughter back into the house and held her, but Nelcy never gained consciousness again. In the afternoon, her breath flattened. Her family started to pray for her recovery together with a spirit medium, Sandra. Sandra is a woman from Timbunmeli whose body is possessed by the spirit of a dead villager called David during charismatic prayer sessions. When possessing Sandra’s body, David can heal, provide answers to villagers’ concerns and problems, and speak the truth (see Falck 2016). After the prayer in Nelcy’s family house, David explained that the spirit of Imelda’s dead husband, Morris, was responsible for the situation. Nelcy’s father, Bill, had done something to anger his dead clan brother, Morris; he had had an argument with Morris’s wife, Imelda. Nelcy died during the night of

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the same day, and people said: “The little girl only died because of Imelda and her husband.” In the aftermath of Nelcy’s death, villagers discussed the circumstances of her death. Although most people attributed the sudden death of the child to the doings of the spirit of Imelda’s husband, Morris, there were also other critical voices that said the little girl should have immediately been taken to a hospital as she had been sick for a few days and had obviously been suffering from a severe malaria attack. On the third day after Nelcy’s death, the family decided to practice a divination ritual to receive clarification on the reasons for Nelcy’s death—her spirit should provide the answers. In preparation for the ritual, Nelcy’s grave was covered with a plastic canvas. Shortly after Nelcy’s mother, Ellis, had placed her head and hand under the plastic canvas over the grave and had called out her daughter’s name, her body was possessed by the spirit of Nelcy. Back in the family house, Nelcy, possessing Ellis’s body, sat down and started to cry; she cried for her parents. When asked to talk out about the reasons for her death, Nelcy explained that she died because of the dispute between her father and Imelda. Morris, Imelda’s dead husband, had made her ill. Soon after the spirit possession was over, the visitors left the house. Before I left, Bill asked me whether I could come back some day when I was free— he had a worry that he wanted to share with me. After some time had passed, I went to visit Bill and Ellis. They were sitting at the back of their house, which had customarily been called the “house of cry” since their daughter’s death. As is common nowadays, the family wore black clothes and had put black ropes, called kaikmanje, around their necks, wrists, and ankles. The kaikmanje (Figure 13.2) can be understood as items that function as a materialization of the presence of the dead. The ropes do not only visibly demonstrate the family’s grief, but also, I was told, aim at tying the spirit of the dead to their family members’ bodies who are not yet ready to let them go. Bill said that he wanted to see me because he wanted to ask me whether I could help them get the spirit of his daughter to stay with them or make it use the body of her mother regularly to deliver messages to them. When I told Bill that I was not able to do that, he accepted my answer. But as was often the case in these situations, I was left Figure 13.2.  Some of Nelcy’s relatives with kaikmanje. Photo by with an uncomfortable feeling. I feared Christiane Falck, 2013.

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that he perceived me as not wanting to help him and sensed that I could not convince him with my explanations why I could not follow his wish. While spirit possessions materialize the presence of the dead in a lively and tactile way, there are other practices and objects found in mourning rituals that materialize the presence of the dead. For example, part of mourning practices is also the setup of an installation called monu, which is made up of tree branches (Figure 13.3). The tree branches, on which three bundles of firewood are hung, symbolize the father’s and mother’s sides of the person who passed away; they are part of the totemic repertoire of the maternal and paternal clans and represent

Figure 13.3.  Monu set up for Nelcy. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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ancestral beings. The firewood is designated for spirits of the dead who are said to come and witness the mourning rituals and who eventually will take the recently deceased with them into their realm. One bundle of firewood is hung up for the dead of the mother’s clan, another is hung up for the ancestors of the father’s clan, and one is designated for the dead person—they function as an offering and a last farewell to the dead. Furthermore, in preparation for the end of the mourning period, a line of clothes (kaikwagunda; Figure 13.4) is hung up in the dead’s family house. The clothes symbolize dead family members who are believed to come and stay with the mourning party during the “last cry.”

Figure 13.4.  Kaikwagunda hung up for Nelcy’s “last cry.” Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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Figure 13.5. Last ritual washing in the context of Nelcy’s death. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

The “last cry” is a collective mourning ritual that takes place when the official time of grief is ended. Then, the deceased’s family cries together with women from the village for the last time, starting in the afternoon, and lasting throughout the night until the next morning. During the “last cry,” it is common for women to color their faces with white clay, white being the color of death (see also Stanek 1982: 52). When tears fill up in women’s eyes, they hold their head pressed back into the nape of their necks so that the tears leave their eyes on the outside, leaving their traces on the skin by washing away the white paint. Everyone should see their sorrow materialized now in tracks of tears. The dead are said to cry with the living—they mourn for the living as the living mourn for the dead. Nelcy’s “last cry” took part on 20 June 2013. Women sat on the floor of the “house of cry,” painted their face with white clay, and cried together for the last time. “Yambiure [Bill’s local name], grieving man, what will you do tomorrow?” an old woman cried out, stating the inconceivability of the certainty that life had to go on. The “last cry” is ended with a collective ritual bath (Figure 13.5), during which people bathe in the water of the lake that surrounds their village and scoop the water away from their bodies and skin. People say: “We are washing ourselves and letting it [the spirit and the grief] go.” People no longer hold onto their grief and the spirit of their dead family member. The family and the dead have to accept that the spirit has entered a different realm.

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The Nyaura in Timbunmeli perceive water and wind as substances that conceptually relate to the materiality of spirits: “When we die we will become like wind and rain,” my interlocutors said. The Iatmul creation myth also sees water as the beginning of everything that exists (Moutu 2013: 189; Silverman 2001: 27; Wassmann 1991: 91): “It was out of water that everything was first created, and so it is to water that one should return after death” (Moutu 2013: 189). Other anthropologists have documented that the Iatmul believe that the spirits of the dead travel along the river to the place of the dead (Silverman 1993: 329, 2001: 85; Stanek 1983: 324, 365; Wassmann 1991: 105, 191; see also Bateson [1936] 1958: 230 on spirits of the dead and the Sepik). During his fieldwork in the 1970s, Wassmann (1982, also 1988) documented ritual chants that guided the spirit of the dead to the place of the dead situated in the ocean. I would like to propose that this has to be understood symbolically. The place of the dead is not a faraway place in Timbunmeli, but an invisible part of people’s lifeworld. By washing in the water of the lake, I suggest, people not only wash the grief off their skin, but also send the spirit of the dead off into the water—a sign that it has to leave the realm of the living and become part of the spiritual part of the world. At the beginning of the Nyaura cosmos there was only water and ground—and it is to water and ground that a Nyaura person returns. However, although death dissolves a person’s matter into the substances and entities it was composed of, death is not an end to Being and the social relations it contained. Being, understood as being continuous or eternal, as Borut Telban (1997: 320) has so aptly described for the Ambonwari, “has not much to do with the ‘direction’ of time as such, but with everlasting now” of which the dead and the living are part. During my fieldwork I witnessed different practices that sought to communicate with the dead. Whereas divination practices have already been employed by the Timbunmeli’s ancestors to access the dead and receive help and guidance from them, today also the cell phone is perceived as a device that can set villagers into contact with dead relatives. In the following, I will present the villagers’ appropriation of the cell phone as a new technology to contact the dead.

Calling the Dead Katharina was still alive when I returned to the field in November 2014. This will remain the last time that I saw her. She died a few months afterward. I learned about her death first from a text message that I received from one of her sons, whom I never met personally. He had traveled to Timbunmeli upon her death, and in the village, he heard my story. He obtained my phone number, and started to send me text messages asking me about something that had occupied his mind: 16 March 2015, 10:30 pm Sis[ter]! . . . I would like to ask you and know about a story that Fr[i]eda and people from Timbun told me . . . I heard that you are a dead woman who came to stay in the village, I went and saw your house on the mountain at papa Leslie’s area.

I replied that I knew that many people in Timbunmeli thought that I was a spirit of the dead, but that I did not believe it myself. I told him that I was a university student who came to do research in the village. I received further messages from the son in which he raised more questions:

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17 March 2015, 10:08 pm Sis[ter]! Frieda told me that you showed her your sacret [sic] book of your life and that she saw it. This sacret [sic] book, what is it about? Did Frieda say the truth or did she lie?

I replied that I was not sure which book Frieda was talking about but that I suspected that she must have meant a book of photos that I took with me to the field to show people photos of my home in Germany. After that, the son replied: 18 March 2015, 06:18 am Sis[ter]! I am very sorry to have asked you all these questions they followed the nonsense of the people in Timbun.

However, although it seemed as if Katharina’s son had been satisfied with my answers to his questions, I received a new text message weeks later: 13 April 2015, 10:31 pm Sis[ter], a very good night! I want the phone number of my mother Catha. If you really are a spirit of the dead. I still think that you are a dead woman ya, I think you lied to me. A very good night.

I have not received a reply to my response in which I asked Katharina’s son why he would still think that I was a dead person and in which I stated again that I was not. However, this conversation shows several characteristics of the perception, temporality, and materiality of death in Timbunmeli: first, it relates to a point I have illustrated above, namely, that the dead do not leave the human world behind but remain within it. Second, it illustrates that the cell phone has been interpreted as a technology that is able to reach into the spirit realm, which is part of the same space-time continuum as that of humans. Third, it shows that the dead as well as the place of the dead have become identified with whiteness. I will now discuss the appropriation of the mobile phone as a technology to access the dead, leaving the third point for a subsequent discussion in the next section. The cell phone is a new technology in Timbunmeli. The village received access to the mobile phone network only in 2010. Since then villagers have appropriated the device not only to talk with friends and relatives in other parts of the country, but also as a means to bridge over into the invisible realm and reveal its powers. Its network, being invisible itself, is perceived as being able to connect people with spirits of the dead via invisible wires and signals (see Falck 2016). To enhance the relationship to the invisible and get access to its secrets is not only an existential intentionality that many Nyaura in Timbunmeli have, but has been described as a characteristic for other groups in Papua New Guinea. Borut Telban and Daniela Vávrová (2014: 224), for example, write that the Ambonwari people had “cosmologically well-established desires to deepen the contacts with the usually invisible (external) world, their deceased relatives in particular, and bring all the advantages to the latter into their living presence.” The same has been described by Andrew Lattas (1998, 2000, 2006) for the Bush Kaliai on New Britain, who experimented with technologies formerly alien to their lifeworld to reveal the invisible space of the dead and its hidden powers. Lattas (2000: 326) writes that modern technology’s ability to bridge the spheres of the visible world with that of concealed physical powers and to reveal those invisible powers has been appropriated by the Kaliai in a way that relates to their own familiar “customary practices of secrecy and disclosure through dreams, visions, rituals and possession.” Similar

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to the Kaliai’s approach to foreign technologies, the Nyaura in Timbunmeli perceive the cell phone as a technology that has the ability to reveal the hidden presence of spirits by connecting the visible world of humans with their invisible realm. Katharina asked me twice to set her into contact with her dead husband, Herman. Herman had died shortly before my first arrival to the village in 2012. Only for the purpose of being able to speak with him again, the old widow had bought a cell phone and waited for him to call her. Katharina had been part of a Catholic charismatic prayer group whose members had bought handsets designated for the exclusive communication with spirits. They called those phones “bridge phones” or “heaven phones,” stressing the idea that it would be able to bridge over into the invisible realm and establish a connection with the dead. If one wanted to talk with people on the ground, one should use a different handset, called a “ground phone” (Figure 13.6). Humans were occupied with all sorts of behavior that spirits might find offensive—to avoid a possible contamination of the “bridge phone” with the sinful “behavior of the ground,” it was not to be used to talk with the living. To get into contact with dead kin using the cell phone, group members had to give their names and that of the dead relative together with the day and time of her/his death, as well as the phone number of their SIM card, to a spirit who was regularly using the body of a woman from their prayer group. They were then instructed to wait until they received a missed call as a sign that their dead family member wanted to be called back and speak with them. Katharina had waited in vain before approaching me for help, believing me to be a returning dead person who held powerful knowledge about how to access the dead. When I told Katharina for the second time that I was not able to provide her with the phone number of her dead husband, she looked at me judgmentally and

Figure 13.6.  Heaven (left) and ground (right) phone. Photo by Christiane Falck, 2013.

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whispered: “You have been staying with us for such a long time and still you are not telling us anything.” My response that it was not possible for me to tell her anything about the dead and how to contact them only caused her to chirrup disapprovingly and let me know that she did not believe me. For her I was a spirit of the dead who could communicate with the invisible realm. The materiality of death in Timbunmeli is not only powerful—it is also connected to whiteness. In the next section, I will discuss ideas about the place of the dead and the whiteness of the dead.

The Place of the Dead and the Whiteness of the Dead “The materiality of death is not limited to the dead, their personal belongings, monuments and heritage, but it also includes their memory, powers, blessings, everlasting return and dialogues as well as the very physical properties of the places they inhabit in the Otherworld,” Fredrik Fahlander and Terje Oestigaard write in their introduction to their anthology about the materiality of death (2008: 12). In Timbunmeli the materiality of death has become identified with whiteness. Similar to other places in the Sepik region (e.g., for Tambunum, see Silverman 2012, 2013; and for the Ambonwari, see Telban 2013, 2014; Telban and Vávrová 2010), in Timbunmeli the place of the dead is associated with the places of white people—North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe are places where the dead live in happiness, peace, and with amenities that make life comfortable. There the dead live in white bodies that they receive after leaving their black bodies behind in death. However, although Undumbunge or heaven is associated with the countries of white people, it is not an otherworld in the sense of a faraway place; it is situated within the Nyaura lifeworld. Walking paths in the village are said to be highways on which cars drive, seating platforms are workshops, and the water of the Chambri Lake, where Timbunmeli is situated, is a city. Graves are the doors to the houses of the dead through which they can travel between the different realms of the living and the dead. In visions and dreams, villagers can see those places and the comforts they hold. Silverman (2012: 124) sees the dead’s association with whiteness in Tambunum connected to the “local conception ideology, wherein the soft, fleshy parts of the body gel from maternal blood and eventually decay, leaving only white seminal bones.” At the place of the dead, the dead would be boiled in water “to slough off their black skin and leaving a white, bone-like, ghostly appearance” (Silverman 2013: 245), which would explain the affinity between Europeans and the dead (ibid.: 245). I was told that whites were identified as spirits of the dead when they suddenly appeared at the Sepik River in the nineteenth century (see also Stanek 1982). Also in other accounts, we find hints of people’s association of the dead with white people. The ethnographer Adolf Roesicke, for example, who was part of a Sepik expedition in 1912/1913, wrote in his diary after an encounter in a Nyaura village: “Then they asked me if I had seen their dead. They brought a few skulls and explained that only this would remain, but where would the people go to? Into the ground or to the above? Had I seen them in Madang [coastal town in PNG] or at my place?” (Schindlbeck 2015: 287, my translation). Whites appeared from a place that people had never seen, and spirits of the dead too live in a place that is out of reach—Undumbunge. Therefore, white people became associated with that place and are not only called saunbange nimba, white skin people, but

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also undumbu, spirits of the dead. Today the whiteness of the dead is also related to people’s perception of biblical figures—Mother Mary, Jesus, angels, and saints are perceived as having white skin. The dead too receive a white body when they leave the “ground” and enter the place of the dead that is nowadays also called heaven. This understanding is intimately connected to Papua New Guinea’s colonial history. The colonial discourse of racial and moral differences between white and black people once introduced by white missionaries and colonialists has become internalized by people in Timbunmeli and influences their perception and experiences of white and black people and the materiality of life and death (see also, e.g., Lattas 1998). The dead are not only believed to live similarly to white people, they are also believed to be the source of their success. There is a widespread assumption at the Sepik and beyond that white people hold a secret powerful knowledge and that the basis of their power and wealth is secret communication with the dead (e.g., Gesch 1985; Lattas 1998; Lawrence 1964; Leavitt 1995a, 1995b; Smith 2002; Telban and Vávrová 2010). In Timbunmeli villagers believed that whites withheld crucial knowledge from them because they were sinners. A church leader told me: “Sin is hiding the road. . . . If we would be united, became one with God, straighten ourselves, change our ways—then the missionaries would open the road, and we would live alike.” In different places in the Sepik region, foreign things, such as the cell phone in Timbunmeli, have been interpreted as the key to the assumed hidden knowledge of Westerners. Deborah Gewertz (1983: 218), for example, describes the interpretation of a book by a Chambri man as containing “the power of white men.” Fr. Patrick Gesch (1985: 27–28) describes the interpretation of a key found by a man as the key to heaven. Gaining access to the invisible and materializing its powers are currently on many people’s minds in Timbunnmeli. The return of dead relatives in white bodies is a widespread hope. When the dead return to the living, people hope they will share their secrets, money, and goods with them. When the dead return, eventually people will live their lives equally to whites, surrounded by amenities they currently miss. Already Gregory Bateson ([1936] 1958: 230) noted a theory of reincarnation, “according to which the ghost of the dead is blown as mist by the East Wind up the river and into the womb of the deceased’s son’s wife.” In Timbunmeli, people told me that they had often noticed that a new person was born close to the time that another person had died; life comes and goes. However, it is not usually the case that a specific ancestor is perceived as having returned to the living in a child’s body. Rane Willerslev has argued that for the Yukaghir and Chukchi of Siberia, for whom rebirth beliefs are an integral part of their cosmology, the return of an ancestor in the body of a newborn is not to be understood as a return of the same, but of the different (Willerslev 2007: 50ff., 2013). It is not the case that the rebirth of an identical person takes place. The new person, who embodies aspects of the deceased, should be understood as being an individual being, not as a mere replica of the dead. In Timbunmeli people sometimes discover bodily features or character traits in children that remind them of those that belonged to dead relatives. However, while it seems that usually only certain qualities of a dead person are found within a living relative, today people also identify white people who come to their village

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as being the embodiment of a dead relative who has come to visit them. This form of reincarnation is also not exactly the return of the same, since the visible qualities of a person, namely, the color and looks of the body, have changed. However, it is closer to the same because the invisible qualities of the person, namely, the life spirit and personality, are perceived as being identical to that of the dead. I have experienced myself how difficult the attribution of the identity of a dead person can be for oneself (see Falck 2016). It can be very frustrating and challenging to live in a situation in which one’s own identity is recurrently denied and one is perceived as being someone one does not identify with. It is, however, also challenging because being unable to fulfill people’s hopes of putting them into contact with their dead kin or showing them the secrets to white people’s wealth is not only frustrating for those whose hopes are disappointed, but also for oneself. I often felt disappointed and disillusioned in situations in which I was confronted with the suspicion of people I had become close to that I was hiding something from them that they so intensely desired. My being-in-their-village was understood as a proof for people’s beliefs. No white person before had spent a prolonged time in their village and had taken a deep interest in their lives. The fact that I ate villagers’ food, slept in their houses, listened to their stories, shared my thoughts and things, or laughed and cried with them was something people in Timbunmeli had not experienced from a white person before. By doing what anthropologists do, namely, taking part in the everyday lives of their interlocutors, I supported people’s interpretation of my being-intheir-lifeworld. Toward the end of my fieldwork, a church leader came to tell me that after he had carefully studied me, my movements, my interactions, and my behavior toward people, he had come to the conclusion that I was certainly a spirit of the dead who had returned to her community.

Conclusion: The Time of the Living, the Time of the Dead In Timbunmeli death does not end Being. As in other cultures, in Timbunnmeli death “is not understood as finitude per se, but as a transitory realm” that transfers a person “into another state of communal existence” (Willerslev et al. 2013: 5). In Timbunmeli this means that after death the life spirit of a person turns into a spirit of the dead and lives on in an invisible realm of people’s lifeworld, while bodily matter is reabsorbed into the ground that once was created from an ancestral body. Other anthropologists working with Sepik communities have argued that rituals of death aim at ending the relationship with the dead (Telban 2014; Wassmann 1982). I have shown that certain practices and objects aim at materializing the presence of the dead during mourning rituals—the dead are part of people’s lifeworld, also in times of death when they come to take the recently deceased with them into their realm. In contemporary Timbunmeli, I suggest that death rituals cannot be understood as an attempt to bring about a radical break with the dead. Although spirits of the dead are perceived as being capable of bringing sickness and death if angered, today villagers do not aim to end their relationship with the dead, but in fact strive to build on it. Currently many people seek to actively engage with their dead mothers, fathers, siblings, or children long after the mourning period and its rituals have ended. Villagers actively try to maintain relations with the dead and try to materialize their presence, for example, via spirit possessions

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and cell phones. People’s practices are thereby not only motivated by a longing for lost loved ones and the wish to talk to them again, but also by the hope that the dead will help the living with the material comforts and success associated with their realm. Furthermore, the possibility to see a dead loved one again in a white body is widely believed to exist. The belief that death does not end Being, but carries it into a different realm of existence that has become identified with whiteness, has been reinforced by people’s experiences of me staying with them for a substantial amount of time. My appearance was taken as a sign for a better time to start, one in which the dead and the living would not only share the same existential space and the same here and now. It would also be a time in which white and black people would live equally—being-with each other and sharing their wealth with each other like people in Timbunmeli do.

Christiane Falck is a social anthropologist from Germany with a focus on Oceania and especially Papua New Guinea. She is a lecturer at Georg-August-University of Göttingen at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology and an adjunct research fellow in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University, Australia. Falck conducted the research, on which the material presented here is based, as a PhD student of James Cook University, Australia, and Aarhus University, Denmark. In her PhD thesis, she investigated religious and technological change among the Nyaura of Timbunmeli, where she undertook fourteen months of fieldwork. 

Notes   1. Conversations with my interlocutors were held in Tok Pisin, a neo-Melanesian pidgin English. The translation into English was done by myself.   2. I conducted my fieldwork in Timbunmeli as a PhD student in anthropology at James Cook University, Australia, and Aarhus University, Denmark. My research was made possible by funds James Cook University and the Moesgaard Museum provided.   3. I follow John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s ([1962] 2001) translation of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit into English and also follow their capitalization of Being to express the noun Sein, which is always capitalized in German. Note that Heidegger has termed human Being Dasein (Being-there). I, however, for better readability in English, do not use the German term Dasein.   4. The Nyaura differentiate between spirits of the dead (undumbu), ancestral clan spirits (wagen), spirits of the bush (miunjumbu), and spirits of the water (wanjemook). For people’s relations with other spirits than spirits of the dead, see Falck (2014, 2016).   5. My interlocutors translated kaik as “spirit” in Tok Pisin and English. Life without kaik is impossible. I therefore propose that it can be called “life spirit,” a suggestion my interlocutors support.   6. During my fieldwork, spirits of dead villagers who died during the last two decades were identified as acting in the village.

References Bateson, Gregory. (1936) 1958. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; London: Oxford University Press.

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Fahlander, Fredrik, and Terje Oestigaard. 2008. “The Materiality of Death: Bodies, Burials, Beliefs.” In The Materiality of Death: Bodies, Burials, Beliefs, ed. Fredrik Fahlander and Terje Oestigaard, 1–16. Archaeopress: Oxford. Falck, Christiane. 2014. “Livets Materialitet og Immaterialitet—Relationen mellem mennesker og ander i Sepik-regionen i en sociokulturel forandringskontekst.” Religion 4: 8–16. ———. 2016. “Calling the Dead—Spirits, Mobile Phones, and the Talk of God in a Sepik Community (Papua New Guinea).” PhD diss., James Cook University and Aarhus University. ———. 2018. “The (Re-)Appropriation of Sprit Beings – Spirits of the Dead and Spirits of God in a Sepik Community.” Oceania 88(1): 107–126. Gesch, Patrick. 1985. Initiative and Initiation: A Cargo Cult Type Movement in the Sepik against Its Background in Traditional Village Religion. St. Augustin: Anthropos-Institute. Gewertz, Deborah B. 1983. Sepik River Societies. A Historical Ethnography of the Chambri and Their Neighbors. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1993. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen. ———. (1962) 2001. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell. Lattas, Andrew. 1998. Cultures of Secrecy: Reinventing Race in Bush Kaliai Cargo Cults. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2000. “Telephones, Cameras and Technology in West New Britain Cargo Cults.” Oceania 70 (4): 325–44. ———. 2006. “Technologies of Visibility: The Utopian Politics of Cameras, Televisions, Videos and Dreams in New Britain.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 17 (1): 15–31. Lawrence, Peter. 1964. Road Belong Cargo: A Study of the Cargo Movement in the Southern Madang District New Guinea. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Leavitt, Stephen C. 1995a. “Political Domination and the Absent Oppressor: Images of Europeans in Bumbita Arapesh Narratives.” Ethnology 34 (3): 177–89. ———. 1995b. “Seeking Gifts from the Dead: Long-Term Mourning in a Bumbita Arapesh Cargo Narrative.” Ethos 23 (4): 453–73. Miller, Daniel. 2005. “Materiality: An Introduction.” In Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller, 1–49. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mimica, Jadran. 1988. Intimations of Infinity: The Mythopoeia of the Iqwaye Counting System and Number. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Moutu, Andrew. 2013. Names Are Thicker Than Blood: Kinship and Ownership Amongst the Iatmul. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schindlbeck, Markus. 2015. Unterwegs in der Südsee: Adolf Roesicke und Seine Fahrten auf dem Sepik in Neuguinea. Berlin: Nicolai, Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Silverman, Eric K. 1993. “Tambunum: New Perspectives on Eastern Iatmul (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea), Kinship, Marriage, and Society (Volumes I and II).” PhD diss., University of Minnesota. ———. 2001. Masculinity, Motherhood, and Mockery: Psychoanalyzing Culture and the Iatmul Naven Rite in New Guinea. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2012. “From Cannibal Tours to Cargo Cult: On the Aftermath of Tourism in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea.” Tourist Studies 12 (2): 109–30. ———. 2013. “After Cannibal Tours: Cargoism and Marginality in a Post-Touristic Sepik River Society.” Contemporary Pacific 25 (2): 221–58. Smith, Michael F. 2002. Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Stanek, Milan. 1982. Geschichten Der Kopfjäger: Mythos und Kultur der Iatmul auf PapuaNeuguinea. Cologne: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag. ———. 1983. Sozialordnung und Mythik in Palimbei: Bausteine zur Ganzheitlichen Beschreibung einer Dorfgemeinschaft der Iatmul East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. Basel: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde.

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Telban, Borut. 1997. “Being and ‘Non-Being’ in Ambonwari (Papua New Guinea) Ritual.” Oceania 67: 308–25. ———. 2001. “Temporality of Post-Mortem Divination and Divination of Post-Mortem Temporality.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 12 (1): 67–79. ———. 2013. “The Power of Place: Spatio-temporality of a Melanesian Religious Movement.” Anthropological Notebooks 19 (3): 81–100. ———. 2014. “Transforming Relations in Death Rituals among the Karawari of Papua New Guinea.” Martinmas Anthropology Seminar, Department of Social Anthropology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, U.K., 7 November 2014. Telban, Borut, and Daniela Vávrová. 2010. “Places and Spirits in a Sepik Society.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(1):17–33. ———. 2014. “Ringing the Living and the Dead: Mobile Phones in a Sepik Society.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 25(2): 223–38. Van Heekeren, Deborah. 2004. “Feeding Relationship: Uncovering Cosmology in Christian Women’s Fellowship in Papua New Guinea.” Oceania 75 (2): 89–108. Wassmann, Jürg. 1982. Der Gesang an den Fliegenden Hund: Untersuchungen zu den Totemistischen Gesängen und Geheimen Namen des Dorfes Kandingei am Mittelsepik (Papua New Guinea) anhand der Kirugu-Knotenschnüre. Basel: Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde. ———. 1988. Der Gesang an das Krokodil: Die Rituellen Gesänge des Dorfes Kandingei an Land und Meer, Pflanzen und Tiere (Mittelsepik, Papua New Guinea). Basel: Basel Ethnologisches Seminar der Universität und Museum für Völkerkunde. ———. 1990. “The Nyaura Concepts of Space and Time.” In Sepik Heritage: Tradition and Change in Papua New Guinea, ed. Nancy Lutkehaus, Christian Kaufmann, William. E. Mitchell, Douglas Newton, Lita Osmundsen, Meinhard Schuster, 23–35. Bathurst, NSW: Crawford House Press; Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press. ———. 1991. The Song to the Flying Fox: The Public and Esoteric Knowledge of the Important Men of Kandingei About Totemic Songs, Names and Knotted Cords (Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea). Boroko: National Research Institute. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2013. “Rebirth and the Death Drive: Rethinking Freud’s ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ through a Siberian Time Perspective.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 79–98. Abingdon, U.K.: Ashgate. Willerslev, Rane, Dorthe Refslund Christensen, and Lotte Meinert. 2013. “Introduction.” In Christensen and Willerslev, Taming Time, Timing Death, 1–16.

PART IV

Exhibiting Death, Materiality, and Time

CHAPTER 14

The Wonderful Exhibition That Almost Was Alexandra Schüssler Photographic direction by Marcel Gross

In my double role as designer, though I prefer to think of myself as a translator from text to space, and cultural anthropologist, I was invited to participate in the research project “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time” (DMT) initiated by Rane Willerslev. He and some of his colleagues from Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus knew my work from a visit in Geneva, where I presented an extensive exhibition on Soviet material culture at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genéve (MEG). The exhibition, Villa Sovietica, was commanded by Jacques Hainard, then director of the MEG in Geneva. In my work as exhibition designer and curator, I explore possibilities of integrating aesthetic thinking in scientific research. Designing the DMT exhibition was a continuation of this quest. During more than twenty years of originating, designing, and implementing exhibitions, there came a point when the usual orthodox sequence, sound scientific research followed by turning this knowledge into an exhibition, was reversed. My research used design as its starting point and became design-based. This meant that the spatial and material givens, the location of the exhibition, the technical and material equipment at disposal, the exhibition items available for a display, and the possibilities of the site in which an exhibition was to be mounted became the signposts for the direction of the research. DMT is a project intended to focus on the relation between death-related practices, materiality, and conceptions of time through a cross-disciplinary approach. It based part of its methodology on a number of design experiments through which researchers were to challenge their research findings by interacting with designers, conservators, museum educators, and artists. Unexpectedly, the whole project was moved after only one or two meetings in Aarhus to the Museum of Cultural History (KHM) in Oslo, because the project leader became the new director of this institution. One of the long-term aims of DMT had been to finalize the program with an exhibition. Moving the planned exhibition from Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus to the KHM in Oslo was to have a profound effect on the project.

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Figures 14.1–14.22.  DMT design experiment “Accumulation and Destruction,” Oslo, April 2012.

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DMT Design Experiments In Oslo three design experiments were conceived, organized, and managed by Peter Bjerregaard, cultural anthropologist and participant in the DMT project, and myself: “Accumulation and Destruction” in April 2012, “Accumulation and Destruction, Part 2” in June 2012, and “Containing and Transporting Soul” in March 2013. The idea behind these design experiments was to consciously install an aesthetic element into anthropological and archaeological research, both in the field and in the museum setting. These three design experiments, in which DMT researchers and staff from KHM participated, were meant to flow into the final exhibition. During these three-day meetings Danish and Norwegian representatives of various disciplines collaborated by actively engaging with the material world. No lectures, no extensive discussions, but experiments with a vast number of materials from clay, wood, wool, candles, fabric, and plaster to eggs, gold, watermelons, and animal blood. The aim of these experiences was to enhance an awareness of the necessary coherence of form and content. Participants addressed their ideas on experiencing time and the end of time through the material world rather than through logo-centric discourse. This strategy is based on the hypothesis that human experiences and conceptions of time inherently hinge on the material world, and that time as a socially experienced phenomenon cannot be understood except through material form or expression. Therefore, in the design experiments participants accumulated varied objects, destroyed their collections, and analyzed the reactions and experiences generated by these acts. We were heading for a consciousness of knowledge always embodied in a specific structure and gestalt. Each team, consisting of various combinations of academic researchers, conservators, museum educators, designers, and artists, reflected on their experiences during the experiments. Most participants appreciated the interdisciplinary collaboration, exchange of ideas, and tactile sensations generated by the materials used. Below is a description and my thoughts about the first workshop experience, sent to the project leader, Peter Bjerregaard, who was my closest collaborator in the DMT project, on 9 May 2012. I also sent this text1 to my workshop team members, an archaeologist and a museum educator, at KHM in Oslo, on 10 May 2012:

Now I know how it feels to be dead During the workshop, I realized for the first time that the relationship between the curator or scientific head of an exhibition project and the designer/producer of the display of the exhibition is similar to a love affair. The content of a potential exhibition must be communicated to the designer in a way that stirs his/her imagination. The researcher (curator?) conveys the content to be presented in the exhibition in a way that stimulates the designer’s phantasmatic production. The exhibition designers are in a position to demand vis-à-vis the curator/conservator: “Che vuoi?”—“What do you want?” They try to guess the curator’s desire to communicate “something,” which they in turn will give substance and body to. A “body” in the truest sense of the word, as the designers transpose written text and spoken words into material phenomena or human presence (think of guided tours, workshops, performances, interventions within the social realm or [(re-])presentations as part of the exhibition).

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If I refer to a love affair I do so hinting to a common relational structure between lovers: one tries to be what (one imagines) the other wishes one to be, one attempts to do as (one fantasizes) the other desires one should do. So the exhibition designer tries to give form to thoughts (he/she thinks) his collaborators express. And then he/she expects a reaction: “Yes, that’s exactly it!” or “No, this is not what I had in mind.” It is a long process in which all involved parties must give each other a maximum of attention, listen very carefully, try to commit themselves to each other with a lot of empathy: always searching for what exactly it is that the other is aiming for. This is why my team did not stick to the tight time schedule of 30-15-15 minutes of preparation before starting to work hands-on, but instead talked all morning. First we had to lay out what Frode Iversen, the archaeologist from KHM in my team, coined as “archaeological machinery,” and then we applied it to a concrete object. We decided this would be the building we worked in: the ancient train remise of Bjorvika, currently a depot of the KHM. We identified different framings of the site in accordance with archaeological methods. These framings were “translated” into real—rather, I mean material—frames we intended to position around the house, working with distance and proximity, angles of view, sections of views (Ausschnitte), scaling, filters, and metonymy. Thus we obtained an accumulation of possible framings of the site, aware that for the viewing subject (observer?) in the landscape it is only possible to view the building through one frame at a time. Moving from one to the next, all other possible frames had to be set aside—declared to be nonexisting for the moment. Destroyed. Instead of pursuing this project further in the afternoon, we started another one. It was based on Frode’s concern of an (over)accumulation of archaeological objects of the same kind in the museum stores. In the archaeologist’s view, they convey limited information and swallow an enormous amount of resources. The idea to destroy these objects arose. The audience should get a chance to destroy them in an exhibition. We asked ourselves what would be gained—the surplus—if the museum allowed the visitor to destroy objects on display. In order to try this out we had to create our own collection, or rather surplus, of objects. Clay seemed to be the most suitable material to create the same forms over and over again (Frode mentioned the museum objects were all made of metal, of similar shapes). We tried out various shapes and ended up making simple prints of our hands when making a fist. We produced a large number of objects—all from the same material, looking all alike with slight variations. Next we decided to place our collection, still not dry and therefore apt to gather more information in the form of changes, in several locations. Our first site was the production table. From there they went into the kitchen drawers, which we first had to empty for our collection. There they seemed to be stored away like in a museum depot: neatly ordered in seclusion, in containers that could be opened and closed, in darkness, in an intimate space, according to a hierarchy (top-down). The next spatial context was a windowsill. All the pieces of our collection were gathered at one of the industrial windows of the brick building of Bjorvika. In contrast to the situation in the drawers, now our pieces were out in the open—the skyline of the newly built skyscrapers of Oslo formed a backdrop for them shining in daylight, all of them simultaneously exposed to the eye.

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Then they changed site again and were carried over to the imitation leather settees, where other workshop participants were taking a coffee break. We changed nothing in this scene associated with bad taste in office furnishings or waiting areas; we just invaded the space with our worm-like clay objects that sat on the back and arms of one of the sofas. Peter happened to sit on the sofa and was forbidden to move. As more and more clay worms sat on the settee general laughter broke out. Suddenly Peter remarked: “Now I know how it feels to be dead.” But actually it was our collection of objects that was supposed to die. And therefore we planned to take them out of the house into the pouring rain. Packed into a cardboard box, we carried the clay worms, by now imprinted with even more information, into open air. Originally we wanted to bring them down to the waterside and drown them, but we did not get very far. Just in front of the entrance door to our working space there was a round metal sewage lid with a hole in the middle. This was the right place for them to find their final destination, exposed to the rain and people walking in and out and possibly tripping over them, destroying the form, the material swept by the rain into the sewer, dissolving into a large (w)hole. There they were exposed to slowly proceeding corrosion or sudden destruction? During one of the presentations and discussions Frode made a remark that has kept me busy since then. He observed that for him our accumulation had turned into a piece of art when we transported it from the windowsill to Peter’s settee. Ad hoc I wanted to know from the archaeologist why. Frode just said: “Then it became alive. All the other situations were a kind of museum-like.” How can I make sense of this? Is the museum really so tightly connected to death, as a lot of relevant literature suggests? Why did the objects become alive the moment they were inserted into an everyday situation involving human actors? Is it in these moments that objects are imbued with agency? Immediately Pygmalion comes to mind: the sculptor, who creates a sculpture of a perfect woman and she comes to life. In ancient Greece the highest form of art was mimesis. To imitate nature was the painters’ highest aim. A painting of fruit had to be so lifelike that even the birds were deceived and came to it in order to peck at the grapes. Parrhasios beats Zeuxis’s representation of grapes that deceived birds with a painting of a curtain that Zeuxis asked to be removed—ergo he succeeded in deceiving even the painter’s perception. But it certainly was not mimesis we used in terms of display rhetoric. What did we use, then? And why did it work? Isn’t it almost ironic that we set out to destroy the object and we turned it into something that became alive?

Four years later, some of these questions now have answers. Frode referred to museum-like situations as “dead” because life’s constant flux and change stagnates within a museum setting. Temporality has come to a halt the moment an object enters the museum—it dies in the sense that it has left the realm of functionality and circulation, and at the same time, it is inserted into an eternal continuity when it comes to its physical existence. Storing collections under a certain perspective means dealing with the past and the dead. In their text “Assembling the ‘Spark of Life’” (2016), Bjerregaard and Willerslev fall back on André Malraux’s “Musée Imaginaire,” who pleads in regard to his museum without walls to disconnect the object from any functional or symbolic order it was intended for. Malraux privileged curatorial over artistic production by assembling, disassembling, and reassembling

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montages of photographic reproductions of “artworks” from all over the world and through all époques. This can be understood as a first instance of explicitly locating the creative act in the process of selecting, grouping, and displaying objects. The archaeologist in my design experiment team complained about an excess of archaeological items in the KHM stores—all the same material, all more or less the same form, carrying similar information. These he strived to destroy. As we had no access to these objects, as a designer I had to fall back on this information when thinking about how to use substitutes of the collection. As we had a block of clay in our materials for the workshop, I turned back to the most basic form of sculpting: putting my hand into the clay and making a negative print of my fist. In this way, the object was imbued with information (of my own physical existence). Through this simplest of all clay forms I could be fully identified as the creative subject. This strategy I would call displacement, referring to Freud’s Verschiebung when analyzing the production of dreams. After my team had produced our collection, we proceeded to imitate the museum in its dealing with collections: we stored the collection items removed from the gaze in kitchen drawers, and then we exposed them to the world on the windowsill in between glass panels like in a glass case. As I was aware that our final aim was to destroy the objects physically—they were facing death, so to say—I suddenly felt an enormous freedom and urge to do something with them before they would “go forever.” In a playful manner I started “fooling around,” placing them next to Peter, who as project coordinator and cultural anthropologist participated in the design experiments and, at the time, was just having a coffee break. I ruined the object’s identity by leaving the well-known museal contexts for objects to appear in, and I inserted the series into a totally unexpected setting. The large number of eerie, soft forms took up every square centimeter on the sofa that was not occupied by bags, coats, or Peter’s human presence. This became quite obvious when Peter got up and left a void on the black leather. I think we here encountered this uncanny excess of life, a manifestation of vibrant life energy not to be reduced to an entity or identity. To allow the clay objects to reveal the “spark of life” I had to ask Peter to sit petrified as it took us quite some time to pose the little sculptures on the settee. I actually asked him to suspend himself being alive for a moment when creating the installation. This is how he suddenly knew how it feels to be dead. Remarkable was the sudden interest among the other workshop participants—there was this strange excitation with a lot of giggling and even hands-on support. I wonder if it was the “spark of life” as conceived of by Bjerregaard and Willerslev (2016) that caused this fascination, as the authors would probably suggest. Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn makes use of this excess of life in his work. As he says himself, he does not strive for quality but for energy when he makes his hypersaturated installations of tin cans, paper, old cardboard that he sticks together with kilometers of brown duct tape. I was not the only one to have written a report on this design experiment. Here is a fragment from Peter’s report on his collaboration with Mads Harstad Palsrud, an Oslo-based designer. Together they used objects from the most diverse categories to build a construction that was supposed to collapse at a certain instance:

Mads and I really had to discuss a lot while we were working with our construction. In this sense, the act of exhibiting generated a lot of cross-disciplinary debate

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on what we had seen, and how that was reflected through our construction. Thus, rather than discussing how precise the installation was in conveying an empirical “reality” or an abstract idea, we constantly had to follow the emergence of our construction and try to comprehend how it added perspectives to that we had experienced and thought of beforehand. Thus having a kind of abstract image in front of us created a common space we could react to, which we might not have achieved if I had simply suggested an idea to Mads (as designer) and he had worked out a sketch. On 22 May 2012, I reacted to Peter’s report with the following e-mail message:

Dear Peter, Thanks so much for your report. I have enjoyed reading it a lot! Above all the last part, when you write about “preconceived” ideas we put into our material constructions—you are so right calling the installation you constructed with Mads an abstract image as common space: this is when designers make sketches or models, or the Bauprobe 2 Serge refers to, if I recall right. Martin was so puzzled by my constant calling for abstraction when we were working together. This was exactly what I meant: creating a “form” we all could share, we all could identify with. Experimenting means to start out with a hypothesis—you never start from scratch, a tabula rasa. The moment you “pour an idea into materiality” things (objects, space, light) and people (our collaborators and audience) react to it and this is where things start to roll. To pose an act and then wait for what happens, then reflect and pose another act . . . isn’t that the simplest form of learning? I am very much looking forward to go on with this. When do you expect me to arrive in Oslo in June? Monday or is Tuesday enough? This time we shall be working nonstop? But definitely we should have a spinoff discussion on the reports we all wrote. And then I wish to have a film evening at Bjorvika on Wednesday. I was thinking of Import/Export by Seidel or Antichrist by von Trier. One is about death in a home (or rather hospital) for elderly people; the other is about the death of an infant. Very different kind of life energy: accumulations and their destructions—almost metaphorical for museums and sacrifice. Looking forward to hearing from you. Best wishes, Alexandra

PS: With Luder 3 I have just learned that people come to museums to tell their stories and give guided tours instead of listening and taking tours. Because of this work in progress I hang around in the exhibition constantly. I experience the weirdest encounters. Now I am planning to do my next show with posters from the Basel collection on the walls and real goats in the exhibition hall. I wish to push this element of the uncontrollable a step further . . . or at least create a metaphor for it. I miss peers to discuss this with. It is strange, but I have never expected these experiments to become so important for my work. I bring up this exchange of thoughts among the workshop participants for two reasons. First of all, I want to convey a specific atmosphere and energy that was produced by the design experiments, and second, I identify some ideas in these

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texts that also have played an important role in creating the plans for the final DMT exhibition at the KHM in Oslo. I totally agree with Peter: having an abstract image in front of us creates a common space that all collaborators involved in making an exhibition can react to. This is also why we constantly asked for images brought into the design experiments by the participants. Also later on, when we had curatorial meetings concerning the final DMT exhibit, I never showed up without a little image collection. I think Peter could have started by suggesting an idea to Mads (and he certainly did, because otherwise they would not have started to produce constructions with jumble), and the designer would have reacted by posing an act within a medium that he feels affinities with and that is apt to represent Peter’s idea. In my view, the crucial point is Peter’s involvement in the process of making. His and the designer’s reflections were triggered by the representation in the making and moreover by its physical presence, its material being in the world. I am convinced of the benefits of the Bauprobe strategy, and I ask for one at each and every exhibition I am making. Drawings and sketches are fine for a start, but only trying out the material reveals most of the unforeseen (side) effects of an installation. And precisely these are of utmost interest, as they are elements to work with when one tries to achieve a multilayered exhibition. Consequently, I produced tests with the materials the curatorial team chose for the final DMT exhibition. Abstraction or an “abstract image” was also brought up in our reflections about the experiments. I am not quite convinced that these terms capture what was going on in the workshops. Maybe abstraction was meant as a concept, helping us to distance ourselves from mimetic representation. However, the material phenomena created during the design experiments came into being based on a logic of displacement and condensation—their relationships to their referents in the museum storage facilities are rather of a metaphorical, metonymical, indexical, or symbolic nature. To create a “form” we can all take a share in does not necessarily call for abstraction, but rather a “thick description” (see Geertz 1973), a condensation.

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Figure 14.23.  Discussion of DMT design experiment participants, Oslo, April 2012.

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The DMT Exhibition The design experiments enabled me to become familiar with researchers’ activities in Aarhus as early as 2011. Lotte Meinert was then in the middle of conducting research on reburials after war in northern Uganda. The civil war caused a distortion in the spatial relation to the dead. Deceased are supposed to be buried in the family compound in order to remain in the vicinity of the still living. With people living in internally displaced people’s camps, this system was disrupted. When people moved home, the dead remained in the camps. Lotte described the rituals of exhuming and transporting bones, in which the dead and their souls were returned to their proper homes. The excavations and reburials involved moving large amounts of soil and handling the bones in correct ways (see Meinert and Whyte 2013). Lotte was concerned about what she could present from her case in Uganda in an exhibition focusing on death, materiality, and the origin of time. I suggested she bring back samples of the soil that was dug up in order to move the corpse from one site to another. My second interview in Aarhus was with Anders Emil Rasmussen, who did fieldwork on the idea of gradual death on the island of Mbuke in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Someone suffering a “good death,” a person dying in a natural way, distributes his skills, abilities, and other possessions before he dies. This results in a spirit/soul with limited influence, but still capable of affecting the wishes and emotions of the living. On the other hand, people suffering a “bad death,” dying in an accident or being violently killed, become restricted to the places where they died. Thus, when moving around the environment, one has to be aware of the uncontrollable agency of the dead who are still active at specific localities. In conversation with Anders, I learned that the burning of a corpse on Mbuke is an unthinkable way of dealing with the remains of a deceased person. As the spirits of the dead dwell among the living, there is even an issue to create spirit-free zones. My idea of asking Anders’s informants to try to take pictures of the spirits resulted in stunning shots that were commented on by the photographers. In Oslo, I conducted a third interview with archaeologist Per Ditlef Fredriksen. His research is based in South Africa, where he follows the moving of souls or spirits of dead relatives (Fredriksen, this volume). When a person from a township dies in Johannesburg, two people will carry a branch of an uhmlalabantu tree to the place where the person died. The branch will be placed at the site where death occurred, and a ritual is carried out that allows the spirit of the deceased to be absorbed by the branch. Thus, the soul of the dead relative can be taken home and placed on the wall of the back of the house, where people are supposed to be buried. Knowing his background in archaeology and how well these professionals are trained in drawing, I suggested to Per to create a collection of uhmlalabantu branches imbued with souls in the form of drawings for the final DMT exhibition. These encounters with the researchers allowed me to get a sense of what the DMT exhibition should finally be about. The talks were important, as they taught me about the anthropologists’ and archaeologists’ concerns and worries, and about the questions that occupied them in their respective fields. I could not refrain from asking each of them if they were afraid of dying. It seemed important to me to include their own attitudes to death in the project and especially in the exhibition. More interviews could have been conducted, but at that point, I was merely designing the exhibition. Hence, on 19 February 2014, I received the following curatorial paper from the Danish research group.

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Draft proposal for DMT exhibition at Museum of Cultural History, 2016 • We want an exhibition with a broad appeal, but not necessarily directed at schoolchildren. The exhibition doesn’t have to appeal to everyone, but to an interested adult audience across different levels of education, professions, and age. • We want the exhibition to address the senses rather than being intellectual or didactic. • The exhibition is thought of as travel with the dead: you meet the dead body, travel with it, and get input on various practices at different places in the world and throughout history. In this way, we want to stimulate audiences’ own reflections on death, funeral, and afterlife. • As audience, you are placed in the situation of the bereaved: as mentioned in the introduction to vol. 1 in our book series, we cannot experience death ourselves (cf. Romano 2009). Therefore, the part of the bereaved is really the experience of death we are left with. • The exhibition has three “phases” or “modalities,” which we are not quite certain about how to relate: 1. Death occurs 2. The extension of death: afterlife (presence/absence) 3. Death ends (forgetting, moving on, life with grief, cancellation of grave) • Three kinds of agency: 1. The dead body 2. The dead soul/person 3. The bereaved

Ad1) Death occurs: the dead body • The contrast between a concrete, living individual and the same person as dead A. The first space: the dead alive (photos, life, home video, Facebook profiles) B. The next space: audience comes in one by one, pass by the dead, total silence (the sensation of radical absence of sound and movement, a sweet iron smell) We want to deal with the question of what to do with the dead body—cremation, funeral, cannibalism, mummification, etc. But we are not quite certain where/ how to place it.

Ad2) The extension of death: afterlife (three traces) 1. No concept of afterlife (the Ik, organ transplantation, atheism, early modern cremation, the Karimojong, the Hadza, bushmen) 2. Ideas of afterlife together with the dead (proximity/here) (the Acholi, the Chukchi, children’s deaths in Denmark; ghosts, Gettysburg; the Internet, Lifegem, organ transplantation, zombies, passage graves) 3. Ideas of an afterlife in another realm (distance): Vikings/Valhalla, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, early modern Danish painters as Joachim Skovgaard, ancient Greece, old Egypt)

Ad3) Death ends: fading out of sorrow, memory, memorials, distance, routine, disappearance (e.g., cancelled graves, recycling of graves and gravestones, etc.)

We imagine that the three paths from the afterlife section will be “followed to the end” in some way or another, but at the same time we don’t want a classical thor-

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oughgoing ethnographic exhibition where all answers are given. We imagine that the following partition will be relevant:

• Short time until oblivion • Long time until oblivion • Absence of oblivion At the present moment, we don’t agree or are very clear about the relation between these kinds of partitions—which possibilities do you see? We would very much like to make an exhibition that is at once complex and clear. We DON’T want to make an exhibition that claims simple causalities. This input from the DMT research team made me write following message to Peter on 23 August 2014:

Dear Peter, Thursday I made my new exhibition (I) LOVE TO HATE (U) for Basel and since then I am about concentrating on our September meeting in Aarhus. I really would like to keep it 24 hours talking with Rane and the others. That means I want to end up with something finished. My main problem is the poor information on content. This is why I ask you to check if my premises are correct. 1. The exhibition is generally speaking about how mankind deals with death.

2. The researchers defined three ways of how to imagine afterlife. a. There is a realm of the dead utterly separated from the living. Oblivion of the deceased sets in gradually. b. The realm of the living and the dead exists simultaneously and overlaps in space. No oblivion. c. There is no afterlife and therefore no realm of the dead. Instant oblivion. 3. We agreed at our last meeting to start with the MINUS chamber—freezing an interior in order to signify death, the end of time. And we agreed to finish the exhibition with an installation of black walls, in which visitors leave traces of their bodily contours behind. Each disappearance leaves a mark in time.

4. Between the starting point and the end of the exhibition I intend to set up three installations with a manifold of objects. Each installation should perform one of the existing relations between Diesseits and Jenseits (beautiful German words). Diesseits is at the side of the tangible world (objects)—Jenseits belongs to the world of essences, spirits, ghosts: shadows. Peter, this is the stuff that occupies me very much for the moment. Could you control if I got something wrong, please. Misunderstandings would be fatal in this situation. Is there anything I should read to understand better what Rane actually wants?—Except the corpse, I mean. Looking forward to talking to you—all the best, Alexandra

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Figure 14.24.  Sketch of the DMT exhibition concept, Alexandra Schüssler, 2014.

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On 6 October 2014, I wrote Peter the following message:

Dear Peter, As I was not able to reach you by Skype—I just write (although I have to calm down as the exhibition is driving me frantic . . . ) Now I propose to make this an exhibition for ONE person at the time. There is nothing more intimate than the death of others—it is a highly individual experience (though we share it as staying behind—as bereaved we can only exchange accounts of our experiences). The three partitions as we had it, I’d like to keep intact—but there will be no three partitions in the middle part. And no shadow play! We keep the beginning and the end: the frozen room and the traces of visitors, who are long gone. I want to keep this as simple as possible. Based on Henrik’s and Anders Emil’s text in the middle part there will be wind (and dust) in the exhibition hall. In a very classical way we present objects chosen from different categories: collection (museal, lost and found), everyday object, waste, organic material/flora/fauna, consumer goods, etc. We construct a glass case for one human being and we have the visitor rolled into the display on rails. In this vitrine, the living human body is of the same valence as all the exhibited material stuff in the other vitrines. The question of oblivion will be tackled by our object choices—we could show a running TV and piles of photographs in one of the vitrines—finally also this material will vanish and dissolve in the large ocean. I would be happy if we could think this through together. Let me know when we could have a session, please. Maybe it is a totally stupid idea . . . Hope you had a nice vacation and you are not immediately overwhelmed by loads of work. All the best, Alexandra

During later discussions, we decided that this was not a good idea. I present this message here to demonstrate that many ideas were generated in the course of making the DMT exhibition, but many were also discarded in the process. During the search for solutions, the trust to express visions and thoughts during collaboration is of fundamental importance and an essential part of the creative process. Sometimes ludicrous concepts can provide useful elements for the final result. Notably I mention here for the first time that I am comparing the human body to the “exhibited material stuff.” To be precise, I state that it bears the same valence. In the final exhibition scenario, this relation will play an important role. In order to discuss the proposal for the DMT exhibition by the Danish research group and to present the status quo of our thinking about the exhibition, Peter organized a meeting in Oslo of three Danish researchers, himself, and me. Kjetil Sandvik, Jakob Knudsen, and Rane Willerslev functioned as representatives of the Danish research group authoring the proposal. In this meeting, we discussed the content of the proposal and searched for possibilities to turn the most important ideas that we extracted from the text into display situations. We brainstormed about various ways to implicate material culture. We talked about what kinds of objects we would like to exhibit. The idea to use many objects from the KHM collections was still very much alive. We decided to make the exhibition a triptych: three different parts should in the end make a meaningful whole.

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From the discussions, I gathered that we should start with very clear and simple propositions of how to deal with loss, the death of a beloved person. These propositions should be based on the research findings. Some researchers were confronted with people without a concept of afterlife, which was tied to a short time until oblivion. Others worked with people who conceived of an afterlife together with the living, which implicated an absence of oblivion. And then there was the common idea of an afterlife in another realm, which results in a long time until oblivion. For me side comments, for example, “proximity/here” or “distance,” had an enormous significance in my spatial thinking. Immediately I established these terms as relationships between the items on display and the visitor. We were in agreement on visualizing various conceptions of afterlife and the time frames until oblivion, but we differed when it came to the section “Death occurs: the dead body.” The Aarhus researchers had a strong wish to have a sculpture of a dead body at the entrance to the exhibition. Two of us who had participated in all the design experiments were strongly against this kind of exhibition rhetoric. We argued that this would be grotesque or would produce a chamber of horrors atmosphere rather than the effect of loss and absence. The argument was put forward that the actual corpse poses a concrete problem that must be dealt with in specific ways in all cultures. In my role as exhibition designer, I understood the desire of the researchers and proposed two solutions: either we could get a real corpse into the exhibition, an avant-garde approach of breaking representation by having reality intruding into it, or we could organize a live-stream projection in the exhibition of a dead body in a morgue. These propositions could not be realized due to legal restrictions. No conclusion of how to capture the occurrence of death was reached. I was given the assignment to write a proposal for an exhibition scenario that I sent to the DMT research group in Denmark on 19 October 2014.

Draft proposal for the setup of the DMT exhibition at Museum of Cultural History, autumn 2016 This proposal is based on the demands of the curatorial team: 1. Broad appeal, adult audience from Western provenience—or at least acquainted with the cultural practice of museum visits 2. Focus on sensual experience, avoidance of academism and didactic nature 3. Stimulation of audience’s own reflections on death, funerals, and afterlife 4. The audience is placed into the situation of the bereaved as death cannot be experienced as a phenomenon otherwise 5. The exhibition should encompass three phases: a. Death occurs b. Extension of death: afterlife (presence/absence) • No concept of afterlife: total absence = immediate oblivion • Afterlife in the realm of the living: constant presence = no oblivion • Strict division of realm of the dead and realm of the living: presence in different dimension = successive oblivion c. Death ends (remembering, forgetting, commemorating) 6. Three agencies should be taken into account: the dead body, the soul, the bereaved 7. The exhibition should be at once complex and clear 8. No simple causalities

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Proposal of setup based on one exhibition space with several entrances/exits: To avoid simple causalities the exhibition is conceived as one total installation using the space granted for the setup. It is thought as a singular, aesthetically coherent statement, simple in structure, but polyvalent in meaning. The main design strategy is to work with Bauproben (set rehearsals), very much like in theater practice. This mock-up of the exhibition design is the only way to see how everything is going to look and work. Drawings and models give a faint idea, but can be extremely misleading, as they are only representations of real spaces. Very often they function like “poor translations.” Common exhibition material is avoided in favor of creating specific atmospheres. Plinths, showcases, and other furnishing are rather to be found than constructed for the exhibition. The three partitions of the concept is respected with a spatial division into three sections; the first and last is settled, the middle one is still a work in progress. The three agencies are dealt with in the following way: DEAD BODY: The dead body is represented by material culture in a broad sense—collection items from the museum depot, consumer goods, cargo, personal collections (lost & found), furniture & material culture belonging to interiors, vegetal material (plants & flowers), deposed material, garbage, etc. SOUL: The soul is captured in light/shadow, reflections in glass, water, water steam/fog, motor oil, photographic and film projections, wind, void, sound, etc. BEREAVED: The audience is put into the role of the bereaved. Ad a: SECTION 1: death occurs—BELOW ZERO

The exhibition starts with an interior of an inhabited space, from which the human physical presence is absent. Imagine a domicile like the one of André Breton4: everyday items in a fully fitted room (living room or kitchen) filled with books, magazines, photos, paintings, ethnographica, curiosa, mirabilia, naturalia, plants, and flowers. The whole world in form of material culture in a nutshell. The situation depicted is an ever-day scene—on the table there is a tea service in use (cups with content, cookie crumbs and a cigarette, only half consumed, in an ashtray). The whole scene is frozen to minus 13 degrees. It cannot to be entered (as decided during the last meeting), as it is downscaled: a miniature. Death is not accessible for the living—we can only think it as a model (like a dollhouse). Ad b: SECTION 2: extension of death—afterlife

We set out with the most common vision of afterlife in Western societies: successive oblivion and a strict separation of the living from the dead. The same interior as presented in the frozen miniature is installed in the exhibition space in full scale. After a color photograph has been taken from the setup the whole interior is dismantled again. Exactly the same installation is replicated in precise detail, except that the whole installation is flawlessly white. The form/volume and material is there, but the spirit is gone. In the DMT exhibition, the color photograph is projected on the three-dimensional screen (constituted by the white interior). Either it fades in and out—or it moves slowly, almost unremarkably, so that the white volumes do not correspond with the color image anymore. Here successive oblivion is represented.5

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Next comes the afterlife in the realm of the living, no oblivion, no separation of living and dead. In this installation, the objects from “Breton’s interior” are installed above the audience’s heads. Hung up on the ceiling, they move due to a slight breeze (ventilator). Some objects like metal or wood and also paper produce sound when they touch each other. The light is placed at angles so that the objects cast shadows on the floor. The audience moves under the installation in the midst of shadows.6 The third installation of SECTION 2 is “No concept of afterlife, total absence, immediate oblivion.” We imagine it to be a very radical nothingness: the floor is covered with a layer of sand (color to be determined—I propose white or black), strongly lit, almost blinding. One craves for sunglasses. When the audience walks over this surface they leave footprints, which are wiped out (printed over) by the visitors following them. It could be decided to leave traces over traces—or to smoothen the sand every day.7

Ad c: SECTION 3: death ends (remembering, forgetting, commemorating)

The death of others ends with one’s own death or disappearance. Before leaving the exhibition, a guard asks the visitor to stand against the white wall. With charcoal he/she draws the contours of the visitor on the wall and notes the date and first name of the visitor next to it. The body of “the audience” is gone, its traces remain. Time is caught in the successive growth of the mural drawing. At the opening of the exhibition, the walls are virgin, at the end they are black. This is the only part of the exhibition that touches on the architectural givens of the building as the walls of the actual exhibition hall are used as support.

On 20 and 21 October 2014, the same group of researchers met with me in Copenhagen to discuss the DMT exhibition based on my proposal. I brought image material for the “Below Zero” installation, for the white living room environment functioning as a three-dimensional projection screen, the traces-on-the-floor installation, the reflecting oil pool, etc. My intention was to discuss my various suggestions for each section of the exhibition and then to make a choice together. Within these two days we agreed on a small-scale “Below Zero” installation for the “Death occurs” section, and we opted for the white interior with the color projection fading in and out (strict separation of the realms of the living and the dead) and the oil pool with objects hanging from the ceiling at different heights (no separation of the living and the dead) for the afterlife section. We only disagreed on the subsection of “No concept of an afterlife.” Nothingness is impossible to imagine and even worse to create or represent in an exhibition hall with so many installations. Thus, we left this problem unsolved. The last section, “Death ends,” was immediately decided: everybody agreed that the dimension of time would come out quite clearly on the white walls filling up with black silhouettes of visitors over the course of time. We considered some difficulties we would face with the museal institution when wanting to bring in organic material into the exhibition halls. Also, old motor oil would be a no go—with all the detrimental fumes for the audience as well as for the objects. Another problem was the restricted access to the depots of the KHM. We were not sure if it would be possible to use some objects from the collections. I was pressing the researchers to choose objects from the collections that they definitely would want to have on display, but I got no responses and so I stopped considering museal objects as important elements of the DMT exhibition.

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The next working session in Oslo at the KHM would include measuring the exhibition hall and possibly making some Bauproben (set rehearsals) in the space. The Danish researchers would report on the outcome of our session to the group in Aarhus and send me some feedback. At this stage, we had still not been allocated which space of the museum was to be used for the DMT exhibition. Usually I do not even start thinking about an exhibition design if I have not seen the space and gotten plans of it. On 26 February 2015, I received the research team’s comments on my design proposal.

In general, the team likes the proposed design. However, we have some comments and ideas for further developments:   1. The possibility of “augmentation” by the use of digital/mobile devices: using augmented reality embedded into the exhibition space gives us the possibility for getting the dead into the exhibition (ghosts, spirits . . . ), for adding new layers of information invisible to the eye, but visible through digital media (or maybe even analog devices such as sound, light, bursts of air . . . (A[ugmented]R[eality] is not necessarily digital).   2. Solution for the Emptiness room: Anders Emil knows people working with soundless spaces: spaces working with concrete spaces void of any sounds by the use of antiphase sound technology, meaning that there are no walls keeping the sound out, but the use of sound technology creates a spot in space were you can hear no sounds.   3. Solutions for the dead body at the exhibition entrance. This may be made more concrete, e.g., by making this a covered corpse on an ambulance stretcher signaling that death has just occurred.   4. Solutions for the frozen room: Given that we are not convinced that the frozen room produces associations to “a frozen moment,” the room may be transformed into an abandoned room filled with associative marks and traces indicating that what is missing from this room is a presence—someone is absent or has not returned after going away. Traces like an unfinished letter on the table, a newspaper dated prior to the present day, old milk in a glass, a half-empty cup of coffee, letters, papers, commercials stuffed under the door, a half-knitted sweater, or depending on the time of the exhibition: seasonal decorations out of sync like Christmas decoration at summer, a phone occasionally ringing, maybe even an answering machine with friends putting concerned messages on it (“Please answer, this is the 10th time I’m calling . . .”), the sound of someone knocking at the door, the sense of an unheated home, visual projections of a shadow walking through the room, so faint so the audience may be in doubt whether there actually was a shadow or just something they imagine. The various objects in the room may be replicated in the “Waste/garbage” room.   5. The waste/garbage space may be embedded with a grave/gravestone—not just to illustrate that burial and practices of commemoration is part of death, but to indicate that death leaves a void that is present in the lacking name on the gravestone: the deceased’s name is there, but there’s still space for the still living husband/wife: somebody is left behind—and an important aspect of the exhibition is the audience mirroring themselves in being left behind (see Sørensen 2010).   6. The oil pool. The team finds it interesting, aesthetically intriguing: the idea of mirrors and slowness. However, it is also quite abstract and the question

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is what do we want to tell the audience with it, what are the oil pool’s creative, associative elements producing effects that stimulate reflections and affective relations? How is the audience’s imagination stimulated?   7. People should be able to bring their own deceased to the exhibition: ability to upload pictures either on video projected or physical boards.   8. The exhibition may gain from being a little more “messy” as opposed to the sterile and abstract look of the present idea. Even though it is a good idea keeping things simple, some more life should be added (even though it is about death). The exhibition should consist of augmented layers, of the presence of people (represented by sound, lights, movements, concrete relatable objects). Traces and ghosts: the sense of a haunting, a presence, something close yet absent.   9. The team does not support the idea of finding objects for the exhibition (solely) in the museum magazines. Objects should be something that the audience can relate to and may not be too exotic in time or origin. It is important that the team will be consulted when it comes to introducing concrete (ethnographic) objects into the exhibition space: they should relate to the actual research projects of DMT. 10. There is a need to reflect upon the connection between the exhibition, the research projects, and research processes: how do we exhibit the process of asking questions, creating mistakes, being in doubt when performing research: the flaws and inconsistencies in our research, in our theories, our empirical data, our analysis—which has been an important part of the design workshop and the documentation on our website (which Peter should get up and running again!). What are the connections between the projects as such, the exhibition, a dynamic website, various augmenting features (inside the exhibition, in the surrounding museum, etc.) and the exhibition catalog and end publication?

With these comments on my mind, I met Peter in Oslo in March 2015 at the KHM. We went to see our exhibition hall and discovered that it was tiny. All our concepts of our imaginary exhibition on death, materiality, and the origin of time collapsed. It was impossible to put three installations into this space. I had mistakenly imagined the space three times as large. Peter and I agreed to discard all our previous ideas as unworkable. On seeing the site, Rane Willerslev also agreed that we would have to change our plans. I spent a long time in the exhibition hall, this space, which we had neglected to give enough attention to. But what now? I had to come up with something, and fast. Of all the ideas and images produced and discussed I needed to create a condensed artifact. I told Peter that we ought to make one single installation, in which all the previously elaborated ideas would be encompassed. And so, the idea of a “wave of materiality” arose. In May 2015, I circulated this paper among the DMT participants:

Exhibition setup/DMT for Oslo

Title of exhibition? Duration? (Opening & closing dates) Vernissage date & hour?

status quo 22 May 2015

The exhibition is staged in two rooms. The first is a large hall followed by a smaller room (see ground plan).

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This dichotomy is used in the sense that one room is housing all the objects on display, whereas the second one plays on the physical presence of the visitors (devoid of objects). The cornucopia of objects in the first hall stands in for human physical existence (finally also the human being only exists as material entity)—“things” are to be seen as actors on stage. And this is their plot in a nutshell: 1. Before death occurs: realm of the living—facing and being surrounded by “stuff” 2. Moment of crisis: death occurs 3. Dealing with death: a: no afterlife/immediate oblivion b: strict division realm death/life—successive oblivion c: no division realm death/life—no oblivion

Figure 14.25.  Plan and side view of the DMT exhibition, Alexandra Schüssler, 2015.

Instead of three (or more) different installations (as discussed during the last year), the first room will consist only of one global installation: a “wave” of materiality. The following parameters are considered in the design to create meaning: 1. Longitudinal axis of the space 2. Spatial height 3. Movement of visitor in only one direction (no return) 4. Spatiotemporal continuum 4. Elements inherent to museums (plinths, light, amassment of objects, opposition of architectural given and alien element brought into spatial structure) are used for telling the narrative 6. Passing time

In the hall that is to be entered from the staircase through the “arena” of the museum, an enormous wave of “stuff” is installed: it occupies the entire surface except gangways along the walls for the visitors to walk. The material is posed directly on the floor, so that when the visitor enters the exhibition “things” are at his feet. Coming into the hall the totality of the wave is perceivable at once: objects rising slowly

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from the floor to the ceiling. They are posed on plinths (see the power point presentation I send with this text), which are getting higher and higher. Walking along the longitudinal axis close to the wall, the objects start out displayed at the visitor’s feet, but as he/she continues walking the height of the plinths reaches his/her knees—the hips—the chest—and suddenly they are at eye level. Here the crisis moment is marked: the wave is discontinued. There is a gap: a hole in the rising surface carrying the exhibition items. Either we leave the gap as it is or we drop objects from about 170 centimeters in height on the floor and let them burst, leaving the debris on the ground. In the back of the hall, the wave continues to rise. But the visitor has no perspective from above on the items anymore—he/she looks at them from below. First through panes of regular glass, but successively the glass carrying the objects becomes more and more opaque. The further the visitors walk to the back of the hall the less clearly they can see the objects. They perceive only contours of them on the underside of the glass, and further on the objects cast shadows on the walls. At the very end of the installation the objects are posed high up under the ceiling on mirrors, which cast sharp and blurred shadows on the actual walls (see power point presentation that comes with this paper) of the exhibition hall. Mirror is not translucent—the objects now cannot be perceived at all from below—only their shadows appear on the walls. Finally, the visitor leaves the exhibition through the second small room, where he/she is asked to stand against the wall and the contours of his/her body (& date & name) are drawn onto the wall. The room is painted with blackboard paint. It is black and tidy at the beginning of the exhibition and fills up with white lines (& dates & names) as time passes by. To be discussed: Composition of the material wave.

What do we start out with on the floor? Dust, “materia prima,” raw materials that slowly turn into a form? Or:

Objects that relate directly to our daily life experience? Do we try to “catch” life with our selection of objects? That would mean to also include organic material into the installation—a bit like a Daniel Spoerri tableau, but not limited to a table with remains of a feast. Rather there should be living plants, items from contemporary life (toothbrushes, cosmetic items, smart phones, the daily newspaper with the accurate date—not presented as collections, but rather as jumble that looks like the material possession of a subject (several subjects).

The Beautiful Exhibition That Was With all these unanswered questions on our minds, Peter Bjerregaard and I expected to find answers to our concerns during the process of creating. We could not wait to start installing the exhibition, as we knew that in order to come up with solutions we would have to start making the display. Instead of discussing the nature of the potential objects on show over and over again, we were convinced that finally it would be the objects actually available in Oslo (new, used,

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collected, lost and found, thrown away and reused, etc.) that should dictate what we would be able to exhibit. We intended to be playful and experimental when selecting and arranging the items. My big hope was that DMT researchers from Oslo, but also from Denmark, would support the installation process with practical help, but also with thoughts on how their research findings were contained within the exhibition.

Fieldwork and Collecting at the Salvation Army In May 2017 I set off for Oslo just for one day. A meeting with Fretex, the Salvation Army in Norway, was scheduled. After having presented our plans for the upcoming DMT exhibition, Peter Bjerregaard, a photographer from KHM, and I were taken to the general object reception of Fretex Oslo. Continuously, cars and trucks delivered things: furniture, artworks, kitchenware, porcelain and glass, home decor, sports equipment, toys, books, DVDs, and CDs. This myriad of things contained our potential exhibit. Three months later I spent my first day at Fretex starting our collection for the exhibition, which by then even had a title. Letting Go was the name of the child yet to be born. I figured out that the things delivered at Fretex were brought in by individuals, who wanted to get rid of items they had at home, or they had recently inherited, and had no use for any longer. But the large Fretex trucks also delivered entire interiors of apartments or houses from deceased people, whose relatives made a call to Fretex to empty out the residencies. I realized that I was surrounded by an amassment of leftovers. This material world consisted of abandoned stuff that nobody seemed to need or want. Owners had let go of it. Here at Fretex plates, pots and pans, cutlery and necklaces, watches, toys and glasses, vases and shoes, clothes and chairs, lamps and cell phones, and anything else you could imagine to be somebody’s possession had arrived in a limbo between life and death. Things were inserted into a new order—first object categories, then location of Fretex branch stores where they should be resold, and finally color. This reordering was part of an attempt to give them a chance for a second life. Trying to go native, as anthropologists would have it, in the process chain at Fretex, I realized that my relation to the stuff arriving there was different from that of the Fretex workers. Instead of taking on a pragmatic attitude, recognizing the pecuniary value in things, I tried to sense the ties the former owners had to these objects passing through my hands. I could literally see and feel the personhood and identity of the subject, whose former belongings I was unpacking from cardboard boxes. There was, for example, this person who must have had Dutch origins or a fascination with items of popular culture from Holland. I unwrapped numerous miniatures manufactured in Delft blue, a windmill on an enamel plate, a commemoration board for the Afsluitdijk, a couple of teacups referring to places in the Netherlands, and much more. In another set of cardboard boxes I found souvenirs from the former owner’s travel destinations: a wooden African sculpture, small camels made out of white and yellow metal, a nicely painted porcelain Buddha, a miniature menorah, and even wooden boxes from the Viennese hotel Sacher to transport their famous chocolate cakes. Another delivery of boxes contained blue Danish and Norwegian Christmas plates covering the time span of

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three decades. I had the strong impression of facing these people’s portraits when handling their former belongings, their ties to the material world. I started to collect such portraits like death masks, and at the same time I created some imaginary ones. I composed negative casts of people whom I had never known, who probably never existed, by picking singular items from different boxes and object categories. In this way I made up material ties to fictional characters. I have spent days unpacking and packing material remains of people in the form of their material belongings. Striking was the relatively large amount of unused items—objects in their original packaging or still with a price label attached to them. All of these were also added to my collection for the exhibition.

Composing the Exhibition Back at the museum, I transported green plastic boxes full of Fretex stuff into the exhibition space and started to spread out everything on tables. I needed to see what we had collected. Handling specific objects several times, I started to order them following different logics: functionality, massiveness, color, époque, part of ensemble, etc. Having the totality of the installation constantly on my mind, I kept on manipulating the objects, washing them, disentangling jewelry for hours, bringing them from one table to another, arranging and rearranging the items. To carry on our strategy of reduction we dismissed the idea of getting other things than what we received from Fretex: no dust, no raw materials, no organic materials like plants, etc. All the unused consumer goods that we partly got in large numbers were laid out on the floor at the very beginning of the installation. We considered it to be conceptually coherent to start with objects from Fretex that have never been inserted into social life, that have been thrown into the world, but never used by anyone. It is remarkable that one of the ideas in the final paper on the display design did not get lost. There I wrote that the items on the floor should not be presented as collections, but “rather as jumble that looks like the material possession of a subject (several subjects).” This idea has been materialized in the middle part of the installation. Two weeks before the opening, steel frames and glass panes in various opacities were delivered to the museum. The steel frames were to carry the objects resting on glass panes. The visitors should get the possibility to see the objects from below through transparent glass that with each row of plinths successively got more opaque. After having put together the frames, I had to start the object installation from top-down, as once installed, I could no longer access the middle field of our “wave of materiality.” From my Fretex collection I chose only objects with an air of spirituality—in my mind they should come across like ghosts or spirits. I chose only items in white, silver, or transparent glass and thereby made a clear reference to an installation work that had been created (nota bene not by myself) in the “Containing and Transporting Soul” workshop mentioned earlier. I posed objects on the most opaque glass panes on the highest plinths, considering not only the shadows they would cast on the walls, but also the appearance of the items when standing as a viewer under the glass looking at the items from below. As I worked my way down the objects became more and more solid in materiality; during the working process, I would describe the aesthetics of these items

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Figures 14.26–14.31.  DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017–29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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Figure 14.32.  DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017–29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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Figure 14.33.  DMT exhibition Letting Go at KHM Oslo, 29 September 2017–29 July 2018, Alexandra Schüssler, 2017.

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as increasingly ordinary. When arranging the things from Fretex I constantly kept suggesting to myself that I had to work like a sculptor, who is taking a cast of a person—creating a negative from the body. My material would not be plaster, but stuff. The stuff is still there—unchanged—whereas the person is gone, maybe for good. In this sense I heavily invested in my relationship with the ones gone—with those I had lost myself and with those who used to own the objects—not only because they remain a vital part of my and all our lives, but because they are necessary for the flow of time (Seebach and Willerslev, this volume). I intended to transfer my investment to the visitor to the exhibition, who visually would have to travel through this sea of things layered with a patina, arranged in a way to mirror different personas intersecting and flowing into each other. But not only the patina of things, the traces of them being used, should make time perceivable for the human eye, but also the distance to and visibility of objects. Starting to walk down the exhibition hall, things that have never been in use were at the feet of the beholder. The longer or more intensively objects would have functioned within social structures, the closer they would rise to the visitor walking along the sides of the ever-rising plinths. At that time I started to doubt if visitors to the exhibition would be able to attribute meaning to the installation. In the course of time, I had successively reduced and eliminated elements that did not fit into the overall idea and image. It had even been said that the exhibition became more and more abstract, but I would claim that the plans reflected the essentials of the topic. In this rigorous reduction, I predicted that the excessive number of items on display would deploy an energy that could not be denied even if, intellectually, it was not immediately graspable for everyone what the installation was to convey. But even if they would not understand all the ideas presented in the installation, visitors were to experience what the display was about. In my view, this approach should have fully satisfied the Danish research group’s demand: “We want the exhibition to address the senses rather than being intellectual or didactic.” Taking an overview of the “wave of materiality” indeed turned out to be overwhelming for visitors. Like in a painting, everything was there to be perceived synchronically, but in order to make sense of it one had to travel with one’s eyes and mind in it. Once we had started to create it, I was positive that the “wave of materiality” would constitute a common space for all collaborators involved in the making of the DMT exhibition, be it technicians and metal experts, conservators, photographers, graphic designers, museum educators, designers, artists, and academics. All the DMT researchers contributed one or more objects for the display, which we integrated into the installation without hierarchical difference. In order for visitors to identify the objects from the researchers, for example, an Indian mask, a canoe prow, and a fish from Papua New Guinea, a Danish hourglass for pulse measurements, a collection of agendas, a pair of fieldwork shoes, stools from Uganda, and so forth, we made a booklet with photos and drawings describing the loaned objects so that the visitor could go and search for them in the amassment of things presented in Letting Go. This exhibition guide also contained texts from all the DMT researchers, in which they presented the positions of their specific research in relation to Letting Go. As the visitor approached the rear of the hall, the exhibited items would rise on the plinths, which successively became higher, and thereby got closer and closer until they reached eye level. That was the crucial point where perception changed. At exactly this point “death occurred.” From now on the perception of things could

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not be the same as it was before. The visitor’s view on the exhibition turned upside down. First the objects on display were visible from below through ordinary glass. Successively the glass got more and more milky and the contours of the objects faded out. This display arrangement was to hint at the experience that after death we remember a person as long as there are material ties to the deceased.

Things That Comfort Us By now, it should have become clear to the visitor that this exhibition played on the perception of time focusing on materiality. To emphasize this, there followed another smaller room that was also part of Letting Go. It was totally devoid of objects. The walls were painted with chalkboard paint. White chalk was at the visitors’ disposal. Employing the materiality of their own bodies, visitors to the exhibition were to stand against the wall, and a guard or a fellow visitor was to draw the contours of the visitor’s body on the wall and to mark it with the correct date. The room was clean black at the opening and should become more and more white as time went by. The visitor, who was physically present in the exhibition then, would disappear—he/she was only to leave a physical trace reminding other visitors of forensic drawings of contours around dead bodies. Human bodily death and material decay was maybe too drastically represented in this room. Most visitors had the tendency to transfer the visually strong white lines delimiting an absent body into something cute: eyes with long lashes, a smile, a hug, different hairstyles, some little flowers, names or a funny hat. All these elements helped to chase away the eeriness of performing one’s own disappearance. They are interventions in the realm of the symbolic just as Letting Go is in itself. Coherent to the DMT research project, this exhibition did not seek to explain the mysteries of death, but rather the relation of death to materiality and time. Manipulating materiality and time as performed in Letting Go follows the aim of coping with the fearsome existential challenges that death poses. In this respect the exhibition was to function as a model to be applied in a world beyond the museal context—a blueprint for a possible path to be comforted for being toward death.

Alexandra Schüssler has studied sculpture at the Académie royale des beaux-arts de Bruxelles and scenography and costume design at the Academy of Performing Arts (DAMU) in Prague. In 2006, she defended her PhD dissertation in cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, which won the Praemium Erasmianum in 2007. After working as a lecturer, curator, exhibition designer, and scenographer in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Geneva, she currently is codirector of the Poster Collection of the City of Basel, where she also teaches at the School of Design. Her research interests are focused on performing theory in exhibition displays and the interdisciplinary crossover between anthropology and the arts.

Notes  1. E-mails, reports, and proposals that are presented in this text have been edited for grammar and spelling, in order to make the reading experience easier.   2. Set rehearsal.

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 3. Luder was an exhibition created for the Poster Collection of Basel in 2012. It was on the representation of women on posters in relation to identity constructions of women on dating sites (see http://www.sfgbasel.ch/ausstellungsraum/luder-2012/).   4. André Breton was a writer and poet, best known as the founder of surrealism. In his apartment in Paris he kept his collection consisting of 5,300 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, books, photographs, popular art, Oceanic art, African art, drawings, sculptures.   5. With the intention to stimulate a debate with the scientific researchers, I formulated a number of alternative propositions. I present them here for the sake of completion. Proposition 2: A 2.5-meter-high corridor with two white screens (milk glass panes) is set up longitudinally to the ground plan of the exhibition hall. The audience passes through this corridor. Behind the walls a large spectrum of material culture (“Breton’s interior”) is installed. The shadows/silhouettes change according to the distance from the objects to the milk glass pane, the position of the light sources, and the materiality (translucency) of the items on show. This is a Platonic take on the subject. When memory fades out the contours of the shadows become blurred (the objects far away from glass panes).   The living cannot access the world beyond—they only get a direct glimpse at the installation in the very beginning and the end of the corridor. Alternatively there could be sections in the glass pane that are lower than 2.5 meters so that even in the middle of the corridor there could be views into the world beyond. Or we could think of peepholes at different heights cut into the screens. Proposition 3: An installation of “Breton’s interior” divided into object categories in a hierarchical order. There are four sections that touch each other or even flow successively from one into the next one: A. Garbage/waste material (even the remains from constructing the exhibit) B. Consumer goods, cargo, everyday items, plants, flowers, etc. C. Personal collections: books, music, cutlery—the same items in large number D. Museum collection objects   The objects are installed in a way that the audience can ambulate freely in sections 1 and 2, but section 3 is set up in a way that access becomes difficult and section 4 is nonaccessible.   Light situation: As sections 3 and 4 items are imbued with the soul of the collector, they are presented in shadow, whereas the consumer goods, everyday items, and garbage are exhibited in full light. There is a definite boarder (a strict line) between shadow and light sections, which runs through the installation exactly at the spot where access gets impossible.   6. The subsection in which the afterlife is in the realm of the living, with no oblivion, no separation of living and dead, had only one alternative proposition: the object categories mentioned before are hung from the ceiling in different heights. For the audience it is impossible to walk under them as there is a pool filled with motor oil right under the items, which are floating in the air. Motor oil has a surface that is absolutely smooth and reflects like a mirror, but the big advantage to a mirror is that the surface can be set in motion. The pool is set upon a surface that slightly sinks in when a visitor steps close. The container of the oil moves slightly and the surface starts to be wavy, which changes the reflections.   7. The alternative propositions for this section were: Proposition 2: The objects from “Breton’s interior” are present only by traces on the floor. Dust mixed with glue is applied to the floor, leaving white prints where the objects were placed. The objects are gone; only the prints, their contours, are left. A thin layer of dust covers the whole floor, and when the audience passes through, the dust on the floor shifts, making certain parts of the floor visible and covering others. Proposition 3: A rapidly cut film of decay of flowers is projected on a wall constructed of dead vegetal material. The flowers could also be laid out on the floor.

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References Bjerregaard, Peter, and Rane Willerslev. 2016. “Assembling the ‘Spark of Life.’” In Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience, ed. Peter Bjerregaard, Anders E. Rassmusen, and Tim F. Sorensen, 221–38. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Meinert, Lotte, and Susan Reynolds Whyte. 2013. “Creating the New Times: Reburials after War in Northern Uganda.” In Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and Ritual, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev, 175–94. London: Routledge. Romano, Claude. 2009. Event and World. New York: Fordham University Press. Sørensen, Tim Flohr. 2010. “A Saturated Void: Anticipating and Preparing Presence in Contemporary Danish Cemetery Culture.” In An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss, ed. Mikkel Bille, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, 115–30. New York: Springer.

Index

A absence, 80, 189, 269–70, 273, 275 of the dead, 168 of land, 176 of lineages, 166–67 presence of, 168 of time, 47 “Accumulation and Destruction” (design experiment), 254, 261–63, 265 afterlife, 2–5, 7, 9, 33–34, 48–49, 54, 100, 123, 138, 140, 202, 269–70, 273–75, 278, 287n6 “afterlife beliefs,” 71 eternal, 71 agency, 87, 196, 269 of the dead, 8, 163, 268–69 of objects, 263 of the living, 78 symbols of, 140 Alaska, 7, 19, 124–30, 139, 141n1 allocation, 189 alterity, 8, 166, 170–71, 181 Amazonia, 63, 167, 169, 171, 183n5 Amerindian ethnographies, 8 peoples, 166 sociocosmologies, 167–68 anatomical collection, 203–4, 206–8, 210, 215n2 Anatomical Institute (University of Oslo, Norway), 9, 203–7, 211, 213–14, 215n1 ancestor(s), 4, 6, 24–26, 57, 67, 83–85, 87n3, 87n7, 111–12, 115, 118, 120–21, 130, 138, 145–46, 153–54, 157, 161–63, 167, 172, 210, 235, 239, 241 becoming an, 113 offerings to, 15, 119 rebirth of, 109–10, 132, 245 relationship with, 79, 149 spirits of, 19, 76, 86, 126 transport of, 77–78, 80 world of, 75, 84, 108, 116–19, 149, 156 worship of, 108 ancestral world, 75, 108, 111, 113, 115, 118–21, 153 animism, 7, 46, 123 anthropologize, 84 antiquity, 26, 33, 46–47

archaeology, 1, 7, 39, 46, 57, 173, 202, 204–5, 209, 261–64, 268 ethnoarchaeology, 128 Arctic, 2, 7, 123–24, 127–31, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 141n2 Assmann, Jan, 68 atmosphere, 122, 265, 273–74 Atum, 58, 63, 69–70 B Bacchus, 50, 54 Dionysus-Bacchus, 49–50, 52 Barad, Karen, 90, 100, 103n8 bear, 24, 113, 117, 127, 129, 136 being-in-the-world, 16, 155, 189, 192, 234 bereaved parents, 9, 187–90, 192–93, 199, 200, 200n1 Bhabha, Homi on border thinking, 78 Bod (Nobody Owens), 3–4 body, 4, 9, 47, 75–76, 78, 82, 94, 97–99, 102, 107, 110, 115, 117–18, 125, 169, 175, 180, 183n4, 202, 210, 220, 233, 235–37, 243–47, 261, 272, 275, 279, 285–86 body-soul, 169 dead, 109–13, 115–16, 126, 128, 130–34, 136–38, 269, 273–74, 276 destruction of, 114 limits of, 86 parts of, 207 physical, 7, 48, 115, 193, 208, 235 preserving the, 57 sickness of the, 97, 101 transformation of, 67 See also death: suit Book of the Dead, 30, 51, 58, 65, 69 Brazil(ian), 8, 166–69, 174 Candeias River, 171, 173 Bremmer, Jan, 36, 46–52 Bubandt, Nils, 78, 86 burial, 75, 127–31, 133, 134, 137, 182n2, 203, 205–7, 211–12, 214, 276 customs, 137 Egyptian, 57, 59 multiple, 118 places of, 8, 28, 173, 189

290 • Index

practices, 123, 126, 128 rituals, 2, 213 C cairn, 8, 28, 131, 145, 150 calendar, 22, 58–59, 62, 151, 189, 196 calendar of lucky and unlucky days (see hemerology) Canetti, Elias, 19–20 Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela, 166, 168 Catholicism, 175 Catholic(s), 175, 243 saints, 8 cell phone, 2, 9, 83, 241–43, 245, 247, 280 Christianity, 22, 51, 226, 235–36, 269 Chukchi (people), 7–8, 19, 107–116, 118, 121, 139, 245, 269 mythology, 113 Clastres, Pierre, 168, 171 cleansing, 47, 117 continuing bonds paradigm, 187, 199 cosmogony, 36 cosmology, 6, 25, 145, 148, 235, 245 curator, 10, 208–9, 253, 261 D danse macabre, 3–4 dead, 18, 26, 36, 41, 74, 132–33, 145, 175–76, 178, 202, 218, 233, 263 dead, the absence of, 168 agency of, 8, 163, 268 apparitions of, 25 attachment to, 16 being, 261, 263–64 belongings of, 166 body of, 7, 107, 110, 112, 115, 137, 269, 273–74, 276, 286 communicating with, 2, 4, 16, 20, 76, 234, 241, 243–45 defeating, 117 depiction of, 21 caring for, 112–13, 126, 130, 134 elimination of, 16, 166 fear of, 8, 110, 126, 166 graves of, 133, 171–72, 183n5, 268 hosts of, 18–19, 23, 26, 28 identity of, 202–3, 245–46 interaction with, 3, 5, 115, 140, 148, 234 the invisible dead, 19 life of, 3, 9, 177, 218, 244–245 literature of, 16, 29–30, 57. See also funerary texts living with, 15, 168, 188, 234 materiality of, 4, 8–9, 19, 76, 128, 167–68, 173, 234, 244 memorialization of, 5, 76, 152, 172, 188–90, 200n1 mourning, 49, 240

names of, 27, 166, 170–71 paradigm of, 187 place of, 79, 136, 148, 160, 167, 168, 170, 175, 179, 235–36, 241–42, 244–45 presence of, 8, 15–16, 26, 82, 138, 168, 171, 174, 234, 237–38, 246 rebirth of, 109 relationship with, 8–9, 28, 79, 84, 139, 149, 162–63, 166, 174, 182, 191, 202–3, 210, 218, 234, 246 remains of, 5–6 separation from, 111, 274–75, 287n6 speaking of, 145 spirit, soul, or shadows of, 20–21, 33, 36, 82, 108, 126, 132, 137, 153, 157, 161, 171, 183n3, 233, 235–38, 240–42, 244–46, 247n4, 257n6, 268–69 summoning, 22 and time, 3, 5–7 time of, 15, 28, 30, 76, 167–68, 181, 218, 234, 236, 246 view of, 9 viewpoint of, 2 world of, 2–4, 8–9, 145, 149, 153, 155, 160–61, 167, 177, 181–82, 202, 209, 213–14, 233–35, 270, 273 see also death; saints; shadow; soul; spirits “The Dead” (short story), 5, 17, 21, 23, 26–27 death, 6, 15–16, 33–35, 38, 46–51, 53–55, 60, 63, 67–69, 71, 74–75, 80, 90, 94–96, 100, 107–10, 114–15, 118, 120, 123, 126, 128, 130–34, 136, 138–40, 149, 155, 159, 161, 163, 166–67, 169–70, 176, 178–80, 183n5, 187–88, 190, 192–95, 197–99, 200n1, 202–3, 205, 212–15, 218–19, 227–29, 229n1, 235–37, 241, 265 awareness of, 1, 5, 138 being-towards (see Heidegger, Martin) cause of, 218 certificate of, 94–95, 102 exhibiting, 10, 253, 263–64, 268–70, 272–78, 280, 285–86 experience of, 2 finality of, 8–9 in the media, 219–20, 227, 229 life after, 2, 8, 34, 173, 202 and materiality, 2–3, 6–7, 10, 123, 136, 140, 181–82, 227, 234, 242, 244–45, 286 mysteries of, 1–2, 286 nature of, 1–2, 5, 9–10, 107, 137, 233, 246–47 penalty, 203, 206 physical, 1, 108, 212 places of, 6, 74, 76–78, 82, 85–86, 126, 131–32, 173 ritualization of, 218–21, 228 rituals of, 15, 128, 220–21, 228, 240, 246 suit, 111–13, 115, 121 and time, 2–3, 5–6, 10, 13, 33–35, 48, 51, 54–55, 57–58, 84–85, 100, 123, 125, 128,

Index • 291

136, 138, 140, 145, 147, 149, 163, 168, 181, 236, 243 tragic, 6 voluntary, 140 Western notions of, 9, 15, 233 world of, 1 “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time”/DMT (research project), 2, 10, 253, 261, 277 exhibition, 253, 266, 268–69, 271–76, 278, 280, 282–85 decapitation, 203, 206, 212 decay, 1, 3, 5, 63, 82–84, 86, 154–55, 159–60, 244, 286 Descola, Philippe, 63 design experiment, 10, 253–54, 261, 264–68, 273 divination, 20, 64, 236–37, 241 Mesopotamian, 62 Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus, 66 dream(s), 2, 4, 30, 48, 85, 96, 109, 125, 235, 242, 244, 264 E Ebola, 3, 6, 90–103 Egypt, ancient, 1, 3, 6, 51, 57–60, 62–71, 269 Egyptian Museum, Cairo, 59 Endless Agony (photograph), 218, 221–25, 227 ethnography, 7–8, 19, 25, 77, 87n5, 110, 123–24, 128, 130–31, 137–39, 141n1, 141n2, 149, 152, 160–61, 166–69, 181, 203, 219, 244, 270, 274, 277 Eurydice, 33, 35–41, 47–48, 53–55 Evens, Terence M. S., 63 exhibition, 2–3, 9–10, 208, 253, 261–62, 265–66, 268–86, 287n3, 287n5 experience, 20, 49, 54–55, 67, 77, 84, 87, 91, 97– 102, 117, 119, 121, 125, 138, 175, 212, 246–47, 261, 265, 285 of death, 3, 6, 33, 109, 145, 188–89, 234–35, 245, 269, 272–73, 286 everyday, 60, 84, 194, 279 sensory, 79, 83, 273 of time, 1, 3, 5, 25, 34, 61, 85, 91, 107–8, 116, 121, 124, 145, 161, 163, 181, 189, 218, 226 F Facebook, 188, 221, 269 Fausto, Carlos, 169 Federn, Walter, 70 fertility, 5–6, 33–34, 37, 49–50, 52–55, 59, 195 Finland, 2, 204, 218–19, 221–25 Flaherty, Michael G., 189, 191, 197, 218, 228 forebears, 171–79, 181 fortune, 150, 152–54, 159, 161 Foucault, Michel, 77, 80, 87n5, 226 Frazer, James, 22 frequency, 189, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 171, 264 funerary texts, 57

future(s), 3, 5–6, 8, 16–17, 22, 25–26, 29, 74–75, 77, 84, 86, 90–91, 93, 98–100, 102, 109, 113, 115–16, 121, 123, 125–26, 130–31, 138, 145, 161–63, 167, 187, 190–93, 196–98, 214, 221, 225 “future telling, 118 G Gaiman, Neil, 2–4 genealogy, 33, 36, 125, 167 genealogical memories, 166 ghost, 2–4, 22, 27, 30, 76, 133, 244–45, 269–70, 276–77, 281 ghost stories, 21 God(s), 6, 33–38, 40, 42, 44, 48–53, 55, 57–65, 67–71, 98, 167–69, 178–79, 205, 223–24, 235–36, 245 grave, 4, 18, 28, 38, 52, 57, 76, 78, 82, 120, 130–31, 133–35, 137–38, 170–72, 182n2, 183n5, 191, 195, 197, 199, 204–5, 208, 212–13, 220, 237, 244, 269, 276 goods, 127, 129, 134 plundering, 204 graveyard, 3–4, 206, 214 Graveyard Book, The, 2–3, 5 Great Irish Famine, the, 27–28 grief, 2, 5, 8–9, 35, 46, 48, 54, 94, 96, 99, 128, 187– 90, 192, 199, 200n1, 228, 237, 240–41, 269 grief work, 187–89, 193, 200n1 modes of grief, 194 H Hætta, Aslak Jacobsen, 9, 202–8, 210–14 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 191, 233, 247n3 on “being-towards death,” 8, 161, 233 Heliopolis, 64–65 hell, 36, 42, 49, 137 hemerology, 58–63, 65 Hertz, Robert, 115, 118, 182, 202–3, 209–12, 214 Horus, 67–69 human remains, 4–6, 94, 118, 126, 128, 172, 203–5, 208–15, 268 Human Security, 1, 6, 90–91 I identity, 4, 9, 18, 37, 70–71, 116, 118, 200n1, 202, 209–13, 246, 264, 280, 287n3 cultural, 139–40, 211 national, 223, 225, 229 immortality, 2, 7, 9, 218–19, 221, 227–29 indigenous, 7–8, 15, 107–8, 123–24, 139–40, 141n2, 166–69, 171, 173–74, 177, 181, 203–4, 209–11, 214–15 Instagram, 188 International Council of Museum’s Code of Ethics, 209 intra-action, 90, 98, 103n8 iñua, 123, 125–26, 128, 138–40 Inuit, 7, 9, 123–24, 126, 128, 130–34, 136–39, 141n1, 206, 208

292 • Index

invisible, 7, 9, 84, 86, 102, 110, 145, 152–56, 159–60, 162, 169, 181, 233–36, 241–46, 276 dead, 19–20 J Joyce, James, 5, 16–21, 23, 26–30 K Kamchatka, 7, 107–8 Karitiana, 8, 166, 168–74, 181–82, 182n1, 183n5 Kautokeino Rebellion, 9, 203, 205, 208, 212, 213, 215 keeping present, 194, 196 ke’let, 110–13, 115–18 kheper (‘becoming’), 64–67 kinship, 25, 79, 124, 145, 148, 153, 167, 179–80 Kwakwaka’wakw/ Kwakiutl, 23–26 and the Winter Ceremonial, 23–26, 30 KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), 6, 74–77, 79, 81, 83, 87n2. See also South Africa L land, 17, 22, 30n1, 31n4, 59, 131–32, 145–46, 148–49, 153, 156, 162–63, 168, 171, 174–77, 179–81, 210–11, 213 landscape, 8, 62, 86, 90, 123–24, 133, 138, 145–49, 152–53, 155–56, 169, 173, 178, 181, 262 Legend of Orpheus, 6, 33–36, 46, 48, 51, 53–55 letting go, 187, 191 Letting Go (exhibition), 2, 10, 280, 282–86. See also “Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time”/DMT: exhibition Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 172 Liberia, 6, 90–94, 96–100, 102–3, 103n1, 103n6 life, 1–3, 5–7, 9, 15–16, 20, 29, 33–34, 38, 41–42, 47–51, 53, 59–60, 62, 68, 77, 83, 86–87, 92–93, 98–101, 107, 109–11, 113, 121, 123–24, 128, 131, 134, 137–40, 145, 155, 159, 163, 166, 168, 180–82, 187, 190–99, 202, 208, 218–21, 223–24, 226–29, 233–36, 240, 242, 244–45, 247n5, 263–65, 269, 277–81 after death, 2, 8, 173, 192, 234 circulation of, 115 of the dead, 3 eternal, 54 force, 118 material, 6, 234, 245 meaning of, 1, 140 mysteries of, 1 regeneration of, 5–6 ritual, 108 spark of, 264 M materiality, 16, 20, 22, 29, 63–65, 70, 76, 78, 84, 86–87, 100–1, 112, 123–24, 138–40, 147–49, 153–56, 159–63, 166–68, 172–73, 176, 178, 188, 190, 194, 235, 265, 286, 287n5 changing, 90

of the dead, 4, 6, 128, 132, 179–80, 234, 238, 241 and death, 1–4, 6–9, 19, 57, 71, 75–77, 81, 124, 136, 145, 181–82, 198, 233, 235, 237, 242, 244–46, 253, 268, 277 and time, 1–3, 10, 57, 76, 90–91, 102, 107, 136, 145, 166, 181, 189, 218, 233–34, 253, 268, 277 wave of, 277–79, 281, 285 media, 1, 9, 15, 211, 218–29 social, 198–99, 220–21, 226–28 medicine, 78–79, 81, 85 memorial(s), 4, 76, 188, 190, 192, 195–96, 199, 200n1, 220, 227, 269 rituals, 220 memory, 20, 23, 30, 35, 37, 74, 76, 79, 85, 125, 166, 188, 199, 223, 228, 244, 269, 287n5 cultural, 16, 212, 221, 228 of the dead, 172 historical, 28 online, 188–90, 192, 194–97 oral, 78 social, 212–13 metaphysics, 152, 155, 159–60, 162 mimesis, 263 Mindet.dk, 9, 188–200 modernity, 5, 15–16, 78 Mongolia, 2, 8, 145–48, 150, 162, 164n3 Monrovia, 6, 91, 99 moon, 35, 51, 53, 64–65, 67, 69, 108, 111, 132, 134, 139 mortuary literature, 2, 6, 57 ritual, 5–7, 15, 67, 107–8, 111, 115, 118–19, 121, 203, 212, 214, 234 mummy, 6, 57, 66–68, 70, 269 museum, 203–5, 208–11, 214, 215n2, 253, 261–66, 277–78, 287n5 British, 67 Cairo, 59 Kautokeino Open Air, 208 Moesgaard, 253 objects, 203 of Cultural History (Oslo), 2, 253, 269, 273–74, 276, 281, 285 Myllylä, Mika, 9, 218–19, 221–29 myth(s), 5, 25–26, 42, 47, 49, 57–59, 61–63, 65–71, 162, 167, 219, 225, 235, 241 mythology, 2, 26–27, 30, 36, 42, 46, 50, 58–71, 113, 234 N name-soul, 108, 115, 120, 126, 130, 132–34 narratives, 8, 31n4, 51, 62, 90, 92, 125, 128, 187–88, 190–91, 193–98, 212, 214, 219, 221, 227–28, 278 cosmological, 33 cultural, 5 mythological, 61

Index • 293

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 211 necropolitics, 74, 79, 83, 86, 87n7 Nile, 59–61, 68 Nobody Owens, 3–4 nontime, 193 North American Arctic, 7, 123–24, 134, 139, 141n2 Norway, 9, 91, 139, 203–6, 208, 210–11, 215, 220, 280 Nyamaan Bridge, 74–75, 77–78, 80, 85–86 O online, 9, 187, 198–99, 221, 226, 229n1 bereavement, 191 memorials, 188–90 ontology, 69, 138 oral memory, 78 Orpheus, 6, 33–55 Orphic Theogony, 6, 33–36, 48–52, 54–55 Orphism, 33–34, 36, 46, 48, 50–52, 54–55 oscillation, 86, 159, 179 between rural and urban areas, 76–77, 79 between time layers, 75, 78, 80 Osiris, 59–61, 67–68, 70 otherness, 28, 84, 166. See also alterity Otto, Ton, 77, 84 Our Lady of the Mountains, 175–79, 181 ovoo, 8, 145–63 P Papua New Guinea, 9, 233–34, 242, 245, 268, 285 parenthood, 9, 188, 190, 193–94 personhood, 4, 71, 86, 123, 202–3, 206, 208, 210–14, 234, 280 Phondwane, 75, 77, 79, 81–82, 85 Plato, 7, 46–49, 52 plot(s), 191, 194–95, 205, 278 pottery, 173 presence, 3, 16, 24–25, 38, 53, 67, 79, 145, 150, 155, 168, 173, 191, 196, 198, 210, 242, 261, 264, 266, 269, 273–74, 276–78 of the dead, 8, 15–16, 28, 30, 74, 76, 80, 82, 85, 166, 168–69, 171, 174, 178, 181, 193, 234, 237–38, 243, 246 making, 187–89, 194–95 R raven, 24, 112–13, 115, 117, 125, 136 reindeer, 7, 107–8, 110–12, 114–15, 118–20, 205 remains (human), 4–6, 94, 118, 126, 128, 172, 203–5, 208–15, 268 repatriation, 9, 203, 207–14 ritual, 5, 25–26, 30, 49, 52–55, 57–58, 62–71, 108, 148–52, 154, 156–58, 168, 177, 191–92, 196–98, 218–19, 226, 236–37, 242 burial or mortuary, 2, 5–7, 15, 107–8, 111, 113–21, 128, 202–3, 206, 209–14, 219–21, 228, 234, 236, 238–41, 246, 268 specialists, 78

ritualization(s), 9, 128, 188, 192, 196–98, 218–21, 226–28, 236 riverscapes, 6, 90, 100–2 S sacrifice, 108 saints, 4, 8, 175–79, 245 Sámi, 9, 19, 139, 202–8, 211–15 Sápmi land, 9, 204 security, 91, 100, 101–2. See also Human Security Seeger, Anthony, 167 sequencing, 189, 195 Seth, 67, 69 shadow, 33, 37–38, 40, 107, 125, 169, 171, 173, 223, 270, 272, 274–76, 279, 281, 287n5 shape-shifting, 116. See also Bear, Raven shamanism, 19, 46, 108, 125–26, 133, 146–53, 155–57, 160, 169–70, 172–73, 181 sherds, 168, 173–74, 181 Siberia, 2, 7–8, 19, 107 “Siberia” (poem), 28 Sirius, 59 skull(s), 9, 120, 202–4, 206–8, 210–15 social identity, 9, 202, 211 Somby, Mons Aslaksen, 9, 202–3, 205–14 soul, 4, 6–8, 10, 18–22, 34–37, 47–48, 53–54, 78, 108–9, 111–12, 115–18, 120, 123, 125, 131–34, 137–40, 157, 169–71, 173, 175, 183n4, 202, 209, 224–25, 261, 268–69, 273–74, 281287n5 name-soul, 125, 130, 132–34 South Africa, 2, 6, 19, 74, 76–77, 80, 85, 220, 268 South America, 2, 8, 168 Lowland South America, 166–69, 181–82 Peoples, 167 space, 15, 19, 23, 36, 76–79, 82–83, 86, 118, 149, 159–61, 188, 192, 198, 218–22, 226, 235–36, 247, 253, 262–63, 265–66, 269–70, 274, 276–78, 281, 285 of the dead, 79–80, 242 -time, 102, 192, 242 and time, 28, 128, 132–33, 160, 181, 235 time-spaces, 115–16, 118–19 spirits, 4, 6–8, 19–22, 25–26, 60, 63, 74–86, 87n3, 110–11, 123, 125–26, 131–32, 134, 138, 145–46, 148–50, 152–57, 159–63, 167–68, 170–71, 173–77, 179–82, 183n3, 233–46, 247n4, 247n5, 247n6, 268, 270, 274, 276, 281. See also ke’let stillborn, 187, 189–90, 193–97 subjunctivity, 192 substitute, 114, 119, 199, 264 succession, 24, 67, 189, 193, 198. See also sequencing sun, 30n1, 36, 38, 41, 52, 59–61, 64–68, 83, 108, 111, 113, 133, 164n3, 169 T Taussig, Michael, 86 technology, 9, 107, 112, 130, 156, 173, 234, 241–43, 276

294 • Index

temporal(ity), 3–6, 16, 57, 71, 76–78, 80, 85–86, 90–91, 100–2, 118, 123, 128, 130, 132, 138, 154, 161–63, 166, 182, 189–91, 193, 218–19, 233–34, 236, 263 of death, 236, 242 order, 22, 25, 28, 145, 160, 190 rupture, 22 temporal categories, 189 tentyk, 118–20 territory, 36, 115, 137, 167–68, 171, 173–77, 181 territoriality, 182 See also land time, 33–36, 41, 48, 54–55, 61, 63, 76, 80, 85–86, 90–91, 100–2, 107, 115, 121, 126, 130, 133–34, 139–40, 154, 160–62, 180–81, 187, 192–93, 196–98, 203, 212, 225–26, 234, 241, 247, 270, 273, 275, 277 ancestral, 118–19 awareness of, 5 circular, 100, 107 conception of, 1, 6, 16, 22–23, 54, 57, 77, 123–25, 128, 131, 253, 261, 286 of the dead, 3, 15–16, 28–30, 166–67, 181, 202, 218, 234–36, 246 and death, 1–3, 5–10, 33–35, 48, 51, 54, 57–58, 84, 125, 128, 138, 140, 145, 147, 149, 163, 168, 172, 175, 178, 181, 189, 221, 240, 243, 286 flow of, 1–3, 5–6, 90, 107, 109, 121, 124, 285 layers of, 74–75, 77 linear, 25, 100, 137 manipulating, 6, 191, 194–95, 197–98 and materiality, 1–3, 10, 57, 140, 166–68, 181, 189, 218, 286

myth and, 26, 58, 62, 67, 70, 167 outside of, 22–23, 25, 30, 47 passing of, 3–4, 84–85, 125, 131, 133, 136, 179, 210, 278–79 reversed, 107–8 of the year, 21 “time work,” 188–89, 194, 228. See also Flaherty, Michael G. Thoth, 60, 67, 69 transformation, 25, 48, 53, 57–58, 65, 67–71, 148–49, 154, 159, 162–63, 169–70, 202–3, 208, 210, 212, 214 Twelve Days of Christmas, 21–22 U umsamo, 76–80, 82–86 V Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 63, 110, 112, 167, 169 W West Africa, 3, 6, 94 White, Hylton, 75–76, 79, 82 whiteness, 9, 79, 233–34, 242, 244–45, 247 witch doctors, 6, 78 X Xukuru, 166, 168, 174–82 Z Zeus, 34–36, 50, 52 Ziziphus mucronata (buffalo thorn), 81, 85 Zulu, 76, 77, 79, 82