Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament

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Crying Shame

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Crying Shame Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament

James M. Wilce

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

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This edition first published 2009 © 2009 James M. Wilce Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of James M. Wilce to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilce, James MacLynn, 1953– Crying shame : metaculture, modernity, and the exaggerated death of lament / James M. Wilce. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–1– 4051– 6992–9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Mourning customs. 2. Laments. 3. Crying. 4. Weepers (Mourners) I. Title. GT3390.W56 393′.9—dc22

2009 2008033461

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/13pt by Graphicraft Limited, Hong Kong Printed in Singapore by C.O.S. Printers Pte Ltd 1

2009

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Preface

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1 Introduction

1

PART I LOCATING LAMENT AS OBJECT Introduction 2 For Crying Out Loud: What Is Lament Anyway? 3 Lament and Emotion 4 Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament

19 21 22 43 57

PART II LOSING LAMENT: MODERNITY AS LOSS Introduction 5 Cultural Amnesia and the Objectification of Lament in Bangladesh 6 Modern Transformations 7 How Shame Spreads in Modernity 8 Crying Backward: Primitivist Representations of Lament

71 73

PART III REVIVING LAMENT: LAMENT AS KEY TROPE OF MODERNITY Introduction 9 Mourning Becomes the Electron’s Age: Lamenting Modernity(ies) 10 Lament’s (Post)Modern Vertigo: Floating in a Deterritorialized Media Sea

76 97 118 139

153 155 156 170

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11 Lament in a Postmodern World of “Revivals” 12 Conclusion

193 215

Notes References Index

222 228 253

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Acknowledgments

An earlier version of chapter 5 appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History (Wilce 2001). Parts of other chapters appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (Wilce 2005). Ideas included in the manuscript were further refined in an article that appeared in Current Anthropology (December 2006), and I thank Ben Orlove, Debbora Battaglia, Steven Feld, William Reddy, Michael Silverstein, Alexander Surralés, Claudia Strauss, Margaret Trawick, and four anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments on that manuscript. Thanks also to the many anonymous reviewers for Blackwell, and to Janet Moth, Rosalie Robertson, and Deirdre Ilkson for their help in editing the current manuscript, and for their constant encouragement. Northern Arizona University has supported my work on lament over the years, starting with an intramural grant to return to Bangladesh in 1996 to study metadiscourses about lament as I completed my first book. That grant also enabled me to gain the expert library research assistance of two excellent graduate assistants – Abbie Uno and Sara Jasper. Abbie and Sara, this has been a long time coming, but thank you so much! And thanks to then Dean (now Vice Provost) Susanna Maxwell for her support. More recently my former graduate student Karin Knudsen has put countless hours into commenting on this manuscript. Thank you, Karin! Thanks to Francis Smiley, Kathy Cruz-Uribe, and George Gumerman for supporting my first research expeditions to Finland, which enabled me to participate in lament for the first time. This book reflects many years of interchange with innumerable scholars and friends. I was privileged to present earlier versions of the ideas in this book to a variety of audiences who helped me clarify my thinking. I received much help from participants at the panel I organized at the Madison South Asia meetings in 1999 on “Genres in Tension and Transformation: The Politics

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and Circulation of Lamentation and Related Forms.” I am particularly indebted to the panel’s discussants, C. M. Naim and Carl Ernst. Later, during the first sabbatical NAU granted me (2001–02), to start this book, I presented summaries of the argument to receptive audiences at Harvard’s Medical Anthropology Seminar, the Anthropology Colloquium at the University of Chicago, and the Anthropology Department at Pomona College. For my 2003 sojourn at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and for many fine interactions with Parisian scholars interested in culture and expressive forms, I thank Daniel Negers and Michel de Fornel. To others who have read and commented on chapters I am extremely indebted. These include Richard Bauman, Lila Abu-Lughod, Steve Feld, Karla Hackstaff, Neill Hadder, Judy Irvine, Deborah Kapchan, David Samuels, Louis Sass, Michael Silverstein, Bruce Sullivan, Greg Urban, and Neil Websdale. At three points in the history of this project, Carl Ernst provided crucial input – in its prehistory when I was his student, at the Madison meetings in 1999, and later when we were together at EHESS in 2003. I ask the forgiveness of other readers whom I might have forgotten. I am deeply indebted to Aili Nenola, Tuomas Rounakari, and especially Pirkko and Ensio Fihlman for welcoming my wife and myself into their lives and into their work with lament in Finland. Finally, to Sarah Wilce, my deepest gratitude. You have seen the vision with me and been a constant encouragement. You have helped me in the transition from observer to participant. Thank you for sharing in it all.

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Preface

I initially encountered spontaneous improvised lament in my first period of ethnographic fieldwork – in Bangladesh (1991–92). Although partially inspired by those experiences, this book is not an ethnography of a particular place at a particular time; it is a critical analysis of representations of many societies across history, combining ethnographic and historical evidence and analysis. But it is also an ethnographic account of a recent sort, an account of postmodernity – a cultural formation that, by definition, involves the deterritorialized circulation of shared cultural elements (websites, ad campaigns, ideas, values). It is a book of culture theory disguised as a good story – the story of lament. I have had a long-term engagement with lament. Unlike others who have only described this cultural performance phenomenon, I have also participated. Whereas many such descriptions imply that local lament traditions are dead or dying, this book tells the story of several putative revivals, as well. It addresses issues important in studies of “world civilizations,” and stands out among texts in that area in focusing on subjective aspects of culture, in tracing one single theme – lament – through great spans of time, and in relying primarily on ethnographic material. Crying Shame presents a new model of modernity. Rather than simply a set of promises (Wittrock 2000), or losses, I present cultural modernity as a constant oscillation between exuberant “advances” based on sweeping away “tradition,” and a mass form of mourning over “progress” as loss, a loss of confidence that defines postmodernity. What we call postmodernity can thus be considered a phase in a cyclical modernity. This book demonstrates the fundamental relationship of modernity to lament. It shows the links between tradition and modernity, and ties high theory to folk expressive forms. Shame – the topic of a great deal of academic attention lately – and the shame of collectivities in particular, defines some experiences of modernity from

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the vantage-point of peoples peripheral to centers of modernity from New York City to Kuala Lumpur. I present “shame” regarding lament in relation to widely circulating cultural ideas about language, communicative practices, and the people who produce those practices – ideas called language ideologies. In order to grasp how these ideas are now circulating globally, we must jettison old ways of speaking about “cultures” (as though they were bounded and stable), and inquire instead about the dynamic relationship between culture (processes, ideas, products) and metaculture (cultural forces that reflect on, and thus influence, cultural processes and products and their circulation). We will rely on this dynamic model in understanding globalization in terms of both connections and locality. This approach to cultural phenomena enables a new way of looking at traditions around the world – in a single glance, so to speak.

Why an Intellectual Edifice? Some might pick up this book expecting a book that takes wailing, crying songs, and laments as straightforward, necessary – even therapeutic – “expressions of human emotion.” Lament is not that simple. Still, I ask such readers to stay with me. If it is true that I build an intellectual argument about culture from accounts (my own and others’) of lamentation, I do so conscious of the increased attention our own society pays to grief, conscious of its nearness and of my decision to talk about my own and others’ abstracting of lament away from the immediacies of felt experience. So Crying Shame is also a cultural account of those who, like myself, have represented lament. Thus it takes its place as one of many self-reflexive projects that also attempt to engage their material at a human and not only a scholarly level.1 Wailing hardly seems an appropriate foundation for an abstract intellectual edifice. I hope this book is more than that, more than just a sign of the author’s defense against overwhelming grief. To deny another’s pain, from a Wittgensteinian perspective, is to put our future at risk (Das 1998:192). I do not deny the pain laments can express. But as a highly conventionalized and socialized genre, lament expresses more than individual pain. And so this book is not a psychology of grief but a study of performances, of cultural accounts of them (objectifications), of group shame, and of group pride of the sort reflected in cultural revivals.

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Why Lament? My Engagement What exactly is lament? What do definitions say about the definers? What attracts me to Others’ laments? Why do they move, or disturb, me? What is it about lament and the state of that art around the world that merits writing a book that deserves a reading? How do some dry-eyed narratives of modernity resemble what is said and sung in laments? My answers may provide a way for you to encounter lament as dramatic expression. I hope they also persuade you of its importance, and of the significance of the forces that are remaking it. The need to study lament first became urgent for me during my doctoral fieldwork in Bangladesh. My fieldsite was a village in Chandpur district. Twice a month I traveled from there to Dhaka. My collaborator, colleague, and field assistant Faisal knew of my interest in madness. Not long after I started my fieldwork, it seemed everyone for miles around knew of my interests. I returned from a trip to Dhaka in March 1992 to find Faisal announcing the visit to my field home of a “mad” woman, whom I call Latifa.2 Her symptoms? She lamented – too much, at the wrong time. Latifa’s kin took lamenting as a sign of madness. Would it have been so a century earlier? My ongoing struggle to understand lament in part reflects my profound personal ambivalence about being situated between Latifa (who hoped that I could help reunite her with her husband) and her cousins (who threatened me with unnamed consequences should I even emerge from my hut on the night they finally stopped her performances). My personal conflict reflects broader tensions between “neocolonialist” discourses about South Asian women as victims, and relativisms old (cultural) and new (postcolonial). Along with speech understood to reflect spirit-possession, long performances like Latifa’s are vanishingly rare, and some Bangladeshis3 pressured me to pretend possession did not occur there. The topics of spirit-possession and lament elicited sharply contrasting responses from different groups in Bangladesh. At the end of my doctoral fieldwork, in spring 1992, I presented some findings to an audience of Bangladeshi medical professionals working near my field site. One of them became angry with me for talking about spirit-possession, as if it were shameful that the nation of Bangladesh could be so backward as to “believe” in such things.4 Rural people never became angry when they discussed spirits with me, but those spirits themselves seemed to hide (in shame?) when I would try

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to rush to the scene where a woman was said to be possessed and speaking in an unusual manner. In relation to lament, the roles are reversed: Latifa’s wailing made her rural kin extremely angry, while worldly Bangladeshi professionals sympathized with her and criticized her kin. Dhaka academics waxed eloquent about the vanishing genre of lament represented in my recordings of Latifa. Yet my story is even more layered than it appeared to me when I first wrote about lament in 1998; this book critically reanalyzes such representations of lament. The critique starts with my own work. In my earlier book I had positively bewailed the loss of tuneful texted weeping, never critically reflecting on the modernist vantage-point from which that sort of metalament made sense. I even expressed some envy of those whose cultural resources might help canalize the griefs we all face. Writing Eloquence in Trouble provoked me to explore why I might have been attracted initially to study lament – a useful start. But today I find the limited reflexivity of these words inadequate – “Like those who occupy later pages, I had to deal with loss; unlike them, I was not privy to a tradition of poetic public weeping. This book probably displays some envy of the tradition it describes” (1998a:vi). Crying Shame probes the meaning of representing Others as “people who lament,” and the desire or repugnance those Others might stir in modern people who see themselves as having no laments or “no stories” (Grima 1991) – perhaps even no culture. Since my encounter with Latifa, lament has often seemed to seek me out. Whatever the origin of my interest, life keeps lament in my face. I was returning from the annual anthropology meetings once when I had to change planes in a major hub airport. In the gate area near me was a woman I took to be Iranian. She had apparently flown from elsewhere to be with a dying relative. She called ahead on her cellphone from the gate and was shocked to discover that her relative had already died. She began to weepand-speak, sometimes with a singsong intonation. After the 2001 anthropology meetings in Washington, DC, I took a shuttle to the airport. The driver, who happened to be from Bangladesh, made one last stop after picking me up. The man who got on there had represented the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe after “peace” had come to Bosnia. He had overseen OSCE security measures in Srebrenica. From there he had traveled on many a weekend to the coast, where he sometimes visited local bars frequented by Serbs who had fought in the recent wars. One such man told him how the Serb troops had sung sad old songs around the campfire before facing the next day

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of fighting – songs lamenting the defeat of Serbian forces at the hands of Muslims (Ottoman Turks) centuries before. I actively elicited his story of Srebrenica. But the Iranian woman seemed to be scarcely aware of my presence; her story struck me in the face (the ears, to be exact). I presented some of the material in this book during my time as a visiting scholar in Paris in the summer of 2003. During the previous year, I had heard of a newly formed Lamenters’ Society in Finland (Äänellä Itkijät RY; the name means “with-voice [i.e. words] criers”; RY stands for rekisteröity yhdistys, registered group ). Two months before I left for Europe, I arranged to visit Finland with my wife, ostensibly to interview leaders of Äänellä Itkijät. But so strong was the interest of these leaders in having me experience the revival that they pushed me to rearrange my travel dates to be there during Juhannus, Midsummer, when they would be teaching roughly the tenth course on lament they had offered to date. My wife Sarah and I did participate in the course, and found it powerfully moving. In this way I was pushed toward the participant end of the participant-observer role fieldworkers have professed ever since Malinowski (1961[1922]). Äänellä Itkijät’s leaders did not exactly seek me out; but lament grabbed me once again on that occasion – more deeply than this book will ever be able to reflect. Lament has sought me out as much as I have sought it out. My aim is to do justice to it and to the myriad questions for cultural studies that lament raises.

A Myth to Orient the Reader I have already let on that I have found it necessary not just to study lament but to study those who study it, and to critically examine modernist narratives that sound suspiciously like laments even when some of them speak of the putative death of (traditional) lament. This analytical move requires most of the book to explain. But, to give some idea of where I am going, I offer this hint in the form of a myth. Once upon a time, at least in England, there was no science. There were no experimental scientists – no Bacon or Boyle, no Royal Society of emergent scientific elites in England. There were no human scientists – no archaeologists, folklorists, anthropologists, Orientalists. . . . Instead, people (specifically, rural

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English peasants) were simply living their lives, in a world populated with supernatural beings, a world untroubled by any Protestant Reformation, a world with no ambition to become Modern. There was no self-conscious Modernity. Science and Modernity had yet to be born. Imagine the emergence of (English) Modernity as a real birth, involving a real Mother. As the Mother of Modernity, imagine a personification of Tradition – a woman who epitomized all the women, the poor, the marginal people of Europe, and ALL peoples outside Europe – the soft folds/folks in which the embryonic bourgeoisie grew to become a Protestant fetus, which finally emerged as a new babe in the world, a babe with an inordinate interest in the sciences of Man and Nature. In order for Scientific Modernity to be born, his Mother had to die. She died giving birth. But as the babe with the cumbrous name emerged through her birth canal (the years of religious wars in Europe, the English Civil War), he heard something – a tearful song that had been sung from antiquity. The song vanished as soon as he heard it. He forgot it as soon as its echo faded. But as he grew older he was haunted by it, hearing it in his dreams. He was, after all, the child of his Mother, Tradition; the plaintive song was a part of him. Despite that, the song was not quite his, and he could not truly mourn what his birth had caused to die. As Modernity grew into adulthood and gave birth to sons – Antiquarianism and Philology, who in their turn gave birth to sons like Archaeology, Classics, Anthropology, Linguistics, Orientalism – he became obsessed with the haunting song of tears. The song stamps itself profoundly on the “project of Modernity.” Modernity sent out squadrons of his progeny to seek out the song. He himself would never sing it the way his Mother had; yet his triumphalist tune was increasingly tinged with her sad melody, and Modernity was increasingly haunted by nostalgia – at best a “failed mourning.” And at the end of the twentieth century, hundreds of those dedicated to the human sciences had collected laments from the ends of the earth. Scores of folklorists had described lament traditions. Dozens of Orientalists had unearthed ancient laments. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists had described laments’ musical forms, semiotic complexity, and social functions. Finally – in an era in which some anthropologists were teaching urban Americans to become shamans – a handful of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists began to sing the very song that had so long haunted Modernity. His origins, his Mother’s song of loss and her stamp on his very nature, came to light as a few of his sons in Finland taught people how to lament, in workshops that drew on decades of folkloristic research.

My little myth resembles other versions of the founding myth of modernity (Bauman and Briggs 2003) – intentionally so. Savvy readers

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will recognize its kinship to the early, mystical, theologically oriented writings of Walter Benjamin on the Fall, nature, and lament (Benjamin 1996 [1916]). So, did the Mother die? Well, not exactly. The refusal of Tradition to die, despite centuries of predictions that it would, and its presence in the fabric of modernity, are themes occupying me in later chapters. Hers was not a natural (reputed) death, not a natural result of childbirth, but rather an act of war by iconoclastic Puritan zealots against Catholic folk and their folklore throughout England. Yet the fading of traditions and the folk who bore them – their “death,” which seemed to stretch out interminably as every generation of antiquarians and (later) folklorists spoke of the death of the folk and their lore (Bauman and Briggs 2003:222) – led to nostalgia in some of 16th- and 17th-century England’s intelligentsia (2003:72), including (perhaps) Shakespeare (Greenblatt 2004). The human sciences did devote increasing attention to lament, culminating in the 1989 Austin Lament Conference, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the many publications that emerged from the conference – and in movements to revive lament in Finland, New Zealand, and the US. Post-Austin publications on lament reached me as a graduate student in the late 1980s, several years before I met Latifa and more than a decade before my wife and I performed our own laments along with a dozen others at the workshop in a village in rural Finland. To tell these stories requires a book like this.

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Opening Up Lament Perhaps you have been with someone who, in the midst of describing a loss, begins to weep. Perhaps you’ve heard someone trying to continue speaking while sobbing. Or you might have heard someone begin to weep as they sang a song that moved them. Apart from these scenarios, you have heard the label “lament” applied to all sorts of calmer discourses decrying some situation or event. But this book begins by describing something you might have only glimpsed in the media – in the first episode of the HBO television series Six Feet Under, or in media coverage of Iraq (including footage used in Fahrenheit 9/11). You might have deemed this blend of words, tears, and melody quite foreign. Those three elements are familiar by themselves, but perhaps unfamiliar in combination. By lament I mean, first and foremost, this combination of three elements – tuneful, texted weeping. Lament – including (but not limited to) the funeral dirge (Lee 2002) – is often sung or chanted. It is also composed of coherent words, like the lyrics of a song; thus lament has text. And lament appears overwhelmingly emotional; in most traditions treated here, a performance without sobbing would not be a lament (for example a bilAp or itkuvirsi, a Bangla1 or Finnish lament). If you want to think productively about history, life, suffering, or culture, lament (to borrow from Lévi-Strauss) is good to think with. As a means of grappling with loss, lament has served societies both ancient and recent. Today, observers of culture – journalists, literary critics, anthropologists, and anyone else commenting on any form of culture – and performers of culture (especially revivalists, but also psychotherapists and American clergy) invoke lament as they try to grapple with change. For “ancients” and “moderns,” lament is very useful indeed.

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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It would be a crying shame if lament passed from the scene. And if shame over tuneful, wordy crying is spreading, that too demands our attention. But so do the lament-like ways in which people of all sorts – scholars, priests, psychologists, relatives of lamenters and lamenters themselves – talk about lament. All of these stories I must tell. It is best, however, to turn first to defining the domain of inquiry. What do we mean by lament? Lament is a typically improvisational genre in which women (and some men) have expressed grief and aired grievances, one in which communities have ritually reconstituted themselves in the face of loss. Lament is thus a lens through which many scholars have examined emotions, musics, poetic languages, and the societies in which those take shape. And there is more. Instead of simply asking “Why (and how) do the faroff so-and-so’s cry as they do – and do they do so as they once did?”2 I ask, too, about feelings – including ours – about ritual wailing and the possibility that it might vanish. It is important to investigate this second topic in order to better understand lament’s power over us as well as over apparently exotic Others. In fact, I argue that, even if traditional lament is fast disappearing from our modern world, something related – call it postmodern mourning – is alive and well. The study of lament thus gives us a new perspective on modernity and postmodernity. In fact, for some, the loss of lament – or even the loss of culture – is what’s lamented. The recitation of our losses is the modern ritual, and it is strikingly similar to lament. And so, in addition to other warrants for such a book as this, we have another – that, even as lament “disappears” along with “vanishing cultures,” it attempts to redefine our modern experience.

Three Scenarios: An Overview This book is about lament as a genre of crying with melody and words. But it is a layered cake of three different stories. Consider the first framework a kind of Myth of the Fall.

First scenario: positively losing lament The first, relatively positivist, story begins in mythic (once upon a) time. There was once a “traditional world” consisting of thousands of different human societies in which some women and men made up and sang laments on various occasions. They performed these laments when someone died.

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In societies where women married men outside of their villages and left their own kin to live with their husbands’ families, women sang bridal laments. These were conventional. Yet they were not what, say, an Anglican might mean if she referred to rituals, i.e., acts of speaking or chanting whose text and melody were quite fixed. Instead, laments, though ritualistic in function, were improvised for the occasion.3 Women (and occasionally men [Greene 1999]) would perform laments at the time of death and other moments of leave-taking like marriage. In that sense laments were predictable. Yet performers creatively improvised on predictable themes (sorrow, sometimes anger; melodies; words, etc.). Audiences could consistently recognize them, because performances bore a strong family resemblance to one another. In some places, the dual nature of these performances as “improvised convention” was reflected in solo verses, set against choral sections. A professional or relatively expert lamenter (Böckel 1913:97; Tenhunen 2007) – or a woman linked to the family of the deceased – might lead the lament, improvising verses. Between such lines, a group of singers might echo the verses or join in for a set of repeated lines. Or the leader might take up the sometimes unmusical cries or shouts of the most sorely grieving, the closest kin, making them into a more musical line to be echoed by a chorus of neighbors and more distant kin. Here is the climax of this first story: In the last century, such laments have become increasingly rare; an enormous body of evidence supports this claim (e.g., Dwyer 2008, on the disappearance of bridal laments from the Turkic world). In my own field site (Bangladesh) I heard people laugh at, or express religious disapproval of, crying out loud. Quiet crying is becoming more common, particularly among urban classes and upwardly mobile modern rural people. They express a kind of shame about “traditions” like loud crying. That first scenario motivates the first part of the title, Crying Shame. It poses a problem whose solution the other scenarios provide: If what many call cultures, and not only persons, are said to “die” (rhetoric I do not judge here), and these “cultures” are composed of knowledge grouped into somewhat scripted scenarios – including how to grieve – who laments their death, and how?

Second scenario: exploiting lament The first story is incomplete without a second. Rather than mythic time, I open this story with a case study from the late 20th century.

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During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian soldiers would gather in their camps at night and sing songs – “national epic laments” (Lee 2002:10) – about the storied losses of the distant past, some memorializing the defeat of the Serbs at the hands of Ottoman Turks and the eclipse of Serbian culture resulting from it. Nationalist forces revived songs that had been underground during Tito’s socialism, exploiting them to stoke genocidal passion. Thus this scenario speaks not of lost lament but of modernist-nationalist-militarist forces co-opting a song-form that, though not quite improvised, is related to lament. Some laments tell stories. There are also stories (like this book) about lament – metastories, stories about stories. The second scenario complicates the first metastory about lament. Neither crying, nor music, nor the verbalization of grief and grievance are “dying.” Yet something is changing. The nexus of tears, music, and words that constituted performance genres we call lament is breaking apart, sometimes reassembled in what Andrei Codresçu describes as the fetishization of folklore in eastern Europe (personal communication, April 1999). Milosevic’s legitimation strategy twisted grievance rhetorics to serve the cause of violent post-socialist ethno-nationalism. Whereas the first scenario ends in the loss of lament, the second ends in its co-optation. The record of 20th-century nation-states is mixed: some (for example China during the Cultural Revolution) promulgate policies that restrict lamenting (Kipnis 1997:1, 27) – while others give lament a new life and save it from the dustbin of history to which the first story consigns it.

Third scenario: the lament of postmodernity Finally, this book tells a third, very different, sort of story. It is about other stories – including one I’ve told (Wilce 1998a:vi) – that use lament to construct a larger tale about modernity as loss (Benjamin 1996[1916]; Ivy 1994). This book analyzes such metalaments as Foucault might have, looking around the world and tracing connections between forces – especially explicit critiques of “backward” forms of grieving – that push lament onstage or backstage. I reflect on cultural globalization and on the metacultural forces (Urban 2001) that affect culture-in-motion. Thus this book contributes to that genre of anthropology analyzing not single societies but global cultural processes (Appadurai 1996; Bauman and Briggs 2003; Erlmann 1999).

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But let us suspend such abstract claims for a moment and look at evidence that lament is either disappearing or being twisted into something totally new.

“The Language You Cry In”: Illustrating the Three Scenarios The 1999 film The Language You Cry In illustrates all three of the scenarios above. It offers not only an account of, but also a remedy for, genre loss – in this case, the loss of lament (Scenario 1). The distributor’s website plugs it as a “scholarly detective story” (www.newsreel.org/films/ langyou.htm). It is also the story of the collaboration of black and white Americans with Sierra Leoneans in recovering the steps by which “an ancient funeral dirge” left Africa and its ritual context, traveled to the Gullah Islands, was recorded by linguist Lorenzo Turner (Wade-Lewis 2007), and was rediscovered while the cameras rolled in Africa in the 1990s. The history behind the film begins in 1933 when Lorenzo Turner recorded Amelia Dawley singing this song in “a Georgia fishing village” in Gullah country (www.newsreel.org/films/langyou.htm): AMELIA’S SONG Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah. Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen Ha suh wileego seehi uh kwendaiyah. Everyone come together, let us work hard; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace. Everyone come together, let us work hard: the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, like a firing gun. Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of family Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, like a distant drum beat.4

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Ten years after Turner recorded Dawley’s song, he played it for his Sierra Leonean student Solomon Caulker, who recognized the lyrics as Mende. Caulker noted the key repeated term kambei (grave), which, as the film’s narrative tells us, “led him to suspect that [the song] was part of an ancient funeral dirge.” Turner published a translation of the song, which Dawley had memorized but not understood. But how had this Mende dirge survived the Transatlantic Passage and slavery to be recorded two centuries later? Where exactly had it come from? What had it once meant? Lorenzo Turner had only begun the detective work. It is the film’s on-screen heroes – two white Americans, anthropologist Joseph Opala and ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt – who discover before our very eyes the song’s links to an ancient graveside ceremony called Tenjami (“crossing the river”; Thomas-Houston 1999:128). Together with the film’s writer-directors Alvaro Toepke and Angel Serrano, they finish the long story of the dirge, in effect adding their own chapter – which I shall describe at the end of this section. From the opening scene, showing a cloud swirling around a sun slowly being eclipsed, the film memorializes losses black Americans have suffered:5 Africa, 18th century. A young woman is snatched from her village by slave traders, forced apart forever from her lover, her motherland, her language, her identity. This is the non-history of millions of African American women and men, a wall of silence, a mysterious past that memory fights to preserve from the onslaught of time but which ends up shrouded in darkness.

The scene shifts, and we see narrator Vertamae Grosvenor with her back to the ocean – presumably the Atlantic. She says, And this is the story that we’re going to tell you today, the story of how a person was able to go back, before the arrival of the slave ships to the coast of the New World. This is a story of memory, the story of how the memory of an African American family was pieced together through a song sung by a woman named Amelia Dawley [scene shifts to inside of a Sierra Leonean home with five people looking in a ceramic urn, lit only by candlelight], an ancient African song with a legend to have the mystical power to connect those who sing it with their ancestors, with their roots, through time and space. [The volume of Dawley’s singing is turned up now, and the scene shifts to her gravestone off the coast of South Carolina.] (emphasis added)

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And so, of the losses suffered by African Americans, the film makes “memory” one of the most significant. Grosvenor hints that the sharing of memories requires a shared genre (see Chapter 5 below) – and not just any genre, but one imbued with “mystical power,” a genre that by its very nature “links the living and the dead.” For most African Americans – and, as we find out later in the film, most Mende-speaking Sierra Leoneans – the genre (funeral dirges) had mystical power to connect worlds when that connection had been lost. The Language You Cry In makes the lost-and-found song a key trope of “culture.” After the scenes described above we see shifting images of African Americans, from busy, well-dressed urbanites with employee badges to people looking homeless and dejected. Grosvenor tells us, Slave-owners knew that, to master a human being, no matter what his race or color, all you needed to do was to strip him of his identity, [shifting to Africa, women daubing mud on naked chests in an apparent ritual context, with strains of lamenting audible in the background] his land [shifting to frontal view of young woman], the strength of his [sic] culture, and the memory of his ancestors [the camera on Bendu Jabati lamenting, with a group of women sitting behind her]. [Now focusing on a male elder’s calm face – ] Memory is power. We can’t rewrite the history of humanity but we can rekindle memory, or at least a part of it. (emphasis added)

As we learn later, the Mende-speaking Sierra Leonean woman, Bendu Jabati, had been keeping the flame of memory burning. But viewers will understand that the central figures constituting the “we” who rekindle memory are the film itself and its two main heroes. Playing out the twin themes of loss and recovery, Grosvenor moves on to the discovery of the link between Africa and the Gullah coast, the link constituted through the mystical song, the ancient funeral dirge: Linguist Lorenzo Turner and musicologist Lydia Parish came here [to the Gullah coast] to carry out research into the language and music of the Gullahs. . . . Professor Turner made a momentous discovery – a 50-year-old woman who sang a haunting song, the longest text in an African language found in the United States.

The film moves eventually to Sierra Leone and to a postmodern phenomenon. The Sierra Leonean government contacted American anthropologist Opala (presumably a long-time resident of or regular visitor to the

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country) to arrange a performance of culture. That call prompted Opala to see what else could be done with Turner’s discovery of “Amelia’s song.” The team of Schmidt and Opala took the old recording around the district of Sierra Leone where they suspected the song had originated. After many disappointments, they finally found Bendu Jabati in one outlying Mende village, the one person who recognized the song Turner had recorded. Schmidt asks her about it, and the camera focuses on Schmidt’s face: I asked her to talk about it, and she said that she had learned it from her grandmother. [Camera shifts to Bendu Jabati speaking in Mende, with subtitles]: “That song brought back memories of my grandmother.” [Back to Schmidt] One day she had asked her grandmother about the song, “. . . What is that song that you’re singing?” And the grandmother said, “This is a song that I remember our ancestors by. This is the song that I sing to remember my late husband, to remember my mother, to remember my father.” And she said that that song was a song that they sang at their burials, and that it was associated with a very, very important ceremony [called Tenjami]. And this ceremony was very special to Mende people because it connected them with their ancestors . . . a song that they sang to bridge [gesturing from her right to left with both hands, then back again] the world of the living and the world of those who had gone before them.

Note that, apart from a brief moment (represented in boldface), Schmidt speaks (to the camera) for Jabati. Bendu Jabati then tells the camera how her grandmother had guided her to “perform the [Tenjami] ceremony” with singing and a series of bodily moves, how the elder had commanded her to “look mournful,” saying, “Even after I die, this is how you must perform this.” The Language You Cry In weaves its story across two and a half centuries, from the horrific Transatlantic Passage in the 18th century to the years just before the film’s completion in 1999. If the 18th-century slave trade stands for the brutality of early modernity lamented in the film, it dates the loss of genres to the late modern 20th century. Even if Turner, Opala, Schmidt, and their colleagues on both sides of the African Diaspora did recover a particular “song” or “dirge” (“Amelia’s song”) that once circulated as part of the Tenjami ceremony, colonialism and World War I had already destroyed this circulation: The Tenjami rites are no longer practiced in Bendu’s village. Ancient Mende rituals like this were abandoned there at the end of World War I when Mende

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soldiers recruited by the British army came back to the village and introduced Islam and Christianity. But because of her grandmother’s insistence that she keep the Tenjami song alive, Bendu was able to pass it on.

So does the film. The crucial chapter (or interdiscursive link: see Chapter 4 below) the film added to the long story of this dirge is the story of how our heroes recovered it and made it the centerpiece of the postmodern ritual they arranged with the Sierra Leonean government – the cultural performance the government had wanted, which was eventually coupled with a reunion the heroes arranged between Dawley’s American descendants and their Sierra Leonean “kin.” In this context cobbled together by the Sierra Leonean government, local musicians, visiting Gullah islanders, and the scholars, African Americans joined Sierra Leoneans in recognizing that the song once lost was now restored. This recognition was a performative act (Austin 1962), and – like all performatives – it at least attempts to bring about a new social fact, an indicative (“Bendu’s song is Amelia’s song”). Stated differently, since its former ritual context has not been observed since World War I, the celebrated “find” was something of a creation – a dirge made to be a part of something new (a ceremony of international fellowship), rather than a dirge recovered in all its local significance. The film achieves several things. It reorients the local in terms of the global. Its signifiers – a dirge, folklore, loss, slavery – address educated viewers around the world. Its market or path of circulation is that comfortable postmodern class that hungers for narratives of lost-and-found traditions. And its referential object, an ocean-hopping dirge, mirrors the global circulation of such media productions about loss (and the circulation, in an earlier age of globalization, of slaves). The film narrates the loss of funerary traditions including the dirge (our Scenario 1), and of course uses that theme to create a compelling film (Scenario 2). In recapitulating the first two scenarios, it exemplifies Scenario 3 – using lament to construct the grand narrative of modernity as loss.

Lament Matters Culture – dynamic semiotic processes guiding the production and exchange of material and symbolic forms – matters. Lament matters, too – and not only to scholars, though it has attracted a good deal of scholarly

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attention in the last decades. Lament matters to my friends in Finland, leaders of Äänellä Itkijät RY (the Lamenters’ Society). To them, Finns desperately need “therapeutic” outlets like lament (Tenhunen 2007), associated in the past with Karelians and other minorities (not Finns), and with magically efficacious ritual, not therapy. In local traditions around the world, laments arose in, invoked, and helped constitute social life, in funerals and weddings and far beyond. They have touched on the politics of everyday life, gender relations, and religion (Briggs 1993; Holst-Warhaft 1992). Laments have moved people to action, aestheticizing and thus transforming suffering, shaping affect and social relations, sometimes providing performers with at least marginally legitimated public venues for voicing discontent or exercising resistance. Thus lament has provoked repression. And the truest examples of ritual lament (Wilce 2006) enabled the dead to reach the beyond and new marriages to succeed. Lament matters to anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists in part because of its complex relation to the ordering of social practice. Social meanings arise in the face of looming chaos and threats to meaning (de Martino 1972[1948], 2000[1975]). Social scientists from Max Weber to Byron Good (1994:132–134) have sought keys to cultural understanding in local theodicies6 – cultural explanations for pain and death – as much as in local theologies. To search for structure even amidst conflict, and for order even in crisis, reflects the human drive to impose semiotic order on a universe whose meaning consistently eludes us. Studying laments – and lamenting – makes sense in the same way. Laments weave stories – stories of the lamented dead and the lamenting family and community. They respond to cracks in the moral structure of local universes, asking (sometimes answering): Why this sickness, this death, this destruction or loss? How can we reconcile ourselves to this and somehow maintain our notions of the moral order (Good 1994:134)? Laments are windows on culture insofar as they represent the ways people confront crises challenging the order of life (de Martino 2000[1975]). These confrontations reveal the performers’ notions not only of suffering and tragedy but also of the moral universe. Revealing the stakes for culture and for persons, this book demonstrates “what an important part dirges play not only in the rituals of death but in the life of the community” (HolstWarhaft 1992:20). There is already scholarly awareness of the significance of “lament itself ” as a cultural phenomenon; for evidence, see this book’s References. This book is unique, however, in recognizing the importance of lament as

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trope. It breaks new ground in its exploration of the ways recent voices have en-trope-ized lament. But I will save arguments about the light lament can shed on (post)modern cultural processes for later chapters.

Key Terms of the Discussion Modernity, postmodernity This book offers a new understanding of modernity, relating it to lament. “The loss of myth and ritual,” ritually retold, is how we transmit our founding myth, the mythic loss underlying modernity. The representation of loss (of tradition, lament, or even culture) constitutes (post)modernity just as lament ritually held together or reconstituted “premodern” worlds (Tolbert 1990). The term modernity is itself a complex shifter – a linguistic sign whose meaning shifts according to context, telling us at least as much about its context and author as about any purportedly objective reality. Tradition and modernity serve in many discourses as ideal types (Weber 1999[1904]), “pure” concepts that intentionally ignore real complexities – in polar opposition. Urban (2001), for example, treats them as opposing metacultural orientations. For him, “modernity” is a metacultural stance that values innovation over tradition, i.e. “newness” over the replication of older cultural products and processes. Discourses around the world continually reproduce modernity and its opposition to tradition. These discourses have power even when we acknowledge that they reify the division between the two. But tradition and modernity, in fact, coexist. I find evidence of the thoroughgoing hybridity of the major founding voices of European and American modernity, their perpetual turning toward tradition, quite persuasive (Bauman and Briggs 2003). Thus, I propose a Janus-faced vision of modernity: one iconoclastic face sneers at the past, while the other face (sometimes associated with postmodernism) looks longingly over the wreckage of tradition. You will find sentences in this book that seem to join the modern and the postmodern. I share Lyotard’s (1984:77) rejection of any sharp distinction between modernity and postmodernity. Not much is radically new about “postmodernity” vis-à-vis “modernity,” though we can distinguish them as cyclical phases.

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Modernity as discourse is a force to be reckoned with – even when contested, resisted, played with, or renegotiated. How plural and decentered are the modernities that circulate in our world, how far are they from being singular or purely European (Appadurai 1996; Mitchell 2000)! Yet, even if we deconstruct “modernity,” we still confront discursive moves that project it as a universal monolith. Putting this paradox differently, it is true that there are perhaps countless vernacular modernities, and that whatever integrity modernity has, it only advances in interaction with local realities. Still, modernity is a project, a global agenda – a touchstone invoked daily in the media, official discourse, and private conversation. In many of these local discourses – including less critical academic writings – modernity signifies an experience of rapid, disintegrating social change occasioning widespread suffering (Childs 2000:15). For Weber, capitalist modernity constitutes an “iron cage” (1958[1920–21]). Walter Benjamin’s account of such early-modern forms as the German Trauerspiel (“lamentplay”) is a sort of materialist theology, a theodicy confronting the worldthreat posed by modernity and modern forms of signification. The early Benjamin drew on Hebrew lament and Jewish mysticism to offer a view of history centered on lament as both prayer and protest (Plate 2004:13), a view that is both unique and mystifying. Benjamin used the concept of “the lament for nature” as a trope to sum up the modern world’s suffering. Whatever we might think of this theoretical move, the trope fits much of the global discourse on modernity as well as my argument making lament a constitutive element of modern thought. Together, these complementary approaches to (post)modernity – as a disputable claim of radical transformation, or as a discourse creating a reality of its own – provide context for my discussion of lament and its representations.

Modeling cultural dynamism and circulation: metaculture This book envisions culture through the lens of metacultural processes. Greg Urban’s (2001) insightful analysis of cultural processes from the perspective of metaculture provides us with a new way of thinking about lament, popular talk about it, and its academic study. For Urban, culture is incarnate in physical objects – from ceramics, to the sounds of speaking, to cellulose and those electronic disturbances that broadcasting exploits. In those forms, culture moves and circulates. It has

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always circulated across some stretches of time and space; it is defined in terms of its symbolic transmission. “Globalization” refers to the “complex connectivity” that emerges with or is the product of modernity (Tomlinson 1999:2). We encounter it in the form of new technologies (including new electronic media), new forms of intersocietal relations, the increasing penetration of capitalism, and an accelerating circulation of goods and discourses. The intensity of this connectivity is qualitatively new. Globalization reflects, and is enabled by, structures of dominance that emerged in the 19th century. But global circulation of cultural products also engenders resistance to this dominance, and thus reflects ever new forms of hybridity. The unavoidable reality of globalization calls for a shift of anthropological focus from “cultures” – imagined as distinct entities – to ethnoscapes, mediascapes (Appadurai 1996), and metaculture (Urban 2001). Under contemporary conditions of globalization, many forces – mass media, advertising, and cultural commentary – accelerate, decelerate, or direct the motion of other bits of culture. Ethnomusicological products (CDs from Smithsonian/Folkways or the Finnish Literature Society), ethnographies, and religious commentaries on culture now achieve global circulation. Urban (2001) calls the forces impelling such motion metacultural. People desiring, praising, and reproducing one cultural object rather than another give that object a metacultural push. Since metaculture is by definition a secondary piece of culture that is “about” some other, primary piece, academic discourses on human life are metacultural. General anthropology textbooks and scholarly treatises on lament, commentaries on lament, Greek city-states’ attempts to regulate it – and even books about those regulations (Alexiou 1974; Loraux 1998) – are all bits of metaculture. Metaculture is culture – particularly reflexive culture, bits of culture that are about other bits of culture. Criticism, praise, denunciation, and evaluation epitomize metaculture. We read, watch, or listen to commentaries and criticism of such cultural objects as films – also examples of metaculture. But neither critics nor academics have a monopoly on sociocultural analysis. Social life would grind to a halt without constant, instantaneous metacultural analysis by social actors of “what is going on here.” Off-thecuff oral discussion of a lament performed in rural Bangladesh is just as metacultural as newspaper film reviews – or recent documents that circulate from Iran to Kashmir offering theological guidance as to the proper management of public displays of grief involved in Shia ritual lamentation (Pinault 1999a, 1999b).

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Thus I propose to study cultures of lament as always already metacultural. The histories of lament production, transmission, and evaluation are metacultural histories, and this book takes its place in chains of transmission (since it re-presents and recontextualizes some lament texts) and evaluation. I turn now to summarizing the argument of each chapter.

Chapter Summary Part I, “Locating Lament as Object,” opens up the topic of lament. Chapter 2, “For Crying Out Loud,” describes what I mean by lament and explores problems surrounding its definition – problems that other accounts have ignored but that are central to my discussion. One key problem is the relation of lament to textuality. Most scholarly descriptions of lament focus not on the tears but the words. It is not surprising that, wherever lamentation has included words, scholars – typically most comfortable with texts – focus on them. Lyrical textuality enables laments to refer, to be explicitly about something. What they are about is most often the past leading up to and including some tragic loss: “Laments are almost always a theatrical representation of the past” (Holst-Warhaft 2000:51). But textuality is more than words. Text is a repeatable, coherent set of signs – and this definition fits musical signs such as melodies (Laskewicz 2003:91), as well as lyrics. Lament’s musicality has attracted almost as much attention as its verbal text. “Traditional people” characterize the music and lyrics of lament as being “about” grief or passion. People feel that lament melodies convey or bespeak grief, with or without words. Thus musical and not only lyrical textuality help give laments their meaning. Chapter 3, “Lament and Emotion,” asks to what extent lament is about emotion. The chapter uses the topic of lament’s emotionality to offer a new perspective on old problems plaguing Western thought. If emotion is key to understanding lament, what to do with obvious indications of its generic, conventional, and performative qualities? This chapter raises a question that becomes central to later chapters: If lament is emotional, is it – or should it be – sincere? Metadiscourses (discourses reflecting on other discourse) – about sincerity on the one hand and self-control on the other – surround laments precisely because many audiences take them to be expressions of emotion.

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Rationality has outranked emotion in Western intellectual history, and cultural sensibilities touching emotion and rationality typically reflect social hierarchies and constructions of Otherness. Attributions of emotionality figure largely in Primitivist discourses. Is it valid to characterize lament as an ancient tradition, perhaps even one whose earlier evolutionary form was “primitive cries” (Böckel 1913:97) belonging to animal nature and not culture? Chapter 4, “Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament,” introduces the notion of double-timing (adapted from Bakhtin’s notion of double-voicing, 1981) – in which contemporary performances are somehow simultaneously ancient. It situates contemporary lament in a historical context, but also subjects the antiquarian and philological study of lament to critical inquiry. While tracing ancient representations of lamentation, it also reflects on the construction of lament as an ancient object, complete with a patina or signs of age-distress (Stewart 1991). Chapter 4 also introduces the notion of interdiscursive chains and their role in objectifying and controlling lament, across many generations – in Greece, for example. This discussion provides contrast for later chapters’ treatment of much more devastating modern responses to lament. Part II describes remaking lament in modern contexts. It turns out that memory is put to work in new ways in modernity. This prompts me to revisit the nature of lament with a focus on its commemorative features. Chapter 5, “Cultural Amnesia and the Objectification of Lament in Bangladesh,” uncovers the complex relations of lament to recent forms of social memory and acts of commemoration on the one hand, and on the other a contemporary will to forget – to forget truths about violence and practices/genres like spontaneous lament. I present my ethnographic experience of lament in Bangladesh and my analysis of laments by an angry young Bangladeshi woman I call Latifa, and explore the notion of “technologies of forgetting” vis-à-vis lament in that setting. Chapter 6, “Modern Transformations,” temporarily brackets questions about the tradition–modernity binary and compiles evidence of widespread shifts in the practice of lament and in discourses about it. This chapter puts contemporary responses to lament – increasingly homogeneous metaemotional and metadiscursive responses – in the context of globalizing modernity. Globalization is not an altogether new phenomenon. It is at least as old as the colonialist phase of imperialism that so deeply impacted lament in Bangladesh – a discussion that carries over into this chapter. I examine the position colonial sensibilities assigned to “emotional” genres like lament. Despite such 19th-century antecedents, the present generation is

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even more aptly designated the age of globalization because we experience the increasing impact of ever more rapid global flows of media, the concomitant transformation of time–space and boundaries – and global circulation of modern meta-emotions, including shame over public emotional expression. Such global flows become the key to Chapter 7, “How Shame Spreads in Modernity.” This chapter begins with a discussion of the meanings of shame in relation to collective identities and in relation to visibility. It culminates with a case study of how the Irish came to be represented (by a number of voices) as backward, an achievement based in part on associating them with lament. Elite English travelers described Irish lament as “mercenary tears” and “hideous moan[s].” Irish bishops attacked lamentation as “an unchristian practice.” Chapter 8, “Crying Backward: Primitivist Representations of Lament,” gives concentrated attention to representations of lament that frame it using images of primitive life in all its “savage passion.” Representations of lament as backward or primitive spice up travelers’ accounts far beyond those of English women traveling in Ireland; they haunt lament scholarship. The chapter goes on to raise the question of whether the retrospective gaze of laments as texts warrants their linkage with “backwardness.” Modernity needs tradition or backwardness as a foil against which to constitute itself. How does the invidious representation of something as backward square with modernity’s own need to look back in constituting itself as different from tradition? And that in turn raises other, more general, questions. What sorts of homologies can we find between cultural products (laments) and metacultural representations of them? How do various spins on lament handle its contradictory relations to different strands of modernity – its retrospective focus and its tendency to ground its authority in newness, construed in terms of spontaneity or sincerity? Part III, “Reviving Lament,” focuses on lament’s crosscutting relations to modernity. Chapter 9, “Mourning Becomes the Electron’s Age: Lamenting Modernity(ies),” takes up a paradox central to my argument. Many postmodern voices, with their particular self-conscious stance toward cultural production, invoke lament as a synecdoche or a sort of cultural “index species”7 – a key signifier of all the rich, expressive genres available to members of (“perishing”) traditional societies. Genres of lamentation are good for performing a sense of loss, but also for focusing modernity’s self-awareness in terms of its own losses (Saunders 2007). Some contemporary authors who mention traditional lament do so in order to

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mourn its unavailability to them. Ironically, their grieving over this purported cultural loss becomes a kind of lament in itself. The project of modernity is defined in terms of loss – loss of the kind of trust that is the glue that holds society together, or loss of the worker’s very soul or subjectivity in the alienation of his or her labor – and thus modernist consciousness must “oscillate between past and future” (Adams 2001:222, 225). The (not wholly objective) modern consciousness of loss prompts a new search for suitable genres of grief and grievance. Yet no genres, no conventional means of grieving, satisfy; postmodern sensibilities resist and attempt to transcend the purported restrictiveness of genres and, indeed, languages as conventions (Das 1998; Sass 1992; Wittgenstein 1958). Chapter 10, “Lament’s (Post)Modern Vertigo,” finds lament “Floating in a Deterritorialized Media Sea.” This chapter returns to the modernist and postmodernist discourse Chapter 9 analyzes as homologous with lament, this time with an eye to modernity’s contradictory nature. In its search for nuances that speak to those contradictions, the chapter considers the new, electronic media. It then returns to Urban’s concept of metaculture to offer a revision of his model based on the dialectic between culture and metaculture and on the definitive role of tradition in (post)modernity. A metacultural embrace of newness alternates with the desire to resurrect and play with tradition in postmodern media. The remainder of the chapter covers lament drowning or surviving, in a series of stories of the impact of new media – in particular, websites related to lament in the classical texts of ancient India. I extend Jacquemet’s concept of linguistic vertigo in a sea of deterritorialized media – which he uses as a metaphor for the destabilization of deictic words like “here” or “this” – to new uses of “we” on those India-related websites. I show how slippery are the “we”s in websites related to lament and India. Chapter 11, “Lament in a Postmodern World of Revivals,” recognizes that, when it comes to the fate of lament, rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. It explores a series of “revivals” of lament – from very limited revivals of such traditions for school performances in southeastern Alaska [Tlingit]), to the “revival of death” in England and the US (Årnason 2001; Walter 1994). The chapter also explores the growing interest in Others’ lament traditions on the part of leaders (e.g., Golden 1994) of what I call “the bereavement movement,” and a local revival of lament in Finland. Finally, I examine the co-optation of lament in the former Yugoslavia and Iran in the 1990s as an example of the media-based modern production of culture in two very different states. These revivals and adaptations raise

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questions about discourses of authenticity, and about widely differing forms of cultural nostalgia. The book concludes in Chapter 12 with a meditation on the central paradoxes surrounding lament and discourses about lament – discourses on loss being both ageless and ever new, newly fitted to the historical moment. Such discourses make lament a sign of hoary tradition on the one hand, while, on the other, smuggling lament into the very structure of myths of (post)modernity.

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Part I

Locating Lament as Object

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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The introductory chapter described the three “scenarios” guiding this book, three balls that, like a juggler, I will try to keep in the air at once. Part I focuses on the first scenario, “Positively Losing Lament,” but it also recognizes that modern accounts of lament have made it a sign of antiquity, sometimes even “antiquing” or “distressing” the genre, as antique (furniture) dealers may do to enhance the value of a piece. This section presents some apparent facts. For instance, for millennia, lamenting – defined in Chapter 2 as the expression of grief through crying songs, often in a collective ritual context – sustained communities around the world. Often it also challenged local sociopolitical orders. Like all artistic processes, lament at once defines and transforms humanity’s deepest expressions of feeling. Yet Chapter 3 raises serious questions about what outside observers and analysts might mean in labeling lament “emotional” or “emotionally expressive.” Such representations are, of course, metacultural. But, as we explore in Chapter 4, the accounts we have of lament and responses to it indicate that representations and cultural evaluations began to constrain lament at least as far back as Homer. We must consider even the very genre labels that apparently circulated in Homer’s Greece forms of objectification that, to some degree, contributed to lament being brought under control in the classical period of Greek history. Thus, throughout this section, we encounter not only lament, but its relationship to metacultural reflection and evaluation. Metaculture always affects the circulation of cultural forms like lament, accelerating or decelerating them. However, until the more recent centuries in focus in Part II, no form of evaluation, critique, or control eliminated lament from any significant part of the world. Thus this section hints at the question – what is unique about modernity that has resulted in the elimination of this “tradition” from most (not quite all) societies? – that is more fully answered in Part II.

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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For Crying Out Loud: What is Lament Anyway?

Introduction In this chapter I try to define lament – and show why doing so is difficult. It is especially difficult both to define the phenomenon and to keep lament’s emergent interactive qualities in view. I first define the paradigm case – involving tears with improvised melody and words – and then examine its penumbra, a sort of extended definition. At the root of the difficulty is this book’s dual agenda – representing lament and critically analyzing representations of it. This requires a close look at the category itself. In common parlance when we say that someone is lamenting something, we mean neither crying nor singing. We mean decrying or bemoaning some state of affairs via a coherent set of signs (i.e., what theorists call “text”) – in most cases, just words. But note the gap between “cry and moan” and “decry and bemoan” – how much two prefixes can do! Here we grapple with the problem of textuality, ideologies of text, and the broader contexts of performance and inquiry. We must discern what is unique to a performance, and what circulates between one performance and another – the traditional problem of genre or, in a newer perspective, the problem of metaculture.

The label “lament” Just what do I mean by lament? Does any sad talk, any sad song, or any piece of “grief work” count? Does a collection of finely crafted poems like Donald Hall’s Without (1998) – written as he mourned the passing of his wife, poet Jane Kenyon – count? In times of grief, what does the (male) poet do? He writes. Note that Donald

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Hall’s was no private grief but rather the postmodern kind, quite public (Walter 1994:41; see also Chapters 10 and 11 below). Hall’s grief circulates – through the mass media, in print, and in broadcast interviews. Are his poems laments? Yes and no. They are entextualizations of grief (grief channeled into memorable discourse), yes; but they were not spontaneously improvised for tearful public performance. Hall wrote his poems in the privacy of his home for later circulation to a mass public readership. Traditional laments are improvised oral performances, and thus never quite repeatable. Performers, often women, sing/weep for or with a live audience – more accurately, her co-participants. This is the prototype, the center of the fuzzy set of performances I will call lament. The prototypical setting is a funeral or wake. Unlike Hall’s poems, laments tend to be collective performances, at times full-blown ritual performances, aimed at effecting transformation (for example, safely sending the departed to the beyond). While not all who are present actively join in, solo laments are the exception, and group crying-singing is the rule. Finally, as a genre performed in face-to-face settings, bodies play an important role in lamentation. To this I return at the end of this chapter. Table 2.1 offers broad guidelines, but should not be over-interpreted. The improvisation of lament is not continual invention de novo, but draws on past performances (Sawyer 1996). And not all lamenters find company; some sing alone. Lament’s orality should not be contrasted too sharply with written composition. Poets perform their work and may use their bodies dramatically, as in poetry slams. Clearly both Hall’s poems of grief and

Table 2.1 Comparing spontaneous lament and Hall’s poetry of grief Spontaneous lament Improvised in real time Performed in public, often collectively Oral A quintessentially corporeal product Performs emotion, or presents feelings metaphorically a

Hall’s poetry of grief Composed at leisure Conceived in private, later shaped for a media-consuming public Written finished producta “Stimulated by emotion,” shaped ultimately as an intellectual product Names author’s emotions

Hall’s and others’ poems may well have oral roots.

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traditional laments pertain somehow to emotion, but the two embody divergent practices of emotion: Lament as a corporeal practice contrasts with poetry’s conceptual practice. The latter reproduces a dominant Western sense of emotion as private and inward (until revealed by the private subject of feeling) rather than bodily and social from the start. The table conveys an image of “the women who lament the dead in many traditional cultures” (Holst-Warhaft 2000:170) – lament typically being represented as a women’s genre – and this image distinguishes them from poets, or even from blues singers on stage. Still, it is profitable to compare laments to the blues. Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues evinces ambivalence: Lady sings the blues she’s got ’em bad She feels so sad The world will know She’s never gonna sing them no more No more

Holiday performed a highly polished and evolved form of the blues, appealing to white as well as black audiences. It is unhelpful to conflate this genre – particularly in its “bourgeois, sophisticated” form (Kernodle 2004:214) – with lament. Noting historical links is far more useful. Genres of lament were indeed performed in the West African countries from which many slaves were brutally removed. Lamentation and other aspects of funerary ritual apparently survived for some time in the New World, protected by the delay in the slaves’ conversion to a religion that has long opposed lament. They left their mark on field hollers; embodied vocal practices brought from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, including particular productions of vocal timbre (quality), surface in funeral wailing, hollers, and the early blues. African American composer Undine Smith Moore remembers funeral wailing and field hollers from her early 20th-century Virginia childhood: I remember the weeping as we went across the fields to see cousin Johnny – “Cousin Johnny dead.” . . . Such things . . . are lodged deeply in us. . . . About five or six years ago, in the archives of the Library of Congress, I sat listening to a recording of early blues and hollers. Suddenly, I found myself weeping. . . . The timbre of the voices of my aunts had come to me . . . (Moore 1997[1981]:9–10)1

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What if we restrict lament’s many possible meanings to something like keening, dirges, or wailing with words in contexts of personal/familial loss (weddings, funerals)? That excludes the blues. But even if we restrict our definition to dirges – and as we shall see, we ought not – how can we acknowledge their variability around the world while holding on to a sense of their unity? Definitions in diversity Is there one thing appropriately labeled “lament”? If so, what is it? Why would we think that a single English label could possibly make sense of various genres of song, poetry, and wailing performed around the world, when those genres are governed by very local aesthetic traditions? Are ancient Greek thrênos, góos, and epikédeion adequately glossed by “lament”? Are German Klage, French plainte (Thiry 1978), and Judeo-Spanish endechas (Alvar 1969) equivalents? Dare we imagine any essential links across traditions more geographically disparate, such as the African Hemba músúúsá (Blakely and Blakely 1994) and Han Chinese kujia (McLaren 2000b)? To my knowledge, no previous scholars of lament have problematized the category; focusing on the commonality of diverse genres, they have treated them together. What if we start from another direction and ask about what people of all sorts, in many societies, do in situations of loss or parting, especially death? Do particular forms – genres, ways of speaking, singing etc. – arise in relation to loss? Are crying songs sung at funerals? In most societies they were, at one time. Typically, periods of lamentation had to give way, after a prescribed time, to reaffirmation of faith, even celebration. Let’s agree, then, to call songs sung to, or in memory of, the dead during funerary rituals laments, wherever they occur. A new question arises: Are these laments sung elsewhere, in other contexts? Quite commonly so. And this is what interests me and other scholars – lament’s potential as a powerful channel for venting all sorts of dissatisfaction or protest.2 Thus, I propose this definition: Lament is a discursive and musical genre linked with crying and with funerary observances, but also used in other contexts. This preserves the definitive heart of “traditional” lament, while admitting broader uses of the term. Genre(s) To ask whether we can treat lament as a somewhat coherent set, rather than a loosely assorted and ultimately dissimilar set of performances, is to ask

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whether the notion of genres – particularly analytic or comparative genres – is useful. In relation to oral performances, we do not encounter genres or even texts; we hear only the performances. So what use is it to speak of their “genre”? The concept’s utility lies in its ability to help us understand how speakers can accommodate their speech to expectations or conventions (Bauman 1999). Particular conventions attach to specific kinds of performance; they go beyond conventions of grammar, politeness etc. that govern speech in general. To speak of genres of lament helps us avoid essentializing their setting or situation, or making funerals a binding part of their definition. As Bauman puts it, “While particular genres may be primarily identified with specific situational contexts of use – for example, curing chants with healing rituals – it is of the very nature of genre to be recognizable outside of such primary contexts” (2000; emphasis added). In regard to lament genres, their “functions can range from genuine mourning or parting to complaints about status in the community, or to contact with the preternatural or spirit world” (Porter 2007). Some lament genres are esoteric. This brings us back to the question of situational restrictions on lament, but also raises new questions about the linguistic form a particular lament genre might use. Orientalist Mark Cohen has studied ancient Sumerian laments – cuneiform text-artifacts typically composed by priests on the theme of the destruction of a city and its chief temple. He doubts the laments he studies had any popular use, citing the esoteric linguistic register (a speech form associated with a certain activity and with those associated with that activity, Agha 2004) in which they were composed by a special class of Sumerian priests – kalû priests, sole speakers of the Emesal dialect of Sumerian who performed music in temples. “Being in the liturgy of the kalû-priest all the balag-lamentations are in Emesal . . .” (Cohen 1975:35). Laments’ relevance beyond funerals is central to our motivation in studying them. Lament genres no doubt arise in funerary settings. Yet all speech genres – even ritual genres – tend to slip out of their original settings, to be quoted, played with, or used in other settings for quite personal, non-ritual, purposes. For instance, Panamanian Kuna children sometimes playfully imitate shamans’ chants (Sherzer 1983). There are far more allied genres than this book can cover – all the genres of “sad songs” alone would require many books. Their affinity with lament, and the porosity of any boundaries we might put around lament (for example the funeral context), have claimed our attention in part because they remind

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us that genres are not things, let alone stable things. Their limits are no more agreed upon than is the fit of a particular performance (a token) with a type or genre.3 Genres are in fact examples of (metadiscourse functioning as) metaculture; genre labels crystallize reflections on certain communicative forms. This book is not just about lament itself but about us, our labels for lament, and our interest in it – and thus about metaculture. It is a study of invocations of lament, recognizing that such metadiscourses always surround and regiment communicative forms. What gives this meta-study its integrity is the fact that people use these words – English lament, Greek thrênos, etc. – not that their meaning is clear or fixed. I delimit my study with reference to category labels others invoke. These labels represent and reproduce notions of a unified genre or set of genres, and such notions tell us something of the societies and cultural processes that generate them – including my own American academic culture. Analyzing the diversity: SPEAKING of laments A common rubric for analyzing speech events like laments in linguistic anthropology is Hymes’ (1972) SPEAKING mnemonic, which prompts attention to a recognized set of issues important to ethnographic descriptions of communicative events. The mnemonic reflects currents of thought that dominated American anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s, but is useful to us as a reminder of complexity and patterning. Each of the eight letters in SPEAKING prompts attention to a different variable important in a holistic analysis. What follows is an ethnology of lamentation – a comparative account of laments in general. Such an ethnology is possible only because others have written fine ethnographies of particular lament performances and local traditions – for example, Danforth and Tsiaras 1982 and Seremetakis 1991 in Greece; Feld 1990[1982] in Papua New Guinea; and Clark-Deces 2004 in Sri Lanka. Setting/Situation. The first letter in the mnemonic points to the Setting and Situation of the speech event as defined by the actors rather than in a purely physical or objective way. Around the world, laments prototypically occur in connection with death observances. Crucially, ritual settings marking other life passages also incorporate laments. The destruction of whole cities occasioned official laments in the ancient Near East (Cohen 1975; Dobbs Allsopp 1993; Ferris 1992) and later in the Muslim world, including Andalusia (al-Sinjilawi 1991). Weddings, too, occasioned lamenting by brides

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and/or expert cry-women (Blake 1978; Tolbert 1990). Around the world, women have improvised laments in other times of loss. Doreen Indra (personal communication, 1992) tells of a Bangladeshi woman whose home was washed away in a flood. She camped out on her brother-in-law’s doorstep lamenting for at least a whole day, to persuade him to let her stay there until she could regroup and rebuild a home. She got what she needed. Participants. P reminds us to consider the participants in the speech event, again as local groups understand them. Around the world, women have dominated lament. In Egypt, it was older women in particular, in part reflecting the complex relations lament is believed to have with fertility. Recent laments in Hakka (Johnson 1988:144) and Bangladeshi villages were solos, but in the Amazon (Briggs 1993) and elsewhere they were typically choral. Different classes of persons might become the addressees of laments. Some upbraided the dead for abandoning the singer; some challenged deities in times of suffering. Biblical psalms of complaint, often called lament psalms, topicalize tragedies. Such psalms argue “against God,” asserting that the tragedies befalling Israel represent a punishment too harsh (Fløysvik 1997:19, 175–176). Veena Das mentions Punjabi laments that hearers have considered blasphemous, songs cursing the goddess for taking the bereaved singer’s man as if to marry him herself (Das 1996:80). Those who could be expected to hear the words of a lament indirectly would be crucial in local understandings of participants. Briggs (1992) found that Amazonian Warao women include in their funerary laments accusations of sorcery, typically directed against powerful shamans. These men later hear of the accusations, and respond, denigrating women’s knowledge. Ends. E prompts attention to the ends of a performance. Performances may have conscious goals, but also other outcomes, which anthropologists call their social functions. Musicologist A. L. Lloyd finds that laments around the world function therapeutically (for the living), as a means of honoring the dead, and as “part of the rites of transition and incorporation into the world of the dead” (1980:407). We might add to these three a political function. Warao women lamenters’ accusations against shamans have served as a check on the latter’s power. It was probably the power of ancient Greek women’s laments to stir men to revenge attacks that led Solon to ban them (Alexiou

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1974; Holst-Warhaft 1992; Loraux 1998). By intent or simply by function, lament performances also moved some hearers to seek vengeance in Arabic (al-Sinjilawi 1991), Corsican, and Sardinian traditions (Böckel 1913:100–110). Ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Wickett (1993) argues that ancient Egyptians ascribed to lament the power to restore life, at least ensuring an afterlife, but even – in its myth of origin – effecting an immediate resurrection. Not dissimilarly, the Balto-Finnic Karelian people once regarded cry-women as psychopomps – those who conduct souls from one side of the great divide to the other. This put cry-women on a par with shamans (Tolbert 1990). Act-sequence. The A in SPEAKING reminds us of the “act-sequence” of a communicative event, its message-form and message-content. This dimension might harbor the most variability across cultural traditions of lament, since local poetics and aesthetics determine the form of any speech event. You might say I have rigged this game, having defined lament in part by content – something suitable to death rites. The “content” of laments, however, need not be about death; singers exploit the recognizable form and act-sequence, using lament outside prototypical settings, bending it to fit many occasions. Laments are conventionally marked by “grieving questions,” such as “Why have you left us? Did not we all love you? Did we in some way distress you?” and vocatives like “Oh, my mother, my mother!” (Honko 1974:11) – directly addressing the dead. We find such questions in the lament psalms as well. Melody can also be part of a lament genre’s conventional sequentiality. Yet the act-sequence of laments is almost always left to improvisation. Any account of a particular lament tradition must be sensitive to the dialectic of ritualization and improvisation (Sawyer 1996). From genres of lament common in the ancient Near East to genres of “magical laments,” one significant, emergent textual pattern is the movement from grief to hope, prayer, praise, etc. Not only does the emotional mood shift, but so do verb moods, for example from indicative and interrogative (“Now I am bereft of hope,” “Why have you abandoned us?”) to optatives and imperatives addressed, for example, to deities (“Save us!”). The textual movement itself may function as an iconic index of a certain larger, even cosmic, reality to which it intentionally relates. That is, the movement from one state to another within the text both points to (indexes) and magically invokes by resemblance (iconically represents) the transformation this kind of lament aims for.4 These laments – ritual laments

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in the fullest sense, i.e. those designed to transform and not only express – work their magic, in part, through the pattern that emerges at the level of the sequence of speech acts within the performance (Wilce 2006). Keys. K prompts attention to the speech event’s emotional “key” or tone. Hymes regarded key as encoded largely in stylistic features. No doubt a speech event’s tone arises from the relationship of such stylistic features to the setting as locally understood. Have we finally found here a dimension in which laments might be quite invariable around the world? When we define laments as ritual expressions of grief have we said it all? Oddly, no. Irish lamentation in funeral wakes occurred together with “amusements” including sexual games (HolstWarhaft 2000:8; Ó’Súilleabhaín 1967). In an example of the emergent patterning discussed above, the ritual laments of ancient Israel so often ended with rejoicing that we might read their end or function as leading the people through grief to repentance and restoration to their covenant with God (Anderson 1991). The fact that laments immediately preceded rejoicing indicates that apparently contradictory keys of grief and joy can coexist in laments. In fact the emotional key to a given lament may be neither grief nor joy but anger or outrage. This has important implications. Those who construe laments as a therapeutic modality efface their political edge, their function as “rhetorics of grievance” (McLaren 2000a). We err in uncritically applying such Western notions as catharsis (Gamliel 2007:1507) to lamenters whose cultural models of emotion, personhood, and communication are quite unlike Aristotle’s. It is important to keep in view the complexity of laments’ keying in order to retain a broad vision of their impact and relevance. Instrumentalities. In Hymes’ scheme, I refers to a speech event’s “instrumentalities” – the channels of communication it uses. Lament exploits language, but also tears, melody, movement, and even dance (Alexiou 1974). Spontaneously improvised laments are typically performed in a grammatically unmarked linguistic register common to all community members. Beyond their linguistic instrumentality, we know something of the musical accompaniments of the ancient Sumerian genre (composed, not improvised, and esoteric). To speak of balag laments is to invoke the musical instrument for which the genre is named, the balag (Sumerian harp) used to accompany these songs (Cohen 1975:29). And it was not only the apparent ingratitude

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or irreverence of lamentation per se but another instrumentality – the “pagan,” dance-like movements in which it was bodied forth in the time of St. John Chrysostom (fourth to fifth centuries CE) – that fueled his vehement denunciations of lament. Norms. N indicates the norms associated with the production (speaking, singing, crying, interacting, etc.) and interpretation of the type of communication in focus. For example, it is normative for Warao women to lament chorally (Briggs 1992, 1993). Norms are conventions. Yet, paradoxically, it is normative in many societies to interpret laments as “coming from the heart” (one Bangladeshi man’s description of lament). Norms govern who performs: “Often the lamenter was the nearest female relative of the deceased, and those present would comment on the quality and sincerity of the lament” (Porter 2007). A “metaculture of modernity” (Urban 2001) demands that persons communicate authentically; the norm of authenticity may prevent moderns from appreciating the traditional-normative duty to lament. Genres. The G in SPEAKING, genre, is notoriously difficult to define. Genre is a kind of sedimentation of the outcome of SPEAKIN (David Samuels, personal communication, August 2002). Genres are structures of expectation guiding the production and reception of text (Bauman 1999). As reflections on performances, genres are metacultural. From another perspective, local labels for performances are genres; yet this ignores the difficulty of finding one label per society that best corresponds to “lament.” Chapter 4 surveys the many, historically evolving, terms in ancient Greek that designate lament-related performances. The evolution of the lexical semantics of Greek lament went hand in hand with the social evolution of Greek society, for example Solon’s attempt to ban women’s wailing – but not the more staid, entextualized performances of men commemorating other men. Translation always faces the problem of incommensurability, not least in the number and type of categories in the original and target languages. Translation of such terms involves comparing two cultural systems of meaning; as such it is metacultural. Applying the SPEAKING mnemonic to scores of ethnographically informed accounts of lamentation in scores of societies reveals their diversity and commonalities. Such a systematic approach clarifies the phenomena at hand. We are left with a sense of family resemblance among forms called laments, but we cannot reduce them to a single point vis-à-vis any of the

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eight dimensions indexed by SPEAKING. Moreover, there is a metacultural politics to representations of lament that the mnemonic can obscure. The degree to which people consider any sort of lament a genre might depend on our sense of their predictability, their textuality – and such judgments are metadiscursive, and metacultural. Both Hymes’ comparative model and the reflexivity of its constituents (from norms to genres) exemplify metaculture. Textuality results from reflexive, structuring processes – and perceptions of textuality are metacultural. If wailing and moaning lack the sort of textuality that we impute to dirges and elegies, we are less likely to consider them genres. The issue of textuality demands our attention next.

Text and Context: Musicality and Voice, Body and Performance The problem of textuality There is a strong tendency to represent performances as texts, to focus on what is most common and quotable – i.e. textual – across a group of laments. These lines from an Ingrian daughter’s lament for her mother could, perhaps, be for any woman, any time: “Now she is going to the land of death” (Nenola 2002:145, text 1519). Such lines epitomize laments’ textuality; they represent the entextualization of a performance. Entextualization is the packaging or organizing of discourse as text, i.e. some “thing” that is coherent, memorable, and extractable from context (Bauman and Briggs 1990). To speak of laments’ entextualization focuses our attention on their textuality or coherence; and indeed, even improvised laments are often structured (melodically and linguistically) so as to make them memorable. But this textualist perspective is a tad problematic. Would performers, for example, be as quick to represent performances (for example laments) as texts – rather than, say, melodies, or tears? We lack the kind of data needed to answer this – namely, everyday metacultural/metapragmatic characterizations of performances such as laments in a wide variety of languages. (What we do with speech is its pragmatic meaning; to reflect on that speech act is metapragmatic. Representing laments – as texts, as communicative sins, or as valued performances – is also metacultural insofar as it reflects on these culturally constituted acts.) What is clear is that most of the performances we are concerned with are given labels, epitomizing them

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and representing them as text insofar as their discursive patterning is clear enough to be remembered and commented on. But what are lament’s obvious non-textual elements?

Laments: Texts and More Lament is, prototypically, melodic weeping with words. Weeping is not textual, i.e. there is no particular coherence to any pattern of cries. Nor are the particularities of a given performance, such as the moment when a lamenter might turn and address the brother of her deceased husband as you; this turning, this direct address – indexing a sociospatial relationship – is unrepeatable. Neither a turn nor a “you” carries over to another performance to indicate the same person. Thus, the label “lament” – a genre, i.e. a structure of predictability – objectifies the painful particularity of performances. Words, nonlinguistic sounds, smells, musical features, gesture, dance, interactive features of the specific event, and its particular location in history – together these comprise the emergent whole of a lament, its contextual grounding. A unique set of features comes together to form a fleeting, non-repeatable context; this is the contextualization of performance. The moment when a singer might touch a fellow mourner with her hand, the unique temporal indexicality of saying “my brother-in-law whispered his resentment of me” in a lament sung two days after the singer’s husband died and left his fortune to his wife – these exemplify contextualization. Although what is unique to a particular event can also be what is memorable, most contextual features are not portable in the same way as pure text is. Somehow, out of such events it is often the text – the coherent, repeatable, transcontextually portable set of signs – that stays with us. This coherence may stay with hearers of the lament, even if it is not the product of an intentional consciousness on the part of the performer. The event lives on in this quotable and much-reduced form. Bauman and Briggs (1990) argued that it is in the very nature of performance to be entextualized. Performance is entextualization – it entails shifting into a key that regiments, regularizes, or poetically structures speech features such that they become memorable, repeatable. There is nothing peculiarly Western about this. A singer makes her song memorable by imposing on it certain

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crisp regularities; she may or may not consciously craft her performance to this end, but the very act of performing entails making oneself accountable for the very sort of structuring, coherence, or memorability we have been calling entextualization. Bauman and Briggs’ (1990) treatment of entextualization dealt primarily with language – the poetics of linguistic performance – and for good reason. Of all the modalities performances exploit, language may be the most portable, the most memorable. The paradox I opened up in the last paragraph is that, sometimes, it is the emergent features constituting the “performance key” that propel highly contextualized performances across (and apparently beyond) context(s). Parallelism – not a single feature but a set of relations – is the ur-form of entextualization. Note the parallelism in this Ingrian lament by a husband’s grave originally collected by the father of Finnish folklore studies, Elias Lönnrot, in 1844: (a1) If you cannot rise, woman’s-raised-one (b1) the sand with my fingers I shall try to scatter (b2) the grave with my hands I shall try to open (b3) onto the stone, you I shall lift (a2) woman’s-held-in-her-lap . . . (adapted from Nenola 2002:225, lament #1717)5

The three interior lines (labeled b1–b3) manifest grammatical parallelism. I’ve modified Nenola’s translation to show that they all end with (transitive) verbs. And those three are encompassed by two outer lines exemplifying the metaphorical forms of address typifying Ingrian laments. Parallelism and other structural features achieve entextualization, coherence, memorability. They organize what is otherwise a highly contextualized production into something potentially decontextualizable. Contextualization – the process whereby discourse takes root in very particular moments, the flip side of entextualization – may be just as important in reproducing culture. For example, metacultural values may favor the new dimensions of each lament – their spontaneity, or apparently authentic emotions. It is in the emergent domain of contextualization that micro-events come together to achieve apparent newness. Thus entextualization is just one step in the dialectic of immediate contexts and longer histories that is central to the reproduction of culture (Silverstein and Urban 1996b:1). The play of contextualization and entextualization – processes by which laments come to appear as texts despite their shifting contextualized

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grounding, dialectically engaging with actions that submerge any sense of the old in a flood of immediacy – reproduces culture, and laments as a particular cultural achievement.

Beyond lyrical textuality Spontaneous musical laments are more than discourse. No lament performance would be convincing, in many traditions, without visible tears, chest-racking sobs, and even movement. Ancient Greek lament-women danced after a fashion. How is it that such obviously improvised, semiotically multimodal, context-related, emergent phenomena so easily become represented as text – not only by scholars but also by local audiences and performers? Or is the issue, instead, one of recognizing non-discursive forms of textuality? The musical textuality of lament There are obviously limitations to focusing on laments’ lyrics – whether or not they are coherent or quotable – to the exclusion of their vocal quality, musicality, and embodied actions. Beyond words, melodies are also textual insofar as they too are a coherent and repeatable set of musical signs – notes and larger musical units (Laskewicz 2003). Musical “text” has attracted almost as much attention in studies of lament as verbal text. Together, the music and lyrics of lament are typically characterized as signs of grief or passion. We can usefully locate song, singsong, and speech intonation along a single continuum of tonal textuality. Repeatable lament melodies regularize and exaggerate intonation patterns that are less constrained in unmarked conversational complaint (Wilce 1998a). Just as entextualization entails patterning that renders discourse decontextualizable, memorable, or quotable, laments are rendered singable across contexts by virtue of their memorable and repeatable melodic structures. Melodic structure is to song as cohesion is to discourse. It is possible to represent a particular performance as “a lament” in part because of its adherence to certain melodic conventions. “Just from a few fragments of melody overheard the people had understood that someone had passed away and the rite of passage had been commenced” in the area of Estonia that is home to the Balto-Finnic Setu people (Sarv 1998:139). Thus music or melody can conventionally signal grief largely because they are text-like and structured predictably, and melody as well as lyrics

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can make laments memorable. Listeners expect laments to invoke discursive themes common at least in a particular region or social class, such as the hard work and occupational skill of the deceased as a farmer in eastern European laments. In the same way, listeners expect to hear certain melodic themes such as the descending melodic phrase of four or five notes common in old European laments (Porter 2007). Ethnomusicologists interested in lament have divided “texted” musical portions from parts that are nonlinguistic or nonsemantic, but still melodic, and from pure wailing. We can distinguish nonlinguistic vocables (like “scat” singing) from recognizable words, and also recurring from nonrecurring lyrics. Musical composition aims at musical textuality; improvisation is not about repetition or text. Individual performances fall on a continuum between these poles. Hungarian composer and ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály drew particular attention to “the improvisatory [or “inspirational”] nature of vocal lamenting in Hungary”: The inspirational aspect results in sections of unequal length ending with pauses, irregular repetition of melodic phrases, and a melodic structure tied to the freely flowing prose and consisting of two descending lines . . . (Porter 2007, citing Kodály)

Similarly Auerbach (1984:95), an ethnomusicologist who worked in the Greek village of Kalohori, described its laments as improvisatory. She went on to compare her findings with those of Steve Feld: “It is conceivable that Kalohorians view lament melody as a ‘natural given substance,’ but text as a varying ‘composed created substance,’ like the Kaluli6 of Papua New Guinea” (1984:95, quoting Feld 1990[1982]:166). The same issues of “naturalness,” control, expressive freedom, and textuality probably underlie the distinction Albanians once made between “lament by tears” from “the more formal, relatively controlled keen [which, like Finns, they call] and lament by voice” (Lloyd 1980:408 – 409). Lament’s embodiment Lament performance is embodied. We find similar uses of the voice, throat, face, limbs, etc. in lament around the world. Local definitions of lament typically include melody, tears, and a crying voice characterized by pharyngeal constriction and “cry breaks” (Feld and Fox 1994:40; Urban 1988). Wailers in various times and places (for example in 19th-century Finland: Lönnrot 1836) have also put their arms around each other’s necks. Such

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features exemplify the coherent set of signs that defines textuality (Hanks 1989:95, 101), the regularities that render texts quotable, portable (Bauman and Briggs 1990). Producing tuneless texts about the departed or one’s own grief, or performing without crucial embodied features, is unimaginable in traditions of improvisatory texted weeping. Just as there are long histories of borrowing or alluding to textual dimensions of lament (in melody as well as lyrics) – the interdiscursive chains

Figure 2.1 Egyptian woman, arms upraised Drawing by Laurie Coveney-Thom, based on figures by Baud, from Werbrouck and Baud 1938.

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described in Chapter 4 – there are histories – stretching across millennia – of reproducing kinesic forms proper to lament. Wickett (1993) carried out fieldwork with women in Upper Egypt in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She found contemporary women’s laments replicating the very postures and gestures – “lament kinesics” – depicted in ancient Egyptian tomb paintings of women lamenting and dancing at funerals (Werbrouck and Baud 1938). Wickett finds the corporeal continuities across 4,000 years of Egyptian history at least as significant as the continuity in discursive themes of ancient and recent laments. In particular, she describes women reproducing in their bodies the upraised arms (bent at the elbow, fists often clenched) depicted in ancient tomb paintings (Wickett 1993:90). Cupping the hand to the mouth is yet another of the stereotypic gestures recorded at both ends of a four-millennium period. Wickett interprets the ancient images in light of contemporary laments in which a leader cups her hand to her mouth in ululation, which gives rhythm to a larger group’s choral laments (1993:94 –96). Intervening links between the paintings and Wickett’s contemporary subjects confirm that letting the hair down and removing some clothing were common among lamenting Egyptian women (Herodotus 1920, ‘Abd al-Raziq 1973). Ethnomusicologist A. L. Lloyd, in discussing the alternation of chaotic weeping with more orderly lament text, describes “paroxysmic utterances” as “sometimes accompanied by the self-infliction of physical pain” (1980:407). Self-injury through throwing oneself on the ground accompanies lament in a wide variety of traditions and signals an identification with the dead who will soon be in the ground (Anderson 1991). One of Homer’s heroes speaks of having his fill of “weeping and writhing upon the ground” (Homer 1900). I have not seen it in Bangladesh, but people describing AhAjArC (or hAhAkAri, distraught lamentation) mention wailers throwing themselves on the ground. Such acts may result in long-lasting injuries. In 2002 Adiman, a Nigerian cab-driver in Chicago, told me that his mother complained for four years about pains in her chest from injuries she received in falling down and hitting herself while wailing over her husband’s body. In June 2003 I traveled to a southeastern Finnish-Karelian village to participate in a lament course, part of Ancient Culture Week. Instruction began with the playing of recordings of Karelian cry-women archived by the Finnish Literature Society, and a demonstration by organizer Pirkko Fihlman, the granddaughter of an expert cry-woman in Finnish Karelia,

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Figure 2.2 The late Martta Kuikka, cry-woman, in the typical Karelian lamenter’s posture, at the seminar entitled “The Karelian Language is Living,” Iisalmi March 10, 1991 Photo by Hanna Riikonen. Previously published in “Itkuvirren kolme elämää” (“Three Lives of Lament”), Anna-Liisa Tenhunen, p. 267 (Gummerus Kirjapaino, 2006), Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seuran toimituksia 1051.

who now teaches Finns to lament.7 She “quoted” the embodied signs that have traditionally accompanied Karelian lament, rocking (like the Bangladeshi lamenter described in Chapter 5 below) and covering her face with a cloth.8 By the end of the course, in keeping with the ideology of individualism that dominates Finland and the West as a whole, all participants composed laments in their own words. Folklorist Aili Nenola had already told me that using others’ words to vent your sorrows simply doesn’t work for modern Finns (interview, videotaped June 17, 2003). That metacultural embrace of newness or creativity encourages improvisation and discourages direct

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quoting of earlier laments’ words in the process of “getting [sorrow] out.”9 Yet it allows for “quoting” melody in some cases (some participants used Pirkko’s) and gesture, which is perhaps consigned to a “nature” felt to be universal. Many participants imitated Fihlman and the cry-women in old photos she showed, covering their faces with a handkerchief and rocking. Thus, they engaged in selective quoting of the multimodal text features of the old laments. That selective process was, no doubt, guided by crosscutting ideologies about authenticity, tradition, emotion, and textual self-expression. But it also reflects the different sorts and levels of consciousness attaching to linguistic and nonlinguistic modes of textuality.

Conclusion This chapter has attempted to capture some of what has given laments around the world their family resemblance. Probing definitional problems surrounding lament has raised issues of commensurability that have long busied anthropologists. Starting from events and actional fields rather than abstractions is a strategy that can free us from reifying performances. Scholars of lament have focused on words, and on textuality – sometimes in the broader sense that includes other types of signs contributing to the coherence of a performance (be they notes or words, or perhaps even a series of gestures) – or on the metaphors lamenters use (Nenola 2002). Local critics of lament performances might also weigh their textual sense and emotionality against locally important values. Easily lost in linguistictextualist reductions of laments – local or scholarly – are the fleeting, highly contextualized, and embodied dimensions that define the event-in-themoment as surely as do memorable features that are reproducible in the future. Yet I have shown that embodied features can achieve something like entextualization, to the extent that they are conventionalized and salient enough to “quote.” I have worked with models like textuality, genre, and the SPEAKING mnemonic because they are widely known and also heuristic. Hymes’ mnemonic, for instance, helped us recognize distinct dimensions of speech as action. However, it also carries within it the seeds of problems generally associated with structuralist models, particularly a neglect of history. Notions of genre, similarly, are poorly equipped to encompass the movement of culture across time and space. With effort, we have made concepts like text

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and textuality fit the realities of spatiotemporally dynamic culture, but their common associations are much less dynamic. Concepts like these are the stock-in-trade of literary analysis, and a discussion of laments needs to use a metalanguage understandable to the trade. However we might conceive of words, social practices involve bodies. Notions of textuality and genre are transformed if we view them in relation to embodied practice (Hanks 1996). Genre labels sum up social practices, and genres concretize social expectations surrounding a performance style; but bodies are central to those performances and thus must be central to our vision of genres. Human social practices always occur in fields of action, fields that are both a given context for action and to some extent the product of particular acts (Bourdieu 1977[1972]; Giddens 1979). Imagine, for instance, a rural Bangladeshi home where several patrilineally related families live together – the setting of my longest stint of fieldwork. When Latifa, whose story we return to in later chapters, came to visit that home and to sing a series of texted laments, she entered that particular field of action. It already had ways of performing gender, and enacting hierarchies of age as well as gender. It was a field whose regular occupants might expect women to improvise songs of lamentation at funerals – but not after a divorce, especially not after two years. In that field, bilAp “lamentation” was marginally recognized as a mode of action, though the genre label was too technical for everyday usage. Latifa’s attempt to exploit any tacit recognition of a tradition of bilAp that might have survived in that field foundered for two reasons: Latifa’s kin showed an increasing amnesia toward the traditional genre (see Chapter 5), and she performed her laments outside the expected contexts. People in that district of Bangladesh (Matlab) told me that lament tunes come, not from tradition or musical memory, but from the man or antar, “the “heartmind” or “interior” – two ways of describing the seat of subjectivity. I would prefer to say that lament performances involve particular uses of the whole body. Such a fundamentally embodied “technology of commemoration” (Chapter 5) has two potential shortfalls. First, it gives Latifa’s verbal text a bodily reality that convinces her, but not her audience that she is authentically performing grief (Scarry 1985). Second, it makes the genre even less fit for rational modern communication. Thus lament – like history – becomes the more elusive in being radically embodied (Bourdieu 1977[1972]:78). Where it retains a foothold in modern societies, lament is caught up in the struggle between ideologically motivated needs to maximize or

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minimize intertextual gaps between older and current performances (Briggs and Bauman 1992). But the various semiotic modalities that constitute lament texts are not equally salient in such struggles. Understanding such a world (of perception if not reality) requires notions like metaculture. The metaculture model illumines what changes and what stays the same across successive performances. It addresses just what it is that circulates as culture moves through time and space. Even a century ago, each lament performance (or text) was grounded in a unique context, yet bystanders and singers perceived something connecting them. These somethings are predictable sonic and visible signals, the material features that enable culture to circulate, according to Urban (2001). Subtle features of Paraiyar women’s laments carry over into the contemporary protest songs of Kanyammaa, a Tamil woman who sings about goddesses (including the one for whom she was named) and the loss of forests (Trawick 2002). One famous contemporary Bosavi New Guinean guitar band “quotes” vocal features of Kaluli laments – now captured only in memory and on Steve Feld’s recordings – such as cry-breaks accompanying an onomatopoeic syllable denoting crying (Feld, in press). A model of genres as very loose concatenations of features, or – even more radically – a model of “cultures of performance” that dispenses with genre altogether in favor of metacultural trajectories – would absolve us of the responsibility to offer a final answer to the question, What are laments? Instead, a metaculture model prompts us to look for cultural features, patterns, products, and ideas in motion. It is the concept of metaculture that makes it sensible to write a book that presents a unified account of laments and their critiques, lament representations and postmodern metalaments. This chapter has only hinted at what is at stake for lament performers (touching, for example, on laments’ tendency to be subversive), or what is at stake in widely circulating representations of lamentation, particularly its representation as emotional. Such concerns occupy the next chapter.

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Lament and Emotion

A Social Model of Emotion This chapter addresses the understanding that lament “expresses emotion,” that it does so in an uncontrolled fashion, and that lamenters – stereotypically women – are thus suspect. The performance features of lament that I stressed throughout Chapter 2 (rocking, sobbing, “grieving texts” in mourning contexts, etc.) raise vexing questions about lament’s relation to emotion. In the West we often speak of language and emotion as if the emotion preceded some act of “expression.” We speak of feelings as though they were pieces of private property, whose owners choose among available expressive means. In actuality, what is communicated (“content”) is never neutral as to the communicative method or form. The two interact and influence each other. “Expression organizes experience” (Volosinov 1973:85), not (just) the other way around as we normally think. This chapter grapples with the obvious emotionality of spontaneous crying songs and their simultaneous demonstration of skill, arguing that this relationship is not a contradiction, as it would appear to most readers.

Emotions, culture, history Emotions are to a significant extent the product of socialization. It is through immersion in the world of signs, for example seeing and hearing our caregivers’ expressions, that we learn to experience and feel, socially. Babies learn to fear staircases when they see their mothers looking horrified as they teeter atop them (Campos and Sternberg 1981). Therefore, our emotions have never been purely personal or biological. Always social in context, emotions and the semiotic forms that signal and reproduce them are responsive to the forms of our shared life. More than straightforwardly Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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revealing psychological processes, lament and other forms of “expression” help constitute social understandings and “internal” processes. To be a person is to belong to a group; participation in all human social groups entails sharing genres and cultural sensibilities about performances – events in which communicators are held accountable for performance quality, not only what they “say” (Bauman 1975). Altering either emotion, semiotic forms (genres), or the structures of social life means altering the others, too. Widely varying cultural practices – for example hyperventilation, memorialization, or military ritual – help constitute emotional states, and widely varying emotions come to appear as requirements for participating in grand cultural forms. Anthropologist Don Brenneis studies a Hindi-speaking community on Fiji. In the village of Bhatgaon, “bhaw ([Sanskrit bhAva], feelings) are not viewed as internal states. Rather moods seem to be located in events themselves” (1990:118). Participation in various sorts of events is gendered, and events are ranked in importance insofar as they evoke the emotions that Bhatgaon residents conceive of as a sort of social glue. Subjectivities do not only vary across human societies; dominant emotions have also varied across historical eras (Wilce in press). Historian and anthropologist William Reddy has documented, in French history, shifts in emotion discourses and in the sorts of actions humans read as manifesting emotion – words, violence, sex acts, and acts of friendship. Sentimentalism, “the novel view of emotions as a force for good in human affairs” (2001:146), in many ways spawned the French Revolution and the Terror that followed. I have thus far made two important claims: that emotion is central to social life, and that particular emotions and expressive forms vary in their centrality and even acceptability over time and across “emotional regimes” – “sets of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them” (Reddy 2001:129). The social role of lament varies along with that of other modes of expression. What we mean in calling lament “emotional” is thus culturally and historically situated.

Is Lament an Expression of Emotion? If we ask people in societies with a lament tradition that is at least remembered if not performed whether lament expresses emotion (if the question

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is translatable), they would probably say yes. But some examples from around the world may illustrate the challenges of linking lament to emotion in any straightforward way. In the summer of 1996 I visited Bangladesh for a short period of fieldwork focused on conceptions of and attitudes toward lament. On a long ferry-boat ride from Dhaka to my field site I asked male college students such as Masibur Rahman what bilAp (“a weeping, a wail, lamentation; complaint; regret”: Mitra 1924:112) was. He said it’s what people do when they suffer something really extreme like the loss of a parent or sibling – when they experience ekLA kichu jeLAr AghAt sajjo karte pAre nA, “something whose wound cannot be endured [sajjo kar]”. Sajjo – endurance, patience (Ali et al. 1994:811) or bearing up – is an important virtue. To be unable to bear something entails some shame. Mr. Rahman said that lament is the hAwmAw (loud wailing, uproar, or tumult [Ali et al. 1994:861]) people make when they suffer some blow that shatters their sajjo. For him and others in Bangladesh, lament reflects out-of-control emotion. Social historian Vinay Bahl describes the wedding laments she heard when she was growing up in the Indian states of Punjab and Bengal. Indian brides were more or less required to lament their impending separation from their natal families, and families lament the bride’s departure. But what emotion inspires particular individuals’ laments? Bahl’s sister had been married a short time when she admitted to Vinay that she had expressed grief in her wedding lament not so much at leaving their parents as in remembering their mother telling her, “from now on you will live and die in your new home only” (Vinay Bahl, personal communication, June 2003), which she experienced as rejection. Lament survived longer in Russia and Finland than in other parts of Europe. Large areas that now straddle the border between Russia and Finland, called Karjala (Karelia), and Inkerimaa (Ingria), now in Russia, sustained an active lament tradition, something ethnic Finns never had. Karelian and Ingrian are Finno-Ugrian languages, closely related to Finnish. The simultaneous birth of romantic nationalism and folkloristics in 19th-century Finland (a Russian duchy which at that time included most of Karelia) turned Karelia in particular into a cultural icon, and 19th- and 20th-century Finnish folklorists did significant work there, collecting laments and other genres (see Chapter 9). In 2003, during my first visit to Finland in pursuit of its lament revival (elvytys), I heard of an intergenerational controversy. Äänellä Itkijät’s leaders told me that leading Finnish folklorists had publicly declared the

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revival inauthentic. These scholars claimed that the Karelian cry-women (itkijänaiset) of former generations could not possibly have been expressing real feelings since they were often called to lament the death of someone they hardly even knew. Upon hearing that – yes, we live in an era when those we write about read our work – the late Martta Kuikka (see Fig. 2.2), called one of the last living bearers of the Karelian itkuvirsi (lament) tradition, became indignant. She spoke of the hard emotion-work she and others undertook. If a committed cry-woman – one whose laments are so valued that she often receives invitations to cry at weddings and funerals in Finnish Karelia – were called to sing at the funeral of a total stranger, she would work to find emotional resonances within herself. She might imagine her own mother dying, for example (Aili Nenola, interview, June 17, 2003). Kuikka emphasizes a more mystical capacity for empathy with those in whose presence she might be singing, according to ethnomusicologist Tuomas Rounakari, who directed a documentary film on Kuikka’s life and co-teaches lament courses with Äänellä Itkijät founder Pirkko Fihlman. For Kuikka the question was: If a cry-woman herself had little at stake, risked little or expressed little of herself, why would she do something so dangerous to herself? Her own mother had almost died from the heart-stress of lamenting. Kuikka and other Karelian cry-women experienced lamenting as a kind of trance. These women would “move away from their bodies” (Rounakari, personal communication, September 2004). Kuikka explained the risk in terms of the potential to “choke on her tears” while out of her body. Part of the hard work of lament was to “keep her feet on the ground,” or maintain some control even while she was in trance. Kuikka did not deny that lamenting is a performance (like the “performances of emotion” of Paxtun women, Grima 1992) – nor certainly that it is a practice of power – but that lamenting is a purely technical act. In the eyes of Rounakari as well as Kuikka, to present Karelian lament as a conventionalized, mercenary performance without heart – without emotion – is a travesty.

Gender, emotion, and power Interestingly, we have another representation of Martta Kuikka’s story that presents nuances I did not hear from Rounakari. The last generation of Karelian cry-women provided ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Tolbert

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with “descriptions of going to the other world, the dangers of lamenting, and references to direct communication with the dead who could hear and understand all of what was going on” (Tolbert 1990:46). Based on her work with these cry-women, including Kuikka and her mother, Tolbert describes their “manipulation of performative devices” – not to deny that lamenters experiences emotion, but to stress their power as ritual specialists. In telling Tolbert she had almost died lamenting, Martta’s mother was describing the sense of danger lamenters shared. Laments’ danger is tied up with their power, “their overwhelming effects not only on the audience or on the spirits of the dead, but on the performers themselves.” Thus “lamenting is bad for the heart.” Is this heart the seat of emotion, or does it represent the soul put in danger, analogous to that faced by a shaman whose traveling soul can lose its way back to him (Tolbert 1990:49)? “It is the very quality of the female lamenter’s voice that enables her to mediate between personal and collective experiences of grief, and to create a bridge between the worlds of the living and the dead” (Dunn and Jones 1994:11). And so what Kuikka and many moderns might take as an insulting denial of the personal stakes of lament for Karelian performers reflects, for Tolbert, the affirmation that the lamenter’s emotion is changed from a source of vulnerability to a tool of power. A ritual lamenter’s role is as much leading or stirring up emotion as it is “expressing” it (Aili Nenola, videotaped interview, June 2003). The lamenter herself might feel deeply – as well she might, given the risk to her heart – but, even more significantly, she uses the conventions of emotion-signs to create (a) intersubjectivity with her human audience (Tolbert 1994:s191), (b) a bridge for the dead soul to follow to Tuonela (the realm of the dead), or (c) the magical blessing whose efficacy ensures that a marriage will endure (Tolbert 1994:191). Perhaps Kuikka shares the common perception that the “performance” label implies inauthenticity, insincerity. (Certainly Rounakari – who produced the documentary of Kuikka’s life – rejects this view of performance.) Readers might presume that if performers are drawing on the same skills actors use, they are not really feeling and thus question whether “traditional lamenters” were “just performing.” A skeptical Finnish lament course participant, seeing that everyone lamented with tears reflecting authentic feeling, decided it was “not performance.” But there is no need for such a sharp distinction. Laments can be performances requiring skill and hard work and still be deeply felt; if acting is required, it is “deep” acting. Such complexities indicate how misleading the phrase “emotional expression” may be, despite the truth to which it points. “Expression” implies

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and privileges a notion of interiority that is foreign to the social models of emotion that dominate thinking about emotion in many societies (Brenneis 1990; Watson-Gegeo and White 1992). Readers might not understand “emotional expressions” to be highly crafted cultural products. But, as I argued (with important caveats) in the last chapter, laments are engenred texts. As such they enter into a complex dialogical relationship with the dysphoria they (re)present, constitute, or (in some local theories) purge. Thus there are pros and cons to calling genres like lament “genres of emotion” or “emotional outlets.” True, crying helps define lament; ignoring the tears in many “ritual” laments would not aid our analysis. And to analyze lament traditions as if their contribution to social life and social structure did not involve emotion would be pointless, as well as offensive to lamenters like Martta Kuikka. Yet linking lament too closely with emotion is also dangerous. Doing so might obscure its character – as a performance, as a genre governed largely by convention, and as an often politically charged act of a social agent. That is, invoking the category of emotion often connotes something out of control, private, irrational, and thus of marginal relevance to social and political life. This description fails to capture what lament is.

Ritual and performativity What sorts of power have people attributed to lament? Both ancient and modern Egyptian lamenters have recognized their embodied singingweeping acts as ritually efficacious (“performative,” creating new realities, Austin 1962) for example. In Faulkner’s (1934, cited in Wickett 1993:95) translation of the Songs of Isis and Nephthys, a lamenter sings: Mine arms are extended to greet thee, Mine arms are upraised . . . are upraised to protect thee. (ll. 26–28)

Wickett sees a link between actions and understandings of ancient and modern Egyptian lamenters: The lifting of the arms above the head [see Figure 2.1 above] could be intended to invigorate the life-force or ka after death, though this is not explicit. The

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modern lamenter, Balabil, says: “By the life in my arms, I shall bring you nourishment” while raising her crooked arms over her head. Though it is possible that she was only trying to express the intensity of her emotions through physical gesture, it is conceivable that this unusual epithet “by the life in my arms” connotes not only vehemence but ritual empowerment. (1993:94 –95)

Gary Anderson (1991), studying the laments, and commands to weep, preserved in the Hebrew Bible, locates Hebrew lament in a ritual-liturgical context closely related to that of the city-laments of ancient Israel’s neighbors. The classic examples of Hebrew lament have as their theme the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE, which the prophets portrayed as the result of Israel’s sin. The divine commands to lament only make sense, Anderson argues, when we recognize the performative, not just the expressive, nature of lament and its counterpart, rejoicing. Both are ritual acts. Ancient Near Eastern laments were performed in temples, focal points for theocratic states. Thus, this carefully controlled, conventionally expressed passion was important to the semiotics of power and statecraft. Dominant modern ideologies tend to assign passion a place outside of rationality, valorizing the latter, a view that marginalizes lament’s relation to political power. Yet we all know that politics is a field of passion (HolstWarhaft 2000). Indeed, laments in nearly all of the world’s traditions have a political edge to them – in the prototypical funeral setting, but perhaps even more clearly in other settings. This reflects the fact that laments were performances of grief but also grievance. Particular laments and particular local genres varied in their mix of grief and grievance, mourning and protest. But this political edge helps explain the widespread association of passion in general (not just lament) with danger.

Passion as Danger To say that Finnish Karelian lament reflects a kind of gender politics is probably anachronistic; but Karelian cry-women exercised an authority men found threatening (Tolbert 1990:43). Holst-Warhaft (1992:3) also links lament’s passion with danger – to the social order as well as to the performer (1992:27). Laments in several societies once moved some to violent revenge on behalf of the bereaved (Honko 1974; al-Sinjilawi 1983).

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The ancient Greek lawgiver Solon apparently blamed women and the emotional excesses of their laments for causing barbaric blood feuds (Alexiou 1974:15). To regard passion as potentially subversive or socially destructive is widespread; many aesthetic systems (“cultures”) make that link (on Europe, see Foucault 1973:85; on Bangladesh, see Wilce 2002). Some scholars who write about the link attempt to loosen it (e.g., Holst-Warhaft 2000; Woodward 1996). Others have uncovered different cultural stances toward passion, for example associating it with those whose marginality is secured in part by that association, as among the Wolof of Senegal (Irvine 1990, 1998). Yet any attention paid to the association between passion (or lament in particular) and danger – including here in my book – runs the risk of strengthening it. Consider these representations: “To judge by modern custom, the [old Tlingit] expression of grief was very violent” (De Laguna 1972:523-B). “It is a fine line between channeling grief for the benefit of the oppressed and unleashing the violent anger of suffering. Most societies have kept a lid on grief ” (Holst-Warhaft 2000:18). Lamentation has been associated with self-injury from Italy (de Martino 2000[1975]), to South Asia, to Africa (Nagnon Diarrassouba, personal communication, May 2002). Adiman, the Nigerian cabbie mentioned in Chapter 2, told me that Catholic priests preached that feeling sad was acceptable, but that crying would not bring back the dead. Loud crying is rarer at Nigerian funerals, he said, because “We’re civilized now” (and presumably because of the danger of injury described in the last chapter). In previous generations, lamenting Sephardia Jews could become violent, even destroying important household possessions (Alvar 1969:18). What offends in such violent displays of grief, perhaps, is that they allow “nature” to completely overwhelm “culture.” Danforth and Tsiaras (1982) mention the embarrassment (i.e., the shame in this book’s title) young women feel about the “backwardness” of their lamenting village kin. However, the older women of the rural Greek village (Potamia) he studied defend lament as public communicative form, specifically contrasting it with uncontrolled wailing. The women of Potamia generally agree that the singing of laments is preferable to wild shouting and wailing as a means of expressing grief at death rituals . . . [which] is physically harmful and may cause illness. . . . [D]uring this period of uncontrolled shouting the bereaved relative of the deceased may say something . . . embarrassing. . . . By contrast, the singing of

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laments eliminates the possibility of revealing embarrassing information, since these laments constitute a public poetic language, a cultural code [for] the expression of grief. (1982:73)

Even this is not the whole picture in Potamia. Led by skilled older women, lament verses are parts of a dialog. Between the lament verses performed by women who are relatively distant from the deceased (and less affected by the death), those women who are more intensely affected shout personal messages. These may have the potential to be embarrassing not only to young urban cousins but to all who are present. So the lament leaders “interrupt these cries and shouts” with each verse (1982:73). The leaders’ formal interventions keep matters under control; still, wilder expressions of grief co-occurring with lament evidently become attached to lament in popular perception, adding to the young, urban shame over lament’s “backwardness.” Lament’s putatively dangerous passion is inseparable from its status as a predominantly women’s genre. Lament’s perceived danger arises from the reality that women – often represented as “naturally” emotional, irrational, and thus requiring male control – find real power in lament. “The lamenter’s art . . . transforms an expression of emotion that might otherwise be denigrated as ‘feminine’ into an instrument of empowerment for the performer” (Dunn and Jones 1994:11). Tolbert writes of Karelian men performing mock-laments, arguing that these represent men’s attempt to “counteract the serious and very real power of the lamenter in religious ritual” (1990:43). Clearly, talk of lament’s danger is talk of gender.

Grief, Altered States, and Intersubjectivity: Passion as Balance If laments and lamenters possess such power, why has it shocked their compatriots, striking them as the epitome of loss of control? Perhaps we need to reconsider what “out of control” means. Western thought commonly fuses two disparate ideas: being “out of control” and being beyond intersubjectivity (immediate, felt connection and mutual understanding). Such products of Western thought as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM, bible of psychiatry), link loss of control with lack of culture, or primitiveness (Gaines 1992:16).

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Anthropologist Jean Jackson asserts a fundamental difference between the Amazonian society she studies (Tukanoan) and (North) American society: “I am unaware of any culturally-based models that are visible to Americans that structure ‘out of control’ behavior” (personal communication, April 2008). By contrast, Tukanoans have a place for being out of control within the bounds of intersubjectivity. Perhaps, even in apparently losing emotional control, experiencing an altered state of consciousness, lamenters in the Amazon or in Karelia retain cultural sensibilities. This would help explain the endurance of the old Karelian and Ingrian cry-women in the Finnish–Russian border region, lamenting for hours (despite the risk to their heart). As Finnish folklorist Aili Nenola points out (interview, June 17, 2003), raw emotion might power a few minutes of performance by so-called professional wailers, but not five hours. In drawing this contrast between the modern West and Amazonian culture, Jackson had in mind a particular incident. On that occasion, a young Tukanoan man got angry enough with his father that he hit him, opening a gash in his head. As soon as Jackson sat the father down, he began “classical Amazonian mourning behavior,” which Jackson calls “correct . . . since his son was dead to him at that moment.” Jackson perceived the Tukanoan father as unable to stop his lamenting; in that sense he was “out of control.” Yet his acts were not idiosyncratic but culturally coded. Jackson and I agree that the Western notion that lamentation could not possibly be culturally coded, that it represents uncontrolled animal passion, in part reflects the absence – at least from many eddies of Western thought – of a cultural category for an altered or “out-of-control” state that is still safely embedded within culture. According to lamenters, culturally coded wailing can help maintain balance in the face of destabilizing events. Ernesto de Martino called that balance “presence” – a presence that is guaranteed in its relationship to and within the world (1972[1948]:223, emphasis in the original). For de Martino, “the crisis of presence,” the crisis that death presents to the living, looms very large in “traditional societies.” In the face of that crisis the ancient funerary lament, by mediating (through ritual expressed in a context of mythic imagery) the sense of loss and of madness that threaten whoever is mourning, redeems the human potential for operating in the world – in the ethos of memory and affect, in the context of the arts, the social, the political, etc.1

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Lament is thus a technique for protecting “being” or “presence” in the world.

Lament and Madness: Cure or Cause? Ancient critics might well have connected “excessive” lamentation with the risk of madness. Contemporary Greek men (Holst-Warhaft 1992:27–28) and Bangladeshis (Wilce 1998a) make that connection. Irish lore depicts the bean chointe or lament-woman as mad (Partridge 1980), and Ayoub (1978) has also indicated the dangerously thin line between madness and the passions stirred by Shia Muslim laments. Holst-Warhaft’s work with contemporary Greek lamenters led her to side with them in an ideological struggle. Their detractors argued that such performances stirred up passions that could make the performer mad with grief. But “the poetic expression of grief is perceived by the [Greek] lamenters themselves not only as an emotional outburst but as a means of mediating that emotion and thereby avoiding the excesses of madness that death might otherwise provoke” (1992:28). The longest laments I recorded in Bangladesh were by Latifa, singingweeping about her loss, two years earlier, of the husband she had begun to love. She came to my field home, literally to cry out for her mother’s brothers to support her against her own brothers as she sought to undo the damage they had done to her life. They had forced her to marry an imam, failed to pay the total dowry even when his family began to abuse Latifa to force the issue, then had beaten him up and dragged her away, eventually effecting a divorce on the grounds of mistreatment.2 Her brothers thus created a series of social facts, culminating in the divorce. Both Latifa’s public weeping and her brothers’ behavior were scandalous to many. These events shook me, my field assistant Faisal, and our friends in the area. By no means did all neighbors approve of the family’s treatment of Latifa. Latifa’s lament expressed grief over her losing her husband, whom she described as an answer to her prayers (lines 79–82 below; the sobbing inhalations that govern the rhythm of her performance marked with the sign ·hh). In line 83 (underlined) Latifa (L) directly challenges her kin who had labeled her “mad” in a cynical attempt to stop her from pointing out what she saw as their crimes against her and her ex-husband. That accusation did not

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stop her cousin Amina (A; lines 85 – 86, underlined) from doing just what Latifa had described: shutting Latifa up, ostensibly to keep her head from getting even crazier. Transcript 1 72–75L AmAre ni gharer bAhir karlo bun ·hh They have cast me from the house, 76–78L bun go o o ·hh ((long sob)) o o sister – sister, O ((long sob)) O O 79–80L Ami khadAr kAche jA cAychilAm go (bA) ·hh What I had asked of God 81–82L tA [h]aito go pAi[ye]chilAm o o a go ·hh I did receive. 83L AmAre diye pAgal kaiyA kaite dilo nA go ·hh By calling me “mad” they prevented me from speaking! 84L AmAre kemte khuno go kairA laiyA go nA ·hh bun go bun Why have they taken and murdered me, sister O sister? 85A he Latifa, cup karas nAì Hey Latifa, won’t you shut up? ·hh 86A [to others outside with her] cheFir mAthA Aro pAgal haybo beni. The girl’s head will get even crazier. Latifa did not stop, at least not just then. But her family did eventually succeed in stopping her, resorting to chains and other punishment. They seemed satisfied that they had thereby saved her from going completely mad. But, like Holst-Warhaft’s lamenters, Latifa implicitly affirmed that keening helped restore emotional balance. This chapter has rejected extreme views of emotion. Anthropologist Erik Mueggler, who works with the Lòlop’ò, a non-Han people in Southwest China, critiques the anthropological literature on emotion that appeared in the early 1990s (e.g., Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). That literature was so anxious to avoid reifying emotion as internal states, and to stress the social-poetic nature of emotion, that it “miss[ed] the point of these poetic forms – the deeply felt grief, sadness, and pain of which they speak.” To miss this psychological depth is to miss much of the phenomenon. But anthropologists have also gone to the other extreme: “Some ethnographers have attempted to treat mortuary laments as outward expressions of profoundly personal and internal states of pain, grief, or loss . . . Neither avenue . . . is entirely adequate” (Mueggler 1998:983).

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How can academic representations of lament regain their balance? The via media is to embrace a “view of mourning as an ethical activity” caught up in “economic” transactions subjected to moral law (Mueggler 1998:983). “Mourning was not the expression of a prior internal state of grief and loss so much as a collective reorganization of boundaries . . . Ritualized mourning fashioned grief as a communal, corporeal labor, like the labor of making hempen cloth” (1998:1005). Such an understanding of grief – which the poems of mourning made explicit – renders it fundamentally social, as well as profoundly emotional. Finns who are now offering courses in lament describe the practice as cathartic, healing. But “in the poetry of [Lòlop’ò] laments . . . ritualized grief might as easily be debilitating as restorative. It might as easily incarcerate and punish one’s soul as reassure or reconstitute it” (1998:1000). This follows from the fact that laments are caught up in legal systems (including punishment) that transcend death. Lòlop’ò grief came to partake of the social and the emotional in a way that catharsis models cannot represent. Keeping both in mind might restore some balance to visions of lament, academic and otherwise.

Emotional Freedom If lament were not so profoundly emotional it would not evoke the metaemotion shame, as it does today for many – the sense that feelings too openly expressed render the Self naked. Emotion is a tortured symbol in the changing self-understandings of modern Western society. Although I will save most of my comments on modernity for later chapters, I cannot end this one without noting that lament is relevant to the dialectical constitution of cultural Selves and Others, in large part because emotions and selfcontrol figure so largely in those representations. Medievalist Barbara Rosenwein (2002) notes how many scholarly descriptions of emotions in history – from Freud to Elias to contemporary historians’ works – are governed by the grand narrative that “the history of the West is the history of increasing emotional restraint.” Like Freud, many who view history this way curse the trend or seek some sort of freedom – the analyst’s couch, for example – in the midst of restraint. The notion that some “emotional communities” (Rosenwein), or “emotional regimes” (Reddy 2001), are – according to Reddy – freer than others, and

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that such “emotional liberty” is desirable, is an attractive myth, whether “true” or not. It reflects the American preoccupation with freedom. Postmodern malaise leads some (e.g., Maybury-Lewis 1992) to trawl the waters of “other cultures,” “ancient cultures,” or “primitive cultures” for materia medica, including laments. What they “find” there – emotional liberty, exemplified in lament – may well be projection. This book problematizes such trawling expeditions. This chapter has located emotions in sociocultural history, interrogating individualistic notions of “expression.” It has explored thorny issues about lament as performance, and about lament’s performativity. Lament’s emotionality should be seen in that light. More than many would admit, scholars reflect the sensibilities of their times and partake of the realities they write about. Why do any of us care about lament? Claims that lament expresses emotion raise a number of problems. Powerful forms of metaculture manifesting as constructions of lament’s emotionality have entered into its modern marginalization; even with the best of intentions, academic writing participates in that marginalization. Yet scholars and non-scholars alike are attracted to the study of lament in part because it is emotional. “[E]motional intensity stimulates interest in . . . [any] discourse, and impels its circulation” (Urban 2001:122). Crying – especially eloquent crying – is so hard to ignore.

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Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament

Consider carefully the funeral lamentations of others that thou mayest have a remedy in thine own case. “Return, O my soul, to thy rest, for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.” Tell me, sayest thou that the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee, and weepest? (Fourth Homily on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews, St. John Chrysostom, fourth century CE) This chapter asserts that the objectification of lament through texts such as Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad ultimately helped premodern peoples assert control over lament and over those who lamented, namely, women. Yet spontaneous outpourings of lament were to survive millennia of objectification and repression. Later, in Part II, I uncover why modernity and its antipathy toward lament succeeded where ancient measures failed. Here I present case studies of objectification and repression from several ancient societies. In order to keep in play the several perspectives to which this book is committed, this chapter critiques the process of “antiquing” even as it offers stories of antiquity. I aim here both to present what scholars agree about in regard to laments that are millennia old, and to describe the patina of antiquity that modern people add to anything designated as traditional. Laments are stories in themselves, some of them performed four or five millennia ago; but we must attend to literary, legal, scholarly, and popular metastories of laments as well. The horrific losses, not only of individual lives but of cultural sites, during the second Iraq war have made some in the West aware of the centrality of antiquity and antiquities in the construction of Iraq or the Middle East as the “cradle of civilization.” The mining of ancient texts, coated as it were with a carefully constructed patina of age, has been crucial to that process. Crucially, this chapter contributes two conceptual tools

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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to this complexity – interdiscursive chains (linked performances and metadiscourses extending across spans of time), and (immediately below) double-timing.

Antiquity, and the Patina of Antiquity Contemporary theories of literature and performance reflect the profound impact of Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1981). In any particular stretch of novelistic discourse, Bakhtin detected what he called “doublevoicing.” The “voice” of a novel’s narrator, for example, may be infiltrated by characters’ voices. Any “word” or utterance is “half someone else’s” (1981:292), most obviously in the case of reported speech. But doublevoicing pervades spoken and written discourse. By analogy, what confronts us in contemporary representations of lament is a kind of double-timing – a contemporary performance of a lament is still somehow “ancient.” Lament is thus like those some call “old souls.” An example comes from a 2002 feature by National Public Radio correspondent Rob Gifford, primarily focused on rising joblessness in China. Gifford interviewed a middle-aged unemployed man whom he called “Li Hwa.” Listeners heard a tape of Li venting his frustration in intonationally unmarked speech, in which he suddenly broke into performance with a tuneful lament. Over Li’s song, Gifford said: Suddenly Li Hwa starts to sing, his proud forehead straining with emotion and his eyes welling up with tears. [Li’s singing-crying briefly rises over Gifford’s voice.] It’s a lament from the Song Dynasty, 1,200 years ago. (Gifford 2002)

This apparently ancient (antiqued) lament became Li’s, to the extent that reported speech can. Performing a text represented as ancient (by Gifford, presumably reflecting Li’s attribution) links past and present, and constructs the entextualized discourse as timeless. To label a practice ancient lends it a patina like that on a fine old piece of silver or brass. Such representations are like antiquing a piece of furniture, or “distressing” it to give it the appearance of an antique (Haney 1999; Stewart 1991). Note that adding a particular spin to a cultural feature or “object” that affects its movement through space (for example, sales) is a metacultural activity (Urban 2001, defining metaculture as secondary-level

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or reflexive cultural signs that frame primary cultural signs). If a metaculture of newness (Chapter 1) completely monopolized the contemporary US, Americans would collect no antiques – and no one would distress their antiques to help them sell. “Antiquities, by definition, can only exist in a damaged state” (Bauman and Briggs 2003:74). This truth is exemplified in representations of even contemporary lament traditions. To represent a tradition as ancient and endangered may increase its economic value (Urban 2001:62–63). Or it may enhance its contribution to upholding patriarchy, as in the case Goluboff describes – an Azerbaijan Mountain Jewish community characterized as diasporic, in which women’s laments are represented as “relics from the past” (2008:90), yet also as “the custom defining Mountain Jewish identity in the Caucasus” (2008:81). It may well be true that living heirs of a tradition like Karelian lament – who may or may not consciously pattern their performances on memories, photos, or filmic images – manage nonetheless to replicate those ancient patterns. Although that sort of historical link deserves study, what interests us here is the study of the contemporary social lives of “ancient” texts. Representations of antiquity play a role in academic and political rhetoric, as discussed in Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said 1978) – but also in communities of practice, including faith communities. Hebrew texts still circulate in contemporary Jewish and Christian communities; chanting lament psalms may be part of their worship. For contemporary Christians and Jews, these psalms are key forms in and by which the community works out its theodicy (Chapter 1) – as they appear to have been for ancient Israel. Even in the “secular West,” some – not just fundamentalists (Crapanzano 2000) – appreciate the support of very old texts. For many, the more ancient the legitimating text, the better. The antiquity of pious weeping in Islam provides an example of the interesting territory into which I venture. It raises the question of the uses and utility of history. During my year of doctoral fieldwork in Bangladesh, 1991–92, I encountered more than one form of weeping. As I was nearing the end of my fieldwork, I raised the issue of crying with a small group of men gathered in a shop. The topic was already on my mind because of the powerful and controversial lament performances that I had witnessed. But I was talking about it on that particular day because of an old man who came in to the shop, sat down, and started to cry. Some of his tears seemed to me to be tears of happiness. Then, quite suddenly, he cried aloud “What a sinner I am! If only God will pardon me and take me to heaven!” When he left, those in the shop assured me that crying thus to God – a form of

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weeping that differs sharply from the laments Bangladeshis try to suppress – is what old men should do. What are we to make of this? Ought we to interpret it as a merely local phenomenon, or as “modern” because I witnessed it in Bangladesh in 1992? Actually, a tradition of pious weeping has existed for at least 1,400 years. Meier (1960:959) collected evidence of the Islamic tradition of pious weeping and its indebtedness to Judeo-Christian precedent. What Bangladeshi Muslims might describe as a contemporary Islamic obligation, Meier represents as an ancient custom belonging to Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. This case demonstrates the necessity of my dual perspective – affirming the scientific value of knowing historical contexts and admitting the ideological uses to which we all put such histories. To affirm the antiquity and wide distribution of lament, but also to acknowledge that characterizing lament as ancient is an ideological move that undermines lament in many contexts, are both important. Signs of antiquity help construct Self (the academic or reporting Self, or reporters’ home cultures) and Other (the “ancient” peoples who once sang laments). Hence, representations of “ancient laments” actively construct lament’s link with antiquity. Contemporary media representations of Middle Eastern (read Oriental) “backwardness,” underscored through televised video or old films that depict Arab women keening, would be less credible if scholars had not persuasively linked such images with representations of “ancient” lamenting cultures. Orientalism, folkloristics, and philology are useful in linking lament with an antique world, and in antiquing lament and lamenters. I am not immune from these tendencies. I write from the perspective of one whose traceable Anglo-Saxon ancestors have not practiced spontaneous lamentation for centuries. From the vantage-point of my lineage, the tradition appears distant, even ancient. This is the situatedness of my account. I exploit this dual awareness – of “datable antiquity” and of “antiquing” – as I offer very old stories of lament and measures of control. I close this section with a caveat. Scholarship is by no means the only objectifying force intervening in cultural processes. Objectification is endemic to the human use of signs. Before we proceed to case studies in objectification from the ancient world, I must introduce “intertextual” or “interdiscursive” chains, and their utility in studying histories, and histories of objectification.

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Intertextual chains and the objectification of lament People find an image of text useful in representing culture and the process of cultural transmission. “Text is a metadiscursive notion, useful to participants in a culture as a way of creating an image of a durable, shared culture immanent in or even undifferentiated from its ensemble of realized or even potential texts” (Silverstein and Urban 1996b:2). Such local visions of culture as transmissible rely on intertextual links. Li Hwa and Rob Gifford reproduced in a contemporary context a text fashioned as a replica of an older text. Metacultures of tradition are transmitted through such replication (Urban 2001). Reifications of text, and of cultures-as-texts, are common in social orders that define themselves in terms of continuity with an ancient tradition. Some of these societies give rise to very long intertextual chains involving lament. Of particular interest are the many cases in which scholars, or others, explicitly invoke chains of transmission extending from “modern” back to “ancient” lament practice. For example, Alexiou’s (1974) classic study of Greek lament from “Archaic” and modern periods speaks of “modern survivals,” a transmission chain across about 2,500 years. Something of what it means to be Greek, then, is imagined as a relation to texts in such a chain, be they lament texts or textualized representations of why “we” do or do not lament in some represented way (as in the Indian literature discussed below). For the purposes of this chapter I focus on premodern segments of those chains, premodern forms of objectification, and premodern measures against lament. Objectification is pervasive and unavoidable. To name is to objectify. Using a simple label for a diverse set of phenomena is probably more objectifying than using many labels. So, Homer’s labeling many types of crying performances góos objectified Greek weeping performances; the labeling and the performing are two links in an intertextual, or interdiscursive, chain. Objectification, as evidenced here by examples throughout Greek history, can become the first step toward control; later efforts to control these performances went far beyond naming. The intertextual chain of increasingly objectifying Greek references to lament occupies us immediately below. These form intertextual chains linking Homer to Plato and Aristotle and beyond. In what follows, I link these chains to measures to control lament in classical Greece and elsewhere.

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Case Studies in Lament, Objectification, and Control Greece: from antiquity to modernist representations The earliest extensive references to lament in Greek literature are from Homer. We know little about any metadiscourse on lament – including labeling – before his time; but Homer’s audience in ancient Greece and his readers in the contemporary world find volcanic outpourings of grief by men as well as women throughout his work. Nicole Loraux (1998), in Mothers in Mourning, pores over accounts of mourning practices from Greek epic, tragedy, law, and history. For her, the Iliad is the story of memory become wrath. It opens, after all, with a dedication to thea, “the goddess,” whom Loraux takes to represent the Muse (1998:109), daughter of Memory and Zeus. That opening prayer invites the goddess to “sing the destructive wrath of Achilles.” That wrathful memory, mênis, is sustained in practices like lament. In the centuries following Homer, his apparently unquestioning embrace of lament gave way to increasing efforts at control, though in some sense Homer laid the groundwork for those later measures in the very act of assigning messy lament performances neat, tidy labels. Greek drama from the classical era commonly included laments, especially by women, and others’ reactions to them.1 Note how the chorus reacts to women lamenting in Choephori (Libation Bearers) by Aeschylus (525 – 456 BCE): My heart is in turmoil once more, as I listen to this lament. And now I am bereft of hope, and my mind darkens at these words as I hear them. (1970:411–412)

The laments Aeschylus represents tend not to be homegrown; they form an important part of his characterization of the Other in The Persians (Podlecki 1970), a play “written to celebrate the final defeat of the armies of Xerxes [ca. 745 BCE]” (Bellinger 1927:28). Greeks of Aeschylus’ day developed a proto-Orientalism, locating primitivity to the east of Greece, representing Persia as the home of emotional excess. Just as Aeschylus anticipated 20th-century Orientalism, so he anticipated the modernist “denial of coevalness” – the pretense that somehow non-European spaces represent another (premodern) time (Fabian 2002[1983]:31).

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Some nine centuries after the playwright Aeschylus wrote The Persians (fourth century BCE), the Greek poet Nonnus (fifth century CE) spoke derisively of philothrénôn . . . gunaikôn “lament-loving women” living to the East of Greco-Roman centers of civilization, in the “Indies” – presumably stretching from Persia to India. Nonnus uses the root commonly glossed “love” – philo – to form the compound philothrénôn, lament-loving (Nonnus 1909:11). Homer repeatedly invokes the full phrase, the “desire for lament” (discussed below), but Nonnus collapses it to one word that effectively Otherizes the barbarians to the east (Persians and Indians), and particularly their women. “Antiquity” has played a central role in the construction of a European Self; representations of Europe’s own, as well as its Others’, antiquity enabled Europe to claim a kind of transcendence vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Constructing a Greek national identity that was modern yet somehow the heir of ancient Greek practices and achievements – a double-timed identity – has been crucial in Greek folkloristics and politics since the end of the 19th century (Herzfeld 1987). Any contemporary claim to the inheritance of an ancient tradition constructs a double-timed, ancient– modern, identity. Linking the ancient Greek past of lament with its current history – for example Alexiou’s (1974) tracing lament from misty pre-Homeric origins into the contemporary period – exemplifies that double-timing. Whatever might be the intent of such studies – or of this chapter – one effect is to associate lament with antiquity. The reader has already encountered some of the ancient Greek terms denoting lamentation. Representations of lament (including labels) and its temporality matter. The rhetorical antiquing or distressing of an older tradition has an effect on recent traditions, particularly when an author addresses both. And whatever role Homer and his successors might have played in objectifying (by labeling) lament, recent scholarship has its own part in this process. The two Greek words most commonly glossed “lament” – thrênos and góos – are “of ancient Indo-European origin, meaning a shrill cry.” “In their most primitive form, these laments probably consisted mainly of inarticulate wailing over the dead man” (Alexiou 1974:102). Primitive–civilized, female–male: these binaries structure Alexiou’s representation of various Greek forms related to lament. [Women’s] thrênos, góos, and kommós were based on a ritual act or cry of lamentation [accompanied by music, while] . . . the epigram, élegos, epitáphios logos and epikédeion grew out of the social and literary activity of

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Locating Lament as Object the men. . . . This second group tended gradually to replace the first as a recognized form of honoring the dead. (1974:108)

Alexiou’s account of a transition from disorder and emotionalism to the “literary activity of men” reflects a metacultural shift, a shift in what is and is not embraced. This shift took place in classical Greece, but Alexiou’s story also reflects modernist metaculture. The Greek world was not cut off from the ancient world at large. By the fifth century BCE, the Greek gaze encompassed Egypt (whose lament history I turn to below). What struck the fifth-century Herodotus (pioneer of historiography) about Egyptian lament was its embodiment – women tearing their garments, baring their breasts in public wailing. Women’s bodies have been key cultural signifiers in every era, attracting a great deal of metacultural attention – “We do this with our bodies, whereas they do that.” Such metacultural attention accompanies or fosters attempts at control. But, as we shall see, it was the embodiment of memory in lament that made it the target of legislative control in classical Greece. Opening up the topic of memory’s embodiment requires that we take a fresh look at the gendering of mourning and of memory. Greek history offers a clear look at all of these issues. The problem with lament and legislative solutions Pre-classical Greece struggled to produce and maintain a polis, a polity – a civil order and a “civilized” order. Fissures in classical Greek notions of civil order weakened lament as a form of memory. The wrath associated with mourning since Homer was, in ancient Greek representations, “a female model of memory” (Loraux 1998:39). Particularly in Euripidean tragedy, Greek women’s mourning for sons killed in epic battles is linked with their bodily memories of giving birth, memories of bodily intimacies with their infant sons. The Greek cities of the classical era “try to confine [this female form of remembering] within the anti- (or ante-) political sphere” (Loraux 1998:98) – i.e. the backward, barbarous, uncivilized sphere. Given this vision of the barbarity of embodied memory, Greek legislation limiting mourning and lament was central to the civilizing project. That legislation, for Loraux, entailed rejecting “memory . . . [the] guardian of rifts and breaches.” The city-state thus showed that it “want[ed] to live and perpetuate itself without breaks, and [that] its citizens must not wear themselves out with crying” (Loraux 1998:10).

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Solon the law-giver – the transitional figure between the chaotic Late Archaic and the orderly Classical periods of Greek history – codified earlier restrictions on lament, and promulgated new ones. Plutarch’s account of Solon mentions that he “forbade laceration of cheeks, singing of set dirges and lamentation at other people’s tombs” (Alexiou 1974:12, citing Plutarch 21.4). So Solon banned thrêneîn pepoiêména, “set dirges,” verses led by “professional” lament singers that were echoed in verses sung by kinswomen and then in a unison refrain of góos, wailing with words. Despite the fact that they were the most orderly part of the lament, Solon seems to have regarded the thrênoi as the stimulus to the “wild ecstasies” of wailing kinswomen. The ban on lamenting at “other people’s tombs” limited lamenting to kin and circumscribed the role of hired singers and their evocative verses. Lament, indeed, asserts itself as the guardian of rifts and breaches. Admittedly, the process of “literarization”2 of Greek lament – its evolution from wailing to literary elegy – tamed it. Yet dramatic literature has layers of latent meaning, and the balance Aristotle (1961) believed “poetry” (i.e. drama) should exemplify in order to achieve katharsis – between staged representations that are too close to, or too distant from, the real passions of everyday life – could be tipped. Real memories could overwhelm the audience. This is exactly what happened at the outset of the fifth century BCE in the first performance of Phrynicus’ play, The Capture of Miletus. It seems the actual event of Miletus’ sacking was too fresh: The whole theater broke into tears, and he was fined a thousand drachmae for having reminded them of their own misfortunes . . . and they ordered that no one . . . should ever make use of this play. (Herodotus 6.21)

Phrynicus had proven “the dangers of recalling, when the object of memory is a source of mourning for the civic self ” (Loraux 1998:85). The ban on this play indicates the classical Greek stance toward dangerously emotional memory, embodied in lament. Other bans on lament in Greek history The fine levied on Phrynicus was only the first attack on memory fifthcentury BCE Greece witnessed. The second came at the end of the century, on the heels of the civil strife Solon overcame. The situation in some ways parallels the period surrounding the American Revolution (Lee 1997;

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Urban 2001). In both cases a performative speech act was needed to constitute a new order. Athens put the period of violence behind it by means of an oath: ou mnBsikakésD (“I shall not recall the misfortunes”) (Loraux 1998:87). After the coup plotters were executed, a period of amnesty – a cognate of amnesia – followed. This civic amnesty/amnesia offered the comfort of the collective. The transformation of wild grief into music – the gift of the Muse (now decoupled from divine wrath) – was one step in the taming or civilizing of lament. But the civic ban went much further. The oath and Solon’s laws aimed to control deeply embodied and dangerously gendered forms of social memory by substituting for it a form of (cleansed) public memory, i.e. creating a masculinist public sphere. The project of modernity tries to carry that process to a new level, and scholarly representations have abetted the imprisonment, so to speak, of lament in the “world of tradition.” Yet leakage always occurs. Alexiou writes as if the Greek lament tradition were fairly continuous from the Archaic to the contemporary period; her third chapter is entitled “Modern Survivals” (of the ancient forms). Greeks themselves have spoken similarly of it (Auerbach 1984:177). Such representations are important because discourse about lament or its past affects its transmission, spinning it in ways that make it compatible, or incompatible, with metacultural orientations toward tradition and passion, or newness and self-control, orientations that guide evaluations of cultural forms.

Lament as life-giver in pharaonic Egypt In moving on from Greece to Egypt, I follow a path staked out by several centuries of European cartographies of “civilization’s roots.” I stress once again that, regardless of the intentions of modern scholars of Egyptian lament, their affirmations of a striking continuity between ancient and contemporary Egyptian women’s acts of lamentation appear to make real the notion of cultural remnants or survivals, the ancient roots of contemporary practice. In doing so, they help polish the signs of lament’s antiquity; metaphorically, they add a layer of dust to modern records of lament, lest we should mistake recent performances for something fresh and new. The Egyptian story of lament reminds us of what “ritual lament” truly means. Ritual hinges not on repetition but on its transformative efficacy,

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Figure 4.1 Nefertari as bird hovering over husband, à la Isis and Osiris. “The deceased is portrayed in his tomb accompanied by his wife, the Chantress of Amun, Nefertari, and by five children” Drawing by Laureen Coveney-Thom, based on a photo by Jacques Livet, .

as locally experienced. In Egyptian texts approximately 4,400 years old – the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, some of the earliest surviving records from the region – the idea of lament as life-giver and vehicle of fertility first appears. The Pyramid Texts also mark the first appearance of the god Osiris, brother and husband of Isis. (Osiris had another sister, Nephthys.) The myth depicts Osiris’ betrayal and murder. The magician-goddess Isis, taking the form of a bird of prey, hovers and laments over the inert parts of her dead husband and literally re-members him, returning at least his penis and his seed to responsiveness so that she can conceive the god Horus (Budge 1972:202; Wicket 1993). In the Late Period of Egyptian history – the middle of the first millennium BCE – the labeling of the text The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys (Faulkner 1934) situated the winged, magically efficacious lament of Isis for Osiris as an exemplar of the authoritative, foundational lament. Performances of the Late Period text presupposed and reproduced the authority of the origin myth (in the Pyramid Texts) and the fourth-century BCE papyri that referred to it (Wickett 1993:95–96). Thus the authority undergirding the performances was interdiscursive and double-timed,

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i.e. based on the ability of the performance-text to represent itself as a step in a chain whose authorizing, originary link was the even then ancient and beloved version of the Isis myth (Budge 1972:200). The “private person” who possessed this text artifact in Late Period Egypt must have been very highly placed, since, according to Budge, she was instructed to sing her laments “in the temple of Osiris Khenti Amentiu, the Great God, the Lord of Abydos” (1972:521). This interdiscursive achievement of time-play – the authoritative, defining orientation of each new lament in relation to the ancient myth of Isis – reflects a very particular objectification of lament, peculiar to Egypt, and perhaps more narrowly to elites at certain times in history. Here I speculatively reconstruct a bit more of the Egyptian intertextual chain. Priests and others involved in this work of re-presenting the old text in new contexts, or new laments in old frames, must have struggled to constrain singer-dancers from venturing into wholly new types of performance that might have departed radically from the origin myth, straying even into blasphemy (a possibility recognized in contemporary India, Das 1996). The interdiscursive achievement whose links include Egyptologists’ texts – and now this book – makes a somewhat periodic chain of performances known as “Egyptian laments” seem quite solidly forged. Egyptologists like Wickett have asserted a continuity between contemporary Egyptian women’s laments and their ancient counterparts. Egyptian lamenters still raise their arms, often bent at the elbow as in Figure 2.1. As in the ancient texts, they sing of their laments as a life- (or fertility-) giving force. As true as this no doubt is, Wickett’s discourse adds to contemporary lament the patina of antiquity. Ironically, it may well be this ancient (and hence, from a contemporary monotheistic perspective, “pagan”) appearance that has drawn Coptic and Islamic attacks on lament. Coptic Christian leaders sought to destroy as much as they could of the pharaonic legacy (Wickett 1993:334). The early Greek fathers of the church such as St. John Chrysostom (see this chapter’s epigraph) drew critical attention to lament-as-dance and as a wild manifestation of pagan energy, and those critiques might well have informed early Coptic discourse on Egyptian women’s lament. At any rate, although both Coptic and Islamic attacks go back many centuries, 20th-century Islamist movements have intensified theirs markedly. And scholarly studies of Egyptian laments old and new have provided some – not all – of the fodder for these criticisms.

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South Asian/Hindu lamentation The classics of Indian literature seem to acknowledge that the custom of lamentation is widespread, yet follow that acknowledgment quickly with a judgment. The ancient Indian texts thus reflect culture in its guise as metaculture. Classical Indian texts are cultural products that reflect on, or judge, other cultural products, for example genres like “songs of praise” versus “laments” (Fitzgerald 2004:56 [Mahabharata 11.81a.16.42]). And the laments they judge are discursive acts; thus the classical literature contains two links in an interdiscursive chain – both laments and critiques. They regard lament as a triumph of animal nature, falling short of the standard of enlightened culture. The redactors of the texts, and perhaps the circulators of the oral stories, seem to say that “women do this, but women (and men taxed beyond their limits) do not represent our high religious culture” – clearly a metacultural judgment.3 If we take the women’s laments as a sort of primary discourse1, the Indian classics’ master narrative stands to it as metadiscourse (discourse2). That metadiscourse does not describe the women as it does the male lamenter in the Ramayana, full of “words full of good sense and virtue.” Its metacultural judgment is: Female is to Male as Nature is to Culture4 as Madness is to Reason. But is this accurate, in light of the association of the Ramayana’s reputed author with tenderness in the face of loss and lament? The first book of the Ramayana (Shastri 1959) portrays the sage Valmiki as its author, and the impetus for his poetic career as the lament of a female crane (krauncha) for its mate, killed by a hunter. Some say that he joined in her song (Leslie 1998:476), and that we can therefore say that the epic was born out of lament – a man’s lament.5 Though the Ramayana rarely portrays men as lamenters, it presents a whole series of laments for the slain male demon Ravaia, including one by his brother, Bibishana. The metatext presents Bibishana’s lament as “words, full of good sense and virtue” (Shastri 1959:317). Beyond this, Indian classics associate lamentation with women, animality, and the loss of sense.6 Standard similes (evidently circulating widely enough to surface in the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Buddhist text the Jataka) all liken wailing women to animals – a cow that has lost its calf (Shastri 1959:320 [chapter 112]; Cowell 1905 [Jataka XVI:section 92]), or a she-osprey (Shastri 1959:320; Ganguli 1986:24 [section XVI]).7

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More Links in the Chains Described: Toward Early Modernity We have seen that any representation of lament entails some objectification. Still, Homer’s representations convey to even modern readers a sympathy for lamenters. Plato (critically) and Aristotle (sympathetically) cited Homer’s observation (1900 [Iliad 23.14]) that fine funeral oratory could arouse in others goou himeron ôrse, “the desire of/for wailing” (sometimes described as a “sweet” desire). Plato’s loose allusion to this phrase is part of a passage that reflects his distrust of poets and orators because of their power to stir others’ passions. Although Aristotle was more sympathetic to Homer, his theory of emotion (touching on lament through a direct quotation of the passage on desire) is profoundly objectifying. The early fathers of the Greek church, particularly St. John Chrysostom, showed more loyalty to Plato than to Hebrew scripture when it came to lament. From the Middle Ages to early modernity, Roman Catholic church councils issued repeated condemnations of lament. They were heirs to the theology of Chrysostom (and perhaps Herodotus and Aeschylus), who so deeply distrusted the body, dance, and lament. Contemporaneous Muslim critics of lament may well have accessed the same discourses. The peculiar forms of power generated by Christianity and Islam required control of women and the sorts of passions lament (and dance) can display. But none of this ancient opposition, from Solon to medieval church councils, accomplished what modernity has – the erasure of women’s improvised lament from nearly every society on earth. What made the difference? Part II answers that question.

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Part II

Losing Lament: Modernity as Loss

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Making the Case for Transformation How have “lament cultures” around the world changed in the last few centuries? Evidence points to a radical transformation. Why should people in India supposedly sing along with a pop singer “that ‘grief is no letter to be passed around to whoever wants to read’ ” (Sharma 1995:81) when grief is a public sentiment in so-called traditional societies? At least one “imagined Indian” – the protagonist of Akhil Sharma’s short story – does sing along. Theories of globalizing modernity have long grappled not only with shifts in material and informational flow but with globalizing forms of subjectivity (Appadurai 1996; Giddens 1990, 1991; Luke 1996). Apropos of our present topic, does shame circulate globally like a song? If shame over crying or lamenting, for instance, has indeed spread globally, how might that have happened? In Part II, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh, where modernist Islamic visions have decreased tolerance for women “raising their voices” to sing grievances or lament a death, and urban Bangladeshis are said to weep silently. A brew of urbanization plus religious change, associated rhetorically with modernity, might be to blame if lament is indeed disappearing.

Modernity ’s Contradictions Are these changes unidirectional, global, and uniquely “modern”? Where lament is opposed, does the opposition explicitly invoke a standard of

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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modernity? Though influential in transforming lament, modern discourses of opposition are far from being totally coherent. Indeed they are contradictory. Contradictions beset representations and experiences of modernity from the outset – as in Weber’s allusions to the liberatory nature of modernity and even demystification, mixed with metaphors like the “iron cage.” Attitudes achieving a global circulation combine a personalistic model of feeling with a valorization of rational, verbal expression of emotion. The disappearance of improvised women’s funerary laments from Europe (Holst-Warhaft 1992:6) signals the demystifying hammer of modernist opposition to lament. The forces of what Weber called rationalization have by no means been confined to religion, Weber’s focus. Chinese Marxist modernism succeeded where earlier opposition to lament had failed. Pre-revolutionary Chinese laments suffered elite ridicule and pressure from Confucian leaders, but grievance rhetorics (suku, “speaking bitterness”) that arose in the Cultural Revolution replaced laments with rational forms fitting the Chinese Revolution (McLaren 2000a; Mueggler 2001). Did the metadiscursive forces leading to laments’ displacement reflect a Chinese modernity that arose in isolation from the forces of the Enlightenment? If not, what theory of the globalization of subjectivities might do justice to the complex facts?

The Circulation of Technologies and Metadiscourses Recent evidence reveals the role of internationally circulating discursive forms – and pronouncements on how communicative acts should and should not be performed. Thus, Iranian theological treatises impact mourning rituals in Ladakh (Pinault 1999b). And in Pakistan, and no doubt elsewhere, globally circulating technologies that amplify and record the voice have helped change the nature of Shia lament performance (Hegland 1998). Both new pronouncements and new technologies impact genres of expression. Anthropologist Bambi Schieffelin has studied the archived letters of fundamentalist missionaries working with the Papuan Kaluli people sent home to supporters. An excerpt from one letter follows: They know no English or New Guinea lingua franca. . . . they are ruled by methods of the savage ages. . . . these primitive people are half man, half

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animal. . . . they are nature’s children, naive in simplicity one day – moody and treacherous the next. In the primeval isolation, they resemble the labyrinth of jungle in which they live; for if cleared and sown, both yield a wonderful harvest. . . . These untouched Highlanders are a thousand years behind the times, therefore, it is imperative that their missionaries, [as it were], go back behind the times with them. (Schieffelin 2002:S5)

Schieffelin describes how missionary-inspired “innovation co-occurred with the erasure of entire expressive genres – song, lament, and traditional narrative that were the memorializing practices of a people” (2002:S15). Despite their own complex stance toward modernism, these missionaries became globally mobile agents of certain features of modernity. Part II begins with a chapter on lament in Bangladesh as a genre of memory that is itself in danger of being forgotten. Bangladesh serves, then, as a case study for the sorts of modern transformations that are more broadly described in the other chapters in Part II.

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Cultural Amnesia and the Objectification of Lament in Bangladesh Why Memory, Why Here? This chapter theorizes memory in relation to lament as a genre of performance. It introduces the notion of social technologies (socially constructed techniques) of memory and forgetting. Whereas the construction of memory is already a core theoretical issue in history, understanding how memories give way to forgetfulness also requires attention. Social technologies of commemoration include lament. But culturally constituted techniques can contribute to forgetting even whole genres, like lament. This claim is similar to Max Weber’s argument that modern capitalism involves the “disenchantment” or “rationalization” (Entzauberung) of the world. This chapter concerns itself with metadiscourses – talk about forms of talk – focusing on those that either preserve or efface memory. Lament genres typically commemorate by entextualizing loss and trauma. What sorts of pressures do current historical forces bring to bear on this? Why are improvisational genres like lament particular objects of modern critique? In what way might the interactive and improvisational potential of spontaneous laments make them dangerous, or vulnerable? This chapter turns extensively to lessons gleaned in fieldwork in Bangladesh. Bangladeshi culture is changing in ways congruent with some models of globalizing modernity. Some of the changes involve – even require – a kind of amnesia. Indeed, my ethnographic experience in Bangladesh indicates that displacing certain performance genres may be key to modernist transformation. Admittedly, the individual Bangladeshis I describe here endured hardship over several years to continue performing genres their neighbors deemed dated or sacrilegious. This problematizes teleological visions of the progress of a monolithic, secular modernity stamping out older expressive forms. In order to show how this is working out, Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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this chapter closely examines a particular performance in all its interactive, improvisational richness – and its violent suppression. Opening this section of the book, which deals with modernity’s power to transform lament, with a chapter on memory is no accident. Lament, as we have seen, is a genre of memory; mourning in general is an embodied practice of memory (Seremetakis 1994b). Moreover, the foundational discourses of modernity concern memory and forgetting. Early modern antiquarians busying themselves with reconstructing national epics (as in Scotland) considered theirs “the era of forgetting” (Bauman and Briggs 2003:152–153). If tuneful, texted weeping has at least sometimes served as a technique for keeping memories alive and transforming them, legal and religious measures arising in response to lament (Chapter 4) have served as technologies of forgetting. Holding memory and amnesia together before our consciousness reminds us that the former, at least in its guise as commemoration, is a tenuous achievement. Conflicts over social forms of memory are about both past and present. Memory conflicts are always conflicts over identity and moral-aesthetic orders (Wilce 1998b, 2000). What I am calling “technologies of forgetting” – even enforced forgetting – have arisen in particular, historical, cultural moments. “Having gone through traumatic events, societies need to ‘go on living’ . . . ‘forgetting’ is one way to achieve this” (Radtke 1999). If public commemorations of traumatic events are impossible because of fear, “private” recall across generations is less likely. Religion – and particularly conversion to a religion like Christianity – has served as a technology of forgetting for Indonesians (Goodfellow 1999:13), and Ilongots (Rosaldo 1984). And my interviews in Bangladesh indicate that the very nature of the sort of “conversion” to “true Islam” effected by an instrument of Islamist reform – the preaching of the Bangladesh Tabligh Jamaat (Society for Propagating Islam) – entails a turning away from, a forgetting of, some of the genres of discursive self-production that once defined rural Bangladesh. This chapter tells that story.

Modernity, Memory, and Amnesia The themes of memory and forgetting played key roles in the construction of modernity vis-à-vis the rift it posits between present and past. Chapter 1 briefly introduced my vision of modernity as Janus-faced. The iconoclastic face of modernity looks forward resolutely, resisting and effacing memory,

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or allowing one memory to “defoliate” another (Klein 1997). Psychologist Louis Sass writes that, in modernism, “art’s essential role was to . . . destroy, not memory itself, but all the ways in which memory usually provides an implicit framework, an omnipresent, constantly updated set of expectations or schemas that guides normal forms of awareness” (1992:63). Modernists thus want to retain their powers of memory and yet rob memory, language, genre, etc. of their power to automatically structure perception. Modernity’s other face – the focus of Part III – displays a nostalgia capable of distorting perception of the present.

Modernity and the aesthetic of amnesia An “aesthetic of amnesia” governs modernist narratives, which are “tales of forgetfulness, memories of a time that never was” (Erlmann 1999:6–7). Modernist discourse lifts social relations out of their spatiotemporal contexts and recombines them into new imagined configurations of time and space. This must involve a kind of amnesia, a forgetting of histories local and global. Scholarship on lament over the last two centuries reproduces some of this amnesia. Chapter 4 showed that an act of deliberate forgetting laid the necessary foundation for the emergence of classical Greece. Loraux claims that modernity requires the same “forgetting of origins we still call civilization” (1998:43). These origins include ancient Greek lamentation and mourning practices and the violence they incited – the ancestor, Loraux argues, of our own violence.

Lament, memory, and modernity The sensuality of memory Anthropologist Nadia Seremetakis (1994a:9) calls memory a meta-sensory function; ethnographies of memory must therefore be ethnographies of the senses. Seremetakis traces how the particular sensory experiences associated with growing certain varieties of local peaches in the Greek region of Mani are vanishing as the local varieties cease to be grown. Those older sensory memories have begun to be effaced, replaced by the experience of handling and tasting the imported peaches flooding local markets – said to be inferior. Awareness of such loss gives rise to a nostalgia not of the late capitalist variety but grounded in locality.

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Seremetakis seeks an anthropology of the senses as they are in late modernity, though their use is affected by “closures of public memory” (1994a:10). Seremetakis’ metaphor of “public memory” subjected to forced closures resonates with other accounts of local transformations of mourning (for example Feld’s view of New Guinea [in press]). In Mani, the site of Seremetakis’ fieldwork, older forms of reciprocity included two analogous practices of tangible, sensory exchange, both of them crucial to the building of shared memories. The first is the old custom of toothless grandmothers chewing small pieces of bread and placing them in the toothless mouths of Maniat babies – saliva being the first “memory-substance” the babies would incorporate from families. Much later, as adults, Maniat women would share lament, as it were, from mouth to mouth: “This sharing imparts a material density to the antiphonic exchanges of mourners from which oral history emerges” (Seremetakis 1994b:37). Both of these traditional forms of material exchange – the sharing of bread/saliva and of lament – are passing from the Maniat scene.

Remembering, Commemorating, and Forgetting: Lament as a Discursive Technology Seremetakis understands lament as a commemoration entailing shared sonic and oral substances. Lament sounds are substances that once more commonly passed in, out of, and among the bodies of Maniat women corporately singing them. But the materiality of exchange, reciprocity, and memory does not make them permanent. Commemoration is crucial to a society, but it is itself elusive: “Its fate is to be ignored” (Casey 1987:254). Public commemoration is mediated by language, whereas private memory may be body memory and not stored in words. It is “the creating of memorializations in the media of ritual, text, and psyche [that] . . . enables us to honor the past by carrying it intact into new and lasting forms of alliance and participation” (Casey 1987:257).

How lament remembers Lament remembers. But if lament is to be commemoration, it requires the sort of participation Seremetakis describes vis-à-vis Maniat women, the sort

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Briggs (1993) describes in Amazonia – women joining their voices in polyphonic choral performance. The phrase “wall of sound,” used in relation to rhythm-and-blues recordings of the 1960s and 1970s by Phil Spector, comes to mind in relation to polyphonic lament. The wall of choral performance is solid enough to provide safety in anonymity, so that Amazonian women singing funerary laments dare accuse powerful shamans of causing the death they are mourning. Memorialization is a form of social action. Action-events produce and reproduce action-structures (Giddens 1979). Lament remembers not only particular lives and events, but also its own genre, extending into “the now” a practice associated with premodern technologies of self and sociality (Urban 1996:175 –176). Memory as social phenomenon and “groove” Memory is profoundly social as phenomenon, as act, and as construction. Recently, scholars have opened up the study of forgetting as a social process. Forgetting and remembering are both social achievements, in part because time is a social reality, locally variable. Group performance of music is a prototype of social interaction that deserves our attention because of the centrality of time – social temporality – and social memory in it. “Making music together” (Schutz 1962–66) enacts a shared sense of time – shared memory of a musical tradition, but also mutual engagement and attunement in and to the present performance moment. Musical perspectives on the intersection of memory, time, and interaction help us understand an act of singing-weeping-narrating the past and present, and conflict over that act. Jazz improvisers must share musical memories or schemata in order to find a collective groove, creating grounds for joint acts unfolding in real time (Sawyer 1996). Musical performance exemplifies how social memory is embodied; post facto verbal accounting of one’s role in a musical performance can be hard to produce, but the body – fingers, voice, etc. – remembers what to do in the context of group performance. From laments to ballads, songs also construct memories and embodied sentiments (Marsden 2007). But musicians or singers sometimes fail to open a groove for others and get them to join in (Sawyer 1996). Latifa, a young divorcée who first and most forcefully brought lament to my ethnographic attention toward the end of my dissertation fieldwork in 1992, failed to do anything but sing alone. Such “musical failures” are sociotemporal failures, failures to achieve a shared time. It was fieldwork in Bangladesh that taught me this.

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Ethnographic perspectives on lament in Bangladesh: Latifa and Suleyman The subversive potential of improvised genres like lament tends to be high. No one I know claimed that Latifa’s laments had changed the systems of gender or language within her extended family; yet she did succeed momentarily in syncopating or destabilizing those systems through her rapid, perhaps parodic, shifting of voices. But now, the prospect of erasure, disinvention, threatens Bangladeshi lament. Disinvention of a genre – the timely closing of a Pandora’s box – is a “rational” result of a modern sense that the potential trouble from improvisational traditions outweighs any value accruing to it as tradition per se. A sustained and empowered opposition can threaten the very existence of genres, leaving performances like Latifa’s “de-genred.” The loss of genre moorings for one’s story is as cruel as the erasure of the facts of one’s story (Crapanzano 1996). This is the fate I see for Bangladeshi lament.1 After living in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1987, I returned in 1991–92 for nine months of fieldwork.2 I studied “complaints” while living with a large, relatively prosperous peasant family in a village I call Baghmar, in Chandpur district, southeast of Dhaka. Two months before my return to Los Angeles, our Baghmar home resounded with the laments of a 20-ish woman named Latifa, visiting her mother’s kin. My field assistant and I were deeply distressed by the violence with which her kinsmen eventually silenced her weeping and dragged her back to her home. Here is the “refrain” of one of her shorter laments, with sobbing inhalation marked as in Chapter 3: Lord ·hh; I cannot understand it at all ·hh; Lord ·hh.

This chapter retraces the steps I took in 1992, first analyzing Latifa’s performances, then scrutinizing other layers of discourse about her performance. In the 1980s I had seen the genre Bangladeshis call bilAp (or vilAp) invoked in a Bengali Protestant hymn to represent the wailing of the damned. Yet bilAp performances were rare enough that I had never heard any before 1992. I recorded all three instances of laments performed in my presence – one by Latifa, one by the old man Suleyman (see Transcript 2, below), and one by a woman who accompanied her critically injured brother to a clinic in the bazaar near Baghmar. The last example is the only one that was not

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Figure 5.1 Suleyman’s lament-like tuneful prayer Photo taken by the author, spring 1992.

suppressed. The performance of that woman, whose name I never learned, evidently fulfilled at least one important criterion of appropriateness – her lament displayed concern for her patrilateral kin. Suleyman, an old man labeled pAgal, “mad” (like Latifa), used texted weeping and tuneful prayer (Wilce 2000, 2001, 2002) to protest being kept in chains. This is a widely used rural alternative to psychopharmaceutical restraints. My research associate and roommate, medical anthropologist Gazi Nazrul Islam “Faisal,” visited Suleyman (S) once without me and recorded this spontaneous, highly personalized lament, along with his male neighbor (N’s) attempt (italicized) to put a stop to it:

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Transcript 2: Suleyman 1S In my fate . . . 2N (Listen – don’t do like that!) 3S . . . There is no God [for me]. 4S Allah, I want to go to my daughter’s home, Allah, O Allah. 5S [But] my shirt have they hidden, Allah. Without his shirt and his daughter’s ministrations, Suleyman could not travel. Sensing God had abandoned him, Suleyman’s lament verged on blasphemy. Latifa’s performances aptly illustrate lament’s role in constituting memory – proposing one artistic rendering of the past, like the Maniat laments described by Seremetakis. Latifa made me painfully aware that such practices are not transparent vehicles of emotion or history but attempts to constitute socially agreed models of history and sentiment (Wilce 1998a). Latifa’s laments memorialized the tragic ending of her marriage; lament was, for her, a technology of commemoration. Her kinsmen’s responses indicate, however, that they took her performances to be occasions of forgetfulness – she forgot all propriety, forgot her primal loyalty to her family of origin. What is transcribed in the next excerpt represents the longest lament I recorded – with the conversation surrounding it. This occurred about a week before cousins carried Latifa kicking and screaming back to the brothers her lament condemns. Latifa herself produced most of the lines in the transcript below. Those uttered by others are underlined. Words originally in English instead of Bangla are italicized. My interpolations are in square brackets, and words that gloss uncertain hearings of the recording are in parentheses. Line numbers refer to the complete transcript, the Bangla text and analysis of which are available in Wilce 1998a. Here, I will only lift out the most relevant portions. Note that Latifa was singing to her great-aunt – her mother’s paternal uncle’s wife – conventionally addressed as “sister” (Bun). Transcript 3: Latifa 8L The sirs [teachers] at the school say, ·hh, sister, O sister, 9L “How they [Latifa’s brothers] have murdered that ·hh girl!” sister oh, oh. 10 Bun They will say (whatever [they say]). 11L Whoever hears of it, perhaps ·hh shivers, sister, O sister.

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Losing Lament 12L Whoever hears, perhaps their skins crawl with gooseflesh, ·hh, sister, O sister. 13L How can I bear this fire, sister, O sister? ·hh 14L Tell me – will the smoke (not sear) me? sister, O sister ·hh

Note in the lines above how Latifa invokes, in rapid order, the voices of her teachers at school (lines 8 –9), others who hear her story (11–12), and perhaps medieval Sufi lament writers who made “fire” a trope of love and unfulfilled longing (13 –14; Wilce 1998a:64). (Some of the intervening lines between 14 and 42 are presented later in this chapter.) Latifa picks up the theme of “fire” again in line 42, then questions her brothers’ authority: 42L The fire of judgment day they’ve brought down, sister – sister, O sister. 43L It’s like the day of judgment, ·hh, sister, oh. 44L ·hh Today, if they [my ex-husband’s family] took [me] back . . . 45L ·hh sister, O sister – 46 –47L Why have they [my brothers] dragged ·hh me away, 48L ·hh, sister, O sister? Lament as social memory: genres and individuals When I’ve raised the topic of lament in Bangladesh, people often express visceral opposition. Ideologies of language, music, and affect that I heard in Bangladesh reflect contradictions that some say typify modernity: the competing pulls of orderliness and “sincere expression” (Keane 2007). Bangladeshis told me that lament tunes come from the man or antar, the “heartmind” or “interior” – two ways of describing the seat of subjectivity.3 Two men I interviewed hoped their daughters’ heartminds would someday overflow in lamenting their fathers’ deaths. Yet, when speaking in general and not of their own deaths, at least modernist-reformist-Islamist Bangladeshis condemned laments’ subjective expressions as willful, narcissistic, attention-seeking. No one claimed laments come from “tradition,” or from musical or cultural memory. Spontaneous Bangladeshi bilAp seems destined to be transformed, pushed offstage, or forgotten as European laments have been (HolstWarhaft 1992:6; Weber 1958:105). By contrast, other genres of lament – those commemorating male martyrs in Islamic history (jArC [zArC] gAn [Dunham 1997], laments performed in honor of the seventh-century Shia martyr, Iman Husayn; see Chapter 7) or male heroes from Hindu epics,

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much more textually fixed than the improvised laments in focus here – may well carry on. Fluid, forgettable structures of commemoration Along the continuum between routinized and improvised performance genres (Sawyer 1996), lament falls somewhere between the middle and the improvised end. Recognition of a performance as a legitimate instantiation of a culturally elaborated genre – especially a ritual genre – empowers it, even if some of its words might be subversive. Confronted with this middle ground of regulated improvisation (Bourdieu 1977[1972]), it is difficult, at least for Latifa’s kin, to discern empowering generic links. Even if they see such links, many Bangladeshis are working toward erasing them – a corporate act of forgetting. Laments like Latifa’s are simply too subversive. The past Latifa’s wept memorialization sought to carry into the future (Casey 1987:257) was not valued by her family. The time for lament, more Bangladeshis seem to be saying, is gone; a rational order must now reign full-time. Iconicity and erasure: semiotic technologies of forgetting In his classic essay, “Grief and a Headhunter’s Rage,” Renato Rosaldo (1984) documented his discovery of how much more sense the Ilongot world made than he had realized before the death of his wife, Michelle Z. Rosaldo. Her death enabled him to understand how the taking of heads could be “necessary” not only to vent rage but also to overcome grief. Rosaldo notes how the Ilongot experienced Christian conversion as a kind of therapy for overcoming grief. For them (not for all), Christianity was what I call a “technology of forgetting” loss and grievance. Such erasure requires the effective management of signs. The semiotic processes of iconization and erasure empower discourses opposing lament. One prerequisite for cutting a performance’s genre moorings is severing its indexical links. Indexes (Peirce 1931–58:2.276) are sign relations that owe their meaning to real co-occurrences in time and space. If we associate a certain “accent” (i.e. dialect) with a region, class, or ethnic group – to the point that we claim to recognize people’s origins by their dialect – it serves as an index. But to ascribe a certain character to speakers of that dialect transforms index into icon. Iconicity is a relationship of similarity – always culturally construed as such. The “iconization” or essentialization entailed in attributing character to an index is an ideological move. Such misconstrual attributes “necessity to a connection

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that may be only historical, contingent, or conventional” (Gal and Irvine 1995:973). Iconization can take many forms. For example, Dhaka scholars who heard me present preliminary stories about Latifa in 1992 celebrated her lament, apparently making it the repository of a valued cultural essence. They seemed to celebrate each text artifact of lament (such as the bilAp incorporated into the Bengali classic, Candimangal [Mukundaram 1589]) as a bearer of that essence. Admittedly, Bangladeshi lament’s fans might be limited to scholars. And their celebration does not mean regarding them as embodiments of resistance; they are, instead, well crafted and culturally honored expressions of love and longing. Iconization as romanticization harvests texts from performance contexts to distill a rarefied essence of the genre (Certeau 1984:132). Irvine and Gal (2000) argue that iconization often teams up with another cultural-semiotic process – erasure, inducing amnesia. Romanticization leaves little room for remembering the complexity of form and function in genres like lament. When a speech genre is displaced onto a backstage where no one is likely to find it – or when it is displaced from a setting in which it had a dynamic or even sacred function, to the realm of spectacle or state television broadcast (Salomon 1991) – erasure is at work. Erasure can also take the form of active attempts to obliterate ways of speaking that come to represent some “alternative, threatening picture” of the society (Gal and Irvine 1995:975). I heard Latifa’s relatives and neighbors worry about a future in which women “dominate men.” Her angry assertion of desire for her husband and perhaps revenge against her brothers evidently stirred such fears. Let us call these two faces of erasure displacement and effacement. As male-dominated performances of jArC gAn commemorating Shia martyrdom (Dunham 1997) erase from public view spontaneous women’s laments in Bangladesh, popular memory of the very genre of improvisational lament will eventually vanish. A subversive dance: when improvisational co-ordination does not signal agreement The dance-like achievement of co-ordination in conversation – not to be mistaken for harmony or agreement – is an oft-remarked wonder of intersubjectivity. Lament, like nearly all performance, is a collaborative achievement with those who are apparently not “performing.” (To understand the necessity of collaboration, try giving an “exciting” speech to an

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audience with their backs turned to you, determinedly chatting among themselves.) Even Latifa’s controversial performances were interactively coordinated. Her improvisational lament disturbed her kin, although it actually involved them. Latifa’s “sister” (Bun, marked as B in the transcript) was about 70 years old. She addressed Latifa, in line 10 and again in line 35, as Latifa sang. She was in the middle of line 36 when Bun uttered line 35 – the right-facing bracket signifies the simultaneity of the two lines. Latifa’s line 37 seems to respond to Bun. It is precisely such improvised, interactive performance that can stray into subversiveness, and is thus vulnerable to the kind of attack leveled at Latifa and her lamenting. Transcript 4: Latifa grooving with her interlocutors 35B God himself is [our only] refuge. [ 36L How they have hurt my liver, sister O sister! 37L God is not with me (or, God is not there for me) Verging on blasphemy while staying on beat – and kin responses. Latifa’s kin labeled her pAgal, “mad” – perhaps because of some of the nearly blasphemous things she said in her laments. But if Latifa was mad, she still did not miss a beat: the transcript reveals Latifa and her “audience” engaged in an intimate, improvisational co-construction of the lament’s discourse. Improvisation differs from other modes of composition in terms of the sort of emergent interactivity exemplified by lines 35 –37, above. Bun urged Latifa to trust God in line 35. In line 37 Latifa echoed Bun’s invocation – but only to say, literally, “God is not even there for me.” Indeed, she incorporated this into her ongoing song without rhythmic misstep. One never knows what an improviser might let slip; this time, Latifa’s controversial words deny God’s care and presence. But her lament is not unique in stretching the envelope of orthodoxy. Some Punjabi women’s laments appear to be “blasphemous” (Das 1996:80). This subversive power makes the bilAp a genre many in Bangladesh strive to erase. Bun’s reminder that “God is [our only] refuge” points to the potential of religious discourse as a “technology of forgetting.” At other moments Latifa’s kin tried to draw her into the universe of modernist rationality. By recalling Latifa to faith in Allah, Bun was indirectly urging her to quit her intense, disturbing commemoration of her autobiographical past, and perhaps also to stop expecting so much of her role-bound kin. But this

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call also served to disrupt Latifa’s commemoration of the genre and thus to denaturalize any remaining sense of lament’s power. Loosening lament’s indexical connections: local interpretations Kin treated Latifa’s singing both as an icon of her ostensibly pre-existing “madness” (the result of love charms) and a performative stimulus to madness – a maddening display of passions. (See Transcript 1, line 86 in Chapter 3 above: “The girl’s head will get even crazier [if she keeps lamenting].”) Adapting Gal and Irvine’s words, Latifa’s cousins attribute “necessity” to “a connection” between linguistic features and identity (the pAgal “mad” identity) that might be “only historical, contingent, or conventional.” This involves making an indexical link (between her performance, her gender, and her distress) “appear to be an iconic representation of [identity] . . . as if a linguistic feature somehow depicted or displayed . . . [Latifa’s] . . . nature or essence” (1995:973). Thus, iconization played its role in how the performance was delegitimated in part by being “de-genred” – disconnected from its indexical links with a genre, bilAp, with a long and recognized history. There were far too many life-and-death, on-the-ground relevancies – there was too much at stake (Wikan 1990) – for my research associate and roommate Faisal and myself to speak objectively about the performance and the genre for many days. Latifa was apparently enraged at her whole extended family and had been for months. Her sense of justice was offended. To lament was to assert her rights in ongoing disputes with her family, including my field kin network. They could not tolerate her loud condemnations any more than her brothers had, yet their actions to stop her shocked Faisal and me. After a month, when the crisis had passed, I presented a paper and played recordings of Latifa and Suleyman’s lament performances at a Dhaka University seminar. The scholars agreed in labeling their tuneful speech bilAp. Labeling it thus links their speech with all discourse so labeled, remembered, reproduced, or written over centuries across South Asia (Das 1996:82–83; Vaudeville 1986; Wilce 1998a). Whereas Latifa’s kin debated her agency in shaping the performance (were the love charms responsible, or was she?), and made no link between her performance and the history of a genre, seminar participants connected the taped performances with celebrated ancient traditions. Academics placed Latifa’s performance at the near end of a long interdiscursive chain. Yet Latifa’s family – more than the scholars – recognized the performance’s immediate contextualization,

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its painful specificities, its rage, and the threat it posed to the social order. In the seminar discussion the particular performance disappeared into an abstraction of “the genre,” an Orientalist sort of romanticization or glorification particularly, if not exclusively, of the written “literary exemplars” of bilAp. Label-wars and competing objectifications. As it turns out, however, bilAp was not the first label I had heard for Latifa’s wept songs; Latifa’s kin had a label for them, too. They called them ai purAn kAndA, “that old crying” – using the unmarked term for crying. Here “old” might mean “tiresomely traditional” or “familiar,” and reflect her family’s wish to identify with modernity (Wilce 1998a:chapter 2). At other times the family described Latifa’s performances as sur diye balA, “tuneful speaking.” Though none of those who knew Latifa invoked the sort of “literary” genre label the seminar audience used, other “dispassionate” consultants – Bangladeshi students in Los Angeles with an Islamist persuasion – called Latifa’s and Suleyman’s productions “songs” or jArC gAn (odd, perhaps, since their songs were most certainly not about historic religious martyrs). These diverse labels attest to the always constructed and political nature of genre (Briggs and Bauman 1992), each label indexing the labeler’s identity and some ideologically freighted version of history – Shia or ethno-nationalist, local or Islamic-transnational. Latifa’s original audience, the seminar responding to tapes of several laments, and Bangladeshi sociolinguist Rajib Humayun (1985) all iconized contemporary lament practice in various ways. Humayun’s modernist representation links affective genres with women and reads lament texts as asocial emotional outpourings. Although in many traditions it is women who are most likely to lament, such loose indexical connections all too easily become icons, as in Humayun’s description of bilAp: “There is a style of lamentation called bilap, among women. . . . They express their immediate feelings either in prose or in rhymed words” (Humayun 1985:40; emphasis added). Humayun makes women the sole appropriate performers of bilAp – presumably because (unlike men) they are under the sway of “immediate feelings.” Degenrification Restoring a recognition of laments’ indexicality would mean not just admitting the loose indexical association of bilAp with women, but treating Latifa’s performance as evidence of one woman’s practical, if not

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explicit or discursive, consciousness (Giddens 1979) of the long roots of bilAp. As Bauman (1992) points out in a discussion of Icelandic performances, folk performances project themselves in terms of what audiences conceive of as tradition – i.e., performances are traditionalized – for strategic reasons. Through a chain of transmission that I could not uncover, and that even she might have been unable to name or describe, Latifa somehow modeled her song on a tradition of bilAp performance.4 Was this act of traditionalization completely lost on her audience? More likely, as active recipients, they discounted any traditional roots, treating her performance as a failure. Their degenrification of the performance – disqualifying it as a token of a marked genre with its own history – made it impossible for younger members of the audience to remember the performance in that historical connection. Latifa’s critics were, in effect, erasing history. Why lament is undesirable Taking into account Latifa’s kin’s rejection, her own implicit affirmation of lament, and the seminar’s romanticization of laments as traditional vestiges, my inquiries into genre and values uncovered more discord than consensus. Realizing this complexity, I returned to Bangladesh in 1996 to conduct more extensive interviews about lament. My interviews with men and boys uncovered three reasons why bilAp is undesirable: First, it entails women raising their voices enough to be heard by non-kin, which reformist Islam frowns on. Then, mourning the death of a Muslim insults God, who has willed that death. Finally, loud wailing inhibits the soul’s departure to the next world (El-Cheikh 2003). Unfortunately, gender segregation prevented me from conducting parallel interviews with rural women without men’s participation. How has Islamic tradition viewed lamentation? “A condemnation of public lamentation, particularly by women, is to be seen from the very beginning of Islam” (Naim 1999). We find this condemnation in one of the quasi-scriptural sources of Islamic theology, the Hadith or Traditions – particularly individual sayings attributed to the Prophet and his closest companions. In one such Hadith, the Prophet is made to say, “Three pre-Islamic customs . . . are not to be retained by the Muslims. They are: invoking the planets in order to receive rain . . . attacking genealogies . . . and lamenting the dead [al-niyAGa “alA “l-mayyit]” (Fahd 1993:64–65). On another occasion, the Prophet “forbade . . . diabolical chantings [mazAmCr

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shayLAn] and a voice in times of misfortune (which shows itself) in mutilating one’s face, tearing of clothes and a diabolical mourning cry [rannat shayLAn, the nBnia of the Romans, i.e. a funeral lament]” (Fahd 1993:64–65).5 Knowing something of this historical stance within Islam, during fieldwork I had ascribed the will to forget bilAp to Islamic sensibilities. Later I attributed opposition to specifically reformist-Muslim ideology, defined by its drive to abolish “folk Islamic” practices (Geertz 1968; Horvatich 1994). But, if “Islam” was the true source of the critique, why did many Bangladeshi criticisms sound like things city-dwellers in many nonMuslim societies might say about loud wailing? Could reformist-Islamist and “urban” critiques of lament be reflecting homologous modernist drives? Two 1996 conversations about bilAp indicated what I now take to be the modernist underpinnings of some of the critiques. I mentioned bilAp to a highly educated woman working for a medical NGO in Bangladesh. Upon hearing the word bilAp, the woman’s 12-year-old son Munir asked what that meant, his ignorance likely indicating his age and his removal from “traditional” life. I defined it as the sur diye kAndA (tuneful weeping) heard when someone dies. When this relatively elite boy – who was typically respectful toward one and all – understood what I was referring to, he chuckled and said something like, “Oh yes, that loud wailing! That’s something uneducated rural people do. You won’t hear it in the cities.” On another 1996 day, a rural schoolteacher sharing a long ferry ride with me described several performance genres that were once common but have all but vanished. He indicated that they tended to be a bit bawdy. Significantly, they also offended the modernist-Islamist sentiments, publicly asserted in Bangladesh since the 19th century, against drawing attention to oneself, for example by singing one’s prayers (Wilce 2001). H. K. Arefeen, an anthropologist at Dhaka University, confirmed that women’s songs at weddings, laments, and the ballad-like genres the schoolteacher mentioned are nearly extinct. Both professor and rural schoolteacher attributed the passing of these genres to Middle Eastern influence – rapidly increasing along with the transnational flows whereby Bangladeshi workers go to the Middle East and petrodollar aid flows to Bangladesh – on the formerly “more open” Bangladeshi Muslim culture. Clearly, social memory, and particularly the memory of genres, has been changing rapidly in Bangladesh. But is memory ever stable?

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Loss and “Forgetting what it is to Remember . . .” What is “remembered” is always transformed, never objectively reproduced. Commemoration is a sort of meta-memory; when people commemorate an event they are publicly remembering how to remember. Whereas “recall” is in some sense private, commemoration is public, often mediated by language (Casey 1987:232–233). The performance genres of memory can themselves be remembered or forgotten. Among the most grievous of losses entailed in losing a language or literary tradition is losing the means to properly remember (Basso 1996), forgetting the genres of commemoration. When focused on events that elicit collective shame (Michalowski and Dubisch 2001), commemoration may be particularly vulnerable. This helps us understand the pressures on Latifa to forget, cease, and desist. It illumines the broader pressures to replace lament with silent weeping or talk about grief (Urban 1996:175–176). The Bangladeshi case of “forgetting” has multiple links with violence against women, and against men like Suleyman. Latifa’s story is one of violence in many respects. Her brothers forced her to marry, but later forcibly removed her from her husband and the family that had been abusing her because (as relatives told me) her brothers had failed to pay them the entire promised dowry. Then – as her brothers, cousins, and mother recounted quite openly – they chained and beat her when she carried her “crying” on too long and in too many homes. The suppression of Latifa’s lamentation parallels a situation described by Veena Das (1996) in north Indian villages living with memories of the violence of Partition, the splitting of India and Pakistan. In the same Indian villages Das studied one can hear, or even see on television, contemporary performances of epic stories of men dying in battle – male–male violence. These stories of male violence form the heart of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana; they inspired the ancient Sanskrit vilApa (counterpart of Bangla bilAp) found throughout those epics. Punjabi women have always re-enacted the ancient vilApa in celebration of men’s heroic deaths. But Punjabi women whose bodies were violated by men – survivors of communal violence against women during Partition – had no access to the ancient genre. They did not lament. Instead, they stored up traumatic memory in their bodies, silently. Das heard agreement that this mass violence against women during the Partition should be stored away in silence, held inside women’s bodies like embryos (Das

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1996:85). In violence and in silence, women’s bodies became tablets for modern forms of national Self-inscription. Stories that might have become widely circulated social memories if they had involved male victims instead went underground as private, embodied memories, erased from public discursive record. Some memories stored in the privacy of women’s bodies, others in the body politic – the contrast is significant.

Lament, Caught between a Passion for Control and Reified Passion My 1996 fieldwork led me to historicize my account of lament, since my interviews uncovered threats to lament arising from the postcolonial nexus of modernization, urbanization, and religious reformism. Public weeping there and elsewhere is being transformed into private experience to be talked about rather than performed. The interiorization of affect suits globally ascendant ideologies of person, emotion, and expressivity. Semiotic tools such as romanticization and iconization of the indexical links between lament and women empower language ideologies that are crucial to the privatization and displacement of lament by rational discourses about emotion (Urban 1996:175 –176). Modernity entails a suite of facts, conditions, and dispositions including (among other things) the destruction of barriers to capitalist expansion and barriers separating the world from individuals (Giddens 1991), and a radically new sense of time and history (Schieffelin 2000, 2002). Giddens defines late modernity in terms of a profound reflexivity (or “hyperreflexivity,” or the “self-referentiality” of accepted realities), interiorization (the private sequestration of experience), the pervasiveness of doubt and risk, the rise of “pure relationships” (existing for their own sake, based on trust and mutual disclosure of feelings), and the prevalence of choice – even if the latter is illusory (when “lifestyle choices” are severely constrained economically, Giddens 1991; compare Sass 1992). The Bangladeshi critiques of lament I heard in 1996 reflected a drive toward interiorization, and a modern sense of ruptured time that leaves lament on the other side of a temporal divide. Privatization of affect reflects new “structures of feeling” – incipient social experiences “less formal and more pervasive than ‘beliefs’ ” (Williams 1977:132) – arriving in Bangladesh

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with the penetration of global capitalism. Latifa and Suleyman lamented betrayals that would cause pain in any era, but did so with a hyperreflexive twist. Hence local criticism of Latifa made her out to be full of ideas she had picked up in school, and obsessively aware of demands on women that were (as some claim) accepted passively in another era. She seemed too aware of choice to comply with Bun’s call to trust Allah and move on. Latifa’s family wanted her to go on with a life less intensively reflected upon, and less disruptive. If this sounds like the family “resisting modernity,” other dimensions of their critique reflect modernist notions. Angry, “blasphemous” lament (Das 1996:80; Trawick 2002) has long encountered metadiscursive critique and repression; cycles of repression and revival characterize the millennialong history of Greek lament (Holst-Warhaft 1992). But under conditions of modernity – albeit as “vernacular,” Bangladeshi Islamic modernity – critique and repression can eliminate enemies like lament with some of the frightening effectiveness of modern violence. Changes associated with modernity rest upon material and discursive transformations, including the displacement of genres. Though I confirmed with Latifa’s kin in 1996 that they knew the meaning of the word bilAp, they also said that they never used it. Everyone in that household, however, frequently used several equally “formal” speech genre labels, particularly one from mosque discourse – AzAn, call to prayer. The imam of the mosque that was in fact on this family’s property – Latifa’s mother’s older cousin – vigorously advocated what he saw as rational public genres of religious performance, and inveighed against what he saw as irrational, privately improvised, traditional-folkloric genres. The AzAn is global in its Islamic inclusiveness. Bangladeshi Muslims – taking a page from other moderns – see Islam as the most “rational” (modern?) of religions. The rationalization of religion, and an allegiance to textualism (Geertz 1968; Horvatich 1994), shared with Western Orientalists, are increasingly pervasive. Since Latifa’s kin did use some formal genre labels in their everyday speech, why did they refer to her performances in circumlocutions? Why use unmarked everyday phrases for crying and singing, like “that old crying,” instead of the single term, bilAp, which more neatly encompasses her performances’ poetic, musical, and affective dimensions? Perhaps the immediacy, drama, and conflictual nature of her performance militate against a calm choice of an efficient and denotatively accurate label for the “hot” performance, especially one that they say they do not normally use. But that explanation is inadequate.

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In today’s Bangladesh, the transnational discourse genres associated with the mosque are more salient than ethnic “Bengali” genres like bilAp. BilAp is made to epitomize a premodern way of balancing and entextualizing desire, longing, and control. The absence of the bilAp label from Latifa’s cousins’ arguments betokens a forgetting of millennia of performances, the unmaking of a chain that reaches back to the Mahabharata and Ramayana (Das 1996:82f). It represents a turning of collective consciousness from local and regional traditions – traditions in which women voiced longing and anger, questioned male control, bemoaned if not challenged the prevailing order (as in Bihar, India [Tiwary 1978]) – toward global discourses. Orienting to globalizing Islamist discourses, Bangladeshi Muslims project a singular Islamist identity, and do so along modernist, textualist lines. They emphasize a rationalist rejection of any loud, passionate “acting out,” especially by women. A singular Islamist identity may be a peculiar social imaginary but it is no less a discursive force to be reckoned with in Bangladesh. Madrasah schools teach one set of genres – and one stance toward genres left untaught – that participants take to represent a unified, contemporary, global Islamist voice.

When Genres Pass Away We can compare the passing of genres to the tearing down of buildings in “urban renewal” projects. In his inquiry into the erasure of memories surrounding certain lived spaces in Los Angeles, Norman Klein compares vanished neighborhoods to phantom limbs, and the erasure of public memory to “what psychologists call an imago, an idealized face left over from childhood.” One memory “defoliates” another through “simultaneous distraction” (1997:2, 3, 10). Klein’s metaphors help us grapple with this contradiction – two sets of laments, expertly performed by Suleyman and Latifa in adjacent villages where some metacultural Agent Orange has defoliated the generic tradition into which their performances fit. How could enough memory remain of a tradition sufficiently well attested in South Asian history to perform it, but not enough to label it, to link it with history and a supportive metadiscourse? Why tokens with no acknowledged type? Presenting, or presented with, a performance that should be typifiable with reference to ancient genres, what causes these “typification gaps” (Hanks 1996)?

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Perhaps the explanation is that typification requires a truly common sense; but sense cannot be common when societies are extremely diverse, or even riven with conflict. South Asian societies have always been internally diverse, but new divisions over modernist sensibilities now crosscut families and even individual consciousness (Wilce 2000). Latifa and her kin both represent modernity-and-tradition in different facets or at different moments. Latifa reaches ahead to a modern Bangladesh in which women have more say over their own lives – yet also back to a partly imagined past in which lament was an honored form of performance. Her kin reach toward a modern future in which passions are not given free rein but put to work for Islamic-nationalist ends (cf. Good and Good 1988) – while holding on to a partly imagined past in which women “accepted” imposed marriage arrangements, and in which “choice” had not attained its present dominance in popular consciousness. The possibility that one memory can erase another gives us a perspective on the paradox of remembering-and-forgetting in the same villages – at different levels of discursive abstraction (particular performances vs. a genre). In this case what is effaced are memories of genres that happen to be genres of memory. And what is remembered – by Bangladeshi sociolinguist Rajib Humayun or by Latifa’s family – is partly misremembered. In the misremembrance whereby Bangladeshi lament is made to serve as a trope of feminine emotionality (Humayun 1985), we see iconization at work. In Latifa’s performances and the angry responses they generated, the iconicity that some tried to establish – between a woman lamenting, her putative insanity, and the nature of women as creatures of passion – erased links to history. While Latifa attempted to play to a tradition spanning the subcontinent and many centuries, her kin effectively erased that history and that lineage of performers (partly imagined and clearly discontinuous though it might be). Rationalist-Islamist modernism is just the latest successor to the British Raj (whose impact I treat in the next chapter) in a struggle to erase such performances and their genre links. Productions of those forms that (re)produce social memory – laments contemporary and historic, discursive and embodied – are subject to “the forgetting . . . which history itself produces” (Bourdieu 1977[1972]:78) – that is, to erasure. Yet another paradox lurks here. Traumatic memory is not banned outright from public discourse; the memory of some traumatic upheavals is kept alive as part of ongoing efforts at national self-definition, ongoing incitements to discourse (Foucault 1990) on trauma. Those themes will have to wait for Part III.

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As the last chapter made clear, genres are inherently unstable tools in constructing socially acceptable identities – particularly in late modernity. When the model discourses in which identities are constructed in rural Bangladesh shift from Vedic sagas to global discourses of Islamic renewal, rational development, etc., and the Bangladeshi gaze turns outward toward “the modern world,” the attention of Bangladeshis must be distracted while something is forgotten, erased. In the shift, genres like bilAp, out of which premodern and pre-communalist (Wilce 2000) ethnic Bengali or Indic identities were constructed, must themselves be either forgotten or radically redeployed. It is not that modernity has no truck with tradition, but any tradition it latches onto becomes something new – and bilAp seems unlikely to be chosen for this dance. Such stories from Bangladesh and many other sites occupy us in this chapter. These stories point to widespread shifts in the practice of lament, shifts happening all across the globe in response to globalizing “modernity(ies).”

Modernity Revisited From this book’s opening pages, I have presented a view of “modernity” more complex than the common one, arguing that modernity is alternately iconoclastic and sentimental. This chapter offers a more detailed presentation of recent theories of modernity. Recent social theorists have represented modernity as a discourse, a rhetoric, or a narrative. For my purposes in relation to lament, modernity is a metanarrative, a story of “progress,” a story about other stories (“primitive” ones) being displaced. Modernity as a metaculture of newness (Urban 2001) continually spawns new metanarratives, including this

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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book. But there are also “modern subjects” and “subjectivities,” persons who are committed to the moral imperative to express themselves authentically (Keane 2007; Taylor 1989; Trilling 1972). Meaning is reduced to personal intent (Robbins 2001); inauthentic expressions lack (modern) meaning. Marco Jacquemet (2003) describes two sorts of metanarrative about globalization’s impact on language – dystopic and optimistic neoliberal narratives – that are relevant here. Dystopic stories emphasize language death at the hands of a rapidly spreading language such as English, French, or Bahasa Indonesia – “standard” languages representing empires or nations. Neoliberal stories speak more optimistically – of global cultural flows, and of hybrids that emerge out of such flows. Synthesizing these metanarratives, Jacquemet examines the hybrid forms of language that emerge as speakers and digitized communications obliterate national boundaries – without losing sight of inequities of power that constrain the movement of messages and speakers. Parts II and III of this book offer a similar synthesis of metanarratives. Modern transformations of lament practices around the world lend themselves to a dystopic view of globalizing modernity. Such a view, the theme of Part II, is balanced – not erased – by the more hopeful perspectives explored in Part III.

Many modernities A great number of social theorists have advocated rethinking modernity in light of significant differences in its history and form around the world. For example, Eisenstadt (2000) advocates the “multiple modernities” perspective. Still, he stresses similarities between various global projects or patterns of modernity; “the original Western project” of modernity is “the crucial (and usually ambivalent) reference point” for other local modernities (2000:2). Lee and Taylor (1998) stress divergences between different experiences and patterns of modernity, arguing that diverse cultural “inputs” preclude radical cultural convergence. Later in this chapter I present several local modernities, starting with colonial-Bengali modernity. Despite the differences in their roots, the modernist projects I describe have similar impacts on lament. One reason is that they share a common set of “technologies.” Here again, I use the term loosely to describe socially constructed techniques – of forgetting, for

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example. I also address technologies of capital, imperialism as a technology of power, and globally circulating “technologies of self,” particularly the drive for “authenticity” or “sincerity.” These technologies, and the various local modernities I discuss, are related to each other in interesting ways. Many modernities, but one capitalism? Capitalism has morphed over its several centuries of history; late capitalism differs sharply from early capitalism. “Dynamics of circulation . . . are driving globalization – and thereby challenging traditional notions of language, culture, and nation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002:191; emphasis added). In the 18th and 19th centuries, “local capitalisms” were dedicated to production and gave rise to modern nation-states. Today we face “emergent circulation-based capitalism and its concomitant, a transformed set of social imaginaries that privileges a global totality as it produces new forms of risk that may destroy it” (2002:211; emphasis added). Globalizing circulation-based finance capitalism, which transcends and perhaps weakens nation-states, and the 19th century’s development of competing capitalist nation-states, represent two modernities. Yet today, a circulation-based capitalist globalization is the context for all “local modernities.” Circulationbased capitalism requires the spread of neoliberal ideologies and the privatization of an ever greater proportion of the means of production. As fact and ideology, privatization impacts lament. A story of privatized grief. The long history of genres of publicly performed grief contrasts with new sensibilities about the privacy (and private “ownership”) of grief (Wilce 1998a:chapter 5). Evidence of the impact of privatization comes from a short story by the Indian fiction writer Akhil Sharma – “If You Sing Like That for Me” – published in The Atlantic Monthly and mentioned in the introduction to Part II. Sharma’s protagonist says she “sometimes . . . hummed along to Lata Mangeshkar or Mohammed Rafi singing that grief is no letter to be passed around to whoever wants to read” (1995:emphasis added). If we take this short story to represent something really happening in India – despite the fact that Sharma actually misquotes Mangeshkar’s lyrics – it would appear that privatization has displaced public performances of sentiment onto an interiorized stage. To what reality might Sharma’s fiction correspond? The recent form of Indian modernity (Nichter 2001) entails massive privatization of industries and land – itself the subject of recent laments sung by Dalits (so-called untouchables, Trawick 2002). Perhaps even beyond Sharma’s fiction, grief in South Asia

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is undergoing an analogous privatization. My ethnographic evidence – for example, in the story of Munir, the Bangladeshi boy saying “city people cry silently” – indicates just such a trend. Capitalism mass-produces private consumers and, on a very limited scale, owners. It transforms bodies and sentiments into commodities and inverts attitudes toward commodities and people – fetishizing (attributing life to) commodities and, conversely, objectifying persons and relations (Taussig 1980). But what is this fetishization? Does all payment for performances commodify the performer? Why was it in an earlier historical era – not today – that paid professional funeral wailers flourished in South Asia? Payment represented material recognition of the value of social relationships. Professional wailers first gave way to unpaid wailers, who still sang improvised songs of grief and protest. Now both yield to silent weepers. The displacement of spontaneous laments (unpaid or paid) from South Asia’s public culture reflects the decoupling of “value” from relationships. Let me point out two last connections Sharma’s story of the song has with globalizing modernity. The first is to the widespread Indian circulation of cassettes of pop singers, film songs, and political speeches, all of which mass-produce affect (Manuel 1996). The second is to the deterritorialization of discourse. Akhil Sharma, for example, writes as an “Indian author” but lives in the United States. Has Sharma’s short story, like Salman Rushdie’s work, gained popularity in India? If so, even if Indians might not have shared the singer’s attitude that grief is private at the time he wrote the story, such an attitude might become more popular along with the story. Lament’s transformation: shifting metacultures If, as I assert, lament practice changed profoundly in the 20th century, this was only part of a broader change. Like other expressive forms, lament attracts plenty of critical attention. We have seen how dominant discourses of and about emotion shift across the particular histories of societies. Such shifting ideologies include expectations about performing – speaking, showing affect, etc. – as a competent member of society. What does a competent person do when confronted with another’s death, or another’s suffering? What does virtue require in such situations? What model is held up for emulation, and how does it relate to suffering? Models of good-self construction have probably never been stable. Homer’s heroes lamented; under Solon’s laws, lament-memory was

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banned. Although some current Christian and Muslim discourses repeat arguments written millennia earlier, this chapter shows that something unique is happening to lament today. Lament’s “enemy” is not some enhancement of scriptural arguments enabling strictly religious forces to triumph over lament, but religious collaboration with the forces of capitalist modernity. Singing, speaking artfully, and telling stories with melody – these are as old as language itself. Such means of semiotic exchange, and their cultural surrounds, have always been in motion (Urban 2001). But the pace of change has greatly increased. Metacultural sea-changes affecting the mode of cultural transmission are playing a key role. Genres are changing in ways both obvious and subtle. Global changes in speaking and singing include shifts in the languages of performance. As hundreds of languages become moribund and drop out of use, genres often fail to make the leap from the old to a new language – perhaps English. What some call “culture loss” occurs when genres instrumental in cultural reproduction fade away. Such disruptions have traumatic effects. And the scope scale of such disruptions in the last 200 years is unprecedented, as voices of high modernity have carried out unapologetic attacks on performances of passion – including lament – around the world. Modern technologies of self “Modernity” brings new ways of being, new subjectivities, and radically new ways of narratively constituting the self. Transformations in discourse – particularly ways of performing and talking about self and emotion – represent an under-studied dimension of global change. Amid all the multivocality of contemporary discourses, dominant metadiscourses project new ideas – about genre, emotions involved in discursive performance, and notions of the self behind the performance. New communicative forms foster and reflect new modes of selfhood. Such modes include individuated emotionalism, or the kind of “psychologized individualism” currently being reproduced across generations of upper-middle-class New Yorkers (Kusserow 2004). These transformations have a direct impact on the viability of traditional lament. Discourses of authenticity in a metaculture of newness In what follows, I offer a number of indications as to the rising value of authenticity in verbal performance. Although some observers speak instead of the drive to sincerity, Trilling (1972) sees in modern history the rise of a commitment to authenticity, a higher standard than sincerity.

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Authenticity demands more of the self, and opposes much that was once accepted and valued as “culture.” “The concept of authenticity can deny art itself, yet at the same time it figures as the dark source of art” (1972:11), and this is true of verbal art perhaps more than any other form. It is this drive to authenticity that poses a grave threat to all performance traditions in which affective display is conventionally expected. Strategies that involve minimizing the intertextual gap between one’s own performance and past performances of “the same genre” (Briggs and Bauman 1992) involve a large amount of traditionalization (Bauman 1992). But under a metacultural embrace of newness, calling laments performances of a “traditional” genre makes those performances problematic. In such metacultural conditions, all cultural products, including the self, must constantly take on new forms. In relation to the self, we frame newness in terms of “honesty,” “spontaneity,” or “authenticity” – all key terms in media criticism, therapy, our culture’s “emotivism” (MacIntyre 1980), and thus in popular discourse. The notion that authentic feelings are spontaneous and personal, and that the good life entails following those feelings, has made it harder for “traditional lament” to survive. Are Bangladeshi laments “authentic”? Does an ethos of “authenticity” doom lament? And are authenticity and sincerity modern values? What is there about Bangladeshi rice farmers, such as Latifa’s kin, that is usefully described as modern? Globalizing modernity (Tomlinson 1999) has touched all of Bangladesh. Even rural Bangladesh – still home to more than 80 percent of its people – is now incorporated into global markets. Rural families send at least one of their sons to work in the better-paying industries of Malaysia or the Middle East, whence they return Bangladesh’s chief source of foreign currency – repatriated wages. As education becomes common even for girls, all college and even high school graduates expect to find salaried jobs in or out of the country. The clash between these inflated expectations and terrific domestic job shortages – coupled with the huge costs involved in getting oneself abroad to work – creates widespread social and personal tensions. As significant as these economic transformations are, new cultural values – such as Mrs. Khan’s embrace, described below, of an authenticity she understands as modern – demand analytic attention. Latifa is a member of the first generation of Bangladeshi girls for whom it was common to finish high school. As such, she embodies

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contradictions between the rising expectations created by mass education and the lack of opportunity to exercise certain dispositions. These include the modernist sense, or illusion, of control – the sense that the world is full of choices (Giddens 1990, 1991; LeVine et al. 1993). Such an apotheosis of personal autonomy accompanies a growing emphasis on personal feelings. Yet having recourse to any conventional mode of expression left Latifa vulnerable to charges of inauthenticity. During my 1991–92 fieldwork in Bangladesh, I traveled regularly from “my” village to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Rejak Khan in the megalopolis of Dhaka. Their reflections on Latifa’s story brought home to me the ethnographic value of my Dhaka excursions. Mrs. Khan was shocked at Latifa’s brothers’ behavior; but Latifa also mystified her. This underscored the alienation of elite urbanites from “backward” rural life – and the great diversity of values among Bangladeshi Muslims. Mrs. Khan found Latifa’s self-dramatization particularly distasteful, implying that if she herself were authentically aggrieved she would not sing of it. On hearing her husband point out that a tradition of professional funeral wailers once thrived in South Asia, Mrs. Khan expressed even more distaste: How could the bereaved take comfort from the laments of a professional? Where was their commitment to authenticity? Mrs. Khan’s disgust (an affect linked to shame) over this particular bit of history was visceral. Mrs. Khan’s notion of authenticity shares more in common with current Euro-American than with premodern sensibilities, Western or Bengali. Being authentic is at the heart of Mr. Khan’s values, too. Far from being an accidental feature of isolated discourses, authenticity arises from a technology of the reflexive self central to modernity. Authenticity is also central to modern Europe’s self-construction vis-à-vis its Other – “Orientals” who have long been associated with “dissimulation and diffidence” (Wood 1971[1775]:158).1

Imperialism, modernity, and power-knowledge The risk of even naming (or blaming) “modernity” is that we lend stability to what is ultimately a shifter; we turn the project into an achievement. But I am also anxious to avoid glossing over the very real destruction that modern colonial power visited upon peoples, their modes of cultural production, and their products. The “disappearance” of tradition and traditional peoples may be a trope necessary to sustaining the discourse of

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modernity. But if we stop at calling it a trope we risk erasing the ethnocidal events that modernist discourse naturalizes. Previous generations of folklorists and anthropologists naturalized as inevitable the disappearance of what they study – traditions. Their models neglected the often violent historical events behind such disappearances (Bauman and Briggs 2003: 153–154). The disappearance of lament from so many societies is no natural result of the “decaying” of a tradition. Lament’s suppression is a matter of particular, mostly unwritten, histories; and those histories need telling. To call European modernity a “discursive formation” by no means lets it off the hook in relation to charges of imperialist violence. Modern discourse is in the business of representing Others and Other traditions – typically as “backward.” Such representations can themselves be transformative and, in their own way, violent.

“The Loss of Lament” in Encounters with Four Modernities 1 Colonialism and Bengali modernities Although on first consideration largely Muslim Bangladesh appears quite removed from Protestant Europe, the following discussion will reveal how entangled the two have become since colonization. I have found no records from East or West Bengal,2 before or during the British Raj, that describe popular performances of lament, bilAp. However, evidence indicates that bilAp-related oral genres were commonly performed across South Asia for millennia (Vaudeville 1986; Wadley 1983; Zbavitel 1961). Women performed seasonal laments (bArahmAsA) in all of the north Indian languages. Such laments express pining or longing – biraha (viraha) – for an absent love.3 Even before the Raj, Sufi poets put the genre to different use, thereby changing it, as they collapsed sexual longing into the longing for union with divinity (Vaudeville 1986:38). Such changes in sensibilities surrounding discourses of sentiment represent an early era of globalization in which Persian and Indian metasentiments found their confluence in poetic narratives of longing. In the 19th century under British rule, two rationalisms – arising, respectively, from Islamic and European norms – impacted the production and reception of emotion-performances in Bengal. Muslims who had

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performed the pilgrimage to Mecca brought back new sensibilities that congealed in movements such as the Fara’idi and East Bengali Wahhabi movements (Ahmed 1981), promoting modernist Islam. Thus, the 19th century witnessed an increasing chorus of voices, Islamist and otherwise, calling for reforms of, inter alia, the public performance of emotion. Muslim tracts singled out for unique criticism the “riotous reading of marniyA poems on the death of the [historic Shia] martyrs” (Mannan 1966:171) – a genre they evidently considered dangerously emotional. Such poems are closely related to jAri gAn (songs mourning Shia martyrs, Dunham 1997), another lament genre. Despite their apparently Islamic content, the emotionalism of these Bangladeshi folk offerings offended cosmopolitan reformist Muslim sensibilities forged in global contact during the pilgrimage to Mecca. If 19th-century modernist Muslim reformers condemned emotionalism, so did their contemporaries among the Hindu Bengali bhadralok. Both were thus skeptical of biraha performances. Until the end of the 18th century in Bengal, the label had indicated seasonal laments characterized by biraha, “longing,” but in the 19th century that label had come to index a sort of lament-protest song. Historian Sumanta Banerjee describes 19thcentury vijaya songs (celebrating the vijaya, “triumphs,” of deities) that domesticated the goddess Durga as a Bengali bride and lamented her departure from her natal family (cf. Raheja and Gold 1994:chapter 3). And 19th-century biraha songs used “the Radha-Krishna story as a vehicle for voicing women’s grievances in contemporary society,” often in an erotically playful, frankly sexual idiom (Banerjee 1989:136). To bring those “rural” performances to Kolkata might well have seemed liberating and exciting to their performers, though it greatly displeased the Victorian bhadralok and Raj officials. The latter construed such freedom as moral bondage for women: Significantly contemporary [19th-century] bhadralok critics, obviously ashamed of . . . uninhibited debunking of Hindu deities, took pains to dismiss [these performances] as the domain of the . . . “lower orders” whose base instincts, they said . . . [were] tickled by such “obscene” songs. (1989:139; emphasis added)

The apparent shame of the intelligentsia reflected their intimate, asymmetrical relationship with their colonizers. While the shared sensibilities of the British and bhadralok rejected “obscenity,” they appreciated a good farce, including stage parodies of folk

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genres. As it emerged in the 19th century, modern Bengali drama used working-class women’s songs about their occupations as “stock pieces for providing comic relief ” (Banerjee 1989:141). The point here is that colonial sensibilities and performance media (for example, the theatre) produced highly influential – and critical – metacultural representations of emotionally expressive folk genres. Islamist- and British-inspired rationalist commentaries on Bengali traditions became unwitting collaborators in 19th-century Bengal. A relatively religious and a relatively secular metadiscourse – both of which Otherized folk genres – shared a self-consciously modern sensibility regarding emotion, control, and performance. Global change, including faster transport, and local religious reform and conversion (Ahmed 1981; Eaton 1993) had led to a vastly increased traffic of people and ideas between Bengal and Mecca. And reacting actively to Christian European imperialism, Muslims in India and Arabia co-created reformist and modernist Islam (Geertz 1968; cf. Horvatich 1984). Insofar as those discourses addressed emotionalism and rationality, they resonated powerfully with British – and Hindu-Bengali – Orientalism, the discourse of the “Bengal Renaissance” (Kopf 1969). The two forms of globalization collaborated in Bengal, spawning a Bengali vernacular modernity. British and bhadralok efforts to guide the evolution of Bengali performance genres in a Victorian direction happened to parallel Muslim metadiscourses that pre-dated the Raj but carried on into the 20th century. From the 19th to the 20th centuries in Bengal, one more important transformation took place, reflecting the interplay between European and local ideas of self and suffering. This change entailed a shift in the subject-position (Foucault 2005:56) of Bengali elites. This was an interiorizing shift. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the “display [of] suffering in order to elicit sympathy” as an ancient practice (2000:52). By contrast, the Bengali-modern subjectivity emerging in the 20th century is epitomized by the “will to witness and document suffering” (2000:49). In this modern sensibility, to lament is backward; to document the suffering that might once have motivated unabashed lament is modern. Bangladeshi academics sympathized with the distant character, “Latifa on tape,” but interpreted Latifa in relation to an interiorizing, psychologizing, privatizing model of selfhood. Chakrabarty locates the will to witness and document suffering particularly in Kolkata’s elites. In the homestead where Latifa performed her laments, her cousin Amina walked daily through neighboring villages as a representative of the governmental public health service, witnessing much suffering. Yet Amina

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vehemently opposed Latifa’s lamenting. To bear witness to suffering in some distanced way, through her public health work, was much more respectable than to display suffering as her cousin was doing in 1992. Unfulfilled desire: (post)coloniality and the transformation of performance contexts Despite the important caveats I expressed in Chapter 3, lament does reflect and spawn emotions: desire, longing (unfulfilled and often unattainable), and rage. Although Bangladeshis (even, on occasion, men) may still semi-legitimately perform laments for the appropriate dead relative, the legitimacy is shaky. Rickshaw pullers, boatmen, small shop-owners, and schoolboys ridicule lament. Thus laments become sites of struggle. Devaluing or degenrifying responses to lament reflects a longing for order that typifies Bengali modernism, in relation to which Latifa’s expressed desire to be reunited with a man from whom her brothers had forcibly and finally separated her represents a dangerous destabilization, the undermining of order by desire. Latifa’s performance was multivocal, deploying modern and traditional idioms. The longing that her laments distilled, expressed, and enacted was structured; yet it threatened to break out of structures both poetic and social. Latifa’s family urged her not to sing, or transform speech into a melodically and rhythmically marked form, but to speak (rationally) – but would have encouraged no sort of expression of what they considered an illicit desire (for her ex-husband). Latifa’s family wanted her to forget not only her divorced husband and her transgressive desire for him – and for revenge against her brothers – but her poetic, musical mode of performance and its links with a river of South Asian women’s history. Local voices sometimes reflect global or alien agency; that is what the concept of double-voicing points to. Latifa’s relatives speak in many voices, being caught up in globalizing Islamist politics – which they experience as Bangladeshi and nationalist – while also being aware of that other Bengali modern rationality, the echo of colonial ridicule of folk genres. Some Bangladeshis see Latifa’s family as agents carrying out the erasure of a part of their own history. Still, whatever we think of rationalist Islamist modernism and its iconoclastic, anti-Bengali cultural animus, we should keep sight of its close relation to other forces of modernity, especially colonialism. The uses of speech, voice, and body to which Latifa’s relatives called her – the communicative frame in which they would have her inscribe her

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identity – do not seem to them to be foreign. Between 1992 and my next visit, Latifa had shifted (under pressure) from performing tuneful Bangla laments to chanting of the Arabic Qur’an, as I discovered in my 1996 visit to her brothers’ home. The regimentation of language entailed in reciting a text like the Qur’an, and the regimentation of conversational rationality to which relatives had called Latifa in 1992 (paraphrasing: “Speak it [rationally], don’t sing it!”), are of a piece. Her 1996 chanting – the Arabic text floating out from her room – did not seem strikingly foreign to them, any more than did their modernist idealizing of rational conversation between authentic selves. Given what we know of lament as performed and even written across the region and across several centuries, the “local tongue” (a history of discourses including laments) has received and lost something in its encounter with a “foreign tongue,” i.e. the new regime of language (Kroskrity 2000) – one oriented to Islam, modernity, and rationality but operating within what appears to be the same code, Bangla. Latifa’s 1996 voice was still mournful and tuneful, but made acceptable by the Arabic text. 19th-century Victorian attacks on passionate and resistant performance genres associated with rural Bengali women are homologous with the hostility my interviewees expressed toward lament. Banerjee’s account of the Raj and its stance toward popular performance genres thus provides important historical context for the criticism of Latifa’s singing. He uncovers how missionaries and colonial administrators bequeathed to the emergent Kolkata intelligentsia a revulsion toward the public performance of passion. Their attempts to “emancipate” the women of India entailed weaning them from their love of a public culture dominated by working women from the countryside. Today in Bangladesh – when even an otherwise respectful schoolboy laughs at descriptions of bilAp and associates it with ignorant rural folk – we hear echoes of the Victorian voice of the Raj and their bhadralok allies. Yet the British/bhadralok roots of cultural shaming and of genre amnesia are themselves easily forgotten. “Islamization” is too salient to keep the role of colonial discourses in view. Is my picture of the rationalizing influence of the bhadralok simplistic? A 19th-century scion of the bhadralok, Keshub Sen, advocated more passion in worship.4 Such movements, however, have always run the risk of guilt by association with the “mad saints,” who represent the antinomian and anti-structural streams in Bengali religion (McDaniel 1989). In a case of the conservative outcome of revolutionary beginnings, such movements in Bengal have achieved more self-marginalization than broad transformation (Allen and Mukherjee 1982:chapter 1).

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In any event, it appears that – in the case of rural Bangladeshi lament – there is a historic gap between that future moment when a woman-friendly civil society appears and that past moment when spontaneous lament offered a commonly available channel for women to participate in local public discourse.

2 European Christianity The second vernacular modernity I describe is that of Christian Europe. Chapter 4 described the attempts over many centuries to stamp out lament, efforts that were mostly ineffective. Recent successes in part reflect modern Christianity’s use of new technologies of self and of power, and these are seen most clearly in the context of missionization. However, in order to grasp the influence of missionization, we must start with its prehistory in European Christianity. To understand what was new about modern Christian technologies of self, it is useful to contrast them with the arguments of St. John Chrysostom, that fierce opponent of lament who would have given his right arm for the successes recent generations have had in stamping it out. Chrysostom saw a rupture between old and the new, but one exclusively defined in relation to a religiously conceived event, the Christ event, and not the human achievements modernity celebrates as its origin and telos. The rationality to which Chrysostom appeals is defined in relation to a non-negotiable textual authority. His arguments take for granted the notion of text codified in the metapragmatic label “scripture.” Nowhere does he condemn laments because they are repetitive or otherwise hinder the constant generation of new cultural forms, words, or emotions – the modern criticisms of lament. Likewise, the condemnation of lament by Plato – a major influence on the Greco-Roman world where Christianity originated – rests on a conservative notion of the state, statecraft, and state-sponsored religion – not on a disdain for “backwardness” (the theme of the next two chapters). Many scholars date the explosion of modernity onto the European scene to the Protestant Reformation. Rather than taking scripture for granted, the Reformers actively asserted scriptural authority. Sociologist Max Weber traced a particular process of the rationalization of culture to Protestant roots. In an apparent reference to lament (“song or ritual” accompanying burials [1958:105]), Weber indicates its “irrationality” vis-à-vis the

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Puritan’s stripped-down (“demystified, rational,” “without song or ritual”) alternative. By “song” Weber may well have intended women’s improvised laments, whose lyrics can always take a turn toward the subversive, and often have. Why have hymns – as opposed to laments – been acceptable to most Protestants? The reason was adumbrated in Chapter 5: the improvisational nature of lament contrasts sharply with hymnody, highly entextualized performances that appear much safer than improvised laments. In post-Reformation Europe, lament is no more. How has this been achieved? Is the elimination of lament the achievement of militant Christianity? The answer is complicated. Lament in European countries To highlight the similar pronouncements lament scholars have made on its status in various European societies, let me introduce a few of them: • “Only in isolated pockets . . . can we find, usually in the memory of the older women, some last remnants of the songs for the dead that were once improvised at every funeral.” (Holst-Warhaft 1992:6) • “In some areas of [Russian] Karelia the traditional funeral context still partially survives. Karelian laments . . . survive today in areas under the influence of the Orthodox Christian Church, presumably due to its relatively tolerant attitude toward pagan beliefs and rituals.” (Tolbert 1990:43) • “The [Irish] practice of caoineadh [keening] resisted church opposition for centuries but it was gradually displaced by increasing modernization. It . . . has now died out.” (Bourke 1993:161) • “[Greek Orthodox] . . . priests often discourage excessive displays of grief, while recognizing that they cannot control lamenting and other folk customs of bereavement.” (Auerbach 1984:158) When read carefully, these accounts all indicate the limitations of churchly action against lament, and the churches’ dependence on technologies partly beyond their control. Tolbert mentioned the relative tolerance of the Russian Orthodox tradition toward lament. Greek Orthodoxy has a somewhat similar reputation. This does not mean lament has survived the 20th century in Greece. But what has probably killed it by now, according to Danforth (1982), is the new urban view of rural life as backward, a view manifested in the shame young urban women feel toward their rural relatives who lament.

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Figure 6.1 Greek women lament Photo courtesy of Alexander Tsiaras, from Danforth and Tsiaras 1982:plate 19.

Lutheranism, modernity, and the death of a Balto-Finnic lament tradition Protestantism has been far less tolerant of lament than has Eastern Orthodoxy. Finnish folklorist Aili Nenola has documented the increasing pressure on Ingrian lament in the 19th century from the Lutheran Church. Lutherans condemned both bridal and funerary laments. One Lutheran bride argued that “Christian” (read “Lutheran”) brides are not lower than their husbands, and that it was only in “pagan” times, when wives were “bought slaves,” that bridal lament was appropriate (1982:247). This woman was a follower of the late 19th-century Lutheran minister, J. W. Murman, who called laments “pagan” songs. His 36-page booklet against lament “show[s] where the old customs come from and how unsuitable they are for Christians to follow” (1982:246). But this force from the church was compounded by the pressure on tradition coming from mass schooling, some of it in Finnish (not the first language of the minority Ingrians, Nenola 1982:245). Thus, it was not this Lutheran campaign against Ingrian lament that killed it, but violent dimensions of European modernity unrelated to church activity:

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the deportation of Ingrians in the 1920s and 1930s to different parts of the Soviet Union, and finally the deportation and evacuation of population during and after the Second World War, left nothing untouched in the old Ingrian society. (Nenola 1982:248)

In the end, it was not Lutheran antagonism but the massive population movements caused by the forces of modern economics, politics, and warfare that finished Ingrian lament. This example provides context for the global impact of European Protestant missionaries.

3 The modern Christian missionary movement: missionization and the European encounter with others Despite the limits of Christian power to eliminate lament from Europe, missionaries of European ancestry have effectively suppressed lament in a number of cases. Evangelical Protestant missionization would appear to be an ongoing threat to lament in a few societies where it was, until very recently, a rich tradition, exquisitely described (Feld 1990[1982], 1995, 2001). In what follows, I offer a description of the role of missionization and conversion in broad contextual shifts that may indirectly erode support for lament, using an example from Oceania, then move to stories specifically illustrating missionary measures against lament in North America and Africa. I have touched on vexed questions about what is common to “multiple modernities.” The missionization of non-European peoples results in cultural transformation that may eliminate lament. But conversion also typically involves those peoples appropriating “modernity” for themselves, in their own ways. The end of Kaluli lament: missionizing the domain of emotion The global circulation of Christian missionaries and their religion has played a significant role in the spread of modern technologies of the self, particularly an incitement to authenticity. It is important, in laying out the sort of account of modernity this book requires, to recognize both that sincerity and authenticity were never universal values governing speech, and that recent examples of cultural globalization involving missionization have introduced these values to communities that have indeed cultivated lament genres. Nowhere is missionaries’ impact on ideas of self and language clearer than in Oceania, where truth-telling has taken on new importance, transforming talk and notions of talk.

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Throughout Oceania, conversion tended to occur as a movement that swept whole villages and societies into Christianity. For example, Sumbanese (Indonesian) converts and their missionaries tell stories of “the progress of salvation” (i.e. of Christianity) that are textbook modernist. They commonly invoke the central trope of modernity – the great transition from the traditional past to the modern cosmopolitan present – and describe the rise of features that are commonly identified with “modernization”: “individualization, interiorization, and, by many accounts, eventual secularization” (Keane 1997:684 – 685). What is elided in this telling is the collective nature of the original conversion – a small sign that the globally circulating (“modern”) has melded with the local (“traditional”). Fundamentalist Protestant missionaries brought to the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea a new epistemology and sense of time, and the erasure of lament – major transformations. Ironically perhaps, these changes do not appear to be traceable to a particular scriptural source (Feld 1995:100), nor have they exactly fit the goals Australian fundamentalist missionaries described in emotional letters to their supporters at home. Christian conversion in Papua New Guinea has introduced new technologies of knowledge – nothing to write home about, at least in those terms. Kaluli Christians – and few dissent from the new religion – relate traditional bodies of knowledge and genres of discourse to the preconversion “time of ignorance.” New discourse genres, such as literacy lessons by Christian leaders, constitute the new Kaluli metanarrative with its master trope – the rift of modernity, the gap between traditional and modern ways. The everyday narratives of Kaluli Christians who are not (yet) in leadership positions reflect this sea-change in temporal subjectivity. The new temporality sets Christian narratives apart from traditional stories. Steve Feld (personal communication, 1997) says that the decline of lamenting in Kaluli seems to be mostly due to the forms of emotional repression introduced by evangelical missionaries, and to the new ways in which Kaluli struggle to control anger (which is associated with lament). In this generation, which has not directly witnessed ritual weeping, Feld’s old recordings of women’s sa-yalab [laments] spontaneously elicit highly positive evaluative remarks; there is clear appreciation for the way women articulate for the collectivity the essence of what it means to be in the moment, to be fully saturated in a sensibility that brings thoughts to the mind with tears to the eyes. (Feld 1995:100)

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Despite this appreciation, lament has picked up a powerful enemy: Traditionally no attempts were ever made to constrain sa-yalab; these performances were considered vital and necessary parts of social life. In recent years, however, attempts to discourage sa-yalab and to negatively value their performance have emerged. Such attempts emanate entirely from evangelical missionaries and from evangelized Kaluli under their influence. The irony of course is that nothing about sa-yalab really violates Christian teaching; what they violate is the particular cultural background of the Australian missionaries, who tend to emphasize strong repression of emotional display in all affairs. (Feld 1995:100)

Once again, at least in Feld’s view, we should attribute the erasure of a lament tradition to a modern cultural animus, and the material sources of power and authority accompanying that animus – Australian fundamentalist modernity – rather than the persuasive power of scripture per se (Schieffelin 1981:18–19). Still, missionization is the immediate agent of change. Missionized Tlingit: from potlatch laments to hymns Until the end of the 19th century, the Tlingit of the Pacific northwest had traditionally composed laments as part of potlatch ceremonies. American anthropology students know the potlatch as a time when a great deal of stuff is exchanged, and some conspicuously wasted. However, for Tlingit participants, exchanges with and for the dead defined the potlatch: “the potlatch testified to the grief of the living and to the high esteem in which they held their dead” (de Laguna 1972:612A). The mourning relatives sang [beside the corpse]. This singing (“AttcAIA-“axtc) was believed to clear away the underbrush from the path of the ghost, and it therefore undoubtedly served to comfort and distract the bereaved. (de Laguna 1972:533A)

After much work by Israel Wood Powell (Indian Superintendent for British Columbia) and lobbying by missionaries such as Father Donckele, Canada banned the potlatch in 1885. Church and government authorities saw it as the epitome of economic irrationality, and the humorous tone of some improvised lament-songs probably scandalized them. The ban remained until 1951, and Protestant conversion proceeded rapidly. By the 1950s, observers noted a sort of hybrid ritual going on at Tlingit gravesides on Memorial Day, which had become a day of “community feast[ing] for the

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dead.” In a loose sense, the functional slot once filled by laments has been occupied, since the 1950s, by Christian hymns sung on the occasion of a Euro-American holiday: Everyone goes to the cemetery at Ankau Point early in the afternoon, to weep over the recently departed. . . . In the late afternoon, the minister will lead the group in singing hymns before they go home. (de Laguna 1972:547B)

Although some of the emotion-signs of an earlier era remained, dangerously spontaneous songs of grief and grievance had disappeared. What relationship do these stories of the globalization of Christianity have to recent histories of Islam?

4 Muslim laments, global Islam Despite the opposition to lament stretching back to the earliest traditional sayings of the Prophet of Islam, lament traditions managed to hang on in many corners of the world. This began changing rapidly in the late 20th century. Wickett’s magisterial dissertation on Egyptian lament (1993) consistently stresses the remarkable continuity in the tradition from pre-Dynastic Egypt down to the present. However, she notes “a growing consciousness among radical Muslims that the practice should be abolished as heresy” (1993:335). As in Bangladesh and so many countries where lament has largely disappeared from cities, Wickett notes that Egyptian lament (“idCd) “is now rare” in Cairo. The lure of oil jobs has taken Egyptian laborers around the Gulf, where they have contacted “more proscriptive interpretations of Islam and Islamic practice” (1993:335). Wahhabi Islam – the primary source of the radical new opposition to Egyptian lament – is a reformist or “revivalist” movement, whose growing popularity around the world owes much to its modernity. Despite the thoughtless equation in the press between Wahhabism and “backwardness,” the Wahhabi movement and its strong opposition to lament are effective precisely because they are so modern (like all fundamentalist movements, Eisenstadt 1995). Fundamentalist movements around the world may manifest party-like organization and ideological purity, and often exploit electronic communication and global financial networks. At least through the early 1980s, informal gatherings of Paxtun women neighbors in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan focused on the sharing of

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stories of hardship. The lament-like stories were named for their emotional tone – ghAm-xAdi – “grief-hardship.” These gatherings fostered a narrative subjectivity that shares little in common with the “psychologized individualism,” communicated and performed by modern selves such as presentday upper-middle-class New Yorkers (Kusserow 2004). In fact, folklorist Benedicte Grima writes, “gham and xadi . . . do not evoke for Paxtuns an image of internal emotional states” (1991:87). Until recently, these narratives of the “endurance of hardship exemplif[ied] Paxtun womanhood” (1991:79). To be a good Paxtun (Muslim) woman was to narrate one’s life in terms of suffering. This began to change in the 1980s. Urbanized women who identify themselves as (Paxtun-)“modern” became uncomfortable telling the stories of their lives – for example, their stories of childbirth – in terms of suffering. Yet this left them feeling that they “have no stories” (1991:84). Grima goes on: “There is no new model for the Paxtun life story. Thus not having a life story to tell becomes a statement in itself. It may be saying, ‘I defy the traditional cultural model, but must remain silent until a new one is formed’ ” (1991:86). To find one’s experience outside of the realms of known genres – and thus to be, in effect, without a story (Crapanzano 1996) – is to suffer a loss of self, since telling one’s story is a crucial technology of self-construction.5

Conclusion The future of lament would seem to be an open question. History is not teleology, power never operates unilaterally, and drives toward “rationalization” often founder on (apparent) irrationalities, local and global. “Globalizing modernity” is not deterministic; many responses are always possible. In Bangladesh or Egypt, lament might experience long cycles of open and subterranean performance as it struggles with religious rationalism, with nation-states that seek to replace it with a more rational rhetoric, and with media that might soon mass-market versions of performances like Latifa’s. Discourse genres represent key technologies of self. Because the discourses we have examined are performed “out loud” in public, the public subjectivities they constitute add up to what we typically call “culture.” Discourses circulate in the 21st century in ways that transform participants,

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their typical (and typified) identities and, in fact, the very nature of participation. Even local conversational narratives, including stories told by New Guinean Protestants about themselves and their self-transforming project, are somehow caught up in globally circulating stories of modernity, despite their important local ties. New discourses and media forms participate in the constitution of Islamist or Christian religious transnationalism. If performances related to lament increasingly become mass media spectacles, this would represent a profound transformation in the means by which social thought circulates, selves are shaped, and social and cognitive worlds are transformed. Untransformed “remnants,” in this metaphor, are subjected to shame, whose rise and global circulation the next chapter analyzes.

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How Shame Spreads in Modernity

It is time we directly address the “shame” advertised in this book’s title as central to my argument about lament. Here I argue that shame is fundamentally social even when it appears to be located in individuals, and that a notion like “collective” or even “national” shame is tenable, empirically grounded, and crucial to understanding the widespread abandonment of cultural practices like lament. Shame is an extremely complex subject, and its relation to death, mourning, and lament is particularly complex. Before proceeding to an argument that a peculiar sort of shame spreads in modernity, one to which lament in particular is subject, we must acknowledge that death and funerary practices may have a relation to shame that is far older than modernity, however we might choose to date that. Plato, after all, regarded lament as shameful for all but the most marginalized of social groups. In a great many societies, traditional mourning practices entail lamenting and bodily self-abuse. The objectifying nature of Others’ representations of the acts of the Self, this chapter’s theme, cannot obscure the extent to which those acts – including lament – already participate in local systems of meaning. If throwing body and soul into lamenting attracts opprobrium, that reflects, in part, the inevitable association of lament with death, dishevelment, and disgust. Why should mourners abuse their bodies in particular and quite common ways, wearing less attractive (black, or shredded) clothing or none at all, tearing their hair, throwing themselves down on the ground or even into the grave with the one whose loss they lament? Each of those common acts represents an identification with the deceased – with the state of his body, the clothing in which he died or in which he is now shrouded, and the place where he must now lie. Thus these acts, which constitute proper traditional mourning behavior, work upon the self something of what “total institutions” like prisons impose

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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on it – complete mortification (Goffman 1961). In the Gilgamesh epic and the Bible, mourners weep, pull their hair, and tear or remove their clothes (Anderson 1991). The biblical prophet Joel passes on Yahweh’s command to the leaders of post-exile (fourth century BCE) Israel: “Gird on sackcloth and lament, O priests.” These acts have a primarily ritual, rather than personally cathartic, significance. “These acts of ritual dishevelment mark the first phase of [the mourner’s] rite of passage. By these actions, he has separated himself from the world of ordinary men and women” (1991:74–75). French structuralists (Gennep 1960[1909]; Hertz 1960) have influenced Orientalist and biblical scholarship. Compare biblical scholar Gary Anderson’s interpretation with anthropologists’ representations of lament. The early French structuralist anthropologist Robert Hertz cites “a Hupa in mourning” who says, “ ‘People are disgusted by my body’ ” (1960:52). The Amazonian Wari' once practiced cannibalism as a “compassionate” way to identify with the dead (Conklin 2001). Mourning’s tendency toward deep identification with death entails ritual self-mortification. Still, this does not explain new forms of shaming that confront contemporary peoples labeled “backward.”

An Analysis of Modern Shame Chapter 3 explored the problematic relation of lament to emotion. This chapter explores lament vis-à-vis globalizing cultures of the emotions – the global circulation of ideas about emotion and propriety in “emotional expression” – and in relation to ideologies that result in the spread of shame about passionate performances. It also introduces the theme of lament’s “backwardness,” which the next chapter develops further.

Why shame? One of this book’s central claims is that lament increasingly seems shameful. Shame involves internalizing negative representations of the self. The very integrity of the self, collective or individual, is attacked by shame (Giddens 1991:153). An increasingly wide range of scholars (e.g., Saurette 2006) recognize that shame is as salient for groups as it is for individuals. The shame

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I focus on involves negative representations of group character, states, or actions – representations that hinge on binaries like “modern/backward,” “modern/primitive,” “civilized/savage.” These are charged versions of the contrast between modernity and tradition. Shame lives on today at the blurry frontier of public and private. As a source of discomfort and a means of social control, shame has not withered away but rather intensified under late modernity (Braithwaite 1993; Elias 2000[1939]; Giddens 1991; Sahlins 1992). The lack of cultural consensus that lament is backward is in some ways irrelevant; shame can work amid dissensus. Two acquaintances of mine from Africa disagree sharply, one calling lament backward, the other grieving its loss. These two voices represent two sides of modernity as it vacillates between iconoclasm and nostalgia (Lyotard 1984). Modernity’s iconoclastic face amplifies shame over perceived or putative group failings – including backwardness of all kinds (Sahlins 1992), and thus lament. Wickett (1993:36) cites an Egyptian expert on local laments who “stated categorically that the lament texts and aspects of the funerary tradition evinced startlingly ‘primitive beliefs’ when appraised in light of the evolution of culture and religion in Egypt over the millennia ([Salih] 1971:268).” How closely this Egyptian scholar echoes German scholars at the turn of the 20th century, who described the evolutionary connection of lament to primitive, wordless cries of anguish (Böckel 1913). Adiman, the Nigerian cab-driver in Chicago mentioned earlier, told me that his Catholic relatives back home do not wail much now. They certainly wail less than their pagan neighbors, “because we are civilized [not primitive] now.” The sort of shame I am talking about here – the sense that Others see one’s group as backward – is historically particular, grounded in the discourses of racism and evolutionism that emerged in Europe in the Enlightenment. Although we most often speak of shame in relation to individuals, the vulnerability of persons to at least certain forms of shame is linked to their position in the world (for example, their class). Thus one encounters Marxian accounts of shame in anthropology and literary studies (Fox 1994; Lynd 1958). Helen Merrell Lynd, one of the first sociologists to use techniques of cultural anthropology to study a community in the United States, also pioneered a class-sensitive approach to shame. Building on such work, Pamela Fox’s study of shame in working-class British fiction embeds shame in a “new vision of resistance,” arguing that shame and desire (for some of the resources controlled by better-off classes) are positive stages in the evolution of a critical class-consciousness. I hope readers will interpret what I present in later chapters about movements to

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revive lament along with other cultural traditions as an answer to the shame described in this chapter and the next. Shame is only a stage, prompting a decision about resistance or submission.

Shame and spectacle, stage fright and globalization Shame is never a truly individual phenomenon. It always involves a dialog of representations between self and other. Contemporary shaming across social and/or national boundaries invokes the opprobrium of being primitive. Recent forms of international shaming no doubt originate in the colonizer’s need to humiliate the colonized (Fanon 1967). Colonialism made strategic use of narcissistic wounding on a societal level (Nandy 1983; Sinha 1995). Two separate novels about postcolonial South Asia have been entitled Shame (Nasrin 1994; Rushdie 1983). Colonial rhetoric and imagery were as important as physical coercion in driving the shame-message home. It is useful to compare aggression by one nation against another, particularly by a superpower against a smaller nation, with sexual abuse by an adult against a child. Abuse victims develop what psychologists call “carried shame.” The model presumes that the shame ought to belong to the perpetrator, but that – in a psychological twist – the victim carries the aggressor’s shame. We know, too, that many abusers are former victims. A part of the current political dynamic in areas like the Middle East, which continue to experience intervention and aggression by the United States and its allies, is shame – a shame we can compare with the carried shame of an abused child. Violent attacks against Western interests may result from such shame. Shia ritual lamentation plays a complex role in this dynamic: it can become an outlet for venting anger at injustice and the violence of military occupation, but it can also be the objectified target of media coverage that, for some, induces painful self-consciousness (Ghattas 2001).

Shame in recent social theory What is this shame that can arise in individual and collective subjectivities? How might it relate to public weeping? In psychoanalytic theory, shame is the response to the perceived withdrawal of love. It represents fear of a symbolic death through one of two causes tied, at best, in paradox. Being known (seen and heard), and not being known: these greatly feared states

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both pertain to feeling so worthless and unloved as to experience an infant’s horror that one might be finally abandoned to die. This fine paradox unites the flipsides of abandonment-fear – being seen/heard and rejected – and being so far beyond love as to be no longer seen and thus already dead. Babies whose crying fails to bring a nurturing, loving response – being heard but rejected, or simply never being heard – might well develop a shame not only over crying but about themselves. They develop an “insecure attachment,” a “narcissistic wound” (Kohut 1977). If shame often arises out of fear of being seen in a particular way, it involves a kind of nakedness. Sociologist Anthony Giddens’ (1991) model of shame translates Freudian insights into social theory, and nakedness into “a symbolic phenomenon, expressive of the tension between pride and shame in social interaction” (1991:66 –67; emphasis added). “The more self-identity becomes internally referential [as it has in late modernity], the more shame comes to play a fundamental role in the adult personality” (Giddens 1991:153). Giddens leaves ample room here for a modern collective shame arising over what the subject perceives as failures or weaknesses of the group Self. A “narcissistic wound” can characterize societies as well as individuals. In one of the more provocative arguments in recent anthropology, Marshall Sahlins (1992:24) argued that, before an “underdeveloped” society (say, in Melanesia) can “ ‘modernize,’ the people must first learn to hate what they already have, what they have always considered their well-being. Beyond that, they have to despise what they are, to hold their own existence in contempt – and want, then, to be someone else.” Putting an even sharper edge on the argument, Sahlins asserted that “The role of disgrace is critical, for in order to desire the benefits of ‘progress,’ its material wonders and comforts, all indigenous senses of worth, both the people’s self-worth and the value of their objects have to be depreciated.” To be fair, Sahlins also recognized the possibility of a powerful response to humiliation: “This punitive experience of ‘modernization’ risks provoking a self-consciousness of the indigenous culture, as possessed of values better than and distinct from Westernization.”1 Sahlins’ anthropological colleagues have offered revisions. Robbins (2005:14, 15) points out the need to reconcile “the humiliation argument,” and the recognition of those cases involving radical disjuncture (abandoning cultural patterns), with evidence of continuity. Local groups may in fact “steer processes of humiliation.” The need to reconcile the humiliation theme with the continuity theme, Robbins argues, arises out of the broad sweep of Sahlins’ own work.

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Sahlins argued that people understand new phenomena “through the lens of their indigenous cultural categories” (Robbins 2005:15). But if that is so, Robbins says, “then in order for humiliation to dislodge people from their attachment to those categories it must first be felt within them” (2005:15). Besnier (n.d.) documents apparent humiliation – or talk of humiliation – in a Melanesia society. Talk of embarrassing moments in coping with rapid modern change might signal real humiliation resulting from the rupture brought about by the confrontation with modernity. Yet he is inclined to argue that such talk of embarrassment is just “old ladies laughing at themselves and at each other as they probably have been doing for a long time.” Robbins’ and Besnier’s call for close ethnographic work to contextualize humiliation is a necessary correction. At the same time, such “affective states and [local /global] social conditions articulate with political economy,” and “larger issues of economic and political disempowerment . . . inform both the marginalization and the frustrations of modernity” (Knauft 2007:619). In relation to Bangladesh, the nation’s sense of its backwardness arises out of its global relations of dependency; at the same time, any “shame” it experiences is likely filtered through longstanding local understandings, as I argue below. It is at the intergroup level that the historically shifting nature of shame becomes clearest. Shame, defined as I have, cannot arise directly from the universal conditions of human existence, unaffected by culture or history. Neither the likelihood nor the meanings of being painfully visible are stable across time. Histories of recently emerging nation-states, then, are particularly interesting sites for the study of shame, i.e., of the ways in which members of those nation-states struggle with displays of emotion and of the Self. The project of engendering national pride almost inevitably involves shame as a spin-off in those individuals who cannot successfully present themselves as the sort of models of which the nation can rightfully be proud, or in nations that may collectively experience themselves as objects of pity. So, for example, shame and pride play off against each other in a village in Nepal subjected to the rhetoric of national development through school texts and other sources (Ahearn 2001). It may be true that, in some performances in a “traditional society,” the stakes were so high that failure could spell shame – or doom. The survival of individuals or a whole group might rest on the performance of some individual – say, a shaman. Despite this, local understandings of the participant structure of such events may have shielded the central human actor from shame per se. Traditional discourse often portrays performance as the

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product not of lonely selves – whose being and value are reflexively constructed “on stage” – but of collectivities. “Stage managers” ultimately responsible for the success of these collective performances were likely to include ancestors and other spirits (Keane 1997). The postmodern “society of the spectacle” (Debord 1994) – related to the apotheosis of the moral witness to suffering discussed in Chapter 6 – contrasts sharply with traditional society. Performance has become increasingly commodified. Fewer people are seen “on stage,” and more are afraid of being seen in a context of performance; at the same time, sociopolitical surveillance of all kinds is at an all-time high (Foucault 1980:101). The glare of the lights is harsher. Such changes involve transformation in selfhood, in the nature of seeing and being seen, performing and being an audience. Increasingly, one must “perform oneself ” rather than a more distanced role. Performance itself, in this sense, becomes more salient, as does the scope for performance-shame (Wilce 2004).2 Rapid flows of media and information across the world mean that people in a newly global village might see themselves on CNN. Stage fright – the sort of local self-consciousness Geertz (1973) said was so uniquely characteristic of Balinese social life – now takes on a new meaning. Whole groups suddenly find themselves on electronic stages.

Shia Muslims on the global stage Shia Islam has, since the American invasion of Iraq, received much media attention. A ta“ziyeh – a Shia Muslim dramatic reenactment of the death of Imam Husayn in the seventh century CE – was performed at the Lincoln Center, New York, in 2002. The ta“ziyeh is held in the month of Muharram; the day of Ashura, in that month, is the anniversary of Imam Husayn’s death. Public displays of grief over this martyrdom involve lamentation and self-laceration. Shia clerics have long regarded with suspicion the custom known as matam – “gestures of mourning . . . ranging from weeping and chest-beating to self-flagellation” and lacerating oneself in identification with Husayn (Pinault 1999b:286). At the same time, many Shia laymen embrace flagellation as a way of demonstrating their piety, and are loath to give it up. Shia identity has become something “global, transnational, and not merely local,” especially after the Islamic Revolution in Iran (Pinault 1999b:293). This Shia-globalization reaches Ladakh in the Himalayan

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foothills. Pinault, a religion scholar who has done extensive fieldwork there, writes that the increased pride felt by South Asian Shias “has led to a greater susceptibility at least among clerics and other educated Shias” to Iranian influence, and particularly to Iranian clerical attempts to “curb controversial Muharram practices” (1999b:293). One such attempt is particularly noteworthy. During the month of Muharram 1994, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Khamenei, “declared ‘unlawful and forbidden’ acts of matam performed in public involving the use of weapons to shed one’s blood. Khamenei’s primary concern was the harm that might befall the image of Shia Islam if outsiders saw Muharram mourners scourging themselves” (Pinault 1999b:299; emphasis added), as this excerpt shows: If the action of striking oneself with a weapon were actually carried out in private homes behind closed doors, then the harm coming from support for this practice would be solely a question of bodily injury. But when this action takes place before witnesses and in front of television cameras and the eyes of enemies and foreigners, and even before the eyes of our own young, at this point there is an additional harm that must be measured. It is not a question of individual or physical harm, but of great injuries . . . to the reputation of Islam. (1999b:299; emphasis added)3

In seeking to ban matam, it is remarkable that the Grand Ayatollah appeals to the sense of nakedness, so to speak – to the awareness of being seen, unfavorably, as on a global stage – rather than to theology. Ladakhis have felt the impact of such pronouncements (Pinault 1999b). Zealous followers of the Grand Ayatollah have tried to implement the ban on matam, with mixed results. Lebanese Shias seem, if anything, even more in line with the Ayatollah’s pronouncement. Journalist Kim Ghattas (2001) has described Lebanese Shia concern over how matam, as a dimension of their public lamentation, appeared to the world. Ibrahim Moussawi, a Shia academic, told the reporter that, now that this traditional Shia practice is sometimes televised, its image is a matter of grave concern. Ahmed Kahil, a Shia doctor at a hospital run by Hezbollah, told Ghattas, “we believe that it gives a very backward image of Islam and we have to move away from that.” Moussawi went on, “If you want to show how dedicated you are to Imam Husayn and you want to sacrifice your blood, then donate it to blood banks” (Ghattas 2001). We can call this world of global circulation of Shia discourse “Shiamodernity.” Yet such a world is intimately connected with Others, and an

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increasingly overlapping set of non-local systems for the circulation of discourse and media forms the context for all such “vernacular modernities.” Increasingly, those far from global centers of power experience the Self as Other; they perceive ethnic or national identity through the lens of powerful Others’ perception, caught in an awkward position between reflexivity and alienation (Dole and Csordas 2003:337). We might call this combination of reflexivity and alienation shame. Certainly the Ayatollah’s sense of being vulnerable to shame, or to a particularly unfriendly gaze, would not surprise sociologist Norbert Elias. Across centuries of European history, Elias claimed, there has been an “advance in the threshold of repugnance and the frontier of shame . . . a process of ‘refinement’ or ‘civilization’ ” (2000[1939]:86). Shame’s history may be full of reversals, jetties, back-flows, and exceptions, as is the history of its effective use as an instrument of social control. Yet, “we know enough [about the history of shaming in the West] to reject the proposition of a unidirectional trend away from the efficacy of shame as societies modernize” (Braithwaite 1993:7, 16; emphasis added). So, globalization means that most of the world’s people can now see themselves portrayed through the lenses of globalized capitalist media – a set of eyes less likely to reflect their own as they bring the gaze of a far-away and well-off world that is quite Other. Being known and devalued by this Other, feeling the integrity of one’s reference group weaken or fall apart, constitutes shame as a growing international phenomenon. The historical contextualization of shame is only one step. To understand why the new sort of shame that I claim is spreading around the world does not spread evenly, we must consider how socioeconomic class affects such sensibilities.

Crying shame, gender, and spreading notions of middle-class respectability Class is a lamination of two levels of reality: the stratified distribution of power and prestige (i.e. cultural capital in all its many forms) in a tightly dialectic relationship with the distribution of all forms of economic capital. Shame is the awareness of lacking – perhaps the sense of being stripped of – cultural capital, the bare minimum of respectability. An adequate account of how modernity has surrounded traditional practices like lament with shame must explore the nuances of class and gender in

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the construction of shame, and of “backwardness” as a shameful attribute. It is useful here to define shame in relation to symbolic domination. When a dominant and a subordinate social class differentially use certain sign forms (for example “modest” clothing), but agree at some level that the dominant group’s usage is superior, this exemplifies what Bourdieu (1991) calls symbolic domination or symbolic power. From the underside, it appears as shame (about a group’s language [Bonner 2001] or any other mode of sign production). Symbolic domination connected with lajjA “shame” was already a part of the Indian subcontinent scene when the British arrived and added another layer. LajjA was and is polysemous, denoting shyness, humility, deference, or humiliation in various contexts. The dynamics of homegrown shame are class- and gender-specific. The down-and-out have little to lose in Bangladesh, where they are the least likely to be seen as lAjjuk or to resort to pardA (the culturally valued segregation of the sexes). South Asian families with a modicum of means (Abdullah and Zeidenstein 1982; Jeffery 1979) have long sought for their sons a bride with the right amount of the right kind of “shame.” If a traditional Bangladeshi family wanted to draw attention to the virtue of their daughter they called her a lAjjuk meye “shy girl,” a girl with proper lajjA, i.e. internalization of social, and in this case sexual, control. Throughout South Asia such lajjA is a valued attribute. But if a woman violates social norms by, for instance, going from house to house lamenting, this brings her family lajjA “humiliation,” causing the loss of cultural, and often economic, capital. Thus, like Latifa’s family, they must teach the offender to act again in accordance with positive lajjA.4 Systems of class and gender may be local phenomena, but these systems do not evolve in isolation. What is valued may shift rapidly, but the shifting tides never lift all social groups equally. Typified conduct as status marker Conduct – i.e. action typified or viewed as regularized and subjected to rules and, for my purposes, particularly rules about the display or suppression of emotions – is a universal status marker. Abstracted out in locally produced categories such as “dignified,” “wise,” or “sensitive,” distillations of the conduct of persons or groups represent coded assessments of their status. The term “respectability” captures this nicely, and the phrase “middle-class (or bourgeois) respectability” captures the sense that membership in some society’s middle class entails a unique need to maintain

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respectability. It is the middle classes, after all, who have the most to lose. The destitute are less likely to see themselves on CNN, and less likely to read news stories about the shaming of their nation and thus of themselves. Due to their consumption of media and their need to maintain respectability, local middle-classes become ground zero for the kind of shaming I have been describing. In the history of Europe, the spread of shame Elias describes trickled down from royal courts, to newly emerging bourgeois classes, to lower socioeconomic groups. This involved increasing emotional control. The international spread of cricket was accompanied with the spread of the 19th-century elite British practice of emotional control associated with the game (Appadurai 1996:91–92). Thus the spread of cricket and the sensibilities surrounding it made lamentation less likely in the colonies, and even more unlikely at home. Whatever deconstruction to which scholars subject the term “modernity,” in the discourse of local social actors there are “modern” and “backward” groups and moral systems. Moralities defined as modern might appear attractive or repugnant, but moral discourses tend to presuppose such a dichotomy. The stratification of local social classes, and of ethnic groups or even nation-states, is related to such notions. Dominant discourses associate certain classes with modernity and label others “backward.”

“Advanced” and “backward” ways of expressing emotion: intrasocietal and intersocietal hierarchies To the extent that dominant values emanate from certain centers – elites, middle classes, globally hegemonic nations – those groups have inordinate influence on widely circulating ideas of respectability, “backwardness,” and shame. An earlier generation of anthropological and psychoanalytic theories (e.g., Benedict 1989[1946]) ranked “guilt cultures” above “shame cultures” because “guilt” was supposedly an internal form of control and thus a more “highly evolved” cultural personality trait. To some extent that discourse may have influenced the experience of cultural identity and subordination. Shame became associated with moral backwardness. Thus the shame to which women were ostensibly more prone (Freud 1961[1930]) is in itself something to be ashamed of. But according to current theory (Braithwaite 1993; Giddens 1991) shame is just as internalized, and just as involved in modern forms of social control, as guilt. Amenability to social control requires vulnerability to shaming.

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The foolish dichotomy of shame- vs. guilt-cultures has probably never gone completely out of fashion. Seymour Hersh (2004) tells the story of a relatively old anthropological work that gained new life after the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Apparently, the US military discovered Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind (1973), which says among other things that “Arabs” (generically) are particularly vulnerable to shame; they thus began to give the book to thousands of soldiers. Hersh links the embrace of this book with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The idea that there is an “Arab mind” or “culture,” or in fact that “culture” involves homogeneity rather than a constant give-and-take of tension, conflict, and resolution, has passed from fashion in anthropology. Culture is contested, and the concept of ideologies, at times competing for dominance, is now central to anthropological visions of culture. Relatively welloff classes are uniquely positioned to influence metacultural reflections on what forms of expression are shameful, though such classes do not use their unique influence in consistent, simple, or predictable ways. Divergent cultural-historical trajectories shape acts and evaluations of action. Whereas British elites were supposed to exercise tight control over strong personal emotion in playing cricket as in their general conduct, late modern upper middle classes in the United States cultivate an emotionally expressive form of “psychologized individualism” (Kusserow 2004). Parents in the well-off New York community in which Kusserow did fieldwork placed “a high stress on the importance of words in expressing feelings and articulating desires” (1999:222–223; emphasis added). Such Americans may view themselves as more advanced than their counterparts who do not value such self-expression. Yet this New York City upper middle class would also look askance at wailing of any sort – and the addition (as per my definition of lament) of melody and words might make wailing appear even more bizarre. The difference between these particular Americans and, say, Amazonians – who would easily recognize and accept ritual wailing, while perhaps viewing silent grieving as shameful5 – reflects the rationalist ideology that constitutes the American middle class vis-à-vis some Other, as well as their relative power to control globally circulating metadiscourses. Few Euro-Americans would find “out-of-control” wailing acceptable, although a growing number would advocate some crying and a lot of “putting grief into words” (Pennebaker 1997). Greg Urban contrasts the emotional styles favored in the Brazilian Amazon and “American culture”:

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In cultures with a developed ritual wailing or lamentation tradition, as in many central Brazilian Amerindian societies, grief is expressed by means of formalized crying. Your stylized weeping tells others of your grief. Contrast this expressive style with one in which an individual says referentially – as is so often the case in American culture – “I’m feeling sad.” (1996:175–176)

Urban situates this difference in relation to broader contrasts. In all societies, language serves as a tool for reference – “talking about” something. Its referential function becomes paramount in Western ideologies of language. However, there is no cross-cultural agreement that emotional expression should primarily consist of rational reference to feelings – “I’m feeling sad.” Kusserow’s psychologized individualists might appreciate the emotion expressed in Amazonian laments, but they prefer rational reference to what they are experiencing to feelings acted out in lament. It is a short step from seeing the dominance of those American social classes who prefer a referential style of “expressing” emotions over “acting out” or full-blown lamenting to imagining how the perception of difference could be elaborated as collective self-confidence or shame. This does not mean that the march from lament to psychologizing expressiveness is linear or inevitable. Resistance to shaming is always possible – witness various “pride” movements and various militant fundamentalisms (Hardt and Negri 2000; Chapter 12 of this book). But shame over loud public wailing has spread around the world, particularly in elite-aspiring classes. A global quest for middle-class respectability Middle-class respectability has become a desideratum for people in more and more places around the world. Indian middle classes emerged during the British Raj, and their development intersected and engaged with that of English elites and middle classes (Ahluwalia 2000). This engagement included no small amount of contradiction, as historian Sanjay Joshi argues: “The construction of new norms of respectability was critical to the [Indian] middle-class project” (2001:18; emphasis added). Joshi focuses primarily on the 20th-century emergence of an Indian middle class. But the roots of middle-class urban South Asians’ shame about their backward rural cousins’ habits, including lament, go back to the 19th century. Colonial Bengal was the site of a confluence of Indian and British discourses. The result, discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 (see especially the story of Munir, who sneered at lament), can be called a new discourse of middleclass respectability.

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Roughly one hundred miles away from Munir’s home, in a different district of Bangladesh (Mymensingh) and five years later, I conducted a focus group interview on sociocultural change. Almost 40 people crowded into a public room, and I asked if they would answer some questions on videotape. All agreed, but only a handful of them participated actively. About 15 minutes of the hour-long interview concerned lament. I asked whether lamentation or silent weeping was the wave of the future, and all who spoke agreed that Bangladeshis were rapidly turning away from loud crying. I asked why that would be. An old teacher answered, “Because people are being educated.” Then he added, in English, “It is shame they have learned! You understand? Shame!” (by then he was pounding on his desk). I asked what he meant by this and he presented this scenario (reverting to Bangla): “Someone comes along [I assume he meant “while I am crying”] and I know I can do it. I’ll stay in control; I’ll try. I will learn, of course. The heart stays in control. That’s because of shame. I have an education. Doesn’t that prove our progress toward education?”6 Clearly, for this old Bangladeshi teacher and perhaps most of those present, “shame” (lajjA) was a positive sign – not a signifier in a discourse of personal emotions pertaining to self-image, but a sign of conscience and a valued sort of conformism. Another participant – a younger teacher – had a different explanation, and was equally fervent in asserting it. It was Islamic education in particular that was spreading in Bangladesh, and with it the awareness that “this sort of weeping and wailing – Islam does not like it!” For both teachers, the spread of some sort of education entailed the spread of a proper shame that would someday wipe out loud wailing. Elite-aspiring Bangladeshis are clear on the shamefulness of lament – but not on the roots of their shame, tangled in the relational histories of 19th-century English and Bengali middle classes. To contemporary Bangladeshis, lament appears “backward.” Paradoxically, a long backward look sheds light on why it seems so. 19th-century metadiscourses about women’s performance genres arose in a colonial context in which local elites emulated, to some extent, the values of the British Raj (British India) – and brought to the mix their own caste-based notions of hierarchy based on conduct as well. But such consciousness of history will always be rare, for active participation in a sociocultural system apparently requires historical unconsciousness, as Bourdieu argued. If historic, class-based sensibilities are to shape everyday life as they must, they must do so in the form of embodied dispositions, arising out of the material conditions of existence for a certain class and guiding everyday practice – what

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Bourdieu calls the habitus, “history turned into nature, i.e. denied as such” (Bourdieu 1977[1972]:78 –79). The naturalization of middle-class crying shame in Bangladesh entails ignorance of its colonial roots. Spirit possession, middle-class nationalist consciousness, and metacultural shame During my year of fieldwork in rural Bangladesh (1991–92), I quite regularly heard amplified music for weddings and other such events – amplified Hindi film songs. But I had to virtually chase after every rumored instance of a spirit possession performance, so rapidly did those now end, and I heard spontaneous lament only three times in my whole year in the field. On many occasions in my presence, middle-class Bangladeshis spoke with embarrassment of old-fashioned “beliefs” and practices, as if the whole nation felt itself the naked object of a rationalizing global gaze. Not only lament but spirits that had once more openly possessed young women seemed to be vanishing under the harsh light of Bangladesh’s emergent modernist self-consciousness (Chapters 5 and 6). At the end of that year of fieldwork I presented a lecture at a rural hospital that was the base of the international medical NGO that had given me much logistical and moral support throughout my fieldwork. Bangladeshi doctors and paramedical workers attended. I mentioned spirit possession as an idiom of protest and resistance. One young woman doctor came up to me afterward, outraged that I had talked about such a thing, denying that Bangladeshis “believe” in spirits. Perhaps it is no wonder that spirits don’t stay around long enough to meet me. The doctor’s sensibilities were shaped in dialog with global interlocutors and global media. And those sensibilities included shame centered on some Other’s view of the “backwardness” of Bangladesh. Spirit possession, trance, and lament are more closely related than we might think, as Chapter 3 pointed out. The metacultural order within which trance or lament could appear as safe cultural action has been displaced by another such order – a self-conscious ranking of cultural forms – that recognizes no explicit cultural category for that which is simultaneously in and out of control (Chapter 3). Modern polities therefore regulate such subjectivities – as did Solon’s Greece – indexing how deeply a particular notion of personhood is implicated in a particular polity and vice versa, and how deeply troubled modern polities are by the relatively porous boundaries between personal self and other spirits which possession and even lament present to us.

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The story of lament in Ireland evinces a similar discomfort.

The spread of shame, the awareness of backwardness: the case of Ireland Keening leads “to the great shame of [the Irish] nation, since no such practice is found in any other Christian country.” (The Most Revd Dr. Gallagher, Diocese of Leighlin, 1748) Clerical critique The model of social shame propounded here requires a more developed case study. No better case can be offered than that of the shaming of lament in modern Ireland. After the Counter-Reformation, Ireland was one of many European countries in which Christian authorities opposed lamentation as a pagan holdover. However, as I will show, the Irish clergy and observers of Ireland from abroad used a variety of modernist tools – discursive and otherwise – to render Irish lament and lamenters “backward” and “shameful.” Their discourse linked authenticity with modernity and civilization, and lament with backwardness, “unmeaning” (Diocese of Cashel and Imelac, 1813), and inauthenticity. Thus the clerical critique of Irish lament practices, even when it was cloaked in theological orthodoxy, indexed an emergent, modern, transnational class structure. In the 17th and 18th centuries the church “hierarchy in Ireland passed numerous ordinances against the practice of keening” (Porter 2007). This in itself did not spell the end of lament. “The practice of caoineadh [anglicized as “keening,” i.e. lamenting] resisted church opposition for centuries but it was gradually displaced by increasing modernization. It survived as formal ritual in remote areas until early in this [20th] century but has now died out” (Bourke 1993:161). What finally put an end to it? English travelers, Irish clergy, and Irish “wake amusements” We cannot easily separate “modernization” and “church opposition” in the story of the decline of lamenting in Ireland. Admittedly, there is much continuity between the relatively recent (post-Counter-Reformation) stories of church opposition and our reading of Chrysostom (see Chapter 4). Yet the story of how lament actually ended, and of how the Irish seem to have internalized the clerical pronouncements they so long resisted, is a modern story, and needs telling as such. It is a story I interpretively

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construct from the rich detail provided by O’Suilleabhain’s Irish Wake Amusements (1967). The English term “wake amusements” – covering a variety of behaviors at wakes from joking, sex play, and storytelling to keening – corresponds in a rough way to the Irish term cluiche caointeach.7 O’Suilleabhain’s Ireland was not that of the 1990s, which attracted new industries to locate there from abroad and revive the Irish economy; he came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. That Ireland was more familiar with war and poverty – and the carried shame of British oppression. Irish priests’ and bishops’ opposition to lament as he describes it reflected their sense of Ireland as lagging behind the rest of the Christian world, with one foot stuck in paganism. An “anonymous traveler” from England who, in 1683, happened upon a wake in Kildare, later wrote of “shrill cries and hideous hootings.” The traveler considered these cries inauthentic or insincere – not the products of a modern subject. The bereaved seemed to keen for two audiences: ostensibly for the dead, but actually for those whom they hoped were overhearing the stories of deprivation and injustice which they tell their departed loved ones (O’Suilleabhain 1967:134 –135). James Farewell’s 1689 “mock-Aeneid about Ireland,” The Irish Hudibras, included this demeaning English reference to the Irish ways of lamenting the dead: They raise the cry, and so they fout8 him Into a crate to howl about him . . . Where, in one end, the parted brother Was laid to rest, the cows in t’other . . . (O’Suilleabhain 1967:135, citing MacLysaght 1939:32)

The mocking verse juxtaposes several signs indexing backwardness – corpses are shown disrespect and hired lament women rub shoulders with cows in backward rural Ireland. The English travelers to Ireland reflected the monumental shifts their own homeland had undergone with the triumph of radical Protestants. Among more conservative rural English elites, a few believed that some rural traditions of Catholic peasants were worth preserving. Yet even these harbored a triumphalist, masculinist vision in which women’s lore would soon disappear from the world (Bauman and Briggs 2003:76). O’Suilleabhain takes no explicit steps to connect critiques by clerics and English travelers. Still, we can easily imagine that the classist English

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travelers’ observations were in fact substantively linked to the evolution of churchly condemnations of lament from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The connection underscores the shame that gives my book its title. A new stress on authenticity As these Englishmen’s reports continue into the 18th and 19th centuries, their stress on (in)authenticity becomes clearer. In William King’s The art of cookery, in imitation of Horace’s Art of poetry, there appears this condemnation of hired keeners: So at an Irish funeral appears A train of drabs with mercenary tears

As the verses of King’s (1776 [1709]:87) offhand poetic reference to Irish wakes unfold, he reveals the standard against which he judges loud wailing by “mercenaries” – authentic grief is “silent”: Who, wringing of their hands with hideous moan, Know not his name for whom they seem to groan, While real grief with silent steps proceeds, And love unfeigned with inward passion bleeds (cited in O’Suilleabhain 1967:135–136)

The theme of Irish wailers’ inauthenticity continued to appear in reports of later English travelers. Mrs. S. C. Hall, “an Englishwoman, who visited Ireland more than once in the company of her husband about the middle of the [19th] century, gave an account of wake customs and was severely critical of the hiring of female keeners” (O’Suilleabhain 1967:136). Hall’s book (1841:221–231) quoted these lines of poetry about such professionals: They live upon the dead, By letting out their persons by the hour To mimic sorrow when the heart’s not sad. (cited in O’Suilleabhain 1967:136)

It was a shameful thing to be Irish, in mourning, or inauthentic. Church edicts on wailing further hastened its demise. O’Suilleabhain documents a series of synods inveighing against keening, starting in 1631 with the pronouncement of the Synod of Tuam against “female keeners.”

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In the same town of Tuam the bishops, gathering again in the year 1660, warned the people more explicitly against hiring such women. At Armagh in the same year, a churchly edict described funeral wailing as “an unchristian practice.” Ten years later at Dublin, church officials took steps to enforce such bans, forbidding priests from attending ceremonies at which there was any keening or screaming – on pain of being removed from their parish. By 1748 the discourse returned to the New Testament, condemning wailing at funerals in terms reminiscent of Chrysostom’s, but with a profoundly new twist. Echoing Chrysostom, they called keening “heathenish” and “contrary to the express commandment of St. Paul . . . forbidding such cries and immoderate grief for the dead, as if they were not to rise again.” But biblical authority did not monopolize the bishops’ motivation; keening leads “to the great shame of our nation, since no such practice is found in any other Christian country” (Diocese of Leighlin, cited in O’Suilleabhain 1976:139; emphasis added; compare Lysaght’s mention of 19th-century shame regarding lament [1997:68]). Catholic bishops of Ireland evinced the same sense of shame as the English travelers. Their pronouncements indicated an increasing consciousness of a community of more “advanced” Christian nations looking with disgust upon backward, heathenish Ireland. Their models of shame were oriented – as all are – to the gaze of another, a gaze in which Ireland was found to be lacking. Travelers and bishops agree here – funerary lamentation, loud wailing and what the bishops called “vain fulsome rhymes in praise of their deceased friends” should fill any self-respecting (middle-class English) person with shame. Shame at being premodern For clerics as for travelers, the logic behind shaming lament turns on the perception that the relationship between self and performance that lament perpetuates is premodern, lacking an adequate concern for authenticity. The last official pronouncement on keening that was necessary, according to O’Suilleabhain, was issued in the Diocese of Cashel and Emly, where [the] Most Rev. Dr. Thomas Bray, Archbishop of Cashel, issued a pastoral letter which said: “We also condemn and reprobate, in the strongest terms, all unnatural screams and shrieks, and fictitious [inauthentic], tuneful cries and elegies, at wakes, together with the savage custom of howling and bawling at funerals. And, in place of these pagan practices, so unmeaning, and so unbecoming Christians, we exhort . . . rather . . . prayer for the soul of the deceased.” (1813; cited in O’Suilleabhain 1967:140; emphasis added)

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To this official pronouncement the Revd Bray appended a note as to its proper use: they were to be read annually, “and where necessary, should also be explained in Irish” (1813; cited in O’Suilleabhain 1967:140–141). This reference to the Irish language reveals the linguistic gap between the relatively cosmopolitan and multilingual (perhaps even Englishmonolingual) clergy and their parishioners. The Revd Bray must have composed his epistle in English or Latin, not in Irish. The document associates Irish (but not English) monolingualism with backwardness or intransigence. By underscoring this marker of Irishness associated with the laity, the Revd Bray’s new condemnation of lament drew an implicit contrast between the cosmopolitan, modern knowledge and practice of the clergy and the stubborn localism – and embarrassing backwardness – of the laity. Irish monolingualism was made to index lack of participation in modernity, and, by implication, speaking English was a means for inculcating a proper sense that the cosmopolitan world was watching. Thus the hierarchy across ethnic and national lines – the subjugation of Ireland by England – arose, as is so often the case, in conjunction with the domination of Irish country folk and laity by a cosmopolitan clerical class. Local class relations and global imperialism have evolved together. Together, they help constitute everyday realities of shame. By the 20th century, Irish lament had all but disappeared. And what was the cause? Was it “modernization” or “church opposition”? It was a modern form of church opposition combined with other condemnations that made Irish women in particular, ashamed of, and afraid to continue, lamenting or keening. O’Suilleabhain’s father told him of a priest who, around 1900, encountered three hired keeners sitting on a casket on a cart heading for the graveyard where the priest was to officiate. The women were wailing. The priest on his horse whipped them, and ordered them to stop. They did, but recommenced when their cart reached the graveyard, whereupon the priest forced them down from the coffin with his whip. They were afraid to enter the graveyard to howl at the graveside. This [finally] put an end to the hiring of keening women in that parish. (O’Suilleabhain 1967:143)

In no earlier accounts of church opposition to lament do we find any mention of the threat of physical violence. Although physical coercion may not dominate modern forms of discipline (Foucault 1977[1975]), violence is inscribed in the very fabric of modernity.

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Modern circumstances heightened clerical awareness of an outside world that included the English elites for whom travel might be a leisure activity – a world that viewed Irish keening as shameful. This shame prompted increasingly forceful measures against lamentation, until Irish women, who once earned money and drink at wakes, abandoned their work. Bereaved kin had taken their musical and lyrical cues from those hired keeners. With the disappearance of the professionals, the institutionalized improvisation of laments at Irish wakes came to an end, displaced by quiet prayers.

Conclusion Ethnographies once focused on small, isolated communities. Ethnographic accounts of shame in such communities might have relied upon interviews with individuals. Although ethnographic and historical accounts, linked together, form the basis of my argument in this chapter, we clearly need new methods in order to study shame that circulates in public cultural forms such as the media, or in churchly pronouncements, as much as it is voiced by individuals. The shame I have described here was apparently effective – accomplishing what premodern opposition to lament could not – because of the ways that modern national and transnational forces empower these circulating forms of public culture. This chapter has uncovered the pervasiveness of shame in modernity and its role in discouraging lament around the world. The next chapter, closely related, analyzes the juxtaposition of key signifiers – “lament” juxtaposed with “backward” and “primitive” – in contemporary discourse.

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Crying Backward: Primitivist Representations of Lament

Introduction This chapter explores representations of lament that frame it as “primitive” or “backward.” It explores the iconicity or non-trivial similarity between lament’s “backward” or retrospective stance and its deeper backwardness, moving from older Orientalist scholarship on lament to web-based discourses that construe lament as backward. “The primitive” makes modernity possible. Just as 19th-century anthropologists built their notions of “Civilization” on the rhetorical back of “Savagery” and “Barbarism” (Morgan 1996), “modernity” requires as its Other the “traditional,” “backward,” or “primitive.” Primitivist discourse is useful not only in holding sociocultural Others and their practices at arm’s length but as “a way of coming to know and contain that which is forbidden, marked off and tabooed in our own society” (Lucas and Barrett 1995:289). In Chapter 3, I showed how an image of primitive lament and emotional freedom – sometimes represented as tabooed in contemporary society – beckons modern subjects. In this chapter, I focus more generally on how widespread primitivist imagery is in discourse on lament, and on how images of backwardness and primitivism help to stigmatize ritual wailing and those who perform it. The binary “primitive” (or “backward”) versus “civilized” (or “modern”) reflects the rhetoric of cultural evolutionism. The idea of backwardness invokes an earlier evolutionary stage of culture; in an evolutionary vision, the primitive is primal or first. The notion of backwardness brings other nuances to bear, relying on an embodied metaphor of directional stance. “Backward” contrasts with “forward-looking” or “progressive” – orientations that fit our embodiment as beings who tend to walk and stand with our heads facing in the direction we think of as forward, perpendicular to

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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an imaginary line through our shoulders. The metaphor is nonetheless particular to a given cultural-historical perspective. The polarities bespeak a sense of time constituted through the linguistic habits formed by speaking “standard-average European languages” as unfolding linearly from past to future (Whorf 1956). To remember, in this view, is to look back. This linear sense of time, shot through with value (despite its “objectivity” as viewed from inside it), informs European thought from the Romanticism of Rousseau to the evolutionism of Spencer, Engels, and Freud, and more recent exemplars of modernist social theory. It is a commonplace that Western thought construes time running in one direction, which we define as forward. This view of time makes it appear sensible to label a retrospective or historical glance of regret or examination “backward.” It is shameful to be primitive or backward.

Discourses on the Other: Observing “Savage” Laments Accounts of lament are metacultural insofar as they constitute reflexive guideposts for evaluating other, primary, cultural features. My metacultural account, which is concerned to trace the origins of shame about (a particular reflection on) loud crying, must deal with lament’s association with the primitive. Primitivist discourses are hegemonic. Again, no hegemony is complete or inevitable, since resistance is always possible; still, widely circulating representations of peoples of the global South impose on them labels like “primitive” and “backward.” And no one aspires to be “primitive” – not even those who call contemporary women and men back to some golden age. Travelers’ accounts of lament have sped the circulation of images of the primitive Other. The traveler and ethnographer William Cook, representing Bororo Indian laments, is a prime example. Around 1900, Cook sojourned among the Bororo Indians of the Brazilian Amazon. In his description of what transpired after a particular death in “his” village, note his close juxtaposition of “lament” with a rhetoric of animal savagery. The funeral included shaking huge calabash rattles. This was accompanied by the wailing chant of a chorus of women standing just behind the quartette and waving fans to keep away the flies. The snort of two huge flutes, the barking of the

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calabash trumpets, the lament of the savage mother, her body besmeared with her own blood, kneeling by the corpse of her child, the hairs jerked from her head, half a dozen at a time, by a female crouched behind her, the lamentations of the father, with his hair clipped, as he kneeled on the other side of the body and recited the virtues of the deceased loved one, and the low mournful chant of female relatives or friends as they slashed their legs and arms, or even their entire bodies, with sharpened shells . . . This was the drama that unfolded itself one beautiful summer morning as we crept into the . . . Ta Dare Mano Paro village. (Cook 1907:52; emphasis added)

The master trope here is the primitive as savage. The contributing signifiers include blood and lament, defined by its position in a semantic network of animal sounds – snorting, barking. Cook’s observations of lament made their way into our national archive, the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, and into the widespread metacultural association of lament with the primitive and animalistic.

The uncanny sounds of Tierra del Fuego Martin Gusinde had more anthropological training than Cook and lived with the Selknam, “a hunting people of the Great Island of Tierra del Fuego,” between 1919 and 1923. The binaries that constitute his description of lament are Selknam vs. European, order vs. “uncanny” or “weird” chaos, and “monotony” vs. “(modern) creativity”: The mourning cry, marked by its peculiar sound, is the same at the death of an adult person and at the collective mourning solemnity. That hollow, weird howling that wakened me at daybreak after my first night in the Selk′nam camp sounded uncannily frightening, it penetrated to my very marrow. (Gusinde 1931:797; emphasis added)

Gusinde describes the bereaved father’s cries as a “monotonous song of lament” (1931:797) – an indirect indictment of tradition. Invoking a metaculture of newness (Urban 2001), Gusinde finds traditional lament repetitive, predictable, and thus “unmeaning” (on this term see Chapter 7 above). Yet Gusinde does not reconcile that depiction with the weird uncanniness of lament, though surely the uncanny frightens in part because it is unpredictable. Gusinde takes for granted a construction of the European man as emotionally controlled. The villagers’ savage expressivity takes on

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its meaning in contrast with European self-control, though for a moment the Selknam lament might even touch a European observer’s feelings: “During this the unrestrained agitation or vehemence never reaches such proportions as in the presence of the corpse, but the collective lament would probably be capable, even for a European, of arousing his innermost feelings” (1931:806; emphasis added). It is hard to avoid the sense that Gusinde offers this description of lament – the weird cries of primitive funeral observances – precisely as an epitomization of the exotic Other.

Orientalism and the Objectifying Modern Gaze Orientalism (Said 1978) is a quintessential Otherizing tradition – it requires a distant cultural counterpart against which to define a cultural Self. In Said’s paradigm case, the Christian West defined itself vis-à-vis the Islamic East. The spirit of Orientalism inspires early 20th-century studies of lament (Böckel 1913). The theme of cultural decay pervades Orientalist accounts; decay ostensibly pervades the histories of all Oriental literatures. Over time they become rigid and lifeless – and only rarely is this said to make room for a more “vital” literature. Scholars project this concern back into the earliest text-artifacts of lament, such as the Sumerian. Around 2000 BCE, at the time the third dynasty of Ur ended, Sumerians composed laments for fallen cities, preserved in multiple copies. But by the middle of the first millennium BCE, the dynamic genre had degenerated, according to Orientalists like Raphael Kutscher (1975:4), into a string of wooden imitations of older laments. These late laments he condemns as “repetitive, unimaginative, composed to a large extent of clichés, and devoid of poetic rhythm” (1975:4). Indologist Charlotte Vaudeville exemplifies this rhetoric of decay, depicting lament as a vibrant Oriental art that was gradually buried in Oriental dust during the centuries covered in her analysis. Like early English moderns (Bauman and Briggs 2003), Vaudeville seems to hold writing responsible for the loss of dynamism, finding little of it in the written remnants of old South Asian lament forms. She writes of bArahmAsa, a genre of calendrical laments that flourished from the 16th to the 19th centuries in north Indian written vernaculars. In relation to one of the many religious versions of the written form (originally adapted for folk

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preaching), Vaudeville says that later “Muslim bArahmAsas tend to turn into allegorical or philosophical dissertations” (1986:40). She calls these dry. The “charming” (and predominantly Hindu) oral forms still thrive in villages, Vaudeville writes (1986:x). Orientalism must inscribe this trajectory of loss and death onto the higher cultural products of “Orientals,” for example written laments. This discourse ascribes to Orientals none of the historical ups and downs Orientalists recognize in their own cultural traditions. Even when representations of lament appear to freeze laments and lamenters out of time by ascribing an essential primitiveness to the laments themselves and to their performers, they reproduce the unilineal social evolutionism that in many ways echoes Orientalist discourse.

Evolutionist scholarship on lament in the 20th century Orientalist and evolutionist approaches to lament are close kin. Turn-ofthe-century German scholarship on lament exemplifies a discourse that searches in the more or less exotic Other for the roots of cultural practices seen then only at the margins of Europe, or among European peasants who were almost as distant from bourgeois scholars as were the “true Orientals.” Evolutionist studies of lament sought not only their origins but also the very “genesis of song” in “primitive forms.” Lament, according to the early 20th-century German evolutionist and anti-Semitic activist Otto Böckel, arose from primitive, inarticulate cries of anguish. In 1913 Böckel wrote, “the oldest period practiced the cry, on which the crying-song builds” (1913:97; compare Alexiou 1974:102). At this earliest stage in lament’s evolution, only members of the deceased’s immediate family sang crying-songs. In the second stage professional cry-women appeared. But “in the last stage, lament songs perish” (1913:97), presumably giving way to silent weeping and carefully composed music.1 Böckel’s evolutionist model presumed that lament had to give way as “civilization” spread within and beyond Europe. What Böckel projected onto epochs, musicologists writing later in the 20th century treated as features of the performance moment, which they conceived synchronically. Through at least the 1980s, ethnomusicologists reproduced primitivist binaries: voluntary/involuntary, rational/irrational, controlled/chaotic, language/inarticulate cries. Musicologist A. L. “Bert” Lloyd (1980) implies that lament was the remnant of an ancient period in human

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development, coming down to us quite unchanged – the site of primitive chaos struggling against rational order. Yet even within lament itself, Lloyd juxtaposes the ultra-emotional (the “planctus” or “involuntary cry of grief”) with a token of modernity (the “relatively rational,” sometimes griefresolving, “discourse” (1980:47). Certain moments in lament performance risked losing control, that modern obsession (see Chapter 5), giving way to involuntary outbursts of the sort Böckel described as the primitive stage before the rise of crying-songs. The early 20th-century German scholar Hedwig Jahnow, who perished in the Holocaust, not only described early Christian opposition to lament, like that of St. John Chrysostom (see Chapter 4); she also replicated some of the ancient arguments against lament as something “opposed to faith in the resurrected Christ” (1923:266).2 Similarly, citing some of what I called the “proto-Orientalist” sources of antiquity (Chapter 4), classicist and biblical Greek scholar Gustav Stählin writes: The real home of violent lamentation, and perhaps of the formal θρηνο1 [thrênos] in the narrower sense, of the lament, is probably the east [the Orient]. . . . If [Nonnus] refers to philothrenoi gunaikes [“lament-loving women,” this reflects the] fact that in the orient . . . women played, and still play, a more prominent role in mourning than men. (1966:150)

Stählin cites the fifth-century CE Greek poet Nonnus (introduced in Chapter 4), casting Nonnus’ proto-Orientalism as authoritative. Oriental women were philothrenoi. Stählin’s relatively recent biblical scholarship continues the long interdiscursive chain of Otherizing representations of lament by Christians and scholars, particularly Orientalists.

The East and its “backwardness”: from the 19th century until today The story of lament in Russia, as in Ireland, is one of increasingly successful church opposition, and one involving an increasing tendency to act in the awareness of how Others see the national Self. Much of Russia has the misfortune of lying to the east of Europe; thus Russia has had to struggle against Orientalist rhetoric. It is important to see in the Russian and Middle Eastern stories I am about to tell the central role played by transnationally circulating metaculture.

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Russian lament persisted from long before the acceptance of Christianity in 988 CE until recent times, despite Orthodox Church persecution (Margarita Mazo, personal communication, 1999). It was so common in the 19th century that the poet Nekrásov, who had studied folk laments intensively, “comment[ed] that ‘wailing is called singing in this country’ ” (quoted in Ries 1997:123). “Civilized” consciousness shines a glaring light on lament (Urban 1996:175), objectifying and problematizing the genre. Nekrásov spoke in an (at least) imagined dialog with other-nationswhere-wailing-is-presumably-not-called-singing. His self-consciousness over belonging to such a different, “backward” nation reflects international relations structured by notions of a civilized modernity. Epitomizing his people as lamenters exemplifies a historically situated shame about wailing as an unpolished performance of excessive passion, shame based on an inescapable or “natural” identification with a national Self that a foreign audience (with whom one would want to be identified) perceives as backward.

Backwardness as Retrospective Stance: Grievance Rhetorics Representations of cultural backwardness still abound. Nekrásov’s comments find a parallel in the concluding paragraphs of Bernard Lewis’s 2002 book, his call to Middle Easterners to “abandon grievance and victimhood.” The Princeton Orientalist implies (a) that the region is backward, (b) that this backwardness is reflected in its fixation on the past (particularly past grievances), and (c) that this backwardness is epitomized in a kind of lament, the prototypical “grievance rhetoric” (McLaren 2000a). It is not only the Middle East that Orientalists characterize as backward and obsessed with grievance. The charge also sticks to lament as a genre. Lewis (2002) has publicly described the sense of historical grievance carried and nurtured by Osama Bin Laden. He mentions in particular Bin Laden’s invocation of the humiliation still experienced as a fresh wound – the century-old destruction of the Ottoman empire, signaling the end of any sort of unified Islamic political force in the world. Lewis strongly contrasts the Middle East and the West in regard to their stance toward time and history:

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In . . . [the US] if you say of something, “That’s history,” you mean it’s unimportant, irrelevant, of no value for present concerns. This is not the Middle Eastern view. History is very much present around them all the time. (Lewis and Gross 2002)

In this Orientalist’s view, whereas the West looks forward and therefore moves forward, the Middle East is retrospective, historical, or backward-looking. Its rhetorical orientation to “grievance and victimhood” – i.e. to lament – holds it back. The folly of fixating on the past, on grievance, and on victimhood – as lament may be seen as doing – becomes an important part of Orientalist discourse. Laments are often rhetorics of grievance. Some question the divine as to why the lamented loss occurred. Thus juxtaposing “grievance” with “backwardness” is no accident; it reveals a metacultural stance that associates “mere” grievance with the undesirable and arguably primitive tendency to fix one’s gaze on the past. The “Orient” has long been a fuzzy category. Powerful and widely circulating discourses sometimes treat southern and eastern Europe as Oriental. This backward cousin of northern, western Europe is therefore prone to fixation with grievance (Schnetzer 1999). And Africa, too, is Oriental, or at least backward. Thus Gordon Smith (2001) speaks of “wars of grievance and greed, in the backward course of de-development in poor countries” (2001; emphasis added).

The Global Electronic Circulation of Discourse Linking “Lament” with “Backwardness” The transnational circulation of discourses linking lament with backwardness has accelerated in the age of electronic communication. Statements such as “Today’s political leadership is determined to be forward-looking and not to lament the glory of past times” (Stephens 1999; emphasis added) circulate globally through electronic media. So do statements by American literature professor Richard M. Magee linking lament, nostalgia, and the backward gaze in his work on James Fenimore Cooper and Cooper’s daughter, Susan (in the following citations from Magee 1999 the emphasis is mine). Cooper’s “vision is usually directed toward the past, and his sparsely-peopled landscapes attempt to

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project history backwards, from 1757 and beyond to a legendary time”; “James Cooper’s landscapes are elegiac and lament a semi-mythical past while Susan’s focus on their present qualities and future potential”; “In this manner, the father’s landscapes are elegies that lament a lost historical past and long for a semi-mythological epoch. The daughter’s landscapes, on the other hand, use the past to project forward to a promise of the future when the past and present are reconciled in a moral understanding.” Magee’s paper consistently links the backward gaze with myth and legend, elegy and lament. A final example of how writers (wittingly or unwittingly) construct lament as backward shows more complexity. Not surprisingly, some resist the iconoclastic face of modernity and the notion that lament is a waste of time because progress beckons us forward. Such writers are under an awkward obligation to valorize both lament and the backward look – but not for long. Canadian Lutheran Bishop Michael Pryse’s homily during Holy Week, 1999, exemplifies this: One of the things that I am most aware of in Holy Week is the important role that “retrospection” plays in the Christian life. Although life must be lived forward, it can often only be understood by looking backward! . . . . . . During these special days the distance between the lament of Jesus [“My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me!”] and the lament of humanity is shortened to the point where we can begin to believe that our anguished cries really can reach the one who can save us! By looking backwards through Jesus’ life, we who must still “live our lives forward,” are given sustenance, power and encouragement for the journey. (Pryse 1999; emphasis added)

Pryse seems well aware of the dicey position of Christianity, or of any system that requires constant looking back (to scripture and the days of salvation-history), in the context of a metaculture of newness. He cannot advocate the backward look without hedging. When Christians (figuratively) lament, they should remember Jesus’ lament. Why? Because doing so offers comfort, but also (in light of his resurrection) inspiration to return their gaze forward as soon as possible.

Moving on from grief ? In the fall of 2001, as I was starting this book, our home had furnace problems. Repair man Ronnie Garcia came to our assistance. When he asked

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about my work, I said I was working at home (on sabbatical) those days, writing a book on lament and the possibility that critiques of lament might drive it underground. He took “lament” to mean any rhetoric of grievance, and the “critiques” to include the oft-heard preemptive responses to American minorities’ grievances. In his experience, people are wont to tell contemporary minorities that their sufferings have little to do with slavery or racial oppression in past generations, and that it is time to “get over it.” Such shaming imperatives represent attempts at controlling talk that discomforts the comfortable. Ronnie’s example has a sharp, distinctly American, political edge to it; he speaks most directly to American identity politics as it is worked out in everyday interactions. But what he points to has relevance to all sorts of emotional regimes (see Chapter 3 above). By invoking notions of an appropriate limit on grieving, properly empowered actors can shame those who grieve too long. Ronnie was on to something globally observable. Note how Bishop Pryse and others assume lament has its short time of appropriateness, after which people must move on. This is not confined to middle-class EuroAmericans or to the “culture of therapy” (Sommers and Satel 2005) that calls on the bereaved to work their way to grief ’s end. The notion that one should lament only for some standard number of days is admittedly widespread and ancient. Traditional discourses were concerned with the good of the departed or of others who remain. “Mourners were supposed not to weep too much, for this would make rain and sleet fall on the dead, or so a man told me” (de Laguna 1972:523-B). What is new is the discourse on “getting over it” for one’s own good, and on “closure” with no ritual anniversary observances for the dead.

Performing Backward: Performance as Reproduction In its generic (en-genre-d) orientation (for example, as “a lament’), each performance implicitly indexes previous ones, especially if the new minimizes the “intertextual gap” between itself and the old (Bauman 1999; Briggs and Bauman 1992). Where “speaking the new” (improvisation) is ideologically valued over “speaking the old,” or repetition-replication (Becker 1979) – i.e. where a metaculture of modernity pushes for maximizing intertextual gaps – reproduction of an old lament can appear backward rather than valued.

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Chapter 4 described Li Hwa, an unemployed Chinese man, breaking into performance with a tuneful lament. National Public Radio’s Rob Gifford (2002) called it “a lament from the Song Dynasty, 1,200 years ago.” Gifford – and presumably Li Hwa, who must have explained the interdiscursive link to Gifford – closed the gap between the Song Dynasty lament and Li Hwa’s performance, claiming that what he had performed was the Song Dynasty lament. Representing the new as the old produced “defeasibility,” enabling him to claim that “these words (potentially viewed as critical of the Chinese government) are not my words.” Yet that functionalist interpretation can only account for the vulnerability of Li Hwa and not of lament per se. What Li, Gifford, and NPR jointly accomplished was not only to reproduce an old lament but also to reproduce the notion that lament is an ancient art and, probably, the notion that to perform a lament is to look back to an earlier age for performance resources.

Is lament’s retrospective look “backward”? Globally circulating bits of modernist metaculture such as Orientalist representations of the Middle East associate lament with backwardness. But the truth is that it is easy to make lament appear backward if what we mean is that many laments look back, as Bernard Lewis says the Middle East is prone to do. But to paint a sometimes retrospective genre like lament as inherently backward-looking, and thus as a sign of backwardness, is a troubling essentialization. We speak of lamenting a loss as if this means dwelling on a lost past. And indeed a bereaved singer’s lament commonly thematizes the past shared with her parent, husband, brother, child, etc. But even if laments often focus on past events, it is problematic to claim they are therefore “backward.” A woman who has just lost her husband or son might be as likely to lament the loss of his future earnings (implied by Propp 1984[1963]:32) – or, more tenderly, the loss of his future presence in her home – as she is to grieve over the past she shared with him. And the two are hard to disentangle. Still, there are homologies, albeit slippery and ideologically fraught, between cultural products (laments) and metacultural representations of them referring to them as backward. Even the romanticization of lament in focus in Part III can reflect a metaculture of newness. Many of us who write about lament identify with it as resistance to authority, and downplay its traditional conventionality. Many

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laments are in fact metacultural in themselves. But as Urban argues (2001:chapter 4), our peculiar interest in resistance betrays our allegiance to modernity as a metaculture of newness, which by nature distrusts straightforward obedience. If we step back, we might see more clearly and discover, for instance, much that is old, repetitive, and backward-looking in discourses opposing lament. Yet, although some recent Christian and Muslim critiques of lament recycle ancient arguments, no one attacks those missionaries for repeating fourth-century CE theological arguments against lament. These modern critiques may be similar to ancient ones, but other factors distinguish the modern opposition to lament, especially the use of the metacultural label “backward,” and the modern forces that give that label power. Both are linked with the ever more rapid global flows of metaculture. Recent opposition has spread shame effectively through publicculture channels. Long, old chains of oppositional metadiscourse in Greece and China failed to do what rapidly circulating modern social imaginaries have accomplished – stop spontaneous, melodic, texted weeping in many societies. Modernist Islam and Protestantism are characterized by textualism, festishism of the text, or “the textual attitude” Said described in Orientalism. This is audible in Shia voices condemning self-flagellation as a mere “tradition” – as when Moussawi, the Shia academic cited in Chapter 7, told Ghattas (2001), “I believe [self-flagellation] has nothing to do with religious teachings, it’s just a tradition that has been followed around the world.” Modernist textualism trumps earlier metadiscourse on the dramatic embodiment of grief in Shia lament. In any case, we have here the same paradox noted at the end of the last paragraph: modernist religious discourse in fact draws on something even older than what it dismisses as mere “tradition” – yet labels that tradition “backward” (Ghattas 2001). To reprise, one reason lament appears old or backward is that it can quite easily, if misleadingly, be represented as a discourse of memory, a discourse about the past, one that looks backward rather than proposing any new actions. In fact lamentation has often stirred others to action: Shia participants in ta“ziyeh have, over many centuries, often been motivated by this ritual action to take strong political action as well. And recent Shia laments represent contemporary injustices as a continuation of ancient travesties. But what circulates with more global scope and force is not this complex reality, but laments’ link with inherently stultifying “tradition.”

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“Backwardness” and internal repetition Besides its themes, lament’s reputation for being “backward” may also reflect the fact that each performance, despite being improvised and thus at least slightly different from all others, tends to be internally repetitive. A relatively high degree of internal repetition is connected with the “metaculture of tradition” (Urban 2001:85) – and accusations of repetitiveness are important Otherizing tools in a metaculture of modernity (see Gusinde’s account of Others’ “monotonous” laments). The salience of repetition in any oral tradition is undeniable. We are dealing here not necessarily with repeated description of the same precise scenes or events, but repeated groups of words. In the generations before 20th-century folklorists Milman Parry and Alfred Lord, it was common for folklorists to write of the “repetitions” and “stereotyped phrases” in Homer – and in recently collected folklore. Demeaning references to repetition reflect a metaculture of newness – modernity’s iconoclastic face. Parry did much to remove “the opprobrium attached to ‘clichés’ and ‘stereotyped,’ shifting attention from ‘repetition’ to ‘formulae’ ” shaping emergent performances, as his student Alfred Lord wrote (2000[1960]:30). Old Setu laments in Estonia had “recurring refrains.” Ethnomusicologist Vaike Sarv, an expert on Setu laments, discovered that the number of adjectives “in lament terminology is surprisingly small (modern literary language contains approximately 8,000 adjectives, whereas the terminology of lamenting contains only 30 adjectives)” (Jaago 2000).3 Despite this quantification that apparently indicates repetitiveness, the putative link between repetitiveness and being out of date is not fact. Yet people repeat the claim, unaware of the irony that it entails. The sense that laments are repetitive is widespread and, by itself, can account for lament failing the metacultural test of newness or creativity. In actuality, Estonian pop musical quotation of old laments simplifies them, making them much more repetitive. Yet in Estonia, symphonic compositions that use musical themes from traditional Setu lament gain acceptance – ironically, as new products, radical recontextualizations of old forms.4

Conclusion It is dangerous to admit that many laments are backward-looking. I walk a fine line in doing so while insisting that iconoclastic modernism – in

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linking lament with backwardness – tars lament with a brush too broad, erasing its creativity, hiding the way all “traditional” lament genres refresh themselves in performance, through the improvisation of lyrics and melody. This fine line is analogous to the general argument of the book. I present many sorts of evidence that lament has become rare in most societies, and that this trend reflects modern technologies of self and power. But, particularly in Part III, I also uncover how modern discourses by scholars, therapists, and other romantics create new forms of lament – laments for the loss of tradition, ritual, culture, and (sometimes) lament.

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Part III

Reviving Lament: Lament as Key Trope of Modernity

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Part III uncovers homologies between traditional laments, modernist discourse as lament, and modernist discourse about lament. A raft of 20thcentury scholarly essays on lament exoticized, and mourned the passing of, the “authentic” laments of other people in other times and places (e.g., de Martino 2000[1975]). Part III poses the following questions: What global commonalties do we see in the mass distribution of lament-related forms? How is it that political movements in such scattered nations as India, Iran, and the Balkans exploit lament as a trope? Are there commonalties in shifting stances of nation-states toward grief and grievance rhetorics? Chapter 5 argued that modernity involved a certain kind of amnesia. That is true as far as it goes, particularly in Bangladesh which (as far as I know) has no postmodern cultural revival movements occupying the national attention. But modernity cannot be reduced to forgetfulness. Iconoclastic moments are followed almost invariably by moments of nostalgia. Nostalgia is the other side of Janus-faced modernity. Part III attempts to sort out these contradictory pulls in relation to lament. As Marilyn Ivy writes of late modern Japan, If the practices and discourses I engage speak of the powers of recuperation and appropriation in late-twentieth-century Japan (which they do), they attest as well to the perdurability of local forms and practices and to the strength of memory and desire in the midst of modernity’s depredations. (1994:17–18)

It is to the modern strength of memory and its will to remember, and revive, that I turn in Part III.

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Mourning Becomes the Electron’s Age: Lamenting Modernity(ies)

Hamlet is the most perennially intriguing of Shakespeare’s plays. . . . What we respond to in Hamlet is precisely his vacillation. It makes him seem so modern – perhaps the first modern character in literature. The prince of Denmark has no peers; he grieves alone. He cannot even display his grief, let alone act on it. There is no coterie of sympathizers, of loyal followers of his father ready to join Hamlet’s cause. The grieving women of Greek tragedy and of Shakespeare’s own early history plays have none of Hamlet’s scruples. In their grief they have an implacable energy that Hamlet struggles to fire in himself. . . . Hamlet’s grief, like our own, lacks the structure of traditional mourning or a community to shape a new response. In our world, grief overwhelms us, and we face it, for the most part, without a language of lament . . . (Holst-Warhaft 2000:198–199; emphasis added)

Lament as Trope for Modernity This chapter will demonstrate, in relation to a number of examples, that there is a fundamental, essential relationship between lament and modernist, particularly postmodernist, discourse both academic and popular. This relationship involves iconicity (similarity) and indexicality. Modernist discourse points to, and comments on, “traditional lament” along with other cultural phenomena ostensibly “dying.” Not by accident, but by what philosophers and anthropologists call mimesis, it becomes (like) the object of its attention, i.e. cultural loss and “traditional lament.” Throughout this book I have defined modernity as a set of discursive practices, a “narrated imaginary” (Rofel 1999). Rather than fencing it off

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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from “reality,” calling modernity a discourse describes what makes it real. But what is crucial is the type of discursive practice modernity entails. The lament-like narrative of modernity turns on several interlinked dualities: not just tradition versus modernity, but progress-with-destruction, progress-and-loss. The discourse on loss is not peripheral to, but defines, modern self-consciousness at least as much as a discourse on progress does. Playing on the title of Eugene O’Neill’s dramatic trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, this chapter describes the ways in which mourning is peculiarly “becoming” to the electron’s age – in part because our age regards itself, perversely, as unable to mourn like Others. Early modernity, i.e. the Enlightenment, gave way in the 19th century to melancholy, and Romanticism to the “Age of Optimism.” That age in turn, with its enthusiastic embrace of the modern, gave way sometime around World War I to the bleakness of modernism in the arts, literature, and philosophy. “Postmodernism” often takes on a more celebratory tone. Such flip-flops are cyclical. Modern discourses cycle between optimistic departures from “tradition” and desperate moments of mining the past for something to hold on to. My agenda requires us to examine how often modernism, searching for a trope for itself, turns to a kind of pseudo-lament. And to complicate matters, some of this modernist discourse includes talk about “traditional laments.”

Roots in Romanticism and Western Social Theory, Branches throughout the “Modernizing” World Sociologist Björn Wittrock (2000) regards modernity as a set of promises – the “promissory notes” people around the world associate with modernity (2000:38). A promising model? Unfortunately, it leaves no room for what appears to me to be far more pervasive in modernist discourse – nostalgia or mourning. Wittrock misses the centrality of discourses of loss that also circulate globally and help constitute local uptakes of “canonical” modernity (Robertson 1990). Realities are complex, but human signifying processes, including common discourses, reduce that complexity. To speak, to use category labels, is to imply more unity than diversity even in the most heterogeneous assemblages. And such are the workings of rhetorics of modernity around the globe that I trace in this chapter.

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A first example: for anthropologist Vincanne Adams (2001), a trademark of modernist discourse is its “perpetual search for self-completion by pursuing a ‘better’ future, in part by recruiting from a recuperable past” (2001:226). She proposes that, at least when they speak or write under “conditions of Chinese socialist modernity,” practitioner-scholars of Tibetan medicine like Amchi Trinlay organize their description of Tibetan “health measures” in terms of a loss of innocence. Writing under close Party scrutiny, Trinlay writes of Tibet’s past as “feudal.” Still, he scours that past for what might be worth salvaging. Trinlay’s search reflects the sense that modernity, too, entails loss. Thus he finds jewels in the feudal rough, gems of an indigenous Tibetan science that can help the Chinese people – and indeed all the people of the world whose emotional and bodily selves so easily fall out of step with each other, and out of step with the cosmos. Trinlay’s modernity, as Adams points out, is a particular, Chinese (or Tibetan) modernity. Capitalist modernity inevitably sweeps away so much, reinvents itself or its products so radically and constantly, embraces the new and eschews the old so passionately, that it creates loss on all sides. This is an assertion I don’t intend to prove, and admittedly there are other discourses celebrating change and hybridity, bravely resisting, or triumphantly pointing to the ways that local agency resists colonial modernities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993:xiv). For my argument to work, it is unnecessary to prove either that all mourn, or that the modern condition objectively entails loss. I need only demonstrate that discourses of modernity often define it as such – and in that sense modernity becomes loss.

Modernist discourse as lament Fostered by its imperial encounter with the rest of the world since the 15th century, the idea of modernity has been central to Europe’s selfconception. (Before the Renaissance, travelers like Marco Polo held the world outside of Europe in some awe.) The idea of modernity was also fostered by – and itself fostered – the growing gap between the bourgeoisie and the peasants of Europe, “the folk” regarded as the owners of “folklore.” Yet, the moment the European bourgeoisie began to conceive of itself as modern, it noticed what it had lost, and the romantic move to trawl the waters of antiquity for lost treasure began. The antique past was not purely temporal – the Other (be it the folk at home or far-off tribes)

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represented a “living past.” From the perspective of 17th-century scholarship (and not only then), antiquities, “by definition, can only exist in a damaged state . . . salvage from the deluge of time” (Bauman and Briggs 2003:74). The early antiquarians regarded remaining manifestations of traditional culture as “survivals.” This experience of the Other-as-living-past, and of the modern present as haunted by the absence or impending loss of that Other, also animates recent representations of lament, as I will show. In 19th-century Europe, as Romanticism reached its zenith and began to fade, the social sciences emerged in something like their current institutional form – and cut their teeth on the problem of modernity. Marx, Durkheim, Mauss, Weber, and Freud launched discourses that continued long after their deaths, built on anxiety about loss – the loss of Gemeinschaft (“community,” Tönnies 2001[1887]), trust, or – as Marx would have it in relation to capitalism – humanity’s very soul. Marx inspired many totalizing visions as well as many movements conceiving of themselves as making whole what capitalism had fragmented. What became of this hope in the 20th century? One set of heirs to a hopeful or revolutionary Marxism – the Frankfurt School and its “critical theory” – offered their own critique of modernity in which the totalizing triumphalism of earlier Marxism gave way to yet another generation’s discourse on loss. In particular, much of Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre hinges on his arguments concerning mourning, the role of German Trauerspiel or lament-plays (Plate’s [2004] translation) in the birth of a modern subjectivity, and the centrality of lament itself to “Nature” in its relationship to contemporary (post-Fall) humanity.1 Michael Taussig, meditating on Marx’s analysis of capitalism, argued that capitalist transformation inevitably results in the atomization of relations and of persons, the alienation of person from product (once inexorably bound) and of person from group. “Man is individualized, as are all things, and organic wholes are broken into their supposed material constituents” (1980:30). Gemeinschaft, in this analysis, could not withstand the onslaught of capitalism. For Sigmund Freud (1961[1930]) as Romantic, “civilization” represented the loss of self. Freud argued that the loss of direct access to the oceans of unconscious material in which infants, children, and “primitives” exist can be repaired. Classical psychoanalysis holds out the hope of “regression in the service of the ego.” But where Freud held out the hope that (through analysis) “where id is there ego shall be,” his grand-student Jacques Lacan sang a more despairing song. For Lacan, the sense of loss at the center of

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human subjectivity is irreparable; thus Lacanian discourse is a kind of lament. Lacanian anthropologists, such as Trawick (1988, 1990, 2002), have directly engaged lament in ethnographic situations of “abjection” and “remaindering” – untouchability as Tamil Paraiyar women experience it. Finally, there is sociologist Max Weber. Whereas a shallow reading leads one to consider him a shameless celebrant of Europe’s triumphant rationality, Weber treated modernity as loss. Most readers of Weber miss his casual reference to the loss of ritual lamentation (see Chapter 5 of the present work). Weber sums up his view of capitalist modernity as loss in with the metaphor of the “iron cage” (1958:181). How easily the modernist song of loss becomes a (meta)lament, bewailing the imprisonment of the old world of traditional laments in an iron cage! Anthropology as lament The postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard has accused “ethnology” (i.e. anthropology) of requiring – while simultaneously lamenting – the death of its object. “In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being ‘discovered’ and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it” (Baudrillard 1994:7). Anthropologists have moved beyond that; yet Baudrillard is not only on target in his assessment of earlier generations of anthropologists. He also grasps the tone of anthropology as popularly consumed and presented in recent media products. In 1992 many Americans watched the ten-part television series Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World, hosted by Harvard anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis. His series conveyed more than a touch of lament over cultural loss, as does the organization he founded, Cultural Survival. For practice theorist Michel de Certeau (1984) modernity is obsessed with the lost or perishable oral words of Others who end up, paradoxically, not having much of a voice in modern representations of them. In recordings of oral texts made in the “scripturalist economy” of modernity, it appears that the People speak, but “this speech is . . . constituted as the ‘Voice of the people’ by its very repression, the object of nostalgic longing” (1984:132). Recordings – including recordings of lament (which played a key role in the contemporary Finnish lament revival described in Chapter 10) – become objects of nostalgia quintessentially suited for circulation in a metaculture that construes modernity as loss as well as triumph. I turn next to the story of such recordings in Finland, including the encounter of Finland’s most famous folklorist with lament.

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Nostalgia is a metacultural stance. The presence of large doses of nostalgia in modernist scholarship on lament again provokes a reconsideration of Urban’s neat dichotomization of modernity and tradition. Although I offer that revision in the next chapter, it is foreshadowed here in my treatment of nostalgia. Folklore as national memory, pride, and shame: modernist folkloristics and its fundamental paradox There is a foundational paradox in the modern creation of folkloristics and of the European nation-states it helped invent. The nationalist folklorists of Europe needed a notion of tradition, the unbroken transmission of cultural lore, in order to be able to represent that lore as “their own,” the national patrimony. Ownership of that sort requires an ideology of continuity. Yet the work of collecting folklore requires a discourse on loss to motivate it. Elias Lönnrot, a 19th-century medical doctor, spearheaded the development of Finnish folkloristics. Lönnrot illustrates how those who searched for salvageable folklore, though motivated by a mournful vision of loss, sometimes found more than they bargained for – especially when they stumbled onto “authentic, traditional” laments. Elias Lönnrot and Finland’s “kalevala songs.” Sweden dominated Finland from 1323 to 1809, when they ceded it to Russia (DuBois 1995:32). Tsar Alexander I then made Finland an autonomous Grand Duchy under his authority, and promoted some forms of nationalism among the Finnish elite. Alexander was thus pleased to sponsor Lönnrot’s efforts to collect Finnish folklore, particularly what he called “kalevala2 stories and songs,” as a means to distance Finns from Sweden (DuBois 1995:32). These were the raw material out of which Lönnrot would be able to construct an epic, the Kalevala, worthy of an emerging Finnish nation: “Scarcely remembered among Finland’s own rural and urban populations during the nineteenth century, and hardly imagined in wider Europe, Finnish folk poetry became synonymous nonetheless with Finnish character and identity” (DuBois 1995:3). Ironically, romantic nationalism in Finland evolved so rapidly that it became the focus of resistance to Russian hegemony. The paradox is that Finland’s search for a national tradition was less a reflection of traditional transmission than the product of its relationships with Sweden and Russia – and the force of contemporary European Romanticism. Lönnrot, founder and first secretary of the Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, or SKS; DuBois 1995:32), 3 was

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dominated by a consciousness that took for granted a rupture between tradition and emergent modernity. Thus, even if Lönnrot was able to construe Finnish peasants as links in an unbroken chain of kalevala-song transmission, he could not easily depict himself or his fellow collectors as the rightful heirs of the tradition. To do so would have jeopardized his status as a cosmopolitan scholar and modern nationalist. Lönnrot “discovers” rural lament. We see Lönnrot’s ambivalence in his comments on a lament by “a number of women together,” which he ran across (though he says he had been looking for it) in the midst of collecting kalevala songs. Lönnrot had apparently been expecting a calmly reported (Hymes 1981) version of the lament. Instead, one of the younger women . . . suddenly began to weep her laments from the depths of her throat so that I fairly shuddered to hear it. “Don’t, it’s futile, don’t it’s futile, abandon it, abandon it,” was heard from all sides from the mouths of the others, but she, once inspired, did not abandon it. And so I got what I had been fishing for, to hear an authentic lament performance, but I would have gladly paid her twice the sum if she would have ceased her lamenting when the others told her to. For a full half hour my ears were tortured by that ghastly wailing, and in addition to the crying, [the lamenter] fell upon [the others], hugging and embracing now this one, now that one, for they do not lament separately but always with their arms around each other’s necks. . . . On this day I lost the sum of four rubles to them for their laments, almost to no purpose, since what I did receive I consider hardly worth my trouble in writing it, since they were not at all able to give me any rational dialogue. (Lönnrot 1836 as cited by Utriainen 1998:186; emphasis added)

As positivist collector, Lönnrot had not wished to become involved in the performance. His desire to collect stopped at the limits of his masculinist vision of tradition. Yet he was unable to avoid closer encounters with embodied, passionate lament. Thus the modernist attempt to recover a pure Finnish national memory in “kalevala song” ran up against the realities that, for women, memory entailed passion. The Balto-Finnic poetic traditions underlying both laments and Lönnrot’s Kalevala have been called “one of the longest dying traditions of Europe” (DuBois 1995:295, citing Kaukonen 1980). It must have been with great sadness (as well as inaccuracy) that Lönnrot “pointed to Arhippa

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Perttunen (1769 –1840) as one of the last singer-patriarchs of old.” But he neglected “to mention the singer’s own son, who became a prime informant of later collectors” (DuBois 1995:295). Still, to some extent, Lönnrot’s lament was prescient; DuBois implies that Lönnrot and his colleagues nearly strangled the folk tradition by fixing its formerly fluid texts. But not quite – some folk singers acquired the published Kalevala and used it to stimulate new improvised performances (1995:295). The singers’ numbers continued to dwindle. The lament over their passing, however, was prototypically modernist – and premature.

Modernism in European Arts and Literature The romanticization of the Other and the discourse on loss spread beyond the proto-folklorists of the 18th and 19th centuries, infecting all European arts and literature. One could cite Rousseau, Delacroix, or Wagner in this vein. English Romantic literature popularized an elegiac tone, which we see in the great poem of Matthew Arnold (1822– 88), “Dover Beach,” which mourned the modern, “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the retreating tide of faith. Anthropologists have long argued that a society is defined not only by its subsistence strategies but by the ethos it creates and embodies (Bateson 1936). Performances of spontaneous improvised lament at the graveside or during marriage ceremonies characterize some societies or eras more than others. The widespread availability of such a performance genre both reflects and constitutes an emotional-discursive ethos that suits some ways of being human better than others. Spontaneous lament has not suited bourgeois European life for several centuries. Other genres of emotion, however, have contributed to forming a bourgeois-modern sense of self (Coleman 1998:19; compare Chakrabarty 2000). In Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel, French literature scholar Patrick Coleman argues that literary modernism and a sense of loss-made-literary emerged together.4 Strictly speaking, this is grossly inaccurate, since all lament – ancient and modern – entails turning loss into a work of oral literature or verbal art. But Coleman accurately senses the modern appeal of mourning or lament as a trope. He asserts the centrality of overt discursive exploration of feeling – and

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mourning, in particular – as defining features of the modern novel. In one sense, modernist literature is thus homologous to lament.

North Americans Revisiting the “Sweet Desire for Lament” When we move from the worlds of high theory and literature to more popular writings, we hear not only an elegiac tone but also regret over the modern abandonment of traditional lament. There is a widespread sense among those Euro-Americans who encounter lament in its strangest forms – the forms of Others distant in time or perceived cultural space – that “we” lack something that Others have, perhaps by “nature.”

Mourning the Montreal Massacre – and “our” alienation from lament Tamara Bernstein, writing/grieving in the online feminist journal Herizons over the December 6, 1989, Montreal Massacre,5 invokes the romanticizing motif of “healthy primitives.” Every December 6, as she finds herself unable to enjoy her usual emotional idiom (music): [A]lienated from my own, Jewish tradition in which women don’t “count” in the quorum of ten men needed to chant the mourners’ kaddish, I’ve wandered from one rally or memorial to another, lines from Adrienne Rich’s poem, “A Woman Dead in her Forties” running through my head: “But from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening.” (Bernstein 1993)

Modernists Rich and Bernstein cry out that there is not enough primitive lament in their world – and certainly not enough access to it by moderns: Western society has commercialized and “civilized” music until its magicoreligious roots are all but forgotten. Ours is also a society that is neurotic about death, and offers precious little in the way of healthy and empowering mourning rituals. But in many ancient and traditional cultures, the singing

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of funeral laments not only provides emotional catharsis for the community; it also enables the spirits of the dead to find their way to the afterworld . . . (Bernstein 1993)

Bernstein thus casts modernity in terms of loss – occasioning a sort of lament – and has little hope for a widespread restoration of the traditional laments whose loss she particularly mourns. Bernstein’s rhetoric is not only about laments. It also is a metalament in its own right, with substantive connections with “traditional lament.” Bernstein calls her piece “Lament for the [Montreal] Women.” But it laments more losses than the women’s lives; it mourns the loss of lament. Bernstein’s reference to her own “wandering,” her resistance to forgetting, and her indictment of those she blames for the death of the beloved (lament) – all these have their counterparts in traditional laments. If in fact the modern-Western discourse on loss reinvents a kind of lament, then the rumors of lament’s death may be at least somewhat exaggerated. Lament may be “one of the longest dying traditions of the West,” to adapt Kaukonen’s (1980) felicitous phrase.

Which Moderns Lament the Loss of Traditional Mourning? Particularly as we move to the southern and eastern margins of Europe and beyond, I cannot pretend that all “moderns” agree about modernity or about lament. Some regard modernity as a lamentable affair. Who are they? The lament tradition in the Greek village of Kalohori was fading when ethnomusicologist Susan Auerbach studied it: “Currently, no Kalohori women under fifty can lead laments; they rely on their elders to perform on behalf of their kin at funerals” (1984:93). Significantly, Auerbach notes that it was “two urban villager families [who were] concerned about preserving the folksong heritage for their children, who are growing up with guitar lessons rather than harvest songs. They have recently begun writing down the texts and recording the songs of their older relatives during village visits” (1984:93). Perhaps metalaments over the loss of lament or other traditions are the particular domain of newly urbanizing Greeks experiencing anomie.

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Some Africans – not all – repeat the modernist lament. It took only a few questions to prompt one African-born acquaintance to speak animatedly about the passing of old ways of mourning, including spontaneous, tuneful, texted weeping. He commutes between Hollywood and Santa Fe (New Mexico), where he writes and acts, and Washington, DC, where his American wife lives. Both are horrified at the loss of traditional African rites, including lament, and at their rapid replacement with calmer displays people associate with modernity. They say the psychological costs of this change are steep. By contrast, an African friend completing his doctorate in education at Northern Arizona University is convinced that older laments and other funeral rituals simply took too much time away from work and thus had to be abandoned. Some early English moderns, representing the elite of their day, mourned the rapid loss of tradition; they regarded “women and peasants” as its guardians. Class stratification pervades modern discourses about tradition and its loss. But the search for gems among Others’ traditions must distinguish those gems from the dross – superstition, as the “dark Other” against which middle-class modernity has consistently constructed itself from Europe to Korea (Kendall 2001) and India (Ram 2001). The same class stratification underlies folkloristic efforts to “document the peculiarities of folk speech,” including lament, in Egypt (Wickett 1993:33). Oral genres constituted a window onto this body of people from whom these scholars felt themselves alienated, by virtue of their urban culture, class and education. They could be recorded and then legitimately studied by scholars for their historical and linguistic content. (Wickett 1993:33; emphasis added)

Like his Egyptian counterparts, Jordanian folklorist Hani Al-Amad found some gems – in Jordan’s lament tradition. “I have noticed a number of eloquent expressions used by illiterate lamenting women” (1984: English introduction; emphasis added). We share such folklorists’ appraisal of lament’s great value. I do not blame them for their concern over “treasures” that might be lost, but rather for their Otherizing discourse, and their participation in a modernism that laments losses while obscuring the human agency responsible for those losses. And I hold scholars accountable for prematurely lamenting the death of lament while delegitimating authentic local efforts to carry traditions forward into the next generation (see Chapter 11).

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A return to hired mourners: the West’s use of others to lament its own losses This chapter has traced a long line of pseudo-, neo-, or meta-laments, arguing that the discourse of modernity resounds with echoes of “traditional” lament. Yet, there is something un-serious about modernists’ “lament,” as though rising to the occasion of a full-throated lament required more energy than they can muster. As with those moderns who, contemplating “The Sinking of the Titanic” in Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s (1980[1978]) poem by that name, were only able to mutter “it is a pity, I am severely tempted to wail,” the modern voices surveyed in this chapter can muster at best a “failed mourning” – what Freud (1925) called “melancholia.” Left to their own modernist devices, the best they can do is wallow in self-pity and say (with Enzensberger) “ ‘The Doomsday year,’ I wail, ‘Is not yet clear / so let’s have / so let’s have / another beer.’ ” With such pitiful lamenting skills and with such destruction all about (destruction noted since the earliest English moderns, as the myth in my Preface pointed out), it is no wonder that modernists look to Others they might hope to hire to do a better job of mourning.6 The Western co-opting of traditions of lament, and lamenters specifically, for use in their own devices – and especially as a trope to lament their own losses – can clearly be seen in an example from film mentioned in the Introduction. Like Liu Bingjian’s 2002 film, Cry-Woman and Kalpana Lajmi’s 1992 Hindi film, Rudaali (The Funeral Wailer, based on Devi 1994), The Language You Cry In indexes the salience of lament as a sign in two intersecting semiotic domains – a partly imagined domain of traditional performers and their audiences, and a newer domain in which media producers and viewers consume lament as a “phantasmatic” signifier (Ivy 1995), using it to constitute a modern sense of unease and loss. As the American researchers featured in the film trace a lament song fragment back to its “traditional” roots, they come to see the lament as symbolic of loss – not only of a song and ceremony, but of the history of a people – a loss they, as present-day researchers, come to mourn. They use the voice of Amelia Dawley – the Gullah woman who performed the African song that is caught on tape – as a guide on this modernist journey to mourning. Thus, although the late modern mourning exemplified in the film prefers dry-eyed filmic discourse to improvised teary songs, it constitutes itself via an Other it constructs as primally connected to the more powerful genres

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of mourning to which it denies itself access. Amelia’s song, the filmmakers seem to say, is somehow essentially connected to the dirges and grief-work ceremonies of the Mende-speaking people of Sierra Leone, a connection their own mourning practices have been denied. And the loss of these songs and ceremonies is something to be lamented by us moderns, even if we have to use Others’ laments in doing so. It is notable that, of the three films mentioned, only the one that primarily targets Western audiences (The Language You Cry In) engages in anything like a metalament for the loss of traditions like the Tenjami (the graveside ceremony) and the dirge with “mystical power.” But such Western media need non-Western actors to speak to a particular need in Euro-American audiences. Neither Amelia Dawley nor her African ancestors invented a tradition for the sake of troubled observers and academics. Yet their performances nonetheless survived in recorded form to be used to meet a modernist need. Judith Irvine’s (1989, 1990, 1998) work on the role of language and affect in West African caste relations can serve as a metaphor to illumine this phenomenon. The Wolof griots she studies traditionally made their living by hard labor, including the work of praising nobles at a high pitch in terms of both tone and emotional intensity. Nobles pay griots for this, but such labor also reinforces their low status. This becomes the metaphor for understanding Western modernity’s “hiring” Others, or at least borrowing their lament-ability. We have read Bernstein lamenting the absence of lament and other such “ritual outlets” in their own communities. Yet such voices recognize the impossibility of restoring this “primitive” outlet. The American ambivalence – longing combined with a deep pessimism about such a restoration – is like that of Estonian ethnomusicologist Tiiu Jaago (2000): “Modern Setu culture has changed to the degree that lamenting in its original homogeneous form is no longer thinkable.” We could consider this a simple case of melancholia, or of ambivalence toward the laments of Others distant in time, space, or culture. This ambivalence views lament’s passion, alternately, as catharsis and as frightening irrationality. Such an interpretation matches our approach to modernity as Janus-faced. However, a subtler analysis of these modern voices uncovers what Bakhtin (1981) called ventriloquism, a form of multivocality that plays on ambiguity. To return to the Wolof example, the value of griot speech is universally recognized; but nobles do not normally use the griot register (registers being speech forms associated with an activity or social group) – high-pitched, energetic, and emotionally charged. To do so would entail

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a loss of face. Yet often, it is the noble who authorizes or stands behind words he pays the griot to perform. He deploys the griot as his public voice (Irvine 1989). True, the griot receives some sort of honor in the deal. But his status remains that of hard laborer and descendant of slaves – or, to use the metaphor of ventriloquism, the dummy. And so it is for the Other whose ethnographic presence is conjured when a therapist, minister, or scholar needs to represent what the West has lost – some longed-for freedom-in-community, some freedom-withinconventions that might allow one to grieve aesthetically. And that is the dark side of the modernist metalament.

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Lament’s (Post)Modern Vertigo: Floating in a Deterritorialized Media Sea Introduction This chapter returns to the modernist and postmodernist discourse Chapter 9 analyzes as homologous with lament, this time with an eye to modernity’s contradictory nature. The goal is to offer a more adequate concept of modernity, and of metaculture, a dynamic and dialectical model. That is, I seek to demonstrate that, rather than progressing in a linear fashion from an embrace of tradition, to iconoclastic fervor, never to return, modernity is essentially cyclical. Thus we tweak Urban’s claim that modernity can be defined as a metaculture of newness, in keeping with the recognition that modernity returns to what it has apparently “destroyed,” often with longing, and that contemporary metaculture is as likely to rehabilitate some “traditional” practices as it is to discard them without looking back. Still, such renewals or rehabilitations are always transformative. Urban’s instincts in calling modernity a metaculture of newness were sound. The story simply needs a bit of complicating. Here, I open up the topic of lament in relation to “postmodernities.” In his review of “anthropologies of late or postmodernities,” Michael Fischer (1999) cites three phenomena to which anthropologists must attend: (1) science, (2) decolonization and reconstruction after social trauma, and (3) the unprecedented role in society of media, especially new electronic and visual media. Anthropologists do not just study those phenomena; they contribute to them. Fischer notes, for example, that radical reconstruction presents anthropologists with opportunities, such as producing new films. Thus trauma and reconstruction come together with media in the world in which anthropologists, along with many others, are actors. This chapter focuses on lament’s relation to those new media that help define late or postmodernities – with reference to metacultures of newness

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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versus tradition. I use Urban’s notion of metacultures as sets of criteria for evaluating cultural objects, and forces affecting their movement. I then propose a revision of his model in relation to semiotic theory and the role of new electronic media. Mass media tend to circulate cultural objects that are definable, and – in a metaculture of modernity – valued as somehow new. The new wine requires new wineskins, and indeed the new media befit the metacultural embrace of newness. Film, television, and new electronic media defy the national boundaries that earlier generations of moderns fought to establish. Even though media are always consumed locally, the new media form a kind of shifting sea in which lament-related websites and digital recordings of old laments float – along with competing media forms. Consuming media differs in significant ways from participating in older face-to-face rituals (of death, for example). And these new patterns of consumption shape the very nature of postmodernity. The concept of metacultures of newness should help us understand media and their crucial relation to what remains of “traditional lament” today.

Metaculture Imagine various exemplars of cultural forms – pots, films, television ads, and narrative performances of some myth – circulating in a population that shares enough “cultural stuff ” (products, categories, understandings, and values) to be a community. Communities are in the habit of judging the sameness or difference of such forms – i.e., their fit with past molds. These evaluations exemplify metacultural signs: reflexive cultural signs that “frame” (Goffman 1974) primary cultural signs. Such evaluations adhere to and frame the primary products, and help maintain community integrity.

Metacultures of tradition and of newness The nature of the judgments differs according to the metaculture. In the Amazonian group studied by Urban, for example, word-for-word correspondence was the normative standard required for one myth-telling to be judged “the same” as another – and therefore valid. The embrace of such

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replication – coupled with a reliance on fairly widespread learning of the skills needed to reproduce (and thus transmit) the form – characterizes what Urban (2001) calls metacultures of tradition. In Urban’s algebra of culture, metacultures of tradition involve replication, i.e., β-products that closely replicate α-products. Metacultures of modernity do not; they jump to the far alphabetical horizon – ω, omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Metacultures of modernity recognize cultural continuities more subtle than those involved in literal replication. New products – Urban calls them ω-objects, pieces of ω-culture – are recognizably related to older ones, but pull together pieces or themes from several older objects, in other to create something judged to be sufficiently “new.” As such, ω-objects freely improvise on older themes. So for example, jazz, as an improvisational genre in which no song is ever played the same way twice, but always renewed in each performance, perfectly represents a metaculture of newness or “modernity.” Of course, in any metacultural regime, cultural “concepts” are still embodied in physical form. But their dissemination does not rely on replication. A metaculture of tradition demands more formal continuity; here, replication and dissemination go hand in hand. The dissemination of an Amazonian myth from generation to generation requires its formal replication in each myth-telling. Metacultures of modernity sever the bond between dissemination and replication. Thus a factory replicates products like films, but the dissemination of the ideas and skills needed to make a film does not arise in the neighborhoods around DVD factories or rental outlets. Films circulate without producing in viewers the ability to replicate them. In Urban’s model, the dynamic entity we call culture faces the challenge of getting from one place and time to another: culture must circulate. This circulation requires metaculture, whether traditional or modern. Cultural reproduction requires judgments and circulatory “oomph” – forces that enable and enhance the circulation of some approved cultural products and inhibit the circulation of others. Metacultural judgments and other reflections affect the circulation of primary-level items like pots or films – but metacultural judgments themselves also circulate. Tradition lends cultural products some of the energy they need to overcome natural “deceleration.” What sorts of products receive the oomph of a metacultural embrace under tradition? Those that replicate past products. Not only that. In products produced under metacultures of tradition, the replication is also internal. That is, the (un)natural selection process

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at work in a metaculture of tradition favors products that are internally repetitive, “built around an internal architecture of repetition” (2001:85; compare Ivy 1995:176–178). The theme-and-variations structure common in classical music and in laments contrasts with, say, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, which – like much music in the 20th century – broke new ground by defying the norms of internal repetition characterizing older musical genres. The Rhapsody does have repeated themes, but they appear and reappear unpredictably. It achieved popularity in part because of that very startling creativity. Metaculture and modernity Urban describes modernity as a “metaculture of newness.” Metacultures of newness do not embrace exact copies as valuable cultural contributions but – when made by unauthorized parties – prosecute mimics for copyright infringement. It is particularly true of metacultures of modernity that valued cultural objects create their own new pathways of circulation. Anthropologists Ben Lee and Ed LiPuma write similarly of “cultures of circulation,” created by the kinds of products that circulate through them; they are pathways created by the circulation they can then facilitate (2002:192). New media, and new sorts of global financial transactions, are examples. Lee and LiPuma’s description is particularly apt for the ω-forms – whose similarity to previous forms is abstract rather than literal – that circulate in metacultures of newness. Some forms of production are highly rewarded where this sort of metaculture has sway, while the skills required for memorization or the careful replication of work along traditional lines may be denigrated as wooden, literalistic, unintelligent, or uncreative. If new cultural products create new pathways of circulation (Lee and LiPuma 2002; Urban 2001:22–25, 217) and are recognized as new types, all the better. So, for example, in recent music or film criticism, the labels “genre artist” and “genre film” are derogatory for precisely the reason that modernity favors products that create new paths. Even those who improvise on an overly conventional formula fall short; little reward comes to those who parrot or reproduce others’ work too closely. Clearly there are exceptions – for example, the frequent production of older plays and the performance of classical symphonies. Even here, however, audiences look for new twists or at least new energy. Urban puts it this way:

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If a cultural object is recognized metaculturally as obviously linked to or derived from a prior object, then the new object can be construed as “brilliant,” a work of “genius,” only if it is understood, metaculturally, as a response to rather than a replica of that prior object. (2001:197; emphasis added)

Urban’s metaculture model is useful, primarily because it reminds us of the always-already reflexive nature of culture and cultural transmission. The model also provides a way to understand the displacement of metacultures of tradition by metacultures of newness, an analysis of modernity I generally agree with. The revision of the model I offer later in this chapter addresses its failure to deal systematically with the hybrid nature of almost all forms of modernity, i.e., the tendency of modernist voices to resurrect the links to tradition that their discourse ostensibly severs (Bauman and Briggs 2003).

The view of lament from a metaculture of newness Where does lament fit into the model of metacultures of newness? The answer is complex – requiring some revision of the metaculture model. There is quite a bit that is repetitive and thus predictable about laments, at least in funeral settings. Still, even from the earliest known written examples of lament, we find evidence of improvisation, historical specificity, or contextualization. In laments or nearly any other performance genre, contextualization always entails balancing creativity and conventionality (Briggs 1988). Genres are structures of expectation (Bauman 1999). Such generic expectations have always given structure to laments. This reflexive semiotic order structuring performance is, as I said in Chapter 2, metacultural. Generic expectations here include melodic patterns conventionally associated with sadness and lament (Auerbach 1984:204; Feld 1990[1982]:99; see also Chapter 2). Yet innovation and improvisation thrive in lament genres. To find acceptance, laments must appear as something new – contextualized to some extent to fit the particular death or other occasion – yet recognizable (Propp 1984[1963]:32). The biographical dimension of each individual funerary lament, and lament’s general tendency toward a “subjective evaluation of reality” (Propp 1984:33), balance the formulaic elements. Lament formulae for lyrical and musical performance are traditionally transmitted; but this fact has no more stopped lament performers from

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improvising them than the copyrights on any 20th-century American song prevent jazz musicians from de- and re-composing it in jam sessions. Local genres of lament are re-created or renewed in each performance. The “pressure” to improvisationally contextualize “traditional” laments is something for which there is no explicit space in Urban’s model of metaculture. The very model of a balance between improvisation and repetition is interpretive, and metacultural. This balance, championed by Parry and Lord (see Chapter 8) in their rehabilitation of oral epic poets from Homeric to Slavic, is a rehabilitation strategy that is itself quintessentially modernist, reflecting the nostalgic-modern metaculture. However, our view of lament balancing replication and innovation is not the view of contemporary elite and elite-aspiring members of those societies where lament was once a common expressive form. Composer and ethnomusicologist Zoltán Kodály (1971:85) claimed that most people in Hungary (speakers of a non-Indo-European Finno-Ugrian language) regard lament as “old-fashioned and antiquated.” Kodály did not say that those Hungarian folk critics invoke the repetitiveness of lament to justify their “scorn and mockery” (1971:85). But criticism of lament’s repetitiveness – a critique reflecting a metaculture of newness – arises in relation to Setu, another Finno-Ugrian language. Vaike Sarv’s dissertation (reviewed in English by Tiuu Jaago) describes the now defunct “lament culture” of a Balto-Finnic people, the Setu. Chapter 9 noted that Jaago and Sarv contrast the lexical breadth and flexibility of “modern literary language” (presumably modern Setu, or perhaps Estonian) with the more constrained, stereotyped lexicon of Setu laments. In other important ways, the work of Sarv and Jaago contributes to reproducing a metaculture of modernity. Sarv studied with Finnish folklorist Aili Nenola in the late 1990s. For Nenola, lament is firmly planted on the wrong side of modernity; it cannot survive any attempts to transplant it in modern contexts, and thus revivals are doomed to produce only “curiosities” (2002:82). Nenola’s work is far more subtle and powerful than this brief discussion can reflect, acknowledging that the incompatibility of lament with modern life is complex, multi-faceted. Perhaps, however, there is at least some connection, for Nenola, between lament’s repetitive predictability – the “repetition of . . . [the common motifs pervasive in lament that] can even seem somewhat monotonous” (Propp 1984[1963]:32) – and her conviction that it is dead, beyond reviving. Such representations of lament invoke a frame central to one dominant global discourse – modernity as new and creative and tradition as old, stereotyped, and stilted.

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The connection between lament’s predictability and its assumed unsuitability to modernity is implicit in Sarv’s description of two pieces of professional music that exploit lament motifs. In these pieces for performance on the modern stage, composers and interpreters . . . interpret what is behind the laments, thus taking their emotional message home to the modern listener by . . . well-known musical means. It is only natural that part of the original information gets lost on the audience, yet new meanings will be added to sustain communication. This nourishes our hope that even though lamenting is disappearing from the traditional village culture, laments will not altogether disappear from the Estonian cultural landscape, reappearing in a new [ω-cultural] context created by professional musicians of today. (English summary of Sarv 1999; emphasis added)

Disgorging an abstract “emotional message” underlying lament befits a metaculture addicted to recycling the threads and message-cores of old products. Yet the recuperative motivation hints at the hybridity, or vacillation, inherent in modernity – in fact, problematizing the tidy distinction between metacultures of modernity and tradition. [L]amenting in its original homogeneous form is no longer thinkable. At the same time [the] lamenting tradition offers inexhaustible inspiration to modern concert music, creating thus a new form of communication. (Jaago 2000, paraphrasing Sarv)

For Jaago and Sarv, lament in and of itself would have no value in modern society. Yet even a dead tradition can be made to live on, although only if it surrenders its threads to be woven into the fabric of totally new musical compositions performed not in ritual or communal contexts but on concert stages. It is this metacultural ambivalence that prompts a revision of Urban’s model of metaculture.

Revising the metaculture model The scholarly literature on lament – all (to my knowledge) dating after the early 19th century – is, naturally, a product of its time, and reflects the concerns of the scholars’ own social class and culture. Those concerns include questions about the “traditional” or “creative” features of a

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particular lament, and how “dynamic” a given local tradition might be. Scholarly discourse may evince either appreciation (even longing) for tradition and traditional avenues of expression, or a critical preference for creativity. Such scholarship is metacultural, and the implications of the twofaced modernist stance for a theory of metaculture occupy our attention in this section. Greg Urban broke important new ground in elaborating the notion of metaculture. I offer here a revision based on a return to the semiotic anthropology of language from which the model derives. Seeds of my revision can be found in his work, but they are underdeveloped. Urban recognized that “a too pervasive metaculture of newness calls up feelings of object loss that motivate a desire to stabilize the sensible world, give it an air of permanence, through traditional replication” (2001:232). He acknowledged anthropologists’ participation in a broader nostalgia, i.e., a cultural discourse on loss (2001:244). This hints at the hybridizing tendency of modernity that we must attend to more closely. Chapter 2 introduced the concept of pragmatic or indexical meaning – what people do with words (i.e., “speech acts”), the contextualization of speech, the ways speech points to context – and its relation to “the metapragmatic” (characterizations of the pragmatic, of speech as action). The culture–metaculture relationship builds on Silverstein’s (1976) model of the pragmatic and metapragmatic, or the indexical and meta-indexical (Lee 1997). These pairs remind us of the fact that language and culture involve an irreducibly reflexive dimension. If a performance is a first-order cultural (f)act, a “review” of the performance (such as film reviews, which are important examples of metaculture for Urban) is a reflexive, secondorder cultural (f)act, ideologically driven. Silverstein’s work on such reflexivity is complex and nuanced. He proposes that indexes – linguistic features that somehow point to their social contexts, without necessarily referring to them – are never simple. Sociolinguists tell us that “dialect” or “accent” is indexical, i.e., it points to some sort of “identity” (regional, “racial,” class, etc.). Folk sociolinguists – i.e., all of us when we characterize “men’s speech,” “academic language,” “primitive” or “passionate” expression – may appear simply to point to “real” links (“indexical relations”) between some patterned use of language and some social category. We frequently hear statements like “Don’t they speak oddly [badly, obtusely, etc.]!” Silverstein’s analysis (2003) shows that such commonplace statements flatten out a crucial relationship. They erase their own role in creating what

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appear to be simple, empirical links between classes of speakers and particular speech forms. Such links are statistical rather than absolute; metapragmatic characterizations tend to make the statistical into the ideological-absolute. In New York City Labov’s quantitative sociolinguistic studies found a statistical relationship between the dropping of r’s after vowels (as in car, pronounced cah) and socioeconomic class; but there are enough exceptions to conclude that claiming that such a pattern straightforwardly indexes class is ideology, not fact. Silverstein calls such claims and characterizations second-order indexes. Statistical correlations between populations and speech patterns are primary or first-order indexes; characterizations of them are metaindexical, or second-order indexes, pointing to the ostensible “fact” at the first level. Evaluative remarks about speech are second-order indexes (metaindexical, metapragmatic). Yet all speech is produced in the awareness that it may or will be reacted to, or evaluated. Widely circulating evaluations – particularly those that judge social groups, for example New Yorkers, and are known by them – have well-documented effects on New Yorkers’ r-dropping. This means that the (potential) evaluation or second-order index interacts powerfully with first-order “fact.” We never meet first-order indexical facts, like the frequency of r-dropping in some New Yorkers’ English that makes such speech vulnerable to negative stereotyping (Labov 1972), in a pure form. The “pure” index already reflects the evaluation. The complete “social fact” (Durkheim 1996[1895]) thus differs from the first-order index; it encompasses the give and take between first- and second-order indexes. The effect of second-order on first-order indexes occurs in interactional realtime (Silverstein 2003:227). Speech acts viewed as pointing to already established social identities (such as class) at one order of indexicality are already informed by consciousness of the next indexical order up the scale, i.e., characterizations of the relationship between speech and social status. Although these characterizations distort reality to some degree, certain speech forms still seem to carry unquestioned information (indexicality) – or relational effects, as in the stated or unstated impression, “Your speech lowers [or raises] you in my eyes.” Under many circumstances – and Pygmalion and My Fair Lady explored those circumstances – “one ‘is’ (or ‘becomes,’ if ever so temporarily) what one (manages to) speak” (Silverstein 2003:219–220). I have thus far stressed instances in which second-order reflections influence speech activity. There is another possible relationship between

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second- and first-order indexes: contradiction. This is the case, for example, in relation to speech taken to be polite or “honorific.” For many English speakers, but particularly for Javanese who have elaborated three distinct registers or levels of “honorification,” some speech forms pay more deference to the addressee than others. This is a first-order index: using deferential forms honors your addressee. But a second-order index again applies to some extent for English speakers, and particularly to the Javanese: one is what one does in terms of honor (adapting Silverstein 2003:216). Speakers who give respect deserve respect. These two rather contradictory indexical levels “compete dialectically” (2003:216). They form a competing pair of language ideologies, defined as shared understandings of the workings of speech. The culture–metaculture relationship has, in my view, more of this dialectical nature than Urban lets on. And it shares some of the features of the Javanese speech levels example in which second-order competes with first-order indexicality. I take the “metaculture of tradition/modernity” dichotomy to be a first-order indexical “fact.” That is, it is true that certain cultural judgments manifest an orientation toward either tradition (replication) or innovation/ cutting-and-pasting/ω-products/newness. But it is equally true that such orientations are ideologically informed, and that ideologies of modernism include some nod toward the values of traditionalism. Consider as an example state- or tribal-level planning for the revitalization of a linguistic or cultural tradition. Such efforts are metacultural in two senses: they rely on a certain ideological depiction of first-order indexes (“this language” indexes “this culture”), and they are reflexive interventions in the history of such indexes. Metacultural judgments are second-order cultural facts, and they slow or speed the circulation of the cultural forms they judge. Latifa’s laments and her kinsmen’s angry reactions to them are a pair of first- and second-order cultural facts. But so are statements about “the death of lament” – that “death” being a lower-order cultural “fact” – vis-à-vis my higher-order reflection that these rumors of lament’s death are not only exaggerated but constitute a new form of lament, which turns the first “fact” (death) on its head, just as the second-order Javanese index turns the first on its head. In the revision of the metaculture model I propose, the relationship does not end there, in sets of paired facts. The dialectic is ongoing and irreducible to a paired, let alone a “single-order,” analysis (Silverstein 2003:227). What effect would this revision have on the dichotomizing

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vision of metacultures of tradition and modernity? I have consistently argued that modernity has two faces – the iconoclastic and the nostalgic – rather than one. Yet even that is inadequate unless we have some model for oscillations between the two, or other variations over time. Apparently stable patterns of hegemony that sped language loss in one century can give way, under pressure, to official policies favoring language revitalization. (Metacultural) discourses of intolerance may yield to a metacultural stance of openness (admittedly more apparent than real, Friedman 2003). The desire to destroy “tradition,” including “traditional languages” and genres like lament, yields to nostalgia – albeit temporarily. But what is this “circulation” of culture and metaculture I have been describing, and what does a revision of the dichotomous model of metaculture imply for models of circulation?

Media-ting the metaculture of newness Culture cannot move through thin air. As Urban points out, “cultures” – which for him means conceptual systems – are always embodied in objects. Each object is a medium for transmitting culture, and only through such media can culture circulate. But “media” has taken on a very particular sense in “the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin 1968). This is the age in which stories or performances circulate not just from mouth to mouth but – in a way that somehow defines the last several centuries vis-à-vis all that came before – first in print, then in broadcast and film, and now in web-mediated communication. Print really took off with the rise of capitalism, and print capitalism is a powerful hybrid – but now only a small part of the larger culture industry, the many-headed industry that produces media, arts, and entertainment and infotainment. These media have arisen or proliferated precisely in the age of capitalism in which “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman 1982). That is, capitalism “cannot exist without” constantly updating products, production lines, relations, and ideas (Marx and Engels n.d. [1848]); thus the media under capitalism require a constant stream of new content. But even “tradition” is perfectly acceptable as a source of “new” content, as in lament-infilm such as The Language You Cry In. In fact, the notion of “tradition” was invented to satisfy the dual needs of creating modern nation-states (each needing its own unique body of tradition), and supplying content in the

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form of books of folktales for early print capitalism. The modern state and tradition emerged together, constituting each other (Bauman and Briggs 2003:224).

Media and transnationalism Folklorist Aili Nenola (2002) argues that lament traditions require stable, patriarchal, agrarian – and, though she does not say so, perhaps isolated – societies. Isolated societies do not exist today. My most recent trip to Bangladesh (2000) convinced me that the circulation of broadcast and electronic media marks this age as one of greatly intensified globalization. I saw satellite dishes on thatch-roofed village homes whose inhabitants were watching international media content, heard a Bangladeshi psychiatrist blame a purported upswing in serious mental illness on some of that content (American cartoons being viewed by too many), and frequented internet cafes in Dhaka. A number of factors shape the phenomena referred to as transnationalism, including “circular migration” patterns in which Bangladeshis move to London and back again, etc. (Gardner 1995). But media also move – with no respect for national borders. The borders of nation-states, like those of the human body (Martin 1990, 1992), seem increasingly porous; globalization at times threatens to erase borders. CNN and Al-Jazeerah, the Arabic network once called the “CNN of the Middle East,” have not only helped shape identity. In telling stories (“news”) from a perspective attractive to different sorts of audiences distributed over huge areas of the planet, they have helped foster transnational identity in ways unimaginable before the electron’s age. Global and even regional media help create selves that draw part of their sense of identity from transnational connections, myths, and narratives. In that sense, late modernity, in the guise of new technologies for circulating news discourse from a dizzying array of places around the world, mass produces a story-form that seems to be told from nowhere, or nowhere stable and particular. Urban’s description of ω-culture fits the circulation of media quite well: It is threads of stories and styles, rather than story-wholes, that circulate. Rupert Murdoch’s Hong Kong-based StarTV now broadcasts a very locally adapted version of South Park in Mandarin into Taiwan. The humor is full of off-color allusions to events current in Taiwan (Chu 2000). What circulates befits the metaculture of modernity: Abstract sensibilities of the

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original show, not the names of characters or the plots, make the passage from Hollywood to Taiwan via Hong Kong. Anthropologist Marco Jacquemet notes the role of media in the deterritorialization of discourse. Deterritorialization, he argues, requires “the displacement and dispersion of a subjectivity unrestrained by territorial control” (2003). New electronic media – the web, email, blogs, and instant messaging – exemplify the ways in which the latest wave of globalization has effected a fundamental deterritorialization of discourse. Traditional laments, rooted in places they sometimes thematize (Trawick 2002), cannot pass unchanged into cyberspace. Cyber-mediated communication cannot help but destabilize the linguistic forms of deixis common in laments – shifters like “here,” “this,” “I,” “you,” “now.” When these forms do occur in cyber-media, as Jacquemet (2003) notes, participants may well experience disorientation in trying to interpret them. What does “here” mean on a website? What do “now” and “we” – both classically identified as shifters or indexes, terms requiring a shared immediate spatiotemporal context to interpret them – mean in this web-based world? Consider this sentence by Sen: “And now as we consider this Munda tribal song from Chhotanagpur (very close to Mithila), we hear Sita’s sigh again” (see my discussion of Sen, below; Sita is the female protagonist of the Ramayana). The shifters used in e-discourse can give us a bad case of vertigo.

Media and spectacle Mediating passivity Concern over the passivity the media putatively encourage surfaced long before Jacquemet wrote about “vertigo.” What transgresses borders in the age of global media is not only media but also a way of producing and receiving culture. Guy Debord argues that the age of mass media represents a broad cultural shift in the dominant mode of popular participation in the production of cultural forms: The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. . . . The spectacle . . . is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory. (Debord 1994:12, 15; emphasis added)

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We can almost hear Debord sigh. In what Debord calls the Society of the Spectacle, the public become consumers rather than producers of (meta)culture. Performance genres like lament require a high degree of audience participation. The increasing dominance of the passive consumption of culture has a deep and lasting effect on contexts where active creation and consumption are required, such as the “traditional” contexts for Setu lament, described earlier. At the end of the twentieth century there are many singers who can lament, but the communication is lost: funeral guests who represent the urbanising [Setu] society no longer know how to communicate through lamenting or with [a] lamenter, and have assumed the role of an audience. (Jaago 2000, summarizing Sarv 1999)

This transformation in the participant structure surrounding Setu lament has been part of what has killed it. Theorists of media and cultural transformation like Debord see the passivization of the masses as a broad trend. In this view, a cultural consensus defining performance as participatory has given way to modes of cultural production and participation that encourage spectatorship. And these different modes of participation and performance correspond with different forms of subjectivity (Lee 1997:345). Finnish-Karelian “cry women” traditionally experienced themselves as something akin to shamans (Tolbert 1990); but in today’s Finland, apart from the performanceoriented courses reintroducing lament as “therapy,” those who merely listen to the CD of Karelian laments archived by the Finnish Literature Society experience no such self-transformation. Complicating the “passivity of media consumption” story A few scholars, dissatisfied with the broad strokes of critics like Debord, have attempted empirical ethnographic studies of media and viewership (Peterson 2004). Appadurai (1996), for example, while admitting that mass media team up with migration to transform the global process of group self-imagination, nonetheless asserts that mass media do not so much dull the senses as foster new forms of collective imagination and collective action. Although such self-imaginations and actions are not completely free (it is still a capitalist world), they are significant. Similarly, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg speaks of the “unequal ‘looking relations’ ” – a phrase that calls to mind shame as a vulnerability to

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being seen in a certain way – involved in global or national media portrayals of “indigenous cultures.” On the one hand, indigenous people are taking hold of screen media for the purpose of telling their own stories of traumatic cultural loss – stories that have been “erased in the national narratives of the dominant culture and are in danger of being forgotten within local worlds as well.” On the other hand, this “retelling [of] stories for . . . media . . . often involves reshaping them” in and for the political economy in which they are situated (2002:40–41). The remainder of this chapter (as well as the next, with its focus on revivals) balances these perspectives. The circulation of “Rainforest Country” In writings and in several music CDs he has released, anthropologist and ethnomusicologist Steve Feld presents a very useful description of a particular case of hybridity, describing songs that (1) draw on tradition while manifesting a metacultural embrace of newness, (2) reflect both the global circulation of music and local agency, and (3) evince a nostalgia that – though it bears some relation to modernist nostalgia – is peculiarly local. The role of global musical flows in Feld’s (in press) story of “rainforest country” is striking. Earlier chapters of this book introduced the notion of interdiscursive chains. The chain Feld describes is one that includes old laments, global Country music, and one very recent hybrid song that was inspired by the Bosavi (Kaluli)1 lament tradition on the one hand, and the global Country on the other. The Bosavi guitar bands Feld recorded call their music gita gisalo, “guitar songs” – a genre quite different from traditional gisalo, “songs.” The song “My Father, My Heart” quotes the discarded saya:lab laments, repeating the “sound syllable ya:-” that “represents . . . the crying voice; it is the onomatopoeic root of the Kaluli verb for ‘cry.’ ” The lines below give a feel of the song’s emotional force: MY FATHER, MY HEART ni dowo: ni himuwo: ni dowo: aba] aneya: ya:-a: ni dowo: mo:yabo: ga:lo dowabiki ofo: sinabiki ho:dabiki ni dowa: ‘gab’-a:la:fo:

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ga:lo ka:la:kediyawo: sowo: mo:dowabiki ya:-a: ni dowa: ko: anelo: my father, my heart my father where did he go? (crying-syllable) my father isn’t coming when afternoon is passing when the sun is setting calling out, it sounds like my father late in the afternoon I listen but there is no talk (crying-syllable) my father is gone for good

The syllable ya:- performed with the “vocal break of the crying voice . . . makes Bosavi listeners think of the sound of the sung weeping of funerary laments for the recently deceased” (Feld in press:18). The song’s cowriter, Oska, used the morpheme ya: to link past and present. Although Oska does not quite say “I am grieving the loss not only of father but of his culture, including lament,” he says of the song, “I’m coming back to that one, the way it was, daddy’s time.” Indirectly, at least, the song is thus a metalament. Oska and Feld co-create an account of interdiscursivity, refashioning tradition to serve a metaculture of newness, making something new of saya:lab lament. Quoted in gita gisalo, a bit of lament lives on in a hybrid ω-product. The defunct lament tradition, eliminated by missionary pressure (Feld 1995:100), creatively indexes a new musical discourse of nostalgia, of “loss and recovery” (Ivy 1995:12). Each saya:lab lament memorialized one death; Oska’s song memorializes those very laments and the cultural past they epitomize. But what sort of nostalgia do the songs construct? Chapter 9 argued that modern discourses partake of the quality of lament. Here I would like to point out the structural homologies between one modern discourse – comments about lament by anthropologists and their academic kin – and traditional laments (and Oska’s metalament). The liner notes to Feld’s three-CD collection of Bosavi music include this observation:

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This [1990s genre, gita gisalo] is the music of the first generation of Bosavi people to grow up in an independent Papua New Guinea. It is also the music of the first generation of Bosavi people to grow up with evangelical missionization central to their everyday lives. This is a generation largely stripped of the ritual and ceremonial knowledge and practice of previous generations. (Feld 2001)

Feld’s liner notes treat “My Father, My Heart” as a mediating link in the interdiscursive chain between saya:lab lament and the notes themselves. Is not Feld’s comment a (meta)lament?2 Feld’s (2001:28) description of the passing of Bosavi lament uses some of the dramatic imagery typifying laments. He speaks of a new generation of Bosavi people “stripped” of knowledge of ritual practices like laments. Stripping evokes the tearing of clothing and hair associated with violent wailing – though Feld intended no such metaphor (personal communication, September 2004). Differences between academic mourning over traditional laments and those laments themselves – especially the conventionalization of lament’s formal features, features mostly absent from academic metalaments – are also significant. Still, the homologies seem clear: Traditional laments refer to individuals’ deaths; academic mourning (Bernstein 1993; Brueggemann 1986) refers to lament’s death. Some academic accounts point out lament’s killers – “modernization” (Seremetakis 1991) or “missionization” (Feld 1995) – just as Warao women lamenting a death accuse shamans (Briggs 1992). The particular case of Bosavi gita gisalo neatly illustrates the more complex model of metaculture – and the role of media in a metaculture of modernity – that this chapter has developed. Feld does not say that Oska’s song circulates locally on cassette or CD, though this would not surprise me. The mediatization of the song is, instead, Feld’s own doing, a part of his contribution to preserving and circulating the musical products of a New Guinean group caught up in rapid change. The sense of nostalgia in Oska’s discourse – or, to frame it in more neutral terms, valuing the old as well as the new – is tangible. But the newness of Oska’s song is also obvious. If it were not perceived as new, modern, and starkly different from traditional gisalo and saya:lab laments, the new fundamentalist Christian emotional regime would not accept it. What it does tolerate – perhaps, what it most needs – is expressiveness of a new, nostalgic sort. This chapter’s conclusion presents a more complete answer to the question posed earlier as to what sort of nostalgia we find among Bosavi people. That answer problematizes notions of nostalgia as simply the

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degenerate practice of elites distanced from the cultural material they apparently long for. Drawing on Stewart (1988), Feld (in press) sharply distinguishes the creativity – and localized, grounded authenticity – of Bosavi nostalgia from the nostalgia of consumer capitalism. “My Father, My Heart” reflects an aesthetic of personal expression (Benjamin 1968:241) fostered by media capitalism, though clearly one with ties to the aesthetics of Bosavi lament. The metacultural forces propelling the song through time and space – including Feld’s CD set (circulating among musical intellectuals and culture consumers with their own form of nostalgia), but also Oska’s desire to hang on to something of “daddy’s time” – somehow exemplify both Bosavi tradition and the personal expressivism fostered and circulated by media and the mediation of experience. The song is thus pre-adapted for mass circulation as world music. This is not surprising, given Oska’s exposure to recordings of American Country artists, and perhaps of “contemporary Christian music” (exalting a subjective experience of God) that might well have reached Bosavi. No embrace of newness is ever complete. Tradition and conventionalism always compete with the iconoclastic drive. Yet, the apparent reproduction of tradition in a song like Oska’s is mostly fictitious. Clearly the American who listens to Feld’s CD, even the one who endures the painful lament tracks as well as Oska’s song in the CD box set, is far from the traditional cultural domain in which saya:lab laments were once created.3 And Oska is not far behind in this race to abandon traditional sites of reproduction.

Web Mediation of Indian Self-Consciousness: The Online Revival of “Ancient” Lament Criticisms To a large extent “tradition” – the patina of antiquity, which has great value in the circulation of songs as commodities – is a modern construction. The discourse of modernity requires and constitutes as its Other something “traditional.” At the same time, having constituted a rift between past and present, modernist discourses transect that divide, trawling the past for treasures worth salvaging for contemporary use (Adams 2001). This section considers web-mediated discourse about Hinduism and lament. What makes recent metatexts and their current circulation on the web so interesting is the impact the web may well have on popular impressions

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of Hinduism, India, or ancient Indian texts. Audiences impacted by webcirculated discourses on India must include large numbers of South Asians whose “self ”-concept is ever more clearly formed in dialog with others. Among these recent texts that re-present and in some way remake “ancient Indian texts” are some that touch on lament. Many sites re-present the ancient Hindu texts mentioned in Chapter 4 (the Ramayana and Mahabharata) in which one figure or another critiques lament as unenlightened, irrational, and – from some perspective “in” the text – womanly. Consider for example “The Home Page of Sita” accessible on the charmingly named site, Mantra on Net. The site seems designed to serve the cause of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, as this metatextual summary of Rama’s longing for Sita indicates: During Rama’s exile, Ayodhya, the capital of Rama’s kingdom, is desolate. . . . Sita is kidnapped and separated from Rama. At one point Rama is reduced to a blubbering, half-maddened wreck and must be returned to sobriety by the appeals of his brother Lakshmana, who tells him it is unmanly and improper to lament. (; emphasis added)

Unmanly? Whether or not this is an accurate summary of the Ramayana’s stance toward lament, modern Indians cannot read the quoted passage without reference to India’s humiliation under the British Raj and its struggle to reconstitute its traditions as resources for manly resistance. The sexualized sense of shame is hard to miss in modern Indian writers seeking a national recovery from the trauma of colonial domination (Nandy 1983:24). Lord Hanuman, the divine hero of the Ramayana, joins this online attack on lament, at least in his incarnation on another web page produced by Mantra on Net: “He who follows the path of right thinking does not lament or cry over the death of dear ones.” Whether or not the next lines derive from an ancient text, their peculiarly modern resonances are clear: “One must look towards the future, as the past is gone. One can better one’s future only.” (). The linear sense of time, the future orientation, shows the iconoclastic face of modernity. Choreographer and scholar Ananya Chatterjea performed “From Sita: Lament, Fury, and a plea for peace” at a feminist gathering (1998). Recontextualizing the gendering of lament in Hindu discourse, Chatterjea

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“critique [d] patriarchal narrativizations of history” invoked in support of Hindu-nationalist-inspired communal violence. In my piece Sita begins by lamenting the destruction that she sees around her and is thereafter infuriated that her name has been associated with such meaningless violence. Then, in keeping with the conception of Sita in rural and tribal imaginaries, where she is invoked in movements toward land reclamation projects and in movements against the use of chemical fertilizers, she moves to a dance about nurture, healing, and growth.

Chatterjea’s Sita starts with laments4 and moves to fury, co-opting the powerful, ancient figure (mournful, wrathful, then nurturing, in the new vision) for contemporary activist causes. The texts are ancient, but the recontextualizations are postmodern. Sita’s narrative is refunctionalized. There is in Chatterjea’s recontextualization something of the drive to revitalize lament that I focus on in the next chapter.

Conclusion Let us return briefly to India, Indian websites, and other cases presented in this chapter, reconsidering them in relation to the revised theory of culture and metaculture that I have been developing. The history of India and its ancient texts is not one we can approach innocently, as though it did not bear colonialism’s enduring mark. British civil servants in India formulated their mission in terms of modernization. British Orientalism, especially in Bengal (Kopf 1969), involved co-opting the textual traditions of India for academic study in the service of empire. The British did not regard this as a violent injustice, since they considered the Indians themselves no longer the worthy stewards of their great texts, having fallen away from them into a stupor of ignorance. Such wounding rhetoric, as Kakar (1978) makes clear, eventually spawned a revivalistic Hinduism whose most recent discursive manifestations can be found on the web. The metacultural values the British encouraged in India were “modern” – for example, rationalism and universalism of a sort. 19th-century British colonial modernism, however, was not opposed to tradition. British Orientalists in Bengal could be said to have invented a certain concept of

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tradition in the Indian context, though they did so in dialog with local voices. Many servants of the Raj devoted their efforts to stirring India from its “stupor,” pushing India from serving the old to embracing the new. Yet even some of these zealots saw India’s great textual traditions either as unavoidable forces to be reckoned with or perhaps as potentially positive forces. And, insofar as the British favored Hindus over Muslims and portrayed their Mughal Muslim predecessors as corrupt foreign invaders (Schwartz 1997), they created an atmosphere in which Islamic forces could be associated with backwardness and Hinduism – at least in its ancient texts – with relative enlightenment. This is part of the relevant context in which to read Indian-lament-related websites. We might consider the British colonial powers, and the work of Orientalists in particular, a first move – an assertion of a metaculture of newness. Countermoves responded to British power-assertions, but many of them had in common a revalorization of tradition. Some of the chief texts of Hinduism may well have served the interests of patriarchy. Although I have cited other interpretations, the Ramayana in particular can be said to contain a biting critique of lament as an effeminate, irrational, and weak form. India-related websites, particularly those invoking lament, flourish in a particular social-semiotic field. That field reflects a metaculture of modernity – but it is a postcolonial Indian modernity, and a modernity of traditionalism co-produced with colonial officers. The discourses on the websites we have examined must be analyzed as links in a metacultural chain – attack, response, etc. Metatexts that reproduce ancient attacks on lament also reflect British deprecations of India and Indian masculinity. As mentioned above, contemporary social identities may be constituted through shifters, particularly deployments of “we.” Oska’s song – like his commentary to and with Feld, which I have described as in some ways a metalament – uses only first-person singular pronouns – “my father,” “I listen but there is no talk [from my father] . . .” But consider this gita gisalo “celebrating” the New Year 1999, by a Bosavi guitar band calling itself “Lus Mangi Grin Neks” (Lost Boys/Green Necks): nofo:lo: nofo:lo: nofo:lo: nofo:lo: 1998-o: nofo:lo: nofo:lo: wagabiki nofolaya:? 1998-o: uwalo:seno: ha:nabo:lo:

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there’s sadness, sadness there’s sadness, sadness, for 1998, there’s sadness, sadness why is it sad like that? we were together in 1998, and it’s going out now

Feld treats the song as an example of how Bosavi nostalgia differs from the nostalgia deconstructed by Western theorists (e.g., Stewart 1993), i.e., the modernist lament analyzed in Chapter 9. Feld characterizes the modernity of Bosavi people in Papua New Guinea as “bush modernity” – a dose of global metaculture that does not change their marginal status in relation to modernity. In the Bosavi gita gisalo, bush modernity indicates that what is driving creative invention is the ability to make nostalgia into an endlessly renewable and socially productive resource. While theorists in the West once formulated nostalgia as a disease of memory, a sign of social destabilization, its New Guinea form signals something else entirely. To wit, nostalgia in Bosavi is a phenomenally effective mode of engaging the past in order to play it off of and into the present. It is a distinctive way of working on the power of that difference so as to proliferate new and expandable signs of difference. (Feld, in press:22)

We see the modernity of Lus Mangi Grin Neks’ gita gisalo in its use of newly introduced signifiers such as “1998” and “New Year’s Eve.” We see its bush modernity, its locally rooted and highly effective deployment of nostalgia in speaking to the present, in part in the “we” of the last song line quoted. Feld traces a continuity between saya:lab laments and gita gisalo as related discourses on loss: “The arena of dramatic musical loss, the very local world of ritual and ceremonial gisalo music, opened up in the 1990s to a new music, the guitar band sound of gita gisalo” (Feld, in press). The Lus Mangi Grin Neks’ pronouns and the first person plural pronouns in Tamara Bernstein’s online article, (meta)“Lament for the Women” (analyzed in Chapter 9) both index the nostalgia-discourses in which they are deployed and raise questions about who is indexed by first person plural pronouns: “Ours is . . . a society that is neurotic about death, and offers precious little in the way of healthy and empowering mourning rituals.” Mourning the loss of traditional lament, Bernstein goes on: “Many of us yearn for that catharsis, that ritual of grief, rage and peace” (1993; emphasis added).

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Urban is at his best when he applies his model of metacultural circulation to particular uses of the English pronoun “we” in various sources, arguing that a particular “we” – for example, “we the People,” or a “we” of universal humanity – can circulate among people in some kind of contact. What, then, is the role of these shifters in web-based discourse on lament? We can speculate that a “nostalgic we” – a product of late modernity – has somehow managed to circulate between the West and Papua New Guinea. The “nostalgic we” somehow captures the more ambiguous or dialectical model of metacultures of modernity (cum tradition) I have proposed. But, no doubt in every new instance of the “nostalgic we,” something local and something global are equally audible.

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Chapter 9 established that the narrative of modernity hinges on “loss” as much as “progress.” In relation to world music and particularly Steve Feld’s Smithsonian-Folkways CD of Bosavi music, Chapter 10 touched on homologies between traditional lament and (post)modern mourning. This chapter picks up from there, moving from the mournful discourse of scholars and liner notes to on-the-ground movements that have included lament, often celebrated as a revival of a part of “traditional culture.” It asks to what extent we can view revivals of lament, like Finland’s, as manifestations of a sort of authentic, resistant, local nostalgia.

Metalaments and Postmodern Regrets Lament has undergone a revival in terms of academic interest. That revival reached a high-water mark after the Austin Conference on the Anthropology of Lament in 1989. Indirectly, this indicates the extent to which lament is an important modern signifier. This section interrogates our own curiosity about lament, and asks about the links we ourselves forge in long intertextual chains that only begin with traditional lament at the old end (the Other’s end). Why do some of us write about ritual weeping and its disappearance (e.g., Bourke 1993:161–162; Schieffelin 2002:S9; Wilce 1998a:vi) – and why at this particular point in Western history? Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann (1986) bemoans “The Costly Loss of Lament,” i.e. contemporary Christian churches’ neglect of a genre that had helped the ancient Jewish people maintain a sharp sense of social justice. Biblical laments reminded those people – and their God – of commitments, covenants, promises. “A community of faith which

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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negates laments soon concludes that the hard issues of justice are improper questions to pose at the throne [of God, in lament-prayer], because the throne seems to be only a place of praise” (1986:64). This sense of loss finds its secular parallel in stories of lament’s “disappearance” from around the globe, and in the widespread rhetoric of mourning that pervades postmodern theoretical discourses. Tropes common to postmodern theory – “notions of shattering, rupture, mutilation, fragmentation . . . images of fissures, wounds, rifts, gaps, and abysses” (Santner 1990:7) – characterize the discourse of traditional lament equally well. They also characterize some ethnographic accounts of (the death of) lament. To be fair, if Kaluli singers, for example, express nostalgia for the days of daddy – the (pre-missionization) days of lament – it is appropriate to reflect that sentiment in ethnographic writing like Feld’s (in press) and Schieffelin’s (2002). Many modern ethnographers find themselves writing stories of loss, because in many cases they are the present-day stories of the people with whom they work. My claim is simply that ethnographers in this postmodern age – the age of collapsing confidence in old sources of authority, of mourning “the death of the signifier,” and celebrating hybridity – are obliged to be ethnographers of postmodernity. If the rhetoric of postmodern theory is mournful, postmodern ethnography often becomes the ethnography of postmodern mourning, and not just that of theorists. A vivid example is Marilyn Ivy’s work on the centrality of loss and death – the “phantasmatic,” “modernist nostalgia,” “recalcitrant spectacles of the elegiac,” “absenting,”1 and “image[s] of the unrecoverability of tradition”2 – to Japanese modernity (1995:4, 10, 12, 20, 148–149). “The relationship between the historical erasures effected by industrial capitalism since the late nineteenth century in Japan and the ongoing reinscriptions of those lost differences as identities is . . . phantasmatic” (1995:21–22). By phantasmatic, Ivy means not a fictional event but “an event across a relay of temporal deferral” in which the first and second events become figures of displacement (1995:22). To say that the pervasive longing to return to present origins . . . is phantasmatic does not mean that people are nostalgic for no good reason, that no “real” losses have been incurred in the rapid industrialization of the countryside, for example. It means rather that loss can never be known simply as loss, as originary loss. (1995:22)

In light of the importance of a rhetoric of mourning to our age and its theorists, there is special significance in ethnographers’ words about

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mourning and traditional laments. It is notable that Nadia Seremetakis, for example, describes “the modernization of death [in which] . . . urbanized kin attempt to silence discursive polyphony and singing [laments]” on the Greek island of Mani (1991:221; see also Chapter 5 above). Although we cannot equate unsung, emotionally distanced, postmodern academic mourning (e.g., Lyotard 1984) with traditional lament, we must explore their connections and isomorphisms, too ironic to pass unnoticed. The similarity of these metalament-memorializations to traditional lament’s memorializations is essential, not trivial. It entails a mimesis based on identification with “the dead” or dying – in this case, lament (even if the death of lament turns out to have been greatly exaggerated). The academic revival of lament is therefore unsurprising. It reflects broader cultural trends beyond the ivory tower. The “revival of death” and the postmodern bereavement movement Sociologist Tony Walter (1994) claims that, starting in the Victorian period, there has been a “revival of death” in the modern Anglophone world (compare Cannadine 1981). The Victorian obsession with death, which admittedly slipped off of Britain’s radar earlier in the 20th century along with Victorian sentimentalism, has recently made a comeback – particularly in the last decades of the 20th century. Walter describes the Natural Death Movement (NDM; Albery et al. 1993) as part of the “postmodern” hybridity that characterizes the so-called revival of death. The NDM draws “bits of death cultures from around the world” together (Walter 1994:42) into a pastiche that very much fits Urban’s (2001) model of metacultures of modernity and their preference for ω-culture. Albery et al.’s Natural Death Handbook (1993) includes a positive description of lament on the island of Crete in the chapter “ ‘Improving’ Grieving.” The “hybrid” descriptor is not only apt for the postmodern death movement; it reminds us of the need for the revised model of culture and metaculture, and of the significance of first person plural pronouns, stressed in Chapter 10. Making sense of this postmodern death movement requires the dialectical model of metaculture I proposed in Chapter 10. It has become almost obligatory for revivalist writers to eulogise primitive or Victorian death, in order to highlight the dreadful taboos and depersonalisation of the modern way (Walter 1994:42, citing Lofland 1978). . . . While asserting that all primitive cultures knew how to do death better than us, postmodern revivalists actually choose just the bits of primitive death that they personally would like to embrace. (Walter 1994:42; emphasis added)

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The revival of death in the Anglophone world includes what I call the “bereavement movement.” The United States and the United Kingdom have for 20 years witnessed growing movements to help the bereaved; bereavement is a major industry in late capitalism. Bereavement groups, bereavement counseling, online support, self-help books, and a large number of conferences reflect the revival of death Walter described. Leaders in the movement, like Tom Golden (1994), advocate incorporating the rituals of cultural Others – including lamentation – into our own ways of dealing with loss. As Årnason (2001) describes it, bereavement counseling legitimizes what I would call a metacultural embrace of private, endogenously generated, emotions. Apart from formal counseling in bereavement help centers (more common in the UK than the US), support groups play a key role in the “bereavement movement.” Training for group leaders – sometimes social workers – has at times included selections from Golden’s work. Golden has self-published a series of booklets on grief, the most interesting of which for our purposes is his Gender and Cultural Differences in Grief, which claims “Our culture is a death and grief denying culture” (1994:23; emphasis added). Think of the last time you were in a funeral home. Were there rituals there that helped you in dealing with death, or did you stand there uncomfortably not knowing what to say or talking with the guy next to you about the local sports team? There were no mourning songs for the men to sing together as is done in some cultures, no funeral drums to beat as is done in some cultures. (1994:25; emphasis added)

After reflecting thus on “our culture,” Golden continues along the lines of “there is a tribe in X where . . . .” After describing the “healthy” rituals of Others, Golden asserts, “We have much to learn from indigenous people about the resolution of grief. We can use this knowledge to find creative mechanisms that are right for us” (1994:43; emphasis added). What are “we” to make of Golden’s work? Where are we to place it? It is not ethnography, but the product of a late 20th-century United States culture steeped in psychology and aware of anthropology. It is a cultural product about culture – cheap, second-hand ethnography, but, like all ethnography, metacultural. In a postmodern world, ethnographies become resources for new forms of cultural pastiche and self-invention. Golden mines the ethnographic, or pseudo-ethnographic, literature in order to help Americans reinvent themselves as people who can lament and thus grieve effectively.

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Despite the rhetoric and the very real borrowings, bereavement counselors differ markedly from, say, Karelian cry-women or traditional Egyptian lamenters. Their counseling “typically entails the translation of whatever discourse the client originally produces into a discourse of feeling” (Årnason 2001:307). Given that traditional laments rarely made direct reference to feelings, but rather used elaborate metaphors for feeling (Nenola 2002) or referred instead to the actions of grief, the revival of death is no true reappearance of a lament tradition but rather a reappropriation. Golden pushes the envelope of the mainstream culture of therapy, reaching for spiritual as well as psychological renewal. In that effort he has an ally in Malidoma Somé. An African voice in the Jungian men’s movement Malidoma Patrice Somé is an African living in the United States – a selfstyled “shaman” (Somé 1995), an entrepreneur with Jungian connections, as his website shows (<malidoma.com>). He is the subject of a Hollywood film project started in 2007. Somé’s collaboration with Jungian men’s movement leaders Robert Bly and Michael Meade indicates the sort of cultural hybrid he represents – “He’s an ancient person interpreting modern life to village elders and showing village ways to modern eyes” (Meade 1993:16). He is thus the incarnation of the hybrid modernity I have described. A member of the Dagara tribe whose rituals his book, Ritual: Power, Healing and Community describes, Somé provides an outsider’s perspective on America. He draws a sharp contrast between Dagara communal, ritual lamentation and boring American funerals: “People who do not know how to weep together are people who cannot laugh together. People who know not the power of shedding their tears together are like a time bomb, dangerous to themselves and to the world around them” (1993:97). By contrast with this dangerous loss of ritual weeping Somé says of his own people, “the Dagara understand the expression of emotion as a process of self-rekindling or calming, which not only helps in handling death but also resets or repairs the feelings within the person” (1993:97). Both Somé’s discourse and responses to him recapitulate the primitivism of Böckel (1913) and others. Somé contributes to a long history of discourse that makes the West’s Other the guardian of healing. His discourse ascribes to primitive life the expressive freedom that the modern self seeks for its own healing. Yet Somé’s

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writing is multivocal. He writes as American modernity’s Other – a spokesman for his tribe – but also as a full participant in the West and its search for healing paths, one foot in tradition and the other in postmodernity. This double-timing or hybridity finds a parallel in Somé’s description of the “sacred space” formed in Dagara funerals between the corpse – propped up in a chair that becomes “the shrine” – and the crowd of mourners. Tribal members know that, in the sacred space between those two different areas, any sort of emotional expression goes. “They can dance their emotions, run around in response to a strong urge or just weep their guts out” (Somé 1993:101–102). This is the romanticized primitive condition where emotional freedom – here, the freedom to lament, wail, dance, and be angry – reigns. Somé is not just lamenting the loss of this freedom to lament, as the writers cited in Chapter 9 do. He envisions a “new post-modern tribal order” whose “elders” (including himself ) lead true, genuine rituals, unlike those the West has preferred (1993:127). And so, at least in some segments of the American Jungian scene, the beginnings of a revival of lament are stirring. But can the artificial hybridity of Golden and Somé spark anything with staying power?

Folklorization/Identity Movements and Ethnomimesis: Making Lament a “New” Product through Revivals The process of “folklorization” – “the collecting and naming of cultural phenomena as folklore and putting them on display as collections of such” (Anttonen 2005:57) – has been a major contributor to the building of modern nation-states whose people saw the amassing of resources to study an objectified field of folklore as a sign of their international legitimacy (Anttonen 2005). Today, folklorization feeds consumer capitalism, always hungry for new cultural products. The late modern culture industry seems to delight in making the old new enough to satisfy market demand for new products while maintaining the pretense that the truly old – traditional culture – has disappeared. Hence the phantasmatic, i.e. double-timed, nature of cultural revivals. In what follows, I attend to nostalgia/revival movements that even more directly invoke lament traditions.

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Reviving Tlingit potlatch songs It is dangerous to rhetorically create a world of loss and cast anthropologists as rescuers. Even in conceiving their work as salvage or preservation, anthropologists have contributed to objectifying people and notions of reciprocity. Basic-level anthropology and its trickle-down popularizations (for example in the Whole Earth Catalogue)3 have rendered the potlatch (Kan 1989) the paradigm case of purely material reciprocity. Introductory cultural anthropology texts treat the potlatch in chapters with titles like “Economic Systems.” But, as I mentioned in Chapter 6, the potlatch actually had great ritual significance and was the occasion of improvised funerary songs – laments in tribute to the dead. Thus, the textbooks exoticize “native economic forms” and – to the extent that they might acknowledge the ritual importance of the potlatch at all – erase discourse processes from “ritual structure.” Reciprocity is central to potlatches. But offerings (of songs as well as food) are paid to the dead, extending the potlatch’s reciprocity far beyond textbook treatments. The colonial-era ban on North American potlatches was lifted in recent decades. Ethnographic accounts of recently revived Tlingit potlatch performances in southeastern Alaska (Kan 1983, 1990) indicate that the reciprocity central to the performances anthropologist Sergei Kan observed involves something like that between Kaluli/Bosavi men and women (Feld 1990[1982]) – an exchange of feeling, moving people to appreciated and appreciative tears. These recent Tlingit potlatches still honor the dead, and the revived tradition of potlatch songs plays a key role in that. But at least some of the “revived” performances are at public school functions (compare Kuipers 1998). In some cases, those performances so drastically refunctionalize the potlatch songs as to render them offensive to elders (Kan 1990). When public schools teach “Tlingit culture” and children publicly perform “Tlingit song traditions,” the songs lack performative “oomph,” performativity being the power the words once had to bring about new realities in the world (Austin 1962). Teaching “native culture” in school may “preserve” it, but perhaps at the cost of “the decline of the religious practices’ spiritual value in the eyes of many of the younger performers, which hurts the feelings of the older and more conservative people for whom they remain sacred” (Kan 1990:355). However, the Tlingit elders did not give up. They accepted that secular school contexts might be the only means of passing on of the traditions

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but took initiatives “to preserve at least some of their sacredness” (1990: 356). Kan notes how the elders thanked the young performers for helping them re-experience times gone by, while also singing for them the songs capable of “soothing the pain of losing their beloved kin” (1990:360). Is this a promising example of local actors resisting “inevitable change” in creative ways that involve multiple generations in a mutually satisfying encounter with a revitalized tradition? Or is it an experiment that will remain trapped in artificiality? The final outcome is uncertain, but the factors to watch are the irreducibly dialectic relationship of evolving cultural products and evolving metacultural forces. The history of bans, their lifting, and the teaching of potlatch laments in schools has no apparent end. The commemorative function of traditional potlatches and potlatch songs, their long ban in the US and Canada, their replacement by graveside hymn-singing on Memorial Day (Chapter 6), their recent return, and their transmission to younger generations (Kan 1983, 1990) are stories usually not told in the textbooks. In that sense the watered-down anthropology of textbooks has contributed, if not to the forgetting of the dead, at least to forgetting what it is to remember, to commemorate (Chapter 5).

Nationalist Co-optation of Lament Nationalism thrives on certain textual forms, and key forms have continued to emerge, evolve, and play a role in constituting national selfimaginations. Features of modernist consciousness include the desire of peoples to be seen as one nation like many others (Anderson 1991:184). Think of the self-consciousness of Ahmed Kahil, the Shia doctor in Lebanon, and his desire that Shias be seen as just as modern as other peoples. This desire or social imaginary represents in itself a transformation in discourse forms put to the service of nationalist politics. The following cases exemplify such transformation.

The Hindu nationalist Sangh Parivar and its use of cassettes Modern forms of power rarely obliterate dynamic performance genres altogether; instead, they objectify them. Modern agencies may preserve a genre label but put it to new, tropic, telegraphic, or iconic uses. We see

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this in the case of the right-wing Hindutva (Hindu identity/Hindu nationalist) movement, whose orators co-opt lament as a trope. In light of the fact that spontaneously performed lamentation has disappeared from at least urban life in India and is increasingly rare in villages, it is interesting to note where the trope of lament has arisen in the rhetoric of Hindu nationalism. The populist politics of Hindu nationalism that dominated India for more than a decade (until the surprise victory of the secular Congress Party in 2004) faced the challenge of stirring mass participation, as any populist movement must. Mass-distributed audiocassettes of emotional songs and political speeches played a very important role in the Hindutva movement. The Sangh Parivar, a coalition of Hindutva groups, has put cassettes to very powerful use. It has used recordings of highly emotional speeches and songs to magnify their impact beyond live performances and to impose an objectified notion of Hinduism on India’s political scene. These speeches, recorded at rallies, “reiterate the now-familiar Hindutva themes: the marauding, barbaric Muslims came as foreign invaders, looting, pillaging, and enslaving the peace-loving and tolerant Hindus . . . but the time has come for Hindus to [rise up]” (Manuel 1996:131). So where does lament resurface, after vanishing from South Asian cities and most villages where it was once a vital performance tradition? It reappears as a trope, in a speech distributed on cassette, accompanied by songs of political-religious passion. On perhaps the most popular of these cassettes, the Hindu nationalist orator Sadhvi Rithambhara, on November 28, 1990, enlisted wailing in her contemporary ideological cause. She used this entropized lament – a mere mention of “wailing” – in depicting the grief she called Hindus to feel in response to the then secular Indian government’s attempt to resist her followers’ attempts to demolish the Babri Masjid (Babar’s Mosque). Federal police, she claimed, killed a few attackers near a river. Hence Rithambhara stirred up her live and mediated audiences to “listen to the wailing of the Saryu River,”4 which she depicted as the drain for the blood of the “martyrs” she discursively created. Some months later, a Sangh Parivar crowd succeeded in tearing down the centuries-old mosque. A newly politicized lament-trope stirred dangerous passions and played a crucial role in creating altered forms of national self-consciousness. “Traditional lament” (vilapa) was moribund by the time Rithambhara was distributing her speech. Perhaps, in its traditional form, it seemed to her a genre at best marginally relevant and at worst damningly passive (compare Kuipers 1998; McLaren 2000a). Yet traditional genres of grief such as vilapa were salient enough to merit their use as a trope. The Hindu

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nationalist orators have played on a sense of shame – what psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar (1996) calls a narcissistic wound, in this case the humiliation Hindus have supposedly endured for centuries at the hands of Muslims. Rather than dealing directly with shame and probing the complex realities of Indian history, Rithambhara helped the crowds project it in a catharsis of fury.

The transformation of “folklore” in eastern Europe Socialist Romania and the fetishization of folklore In one of his National Public Radio commentaries, Romanian American poet Andrei Codresçu mentioned the monsters that arose out of the muck in post-socialist eastern Europe, exploiting “folkloric” forms to propagate whatever sentiment the state wanted to spread. He writes The folkloristic fetish of the communist regime in Romania took the teeth out of most village rituals [including bocitoare laments], severing the connection to the deeper mysteries. [In their place], faux-folk music used to assault us constantly from radio and TV. . . . There is obviously a great deal to think about concerning the gap between the “genuine” tribal rituals and fascist and communist fetishization of them. (personal communication, April 1999)

Though the socialist nationalism of Romania is a far cry from India’s Hindu nationalism, the two similarly co-opted folk forms. What Codresçu describes is the transformation of a “traditional performance genre” not by suppression but objectification or outright distortion. He says that communist rule in Romania “took the teeth out of . . . village rituals” like lament. Perhaps the state’s motivation was like Solon’s in trying to control lament in ancient Greece. But the apparatus of the modern state, combined with the totalizing nature of ideology in the 20th century, allowed a dark alchemy to take place. “Lament” – or lament-like, sung, epic poetry – became a genre suited for state aims including, as we shall see in the case of the former Yugoslavia, ethnic cleansing. Media, lament, and nationalist politics in the former Yugoslavia Writing of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s, ethnomusicologist Mirjana Lauseviç says, “Singing epic poetry . . . became established as a symbol of

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Serbian national identity” (2000:293). As similar to laments as these epic poems might have been, dirges themselves were adapted for the nationalist cause, and contributed to genocide: In South Slavic cultures the traditional dirge historically was adapted for an oral communal dirge (naricaljka) for national or community tragedy. . . . [W]here death was a . . . frequent occurrence, a type of traditional war dirge/lament developed, a genre related to heroic oral epic poetry. Such war dirges by soldiers, performed publicly, had an ideological aim: mourning the loss of national glory while constructing a national socio-political ideal. (Lee 2002:22–23)

After Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union, in the days of Tito’s socialism, the “astonishing tradition of vastly long epic poems telling of resistance to Turkish rule . . . [was] pressed into service to describe the actions of the Communist government” (Burton 1993:33). But for the most part, the Serbian nationalist sentiment the songs could also tap stayed underground in the Tito era. With the end of socialism, ethno-nationalist forces throughout the former Yugoslavia revived the old song tradition as part of the campaign to constitute a new subjectivity to replace the multiethnic consciousness nurtured – indeed enforced – under socialism. While the men sang these old-and-new songs at the front, Serbian state television “was flooded by images of women lamenting the Serbian dead” (Holst-Warhaft 2000:18). This too – the recognizable behavior of weeping, and perhaps the genre of women’s funerary laments recognizable throughout the former Yugoslavia – Serb nationalists exploited as a trope: “There was a real musical war in Bosnia: a war against the Other . . . [W]hether it is because of crying babies, mourning mothers, burnt homes, or departed friends, [the songs carried the message that] the war is always ‘worth it’ ” (Lauseviç 2000:290, 300). Serbs and Croats shared equally in the production of new “folk songs”: “The massacres, bestialities, typhus epidemics, camps, expulsions and murders have suddenly found a new form of expression and political explanation through folk music: with the sounds of a tamburintza or accordion in a gay rhythm, the audience gets an alibi for war” (Lukovic 1992).5 Thus, nationalists revived “traditional genres,” essentializing them as “Serb,” “Croat,” or “Muslim.” And so I have returned at long last to the second scenario laid out in the Introduction, the story of a nationalistic lament revival. It is the tale of a modernist and militarist agenda co-opting songs of mourning, and televised images

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of wailing, to prolong war. Grievances may start wars; rhetorics of grief often sustain them. Shia lament and the Iranian state Shia Islam reproduces itself largely through rites of public lamentation in memorializing the tragic death of Imam Husayn. Readers might be tempted to dismiss any connection between this public display of sentiment in a historical commemoration and any more private, improvisational expressions like funerary laments, which might or might not be found in Iran. But this would be to reify the boundary between public and private. Public Shia rituals deeply engage mourners’ subjectivity – how could selfflagellation fail to do so? There may also be a close relationship between emotions like depression, familial grief observances, and public lamentation over Husayn. Personal griefs may come to mind during public weeping in ta“ziyeh ceremonies memorializing Husayn (Chapter 7). Anthropologists Byron Good and Mary-Jo Delvecchio-Good were overwhelmed when they first saw “thousands of men, women and children dressed in black, beating their chests and heads and openly crying as they listened again to the stories of [Karbala]” (Good and Good 1988:44). Some indication that these laments may be like those improvised around the world is evident in the rhetorical form that dominates the performance, namely grieving questions (see Chapter 2) – “My God, my God, what have they done to Hossein [Husayn]?” (1988:50). The public cultural elaboration of mourning in Iran is the context in which we should interpret the great energy devoted to mourning of other sorts, apart from public commemorations. That link is what makes the post-revolutionary transformation of personal and familial grieving in Iran so poignant. There is no doubt that ritual mourning shaped the emotional ethos of Iran before the 1979 revolution. But it may well have required the modern state apparatus, combined with a modern product like ideological “fundamentalism” – a quintessentially modernist phenomenon (Eisenstadt 1995), pace public opinion – to achieve what the Iranian regime did after the revolution: making a pervasive ethos of sadness a sign of loyalty to the Shia state. The Goods note that “the establishment of a form of sadness as the paramount ethos for the society, a symbol not only of piety but of loyalty to the new state, radically alters the meaning of religious grieving for many of those [Iranians] whom we interviewed” (1988:45).

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The Iranian theocracy has been thoroughly modern in its authoritarianism and, paradoxically, in its continual self-authentication by appeal to “tradition.” In its construction of sadness as a mark not only of piety but also of loyalty, and in elevating public lament to the single most representative form of this loyalty, the Islamic Republic transformed both religious lament and private funerals (Good and Good 1988:58). Is this a story of the revival of lament? Like the story of the old songs made new on the battlefields of “greater Serbia,” the Iranian story is one of a modern co-optation of the old form. I know of no evidence that the Islamic Republic has discouraged “private,” improvised lamentation. But even in promoting (mostly public) lament, the Iranian state, as an agent of vernacular modernity, transforms what it elevates.

Shias online: web-mediated Shia piety Arabic “azah is a cognate of ta“ziyeh; they derive from a root denoting the sharing of grief. For contemporary Shia Arabs, an “azah is a lament on Shia themes. Perhaps the newest trend in these lament performances is their global circulation as downloadable (and very frequently downloaded) mp3 files – once again placing them in one sense outside of sectors more directly controlled by nation-states. In fact, particularly the Sunni states may well be aware of, and very nervous about, this transnational circulation of Shia laments, some of which do have a clear political edge to them. Popular lament performers, men called raudud (derived from a root that means “repeat, repetitive”), make live recordings of the “azah they chant at very large gatherings. One of the most popular raudud is Basem al-Karbalai (Basem from Karbala, where Imam Husayn was killed). The American National Public Radio Iraq reporter Jamie Tarabay described the open circulation of laments of singers like al-Karbalai as a radical change from the days of Saddam Hussein, whose government had supported Sunnis over Shias, and had severely restricted public expressions of Shia piety. Even more than in Iran, we can say that Iraqi Shia lament is undergoing a revival – but not only in Iraq. The efflorescence of “azah, and the easy availability “azah recordings, are impacting Shias at least throughout the Arab-speaking world.6 And these new “azah do not simply repeat the old story of Husayn. Instead, they link the ancient violence he suffered with new events of violence suffered by contemporary Iraqi Shias. One of Basem al-Karbalai’s widely distributed

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laments concerns the first (February 2006) bombing of al-“Askariyya mosque/ shrine in Samarra. In that particular “azah, al-Karbalai addresses the “terrorists” who destroyed the Samarra mosque, comparing them to the “terrorists” who killed Husayn and his kin. The lament notes that these destroyers deny committing a crime, since they understand Shia practice as un-Islamic. Al-Karbalai repeatedly mentions the worldwide Shia community, and their love and grief in relation to the murder of their forebears. Their weeping, the song says, is like a sleeping volcano that has awakened. The song closes with that most common of rhetorical tools in lament across the world – a grieving question. Addressing the martyred imam, al-Karbalai asks, “What shall we do? We suffer like our forebears did.” Can we locate this efflorescence of lament within the political sphere? After all, al-Karbalai’s “azah decries today’s Sunnis (or at least the extremists among them). We could say, therefore, that it contributes in some way to ongoing communal tensions, just as other historical lament traditions have been feared for their potential to stir up violent revenge. Yet my Shia friends locate the nexus of speech and feeling in lament in the realm of ritual and piety. Those who listen to the recordings are often those who are most regular in their attendance at Husayniya (Shia shrines to Imam Husayn) for daily prayers and sermons. Language feelingfully harnessed in the task of honoring God, his Prophet, and his martyrs – this makes sense to Shia Muslims. Lament cut off from these moorings does not. Yet this does not mean they are not politically edgy, since everything pertaining to the Shia–Sunni split is political. Treating contemporary Iraqi laments as metacultural, if not strictly political, still provides some insight. Recent “azah laments clearly comment on current violence and the state of the Shia community in its larger Muslim social context. Shias embrace (i.e. make a metacultural judgment on) these works as valid, much-loved, expressions of a very particular “tradition,” while simultaneously valuing what is new (contextualized) about each.

Claiming Lineal Descent with the Traditions of Ancient Others: Restoring Lament in Christian Churches Lament is undergoing something of a “revival” in certain church circles. Pastor Steve McCutchan, complaining that “our culture” has lost lament,

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has published arguments for restoring lament to Protestant liturgies in order to help congregations “release troubling emotions” (1995). Psalm 13, a “lament” psalm, “could be used in confronting . . . distressing experiences – a marriage break-up, a long illness, a business failure” (1993:16). Such discourse departs starkly from the anti-lament diatribes of St. John Chrysostom. McCutchan notes the difference between church-based clinical therapy and the more communitarian healing that he believes a ritual use of the lament psalms offers: While the church has done an excellent job of providing support groups and individual counseling, we also need a larger framework in which people can deal with their suffering. The most obvious setting is worship. As I read my way through the Psalms, I realized that . . . the psalms of lament provided such a framework . . . (1995:18)

This discourse represents the attraction spatiotemporally distant Others’ laments have for some contemporary American Christians. One source of the move toward lament in some churches is liberation theology, a movement associated with Latin American Catholic leaders like Gustavo Guttiérrez. Guttiérrez (1987) calls his meditation on suffering and evil in the biblical book of Job and the psalms of lament, God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent.7 Describing the overriding concerns of liberation theology, Guttiérrez writes that “the first concern . . . is not with the ‘evil of guilt’ but rather with the ‘evil of misfortune,’ the evil suffered by the innocent” (1987:xv). The interest in lament has reached some heterodox American Catholic congregations (led by Matthew Fox: Keen 1989), but also mainstream American Christianity. Several Protestant seminaries now offer courses on incorporating biblical lament into the liturgy. Leann Snow Flesher, a professor of Old Testament and author of a forthcoming volume on biblical lament, offers a course on lament to future pastors for whom, she hopes, lament can become an integral part of the liturgy. Some theology graduate students are studying lament – its biblical manifestations, its use in contemporary liturgy, and its broader circulation in the world’s traditions. For some of those, this new lamentation would not necessarily be a dry-eyed, unemotional echoing of Others’ (biblical authors’) lament texts, but sobbing, crying out to God. From this perspective churches should “make noise, wailing, weeping” (Rickert 2004).

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Figure 11.1 Pirkko Fihlman performs a lament in her Lutheran church From the Ensio and Pirkko Fihlman collection, photopermission n:o 01/08 – 4.2.2008.

Lament in the African diaspora: Rasta lament songs Rastafarianism has also deeply engaged with the powerful stories of the Old Testament, albeit taken in relation to the African experience. It turns out that musically gifted Rastafarians have generated songs echoing the psalms of lament in the Hebrew Bible. Cause, the wicked carried us away captivity, required from us a song, but How can we sing King Alpha’s song inner strange land? (repeat) “The Melodians” on Psalm 137; cited in Murrell 2000– 01:1

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Samuel Murrell, a professor of philosophy and religion, wonders why Rastas would turn to these ancient laments: How did an ancient Hebrew lament, sung as an “inner jihad” against Babylonian culture in the sixth century B.C.E., and still recited as grace after meals during weekdays at modern Jewish tables, become not only a Black lamentation but a popular liberation theme song in Rasta reggae lyrics? (Murrell 2000 – 01; emphasis added)

Murrell answers that Rastas use the psalms of lament in their “ ‘itations’ (personal reflections) and ‘lamentations’ ” (2000– 01:2) because they find the biblical language both well known in Jamaica and particularly apt as an idiom for their political-religious vision of liberation. Is the song a revival of biblical lament? It is more accurate to frame it in terms of recontextualization and hybridity, i.e., as a Jamaican-modern idiom, since Rastas mix the ancient words of the psalms with more direct references to recent injustices, and with the drumming and musical traditions of Jamaica.

Lament’s new history in Finland Finnish folklorist Aili Nenola has written that attempts by Finns to revive “lamenting with the voice” would “surely remain curiosities” (2002:82). Yet the movement has proven more vigorous than she suspected. This matters deeply to me since I have participated with those modern Finnish men and women learning to “lament with their voice,” namely the Äänellä Itkijät RY, the incorporated society of those who lament (itkijät) with voice (äänellä), i.e. melody and words (as opposed to weeping wordlessly or silently). Nenola understands modernity, not in the way I have been proposing, but in flat “single-order” terms, in simple opposition to tradition: “Nor do there exist any longer the communal customs and beliefs which could provide a context for the adoption and internalization of lament language and performance” (2002:82). This may be literally true, but revivalists are inventing a new context for their laments. Modernity, when viewed dialectically, may at times favor some of the common “beliefs” and sentiments Nenola finds lacking today – and turn from the iconoclastic towards the nostalgic. The dialectical outworkings of metacultural modernity, its

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tendency to tack back and forth between a rejection of and a longing for “tradition,” mean that a revival of lament does make some sense in modern Finland. As I began writing this book in 2001, reading the voluminous literature, my grip on the story of lament’s “death” began to loosen. What shifted my perspective was what I read about Finland and its lament “revival.” Nenola herself helped me contact the revival’s leaders. Even as I made my initial contacts with them, I was convinced that the revival was a manifestation of what Cantwell calls “ethnomimesis,” or perhaps a “movement” of “fakelore” (Dundes 1985) deeply infected by capitalism. Ethnomimesis, for Cantwell, involves a cultural parasitism (1993:43) in which performance is based on imitation, impersonation (1993:6). Before I made my first visit to Finland in 2003, I heard another story of the movement from Nenola, one that included her own sister, a participant in Äänellä Itkijät’s itkukursit, “lament courses,” for would-be lamenters. Nenola’s sister is not motivated to salvage tradition so much as to “get her feelings out.” As a bearer of a metaculture of newness, one that values authenticity (Trilling 1972), she feels she can only use her own words to lament. Since listening to the recordings of old Karelian and Ingrian laments played in every lament course Äänellä Itkijät organizes, she has composed three laments – one about each of her children, as well as one about her own life. Whereas older cry-women were content to borrow each others’ words, the recordings of old laments “meant nothing” to her – perhaps because they were in Karelian and not Finnish, or perhaps simply because they were not her own (Aili Nenola: interview, June, 2003). In a message she sent me in August 2002, Nenola wrote, “I doubt there are any women [alive today] who learned the tradition in [its] original setting.” I learned later that the lament revivalists took issue with the academic folklorists, who insisted there were no more authentic “tradition bearers” left in Finland. As Äänellä Itkijät organized and began teaching courses across Finland – they have now led 38 courses in 28 locations, including three countries beyond Finland – they invited scholars like Nenola to help them “do it right.” Nenola did so, and has since been involved in Äänellä Itkijät at least from a distance. Other scholars have contributed to courses on occasion. Still, there is still some tension between scholars and activists, some of the former upholding a notion of an authentic but now dead tradition and the latter boldly recontextualizing lament. When scholars have dominated lament courses, they have been less participatory and have produced less impassioned end-products (laments by the students).

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Learning to lament in Finnish Karelia, 2003. In 2003 I began to participate – at first by email and then during a visit that culminated in participation in a lament workshop – in the unfolding history of Äänellä Itkijät. I did not realize at first that I was, in fact, participating; but that reality was brought home to me as my visit drew to an end. Inserting two foreigners (my wife and myself) into a hands-on workshop teaching people how to lament had its own impact. But my self-introduction to the group – my explanation that I was working on a book about lament – entailed a more intensive co-participation, shaping the outcome of the session as all participants did to some degree. The title Crying Shame rang true to them since, to some extent, they all felt they had to overcome shame in order to participate. The Karelia (Karjala) region straddles present-day Finland and Russia. Western Finns accepted a Lutheran form of Christianity in the 17th century and have come, in the eyes of my friends in Äänellä Itkijät, to reflect its serious, “emotionally inhibited” tone. By contrast, they regard Karelian culture as more “emotionally expressive,” more closely identified with Orthodoxy and “the old religion” of nature – and hence a friendlier home to the remnants of a lament tradition. Chapter 9 described the traumatic encounter of the urbane Finn, Elias Lönnrot, with lament during a folklore-collection trip to rural Finland in the early 19th century. Such collecting continued into the 20th century. The results are housed in the archives of the SKS (Finnish Literature Society). Among their archived materials are 1971 recordings of Martta Kuikka, a Karelian cry-woman (see Chapter 3) who worked with the American ethnomusicologist Elizabeth Tolbert (1990:49) as well as Nenola and others. Until her death in 2006, Äänellä Itkijät leaders considered Kuikka a living bearer of the tradition. My sense is that the president and founder of Äänellä Itkijät, Pirkko Fihlman, counts herself among the living bearers as well, since her grandmother was a skilled cry-woman whose services were often called on in pre-World War II Karelia. It is notable that Pirkko only learned about her grandmother’s skill at lamenting after she herself became involved in it. Äänellä Itkijät’s leaders have imbibed the newer currents in Finnish folkloristics; they regard tradition as a living thing. Older Finnish scholars are skeptical about the “authenticity” of laments performed today. Anneli Asplund – a previous director of the Finnish Literature Society (SKS), who made the 1971 recordings of Martta Kuikka – wrote in her archived recording notes that the performance was epäaito, “self-made/inauthentic.” Asplund had asked Kuikka on tape for something she had learned

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Figure 11.2 Pirkko Fihlman, founder of Äänellä Itkijät, outside her summer cottage in Uukuniemi where the lament revival started Photo from Ensio and Pirkko Fihlman collection, used with permission.

traditionally. Kuikka said that actually the laments she was about to perform were hers. For Asplund, that made them inauthentic.8 Yet it was the archive Asplund and her predecessors going back to Lönnrot had created that stimulated the early interest of those who founded Äänellä Itkijät. To foreshadow the story I tell below, Pirkko Fihlman’s long engagement with lament began with a play her husband, Ensio Fihlman (an amateur historian with Karelian roots), wrote in the late 1990s. Karelian lament was in serious decline; apart from revivalists, most now regard it as dead. In the late 1990s women like Kuikka tended to perform only in private, and rarely at that. Lament no longer played a role in common forms of

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mourning. Performances at the Kaustinen Folk Music Festival in Finland certainly did not result in the tradition being transmitted. Still, from the perspective of the revivalists, Pirkko Fihlman and musician Tuomas Rounakari bridged the gap between scholars and performers. Some time in the late 1990s, before the controversies erupted between the two societies – the SKS and Äänellä Itkijät – the SKS archival recordings of lamenters caught the attention of Rounakari and Ensio Fihlman. Pirkko Fihlman listened repeatedly to recordings of old laments and was not only deeply moved, but moved to perform them. (Thus the resources produced by scholars are having unforeseen effects on the phenomena they thought they were only describing from a distance – effects on Finnish society, which they thought had moved beyond lament.) Around the same time, Rounakari began a documentary project culminating in a film about Kuikka. The Fihlmans’ story is integral to the story of the Finnish revival. They maintain a summer cabin in Uukuniemi, in Karelia, a few miles from the current border with Russia, near the community building in which my wife and I participated, along with nine Finns, in our first lament workshop. For several years in a row, the Fihlmans have organized an annual Uukuniemi “Ancient Culture Week,” the week starting on the solstice – Juhannus (Midsummer). (The week is full of metacultural events designed to draw attention to cultural forms – Karelian lament, Finnish music, and ancient spells.) At the time he discovered recordings of the Karelian lament tradition, Ensio was writing a play for Ancient Culture Week about the unequal encounter between the Western Lutheran Finns and Orthodox Karelians in the 17th century. It focused on that fateful day when decades of pressure from Lutherans, resulting in the forced conversion of many of the Orthodox, finally led the remaining Orthodox living in the village of Uukuniemi to migrate to Russia. The tragic occasion probably spawned laments at the time. Because of the salience of lament in what Ensio describes as “the old culture,” and because he was deeply moved by the archival recordings, he decided his historical play should contain a lament. When Ensio asked Pirkko if she would be willing to compose and sing a lament during the performance, she resisted. Eventually she agreed. The play has been performed more than once – each time attracting a few new participants to a lament course, held later on in Ancient Culture Week. Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991) argues that the reflexive effect of the social and human sciences on the societies they study is a new

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and defining feature of late modernity. But, as I have been arguing, the tradition–modernity binary has never managed to keep itself straight or to effectively map onto real spheres in the real world. However we conceive of its relation to “modernity” or “tradition”, postmodernity involves self-conscious play across their boundaries. Äänellä Itkijät is the site of intentional double-timing, self-consciousness, and playfulness. Its leaders are subverting the old categories of folkloristics, “confusing” tradition and modernity. In that respect it is a profoundly postmodern movement. In earlier chapters I have described how Latifa’s laments – heard by all of us in the 70-person compound where her mother’s brother lived – had affected me. Latifa begged me and my field associate, Faisal, to intervene on her behalf. But my fictive cousins in the compound forbade me from even leaving my door on the night they finally dragged her back to her brothers’ home. In Finland, however, I participated in performing laments. Doing so makes it hard to retain objectivity. This is acceptable; few anthropologists today defend objectivism. Recent anthropological theory describes the achievement of intersubjectivity as a preferred alternative to objectivity. Whereas the objectivist stance offers the hope that one can study people as stable objects of one’s gaze – as if that were not dehumanizing – the quest for intersubjectivity makes the mutuality of experience its goal. Direct participation was required of me; the executive board of Äänellä Itkijät would not permit me to attend or record unless I participated like everyone else. And so, for a number of reasons, this experience is far removed from my experience of lament in Bangladesh. Some of the revivalistic movements involving lament surveyed in this chapter appear far more dangerous than promising. But several ingredients that raise concerns about other movements do not apply to Äänellä Itkijät – no dark political connections,9 no borrowing and refurbishing of the traditions of distant Others. It is hard to suspect Äänellä Itkijät of being purveyors of fakelore or the tool of capitalist parasitization of culture. They have a valid claim on representing a locality (especially Karelia), and if they evince a deep nostalgia, that too is a local product, not kitsch. That is the opening theme of the next, and final, chapter.

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Nostalgia and Cathexis About halfway through the decade during which this book was taking shape, I decided that the evidence indicated traditional lament was vanishing. A few years later, it dawned on me to consider the homologies between the “stuff ” of traditional lament and of social theory and popular discourse. Social theorists have typically been theorists of modernity (Chapter 9), and have framed modernity in terms of loss – loss of Gemeinschaft (community), loss of freedom (replaced with the “iron cage” of rationality), or loss of authentic culture (replaced by mass media, in the neolament of the Frankfurt School). The founders of folkloristics and anthropology in Germany, Finland, and the United States – Herder, Lönnrot, Boas, and Kroeber, among others – shared the sense of folklore at the precipice. Their response was a very removed kind of nostalgia. The peoples affected, however – such as the indigenous peoples of Oregon – responded with emotional outpourings in dream, song, and Ghost Dance rituals. These rituals, as Michael Harkin describes them, are what we call metacultural. The early Ghost Dance (or, in its Oregonian incarnation, Warm House) rituals were hopeful and future-oriented, full of performative oomph. Those whose dreams and visions were enacted in the dances were convinced that they would bring back the spirits of the dead – as well as the conditions of life before the European invasion. As the rituals evolved, however, they began (as Harkin argues) to “parody the culture from which [they] derive [d]” (2003:277) as they degenerated into pure catharsis of anxiety regarding the death of their way of life. The ritual came to reflect what Freud called thanatos – the deathdrive – as “cultural death [became] the goal of collective action” (Harkin

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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2003:277). The metacultural tone here was one of grief. Harkin urges upon scholars a new reckoning with this grief, both in their “data” (for example the response of the indigenous peoples of Oregon), and in themselves. Scholarly response to this loss has been all too removed; Harkin’s indictment of Kroeber – he “avoided ethnohistorical research because he could not bear all those tears” (2003:277) – in some sense is his indictment of many working in the present. We should understand social scientists’ nostalgia in this light – as a kind of failed mourning (Wheeler 1999), one leaning toward death – in this case the death of the Other by means of whom the scientist helps construct the Self. This would include a cathexis of (emotional investment in) ritual – and lament – substantively comparable to the cathexis of death apparent in traditional lament (tearing the hair and clothing, singing about joining the dead), but purged of overt passion. “Much of sociology is nostalgic [and] much of cultural study involves the thematization of nostalgia” (Robertson 1990:54; emphasis in original). Tellingly, Robertson argues that the “late twentieth century nostalgia,” appearing in theory and popular culture, “is intimately bound-up with consumerism” (1990:54). I could close with claims about the depth of my encounter with the tears of Finnish lamenters. I will spare you. Still, participating – improvising and polishing my own lament, hearing others’ laments, and being part of a discussion in which we all had something at stake – made it impossible for me to remain on one side of this movement or to write a distanced critique. For all of us, shame was part of what was at stake, and our performances challenged that shame. What do we conclude about cultural revivals and, specifically, revivals of lament traditions such as that being spearheaded by Äänellä Itkijät? Is “revival” the correct label, or are they movements toward death, like the Ghost Dance, from Harkin’s perspective? Is it possible to distinguish death-oriented from life-oriented forms of nostalgia? Based on her fieldwork with struggling Appalachian people, anthropologist Katie Stewart differentiates between the “hegemonic and resistant nostalgias, ‘middle-class’ and ‘working-class’ nostalgias, the nostalgia of a ‘mass culture’ and the nostalgia of and for local, nameable places” (1988:227). The first arises directly out of late capitalism. But Stewart insists there is a resistant, working-class nostalgia of and for local places. Middle-class nostalgia is distanced and distancing. The local variety is a different thing altogether. I’m afraid the world is full of cases that do not so neatly fall in one or the other category. Based on what I had been able to read in advance of

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traveling to Finland, I was ready to see in Äänellä Itkijät another example of middle-class nostalgia, nostalgia from a distance, a movement in which middle-class Finns co-opted the lament tradition of the Karelians, an ethnic minority. What I found was more complex. Founder Pirkko Fihlman not only has Karelian roots; her grandmother was actually a cry-woman. Several participants in our lament course identified deeply with “the old religion” reflected in the old cry-women’s shamanistic power. That course was in Karelia, attended by people (with the exception of the two foreigners) who strongly identified with the place. And to the extent that Karelia and Karelian lament had Orthodox roots resistant to Lutheranism, and that several course participants were either Orthodox or sympathetic to its putative syncretistic openness to “the old ways,” the workshop had elements of metacultural resistance, resistance to [their perception of ] “Finnish culture” and its (un)emotional ethos. Admittedly, leaders and attendees alike are middle-class, modern Finns, for whom a face-to-face agrarian community with arranged marriages and bridal laments is a distant communal memory – as Nenola wrote (2002). What they achieve is not a revival of the whole cultural milieu in which itkuvirsi “lament” operated – the milieu in which it took on its “traditional” significance. Participants’ interest in shamanism was largely just that – certainly not part of an accepted sociocultural order. Stewart describes some of the Appalachian narrative stances she presents as “not assimilationist but revivalistic,” stories not of passivity but of local agency. Appalachian people who “live in the fragments and ruins of [coal] company camps that are now emptying” (Stewart 1988:235) exhibit the “melancholy of a desire that has to continuously fill in ‘this world’ – a world that is always emptying itself out” (1988:239). Whatever Stewart means by “revivalistic,” the world is always emptying itself, even of the stuff revivalists try to refill it with. Time cannot be turned back. The world continues to empty itself out. Lament is gone. And yet, Finno-Karelians seem to be crying, “Lament is dead; long live lament!”

Recapitulating the Argument It has been a long and bumpy ride over 5,000 years of history and of historians, who are among the inventors of “modernity” responsible for filling it with tears.

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Part I led readers through the long history of lament – and ancient opposition to it. In Part II we encountered modernity as steamroller, spreader of shame, champion of denatured rationality, and opponent of lament. We saw that a massive amnesia was spreading over genres of lament, defoliating the tree of lament. But Part III revealed that rumors of lament’s death, like those of Mark Twain’s, had been greatly exaggerated. Lament had in fact been smuggled into modernity in the guise of postmodern regrets and metalaments over the death of lament – and of culture! “There is no lament, no ritual, no culture left for us poor moderns” became our lament, the myth serving as modernity’s charter. The tree is not defoliated; its branches are covered with slips of paper, memories, griefs. It is tempting to place Modernity in a neat box radically separate from another we call Tradition. However, this book contributes, I hope, to that line of thought that asserts that tradition and modernity are co-implicated (Bauman and Briggs 2003). I have offered a new vision of modernity entwined with lament – asserting not a superficial but a substantive relationship, manifest in part in modern scholars’ treatments of “traditional lament.” In the immediate context of bereavement the more extreme acts of the bereaved – tearing clothes, falling to the ground, refusing to eat or bathe, climbing into the casket with the dead, as well as singing words that bespeak a kind of death – indicate an active identification with the dead. Whatever we might think of claims that culture, some particular “culture,” or lament tradition, is dying, we can interpret the discourses I have described (social theory, film, anthropological and pop-culture metalaments) as another form of identification with “the dead” (i.e., lament, culture, etc.). Thus, building on the work of others, Crying Shame has offered a theory of culture. From Bauman and Briggs I have taken a particular critique of modernity. From Urban I have borrowed the notion of metaculture, and showed how metacultural regimes – judgments as to the respectability of lament genres and performances vis-à-vis the cultural traditions that framed them – belong at the center of cultural analysis. From Silverstein I have borrowed a dialectical vision of levels of indexical and reflexive signification. Synthesizing these has allowed me to advance a program of cultural interpretation committed to analyzing circulation and the perpetually emerging layers of ideological reaction to each preceding layer of cultural action. Every bit of culture that entails commenting on, judging, or adding “oomph” to another bit of culture is metaculture, and Urban has helped anthropology enormously by shifting our attention to this semiotic layering of culture. I have argued for a greater attention to the dialectic between this second-order (or n+1th order) culture and first-order (or

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nth-order) culture. This dialectic enables us to make sense of vacillating histories: efforts to suppress or destroy what Äänellä Itkijät calls “lament culture,” followed, scarcely a generation later, by work to revive it. Äänellä Itkijät seems to be taking off – now reaching the point where it is not only holding courses but teaching trainers. Whereas single-order analyses of modernity have flattened it and thus missed (post)modernity’s affinity for lament, I have shown that there is indeed a cultural context for the revival of lament, that we cannot dismiss revivals as curiosities (as Nenola 2002 does) or as the whimsical acts of isolated individuals. 21st-century metacultural movements to revive “traditional” lament are no less a part of modernity than were positivist lament studies in the 19th and 20th centuries. I have analyzed a whole range of response to lament – from the shame of contemporary urban Greeks; to the divergent responses of Latifa’s kin and the Bangladeshi scholars who later heard her tapes; to Orientalist, anthropological, and folkloristic studies of lament; to state-level interventions (Iran, India, Yugoslavia) in lament’s trajectory; to lament revivals – for their contributions to a theory of (meta)culture. Earlier accounts of lament included local responses, and certainly, “literature reviews.” But analyzing under a single rubric (metaculture) the disparate responses of disparate actors (academics, political agencies, and “folks”) as I have done levels the playing field between them.

Modern and Postmodern Discourse: Only the Latest Rhetorics of Loss Modernity is not unique in constructing history in terms of loss. Ancient historiographies – particularly those that were religiously inspired – declared the present age the last, darkest, or most sinful, the age that has lost touch with the spiritual treasures of some preceding, golden age. Perhaps with the transition to what some call a postmodern world – differentiating it, more than I would like to, from modernity – we have moved past being ashamed of loud mourning, and perhaps even past grieving the passing of “primitive” lament. Instead, perhaps the engines of cultural production in the postmodern era have kicked the party into high gear, celebrating diverse “statements,” however loud they might be. Follow along with me in this thought experiment, using two popular culture productions – My Fair Lady (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1964) and the Golden Globe and Emmy award-winning Home

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Box Office cable television series Six Feet Under. Let us take the first to exemplify modernity, the second “postmodernity.” My Fair Lady was based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1916). It debuted on Broadway in 1956, eight years before its release as a film. It is the tale of Eliza Doolittle’s transition from a woman given to loud, wailing protests in her first encounter with Professor Henry Higgins, to a refined “lady.” But this lady grieves the way her conversion to “respectability” has robbed her of the fellowship of her erstwhile friends in the Cockney working class for whom bold forms of expression signaled solidarity. Eliza’s father, Alfred P. Doolittle, grieves a similar transformation prompted by his encounter with Higgins. By way of contrast, consider Nate, the lament-loving son in the American television series Six Feet Under. As we meet Nate in the debut episode, his father has just died. Nate does not just grieve the loss of tradition, or simply advocate doing something like the grieving Sicilians he has seen at a tourist’s distance – he leads his mother in acting out a kind of modern lament or, in his words, “going apeshit.” The disruption of the funeral of the paterfamilias by Nate and his mother follows Nate’s nostalgic representation of Sicilian women whose grieving he casts as so much healthier than that of mourners at his father’s open-casket viewing the day before the funeral. The visual and narrative syntax of the television episode leads us to understand the characters’ behavior at the funeral as an acting out of the Sicilian women’s lamentations. Is Nate a postmodern lamenter? If so, he reflects capitalist modernity in many ways. The shift from shame or obsession with loss to celebration of louder grievance rhetorics does not erase the association of loud grieving with low status. And there is little of the selflessness of Chinese lament (Ye 2001) or Karelian lament (without which funerals and weddings just would not work) in postmodern mourning. Those who attend Äänellä Itkijät courses do so with their own griefs in mind. They come looking for a better form of emotional expression.

Farewell, without Lament Should I at this point lament the postmodern transformation of lament, its loosening from communal ritual? Perhaps. Yet Pirkko Fihlman of Äänellä Itkijät receives frequent invitations to perform public laments for

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her relatives, friends, and neighbors on ritual occasions. As strange as it might sound, Fihlman often performs laments at the baptism of infants. Fihlman’s acquaintances have acquired a sense of lament’s ritual significance – not the same sense of it that 19th-century Karelians had, but some sense nonetheless. They seem to feel that the emotional seriousness of the genre is appropriate to any serious occasion, even celebrations. I return to a personal note in closing. Following the story of lament from Bangladesh, where I first encountered it, to Finland (where my wife and I participated in a workshop) has caused me to reconsider the nature of scholarly endeavor. Particularly because Latifa’s family threatened me with unspecified action if I tried to intervene on her behalf, it was easy not to. What right would I have to talk about what anyone in Bangladesh should do? And so I remained comfortable with the observer’s role. But different circumstances – the insistence of Tuomas Rounakari and the other Äänellä Itkijät board members that I participate in the workshop if I was to attend at all – have led me to reconsider my role. If you meet me in a few years, it might be in Finland, engaged along with Finns in considering what it means to live with tradition, or breaking into song. But if I defer to the skill of singers who seem to be more able to move some to tears, perhaps it will remain the task of others to put forward arguments as to the proper relationship of anthropologists to local nostalgias and local revivals, and to model such a relationship.

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Preface 1

2 3 4

Lincoln (1999:191) attempts to morally engage, i.e. listen respectfully to, the ninth-century C. E. Pahlavi Lament of the Bovines as if it spoke directly to him. All names of Bangladeshis encountered in my fieldwork are pseudonyms. “Bangladeshi” designates a nationality, “Bengali” an ethnicity, and “Bangla” (though sometimes also “Bengali”) a language. This book does not follow the long anthropological tradition of writing about “beliefs” (vs., implicitly, our “knowledge”) – a strategy of intellectual imperialism.

1 Introduction 1

2 3

4 5 6

“Bangla” is the widely accepted name for the language formerly known as Bengali and spoken by 200 million to 300 million people in the greater Bengal region. “Bengali” designates the people and their culture. These words echo the title of Harbsmeier’s brilliant article, “Why Do the Indians Cry?” (1987). Not all lament genres have been improvised. On the “composition–improvisation” continuum, some have been composed at some remove from performance events. The song’s Mende lyrics were translated by Tazieff Koroma, Edward Benya, and Joseph Opala (Wade-Lewis 2007:84). Transcripts of the narration and dialog and representations of the visuals are my own. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a theodicy as “A vindication of the divine attributes, especially justice and holiness, in respect to the existence of evil.”

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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In paleontology and evolutionary studies, finding a fossil of an index species – one whose dates are known – in a certain stratum enables the dating of a species, e.g. a fossil hominid, found in the same stratum.

2 For Crying Out Loud 1

2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9

At the beginning of the 21st century, another woman listened to archived laments, and told me, “I found myself weeping” – and Pirkko Fihlman went on to spearhead the lament revival in Finland. See Briggs 1992; Brueggemann 1986; Holst-Warhaft 1992, 2000; Lee 2002; McLaren 2000a; Murrell 2000 –1; Trawick 1988, 2002. The distinction between token and type is Charles Peirce’s. For a linguisticanthropological perspective on the politics and problematics of genre, see Briggs and Bauman 1992 and Bauman and Briggs 1990. The distinction between icons (which resemble some represented entity), indexes (which point, and whose meaning shifts with context), and symbols (which stand only arbitrarily for what they represent) is Peirce’s (1931–58). The lines in the original Ingrian are: Kui et voi nossa n[aise] nostatellukkainen Mie vötan liivaa sormi tsirkoskelen, Käsi vöta aua arvottelen, Nosan paajen nojalle n[aise] parm[aikkoinen] (Nenola 2002:225). The Kaluli people live in the Mt. Bosavi region of Papua New Guinea. Their language is one of several dialects of Bosavi. Thus the people I refer to as Bosavi in later chapters (following Feld’s preference, 2001) are the same. Fihlman is the President of Äänellä Itkijät. These acts helped old Karelian lamenters to fall into a trance according to Tolbert (1990:50, 56). Aili Nenola, interview, June 17, 2003, tape 1. Nenola is a Finnish lament expert who has watched the emergence of a revival of lament, as it were, from a distance. The metaphor of getting sorrow “out” came up many times in the Uukuniemi course.

3 Lament and Emotion 1

2

Morte e pianto rituale (de Martino 2000[1975]) is still untranslated. What I presented is an English summary of the final paragraphs of the introduction provided by Cristina Piastrini, to whom I am deeply grateful. The full story, and a more complete transcript of this particular performance, are provided in Wilce 1998a, chapter 11. Line numbers from the long transcript are preserved here for cross-reference.

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4 Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament 1 2 3

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7

Classicists agree that, after the archaic period, it was women who performed laments. Literarization entails fitting (often dangerous) oral practice to the model of “literature” (Bauman and Briggs 2003; Pollock 1998). The rise of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism reminds us that representations of ancient India – including the antiquing of lament – are neither purely objective nor politically neutral. The formulation is adapted from Sherry Ortner (1974). This is the opinion of one of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, whom I thank for the stimulus to investigate Valmiki’s response to the bird’s lament. Some male laments are represented as masculine failures, falling into womanly senselessness. See the descriptions of Suleyman’s laments in Wilce 1998a and 2002. See Fitzgerald’s magnificent new translation of the Mahabharata (11.81.11.5, Major Book 11 Minor Book 81, chapter 11 verse 5 [Fitzgerald 2004:46], and the commentary on it [2004:668]).

5 Cultural Amnesia 1 2

3 4 5

Among the reasons for my confidence are data collected from a focus group on social change that I conducted in 2000 in rural Bangladesh (Chapter 7). 1991–92 fieldwork was generously supported by the Institute of International Education and the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies. Analysis was supported by the National Science Foundation’s Dissertation Improvement Grant DBS–9919127. The International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) provided logistical support and consultation. The Organized Research Committee, Northern Arizona University, and Dean Susanna Maxwell supported my 1996 fieldwork. I need not reiterate my objection to this formulation, my claim that lament comes from socially attuned bodies as much as the antar. Likewise, some of her critics might have modeled their attacks on centuriesold Islamic critiques; see Chapter 4. The Hadith sources that Fahd cites are al-Tabari (Appendix, extract from the Dhayl al-Mudhayyal, iii, 2387) and Ibn al-Ahthcr (Usd al-ghaba, I, 299).

6 Modern Transformations 1

I borrow this citation of the work of the important early modern philologist and Orientalist Robert Wood, from Bauman and Briggs (2003:103).

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The modern territory of Bangladesh was, during the British Raj, designated East Bengal, and after 1948, East Pakistan. See Wilce in press for a discussion of rasa (including viraha) “transcendent feeling” in Hindu epic and philosophy. The context of “worship” in Sen’s case was the Hindu-reformist Brahmo Samaj movement. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of this book for pointing out the anomaly of Sen. For a more nuanced account exploring how Egyptian melodrama viewers make those stories their own, rather than having no stories to tell, see Abu-Lughod 2000.

7 How Shame Spreads in Modernity I am grateful to fellow Northern Arizona University social scientist Karla Hackstaff and to my former student Neill Hadder for their insightful comments on an early draft of this chapter. 1

2 3

4

5 6 7

8

Despite the risks in doing so, I have put off (until Part III) a thorough exploration of the possibilities of such resistant responses to shaming – Selfassertion in the form of cultural pride and revivals. For this formulation I am indebted to Karla Hackstaff. Seyyed Ali Khamenei, Ashura: bayyanat-e rehbar-e mu“azzam-e inqilab-e islami waiftifa;at-e ayyat-e “uzam piramun “azadar-ye “ashura (Qom: Dafter-e tablighat-e islami-ye hawzeh-ye ‘ilmiyah, 1994), p. 22. The citation and translation are provided by Pinault. The controversial novel LajjA by Bangladeshi feminist Taslima Nasrin (English translation 1994) – cited earlier in the chapter – plays with the positive and negative senses of shame. I infer this from the fact that wailing is an important social obligation in some places, for example the Amazon (Urban 1988). This argument parallels Plato’s (Republic X 604a), discussed in Chapter 4. I gather the term refers to the “‘game of lamentation’ that took place when a great warrior died in ancient Ireland.” Oddly enough, those are the last words of Irish Wake Amusements (1967:174). I find no other explanation for the title, which O’Suilleabhain wrote in Irish and later translated into English. The archaic transitive verb here might have the sense either of “beat or flog” or “struggle with [i.e. struggle to fit him into the crate]” (Oxford English Dictionary).

8 Crying Backward 1 2

Böckel translations are my own. “So musste religiöses Feingefühl die Unvereinbarkeit der Totenklag mit dem Christentum deutlich empfinden.” Translation of the German text by

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Notes to pp. 151– 87

Richard Helt (Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages, Northern Arizona University) and the author. In the phrase “bad bad,” there are two tokens of one type. This comparison parallels quite remarkably Greg Urban’s comparison of the type-token ratio of words in Amazonian myths and recent American novels, concluding that a metaculture of newness correlates with less textual redundancy. This is my own interpretation of Sarv 1999.

9 Mourning Becomes the Electron’s Age 1 2 3 4 5

6

See especially Benjamin 1996:59–74, 297–360; 1998[1963]. The Finnish word kalevala literally means “land of ancestral giant-heroes.” Kalevala songs follow a particular, octosyllabic, meter. The SKS is comparable to the Smithsonian Institution and Smithsonian/ Folkways Recordings in the United States. Coleman also treats modernism’s literary predecessors, especially the realist novel. “The women . . . were murdered on December 6, 1989 at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada. A gunman walked into a classroom of engineering students, asked all the men to leave the room and proceeded to gun down 27 women, killing these 14 women engineering students” (Men4Change n.d., ). I am deeply indebted to Wendy Wheeler, whose account of modernity and “postmodernity” has as its frontispiece the Enzensberger poem. For Wheeler, modernity is – simply – a state of “failed mourning,” and the most recent “postmodern” phase is a very hopeful search for “healthy mourning” (Wheeler 1999:5).

10 Lament’s (Post)Modern Vertigo 1

2

3

As noted in Chapter 2, Bosavi is the larger province encompassing the Kaluli region, and is the name of the language of which Kaluli is one dialect. Feld prefers to speak of “Bosavi” rather than Kaluli. My discussion of Feld 2001 does not do justice to the nuanced argument of Feld (in press). One senses in the liner notes to Feld’s Smithsonian/ Folkways CD set (2001) an appeal to the popular discourses that I have labeled metalaments. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” “One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” (Benjamin 1968:221).

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SITA’S LAMENT from the Ramayana is found at .

11 Lament in a Postmodern World of “Revivals” 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

“An organizing theme of this study is that of the vanishing, which (dis)embodies in its gerund form the movement of something passing away, gone but not quite, suspended between presence and absence, located at a point that both is and is not here in the repetitive process of absenting” (Ivy 1995:20). One of Ivy’s examples of the “unrecoverability of tradition” is Mount Osore, site of cultural practices that “circulate around stabilizing the dead through memorialization and the momentary unbinding of that stability through grief and remembrance, through mourning” (Ivy 1995:148–149). Editions of the Whole Earth Catalogue that appeared around 1970 included descriptions of the potlatch as a sort of free celebration or love-in. I presume “wailing” glosses vilapa, “traditional lament.” The speech of Rithambhara is cited and translated by Kakar (1996:163). The Lukovic article was translated for me by Rada Drezgic of the University of Pittsburgh. Iraqi laments are almost exclusively in Arabic, Iranian laments in Persian. This, the subtitle of the English translation, On Job, reflects the original Spanish title, which did not mention Job. I am grateful to Senni Timonen of SKS for playing the tape of Martta Kuikka’s 1971 laments, showing me Asplund’s notes, and interpreting both. Nenola tells me, however, of a group of women who dressed in black and went to the Finnish parliament to protest a bill. They called themselves The Lamenters.

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Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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Index

Äänellä Itkijät RY (Lamenters’ Society), 10, 45–6, 209–14, 216 –18, 220 workshops, xiii, 211, 217, 221 abandonment, fear of, 122 abjection, 160 Abu Ghraib, 129 abuse physical, 129 sexual, 121 accent, 177 accusations, 28, 186 act-sequence, 29–30 Adams, Vincanne, 158 Adiman (Nigerian cab-driver), 38, 50, 120 advertising, 13 Aeschylus, 70 Choephori, 62 The Persians, 62, 63 aesthetics, aesthetic systems, 25, 29, 50, 77, 78, 169, 187, 230, 244 affect, 10, 52, 84, 100, 103, 168 interiorization of, 93 agency, 88, 107, 158, 166, 184, 217 Afghanistan, 115 Africa, 5–9, 24, 25, 50, 112, 120, 146, 166 diaspora, 208–9 African Americans, 6–9

age-distress, 15 aggression, 121 AhAjArC, 38 Al-Amad, Hani, 166 Alaska, 17, 199 Albania, 36 Albery, Nicholas, et al., Natural Death Handbook, 195 Alexander I, Tsar, 161 Alexiou, Margaret, 61, 63–4, 66 alienation, 159, 164, 166 Al-Jazeerah, 181 al-Karbalai, Basem, 205–6 altered states (of consciousness), 51, 52 Amazon, 28, 52, 80, 119, 129–30, 140–1, 171 American Revolution, 65–6 Amina (Latifa’s cousin), 54, 106–7 amnesia, cultural, 15, 76–96, 155, 218 aesthetic of, 78–9 amnesty/amnesia, 66 Ancient Culture Week (Karelia), 38–40 Andalusia, 27 Anderson, Gary, 49, 119 animal sounds, 140–1 anthropology and “civilization,” 139 descriptions of lament, xiv, 119, 219

Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament. James M.Wilce. © 2009 James M. Wilce. ISBN: 978-1-405-16992-9

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anthropology (cont’d) and folklore, 215 and humiliation argument, 122–3 importance of lament to, 10 as lament, 160 –1 literature on emotion, 54 and metaculture, 13 and metalaments, 218 and objectivism, 214 of postmodernity, 170 and potlatch songs, 199–200 of senses, 79 and society ethos, 163 anti-Semitism, 143 “antiquing” of lament, 21, 57, 58, 60, 63 antiquity, 57– 61, 159 Appadurai, Arjun, 183 Appalachian peoples, 216, 217 appropriation, 155 reappropriation, 197 α-products, 172 Arab culture, concept of, 129 Arabic tradition, 29 archives, 24, 211 Arefeen, H. K., 91 Aristotle, 30, 61, 65, 70 Årnason, Arnar, 196 Arnold, Matthew, “Dover Beach,” 163 Ashura, 124 Asplund, Anneli, 211–12 Athens, 66 Atlantic Monthly, 99 Auerbach, Susan, 36, 165 Austin Conference on the Anthropology of Lament (1989), xv, 193 authenticity, 18, 99, 101–3, 112, 133–6, 155, 211–12 see also inauthenticity autonomy, 103 Ayodhya, 188

Ayoub, Mahmoud, 53 “azah, 205–6 AzAn, 94 Azerbaijan, 59 Babri Masjid, demolition of, 201 “backwardness,” 4, 16, 51, 60, 104, 106, 109, 110, 119–20, 123, 127, 131–4, 139–52 Baghmar, 81 Bahl, Vinay, 45 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 15, 58, 168 balag laments, 26, 30 Bali, 124 Balkans, 155 Balto-Finnic traditions, 162–3, 175 bArahmAsA, 104, 142–3 Banerjee, Sumanta, 105, 108 Bangla (language), 1, 83, 92, 108, 131 Bangladesh authenticity in, 102 author’s fieldwork in, ix, xi, 15, 38, 39, 44, 45, 59–60, 73, 76–96, 214, 221 as case study, 75 construction of identities in, 97 cultural amnesia in, 155 future of lament in, 116 and lament “from the heart,” 38, 41 loss of lament in, 104–9, 115 medical workers in, 132 and metaculture, 13 new media and, 181 scholars in, xi, 219 sense of backwardness, 123 shame in, 3, 127, 132–3 solo lament in, 28 see also Latifa baptisms, 221 “barbarism,” 139 Baudrillard, Jean, 160 Bauman, Richard, 26

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Index Bauman, Richard, and Briggs, Charles, 33, 34, 218 bean chointe, 53 Bengal, 45, 130, 189 East and West (pre-Raj), 104 see also Bangladesh Bengal Renaissance, 106 Benjamin, Walter, xv, 12, 159 bereavement counseling, 196 –7 bereavement movement, 17, 196 Bernstein, Tamara, 164 –5, 168 “Lament for the [Montreal] Women,” 165, 191 Besnier, Niko, 123 β-products, 172 bhadralok, 105–6, 108 Bhatgaon, 44 bhaw, 44 Bible, 119, 193–4 Hebrew, 49, 208–9 bilAp (vilApa), 1, 41, 45, 81, 84, 86, 88 –96, 97, 104, 108, 201, 227n undesirability of, 90 –1 Bin Laden, Osama, 145 biraha (viraha), 104, 105 Blake, Fred, 28 Blakely, Pamela and Thomas, 25 blasphemy, 28, 68, 83, 87, 94 blogs, 182 blood, 125, 141, 201 blood feuds, 50 blues, early, 24 Bly, Robert, 197 Boas, Franz, 215 Böckel, Otto, 143– 4, 197 bodies, 23, 38, 41, 46, 64, 79, 92, 93, 100, 118, 141, 224, 227 see also embodied dispositions; embodiment of lament Bororo Indians, 140 –1 Bosavi, 42, 184–7, 190–1, 193, 223n Bosnia, xii–xiii, 203

255

boundaries, x, 26, 55, 98, 121, 132, 171, 204, 214 Bourdieu, Pierre, 127, 131–2 bourgeoisie, European, 158 Brahmo Samaj movement, 225n Bray, Most Rev. Dr. Thomas, 136–7 Brazil, 129–30, 140–1 Brenneis, Don, 44 bridal lament, 3, 27–8, 45, 105, 111, 217 brides, Asian, 127 Briggs, Charles, 28, 33 Britain bereavement movement in, 196 as colonial power, 128, 129 and Ireland, 137 literature, 163 nostalgia in, xv Puritanism in, xv revival of death in, 17 science in, xiii travelers from, 16, 133–6 see also Raj, British Brueggemann, Walter, 193–4 Budge, Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis, 68 Bun (Latifa’s “sister”), 83–4, 87–8, 94 bush modernity, 191 Cairo, 115 Canada, potlatch ban in, 114, 200 Candimangal, 86 cannibalism, 119 Cantwell, Robert, 210 capital cultural and economic, 126–7 technologies of, 99 capitalism, 13, 76, 100, 180, 220 consumer, 198 late, 216 local and finance, 99 Marx’s analysis, 159 case studies, 62–9

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Index

Cashel and Emly, Diocese of, 136 –7 cassettes, circulated in India, 100, 201–2 categories, social-cultural, 22, 25, 31, 48, 52, 123, 127, 132, 146, 171, 177, 215 labels, 27, 157 catharsis of anxiety, 215 lament as, 30, 55, 65, 165, 168, 191 and shame, 202 cathexis, 216 Catholicism, xv, 50, 70, 134, 207 Caucasus, 59 Caulker, Solomon, 6 CDs (compact disks), 13, 184 cemetery, 115 see also graves Certeau, Michel de, 160 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 106 Chandpur, xi chanting, 26, 108 chaos, 141, 144 Chatterjea, Ananya, 188 –9 Chhotanagpur, 182 childbirth, 116 China, 4, 25, 58, 149, 150, 158, 220 Cultural Revolution, 74 Southwest, 54 choral laments, 28, 31, 80 Christianity acceptance of, 145 contemporary music of, 187 conversion to, 77, 85, 112–15 critiques of lament, 70, 101, 144, 150, 193–4 European, 109–12 and imperialism, 106 in Ireland, 133– 8 and missionary movement, 112–15 and Orientalism, 142

transnationalism, 117 in United States, 207 see also Catholicism; fundamentalism; Lutheranism; Protestantism Chrysostom, St. John, 31, 68, 70, 109, 133, 207 circular migration, 181 circulation of cultural products, 13 cities, destruction of, 27, 49 city-laments, 49 city-states, 13, 64 civil order, 64 civilization as concept, 120, 139, 143, 145 as loss of self, 159 Clark-Deces, Isabelle, 27 class and nostalgia, 216, 217 socioeconomic, 126–7 stratification, 166–7 class-consciousness, 120 clergy, American, 1 clerical critique of lament, 133–8 closure, 148 clothing, torn or discarded, 118, 119, 186, 216, 218 CNN, 181 Codresçu, Andrei, 4, 202 coevalness, denial of, 62 Cohen, Mark, 26 Coleman, Patrick, Reparative Realism: Mourning and Modernity in the French Novel, 163 collective identities, 16 collective performances, laments as, 23, 142 see also choral laments colonialism, 15, 103, 121, 158, 188 commemoration, 15, 31, 76 technology of, 41, 83 commodification, 124

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Index commodities, 187 fetishization of, 100 communism, 202, 203 community (Gemeinschaft), 159 condemnation of lament, 3, 90 –1, 109, 190 conduct, as status marker, 127 Confucianism, 74 Congress Party (India), 201 contextualization, 33–5, 40, 88 –9, 174, 189 of shame, 126 of speech, 177 continuity, 122–3, 161 contradiction, 179 control of emotion, 128, 131, 132, 141–2 loss of, 51–2, 144 male, 95 conversion, 77, 85, 112–15 Cook, William, 140 –1 Cooper, James Fenimore and Susan, 146 –7 co-optation, 4, 17, 200, 205 Coptic Christians, 68 Corsica, 29 Counter-Reformation, 133 Country artists, 184, 187 creativity, and conventionality, 174 Crete, 195 cricket, 128, 129 critical theory, 159 critiques of lament, 3, 91, 109, 133– 8, 190 see also condemnation; disapproval Croats, 203 cry breaks, 36, 42 crying shame, 3, 132, 211 crying-song, 143, 144 Cry-Woman, 167 cry-women, 28, 29, 38–40, 46, 52, 143, 197, 211, 217

257

cultural capital, 126 cultural commentary, 13 cultural flows, 98 cultural forms, and communities, 171 Cultural Revolution (China), 4 Cultural Survival, 160 culture industry, 180 culture loss, 101, 215 lament over, 160 culture theory, ix cultures of circulation, 173 concept of Arab, 129 critique of discourse on “cultures,” x, 13 death of, 3–4, 215–16 and metaculture, x cyclicality, 170 Dagara, 197–8 Dalits, 99 see also untouchability dance movements, 31, 35 Danforth, Loring, 110 Danforth, Loring, and Tsiaras, Alexander, 27, 50 Das, Veena, 28, 92 Dawley, Amelia, 5–6, 9, 167–8 de Laguna, Frederica, 50, 114, 115, 148 de Martino, Ernesto, 52 dead, addressing the, 29 death, 3 cathexis of, 216 and loss, 194–5 revival of, 17, 195–7 Victorian obsession with, 195 death-drive, 215 Debord, Guy, 182–3 decay, cultural, 142 decolonization, 170 deconstruction, 128

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258

Index

deferential forms, 179 “defoliation,” 78, 95, 218 degenrification, 89–90, 107 deities addresses to, 28, 29, 42, 59– 60, 62, 67–8, 83 celebration of, 105 denial of, 87 Egyptian, 67– 8 insult to, 90 deixis, 182 Delacroix, Eugène, 163 demystification, 74, 110 desire, xii, 13, 63, 70, 86, 95, 107, 120, 122, 129, 155, 180, 187, 200, 217 sweet, 164 unfulfilled, 107 despair, desperation, 157, 159 deterritorialization of discourse, 100, 182 Dhaka, xi, xii, 45, 86, 103, 181 University, 88, 91 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 51 dialect, 177 dichotomization (of modernity and tradition), 161, 176, 179– 80 dirges, 25, 32, 168 war, 203 disapproval of lament, 3, 90 –1, 109, 190 discourses, 13, 116 –17, 156 –7 discursive technology, lament as, 79–91 disenchantment, 76 disgrace, 122 dishevelment, ritual, 118 –19 displacement, 86 dissemination of myth, 172 “distressing” of lament, 21, 58, 63 divergences (between patterns of modernity), 98 divorce, 41

domination, symbolic, 116 Donckele, Father, 114 double-timing, 15, 58, 67–8, 198 double-voicing, 15, 58, 107 drama, 94, 157 Bengali, 105–6 Greek, 62, 65 Shia, 124 Dublin, 136 DuBois, Thomas A., 163 Durkheim, Émile, 159 duty, lament as, 31 education, 102–3 effacement, 86 Egypt, 28, 64, 66–8, 120, 166 lament in, 115, 116 Old Kingdom, 67 tomb paintings, 38, 48–9, Fig. 2.1, Fig. 4.1 Egyptologists, 68 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 98 electronic media, 17, 170, 171 elegies, 32, 147, 164 élegos, 63 Elias, Norbert, 55, 126, 128 elvytys, 45 email, 182 embarrassment, 50–1 see also shame embodied dispositions, 131 embodiment of lament, 24, 35, 36–41, 48, 64–6, 77, 80, 86, 93, 96, 131, 139, 150, 162, 163, 172, 180 Emesal dialect, 26 emotion, 43–56 Aristotle’s theory of, 70 condemnation of, 105 control of, 128 expression of, as calming process, 197 individuation of, 101

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Index interiorization of, 93 and lament, 14–15, 21, 30, 107, 119 repression of, 113, 127– 8 emotional freedom, 55– 6 emotional regime, 186 emotion-signs, 47, 115 endechas, 25 ends (of performance), 28 –9 Engels, Friedrich, 140 England, see Britain English (language), 25, 27, 74, 83, 98, 101, 131, 134, 137, 178, 179 Enlightenment, 157 entextualization, 32, 33–5, 40, 76 entropization, 201 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, “The Sinking of the Titanic,” 167 epikédeion, 25, 63 epitáphios logos, 63 erasure, 85– 6, 90, 95, 96, 113–15 see also suppression of lament Estonia, 32, 151, 168, 176 ethnic cleansing, 202 ethnographies, 194, 195 of media and viewership, 183 of memory, 78 ethnology of lamentation, 27–32 ethnomimesis, 210 ethnomusicology, xiv, 10, 13, 36, 38, 143– 4, 175 ethno-nationalism, 4, 89, 203 ethnoscapes, 13 ethos of authentication, 102 emotional, 204, 217 of memory, 52 of society, 163 Euripides, 64 evolutionism, 120, 140 cultural, 139 expectations, generic, 174

259

exploitation of lament, 23–4 expressivism, 187 expression of emotion, lament as, 44–9, 56 Fahrenheit 9/11, 1 Faisal (Gazi Nazrul Islam, field assistant), 53, 82, 88, 214 “fakelore,” 210, 214 Fara’idi movement, 105 Farewell, James, The Irish Hudibras, 134 Faulkner, R. O., 48 Feld, Steve, 36, 42, 79, 113–14, 184–7, 190–1, 193, 194 feminism, 188–9 fertility, 28, 68 fetishization, 4, 100, 150 fiction, working-class British, 120 fields of action, 41 Fihlman, Ensio, 212–13 Fihlman, Pirkko, 38–40, 46, 211–13, 217, 220–1, Fig. 11.1, Fig. 11.2 Fiji, 44 films, 167–8, 170, 171, 172, 218 reviews, 177 Finland, xiv, xv, 10, 17, 39, 45–7, 49, 55, 160–3, 175–6, 183, 193, 209–14, 216, 221 Finnish, 1, 111 Finnish Literature Society (Suomalaisen Kirjalli Seura, SKS), 38, 161, 183, 211, 213 Finno-Ugrian languages, 45, 175 Finns, Western Lutheran and Orthodox, 213 fire, as theme, 84 first- and second-order indexes, 178–9, 218–19 first- and second-person pronouns, 190–2, 195 Fischer, Michael, 170

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Index

flagellation, 124 see also self-flagellation Flesher, Leanne Snow, 207 folklore, 10, 158, 161 fetishization, 4 folkloristics, xv, 161, 166, 175, 215, 219 folklorization, 198 forgetfulness, of propriety, 83 forgetting, 92–3 “forward-looking,” 139– 40, 146 Foucault, Michel, 4 Fox, Matthew, 207 Fox, Pamela, 120 France history, 44 literature, 163 Frankfurt School, 159, 215 freedom Americans and, 56 loss of, 215 to lament, 198 French Revolution, 44 Freud, Sigmund, 55, 122, 140, 159, 167, 215 “From Sita: lament, fury, and a plea for peace,” 188 –9 fundamentalism ideological, 204 movements, 115, 186 funeral wailers, 140 –1 professional, 13, 100, 103, 135–6 see also cry-women funerals, 10, 23, 24, 25, 26, 41, 110, 111, 163, 165, 174, 204 Gallagher, Most Revd Dr., 133 Garcia, Ronnie, 147– 8 Geertz, Clifford, 124 Gemeinschaft, 159, 215 gender, 41, 44, 51 segregation, 90 and shame, 126 –7

genocide, 203 genre artist/film, as terms, 173 genres, 25–7, 40, 81 changing, 101 folk, 106 labels, 27, 31–2, 88, 94, 157 of memory, 96 passing of, 95–6, 97 as structures of expectation, 174 Germany, scholars, 120, 143, 215 Gershwin, George, Rhapsody in Blue, 173 gestures, 37–8 ghAm-xAdi, 116 Ghattas, Kim, 125, 150 Ghost Dance rituals, 215, 216 Giddens, Anthony, 93, 122, 213–14 Gifford, Rob, 58, 61, 149 Gilgamesh, epic of, 119 Ginsburg, Faye, 183 gisalo, 184, 186 gita gisalo, 184–7, 190–1 global villages, 124 globalization, x, 13, 15–16, 73–4, 95, 104, 106, 181–2 capitalist, 99 cultural, 4 and Islamist politics, 107 and language, 98 Shia, 124–6 goals, conscious, 28–9 Golden, Tom, 196–7, 198 Gender and Cultural Differences in Grief, 196 Goluboff, Sascha L., 59 Good, Byron, 10 Good, Byron, and Delvecchio-Good, Mary-Jo, 204 good-self construction, models of, 100 góos, 25, 61, 63, 65 grand narrative, 55

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Index graves, 5, 6, 34, 114, 118, 137, 163, 168, 200 see also cemetery Greece, 27 contemporary lament in, 53, 165, 219 control of lament in, 21, 61– 6 history of lament in, 94, 150 legislation on lament, 64 – 6 national identity, 63 and sensory memories, 78 –9 see also Kalohori; Solon Greek drama see drama Greek Orthodox Church, 110 grief, personal, 204 grievance rhetoric, 4, 49, 74, 145– 6, 148 Grima, Benedicte, 116 griots, 168 –9 “groove,” 80 Grosvenor, Vertamae, 6 –7 groups lament by, 3, 23 shame in, 119–20 guilt, and shame, 128 guilt cultures, 128 –9 Gullah Islands, 5, 7, 9, 167– 8 Gusinde, Martin, 141–2, 151 Guttiérrez, Gustavo, 207 habitus, 132 Hadith, 90 –1 hair, tearing, 118, 119, 186, 216 Hakka, 28 Hall, Donald, Without, 22–4 Hall, Mrs. S. C., 135 hAhAkAri, 38 hAmAw, 45 Harkin, Michael, 215–16 healing, 197 lament as, 54 –5 “heartmind,” 84

261

Hebrew laments, 25, 59, 70 Hemba, 25 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 215 Herizons, 164 Herodotus, 64, 70 Hersh, Seymour, 129 Hertz, Robert, 119 Herzfeld, Michael, 63 Hezbollah, 125 Hindi, 44 Hinduism, 69, 105, 187–9 epics of, 84 and Muslims, 201–2 revivalistic, 189 texts, 187–9 Hindutva (Hindu nationalist movement), 188–9, 201 historiographies, 219 history and loss, 219 Western and Eastern views of, 145–6 Holiday, Billie, 24 hollers, 24 Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 49, 53, 54 Home Box Office, 219–20 “The Home Page of Sita,” 188 Homer, 21, 38, 61, 62–3, 70, 100, 151 Iliad, 57, 62 Odyssey, 57 honorification, 179 hope, xi, 29, 62, 98, 159, 176, 215, 226 Humayun, Rajib, 89, 96 humiliation, 145 processes of, 122–3 Hungary, 36, 175 Hupa, 119 Husayn, Imam, 84, 124, 125, 204, 205–6 Husayniya, 206 hybridity, 13, 98, 158, 174, 176, 177, 194, 195, 197, 209

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Index

Hymes, Dell, 27, 30, 32, 40 hymns, 110 hyperreflexivity, 93 hyperventilation, 44 iconic indexes, 29, 85– 6, 88, 93 iconicity, 156 iconization, 85–6, 88, 89, 96 iconoclasm, xv, 120, 170, 187 as face of modernity, 147, 151–2, 180 identities, construction of, 97 identification with deceased, lament associated with, 118, 218 Ilongots, 77, 85 imperatives, 29 imperialism, 15, 106 global, 137 as technology of power, 99 and violence, 104 improvisation, 2, 3, 23, 29, 32, 36, 39, 80, 81, 87, 100, 110, 163, 172, 174 –5 regulated, 85 inauthenticity, 47, 103, 133, 135 see also authenticity index species, lament as, 16 indexes, 85– 6 indexicality, 156, 177–9, 218 India, 17, 61, 73, 127, 155, 166, 187–90, 219 cassettes in, 100, 201–2 classical texts, 69 Partition, 92 see also Hinduism individualism, psychologized, 101, 116 Indonesia, 77, 113 Indra, Doreen, 28 Ingria, 32, 34, 45, 52, 111–12 inhibition, emotional, 211 innovation, 179 inquiry, 22

insecure attachment, 122 instrumentalities, 30–1 interdiscursive chains, 15, 37–8, 58, 61, 67–9, 88 interdiscursive link, 9, 149 interdiscursivity, 185 interiorization, 93, 106 internalization of shame, 128 internet cafes, 181 interrogatives, 29 intersocietal relations, 13 intersubjectivity, 47, 51–2, 86, 214 intertextual chains, 61, 193 intertextual gap, 148 interviews about lament, 90–1 involuntariness, of cries, 143, 144 Iran, 17, 74, 125, 155, 204–5, 219 Islamic Republic, 205 Islamic Revolution, 124 Iraq, 205–6 war, 1, 57 Ireland, 16, 30, 53, 144 keening in, 110, 133–8 Irish (language), 137 “iron cage” metaphor, 74, 160, 215 irrationality, 168 Irvine, Judith, 168 Irvine, Judith, and Gal, Susan, 86, 88 Isis myth, 67–8 Islam, 60, 68 and Christianity, 142 condemnation of lament in, 90–1, 131, 150 conversion to, 77 identity, 95 Islamic-transnationalism, 89, 117 nationalist, 96 politics of, 107 rationalist, 107 reformist, 84, 91, 94, 105, 106, 115 see also Muslims Islamization, 108

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Index Israel, 30, 49 Italy, 50 itkurvirsi, 1, 46, 217 Ivy, Marilyn, 155, 194 Jaago, Tiiu, 168, 175, 176 Jabati, Bendu, 7–9 Jackson, Jean, 52 Jacquemet, Marco, 17, 98, 182 Jahnow, Hedwig, 144 Jamaica, 208 –9 Japan, 155, 194 jArC gAn, 86, 89, 105 Jataka, 69 Java, Javanese, 179 jazz, improvisation in, 80, 172, 175 Jerusalem, destruction of, 49 Jesus Christ lament of, 147 resurrection of, 144 Jewish tradition, 164 Jews Mountain, 59 Sephardi, 50 Johnson, Elizabeth L., 28 Jordan, 166 Joshi, Sanjay, 130 judgments, metacultural, 172 Jungians, American, 197, 198 kaddish, 164 Kahil, Ahmed, 125, 200 Kakar, Sudhir, 189, 202 Kalevala, 161–3 kalevala songs, 161–3 Kalohori, 36, 165 kalû priests, 26 Kaluli, 36, 42, 74–5, 112–14, 194, 199 see also Bosavi Kan, Sergei, 199–200 Kanyammaa, 42 Karbala, 204

263

Karelia (Karjala), Karelians, 10, 29, 38, 39, 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 59, 110, 183, 197, 210, 211–13, 217, 220, 221 Karelians, 10, 29, 38–40, 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 59, 110, 183, 197, 210–14, 217, 220–1 Kaukonen, Väinö, 165 Kaustinen Folk Music Festival, 213 Keane, Webb, 84, 98, 113, 124, 239 keening (caoineadh), 25, 36, 54, 60, 110, 133–8, 164 synods against, 135–6 Kenyon, Jane, 22–3 keys, emotional, 30 Khamenei, Ayatollah, 125–6 Khan, Mr. and Mrs. Rejak, 102, 103 Kildare, 134 kin responses, xi, xii, 87, 88–90, 102, 107, 127, 179, 219 kinesic forms, 38 King, William, The Art of Cookery, 135 Klage, 25 Klein, Norman, 95 Kodály, Zoltán, 36, 175 Kolkata, 105, 106, 108 kommós, 63 Korea, 166 Kroeber, Alfred L., 215, 216 Kroskrity, Paul V., 97 Kuikka, Martta, 46–8, 211, 212–13, Fig. 2.2 Kuipers, Joel C., 199, 201 kujia, 25 Kuna, 26 Kusserow, Adrie Suzanne, 129, 130 Kutscher, Raphael, 142 labels, 27, 63, 88, 157, 173 for laments, 61, 62, 95 label-wars, 89 Labov, William, 178 Lacan, Jacques, 159–60

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Index

Ladakh, 74, 124 –5 Lady Sings the Blues, 24 lajjA, 127, 131 Lajmi, Kalpana, 167 lament culture of, 218 defining, xi, 22– 42 elements of, 1 future of, 116 –17 as genre, 145 genres of, 25–7, 31–2, 175 participation in, ix, xiii, xv, 183, 214, 216, 221 as study course in US, 207 lament-plays (Trauerspiel), 12, 159 The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, 67– 8 The Lamenters (women protesters in Finland), 227n Lamenters’ Society see Äänellä Itkijät RY The Language You Cry In, 5–9, 167–8, 180 language(s), 108, 127, 137 death of, 98, 101 ideologies of, x, 179 Latifa, xi, xii, xv, 15, 41, 53– 4, 81–96, 102–3, 106–8, 116, 127, 179, 214, 219, 221 Lauseviç, Mirjana, 202–3 leaders of lament, 3 leave-taking, 3 Lebanon, Shias in, 125 Lee, Ben, and LiPuma, Ed, 173 Lee, Benjamin, and Taylor, Charles, 98 Lee, Nancy C. legislation on lament, 64 – 6, 77 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 1 Lewis, Bernard, 145– 6, 149 liberation theology, 207 Library of Congress, 24

life-force (ka), 48–9 life-giving force, laments as, 68 Li Hwa, 58, 61, 149 Lincoln, Bruce, 222n linearity, 140 linguistic anthropology, 27 literarization, 65 literature reviews, 219 Liu Bingjian, 167 Lloyd, A. L. (“Bert”), 28, 38, 143 Lòlop’ò, 54, 55 Lönnrot, Elias, 34, 161–3, 211, 212, 215 “looking relations,” 183–4 Loraux, Nicole, 62, 64, 78 Lord, Alfred, 151, 175 Los Angeles, 95 loss anxiety about, 159 and death, 194 of lament, 2–3, 21, 73, 92–3, 104–16, 157, 160, 179 sense of, 16–17, 42, 157, 159–60, 194 love, 141, 144, 200 in absentia, 104, 134 charms, 88 of lament, 63, 144, 206, 220 in lament lyrics, 29, 206 and lament tropes, 84 motivating lament, 53, 86 and shame, 121–2 sincere or insincere, 135 withdrawal of (fear), 121 Lus Mangi Grin Neks, 190–1 Lutheranism, 111–12, 213, 217, Fig. 11.1 Lynd, Helen Merrell, 120 Lyotard, Jean-François, 11 madness, lament and, 53–5, 82, 87–8, 96

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Index Magee, Richard M., 146 –7 magical laments, 10, 29–30, 67, 164 Mahabharata, 69, 92, 95, 188 Malaysia, 102 Malinowski, Bronislaw, xiii Mangeshkar, Lata, 99 Mani, 78, 79, 83, 195 Mantra on Net, 188 marginalization of lament, 56 marriage, arranged, 217 martyrs commemoration of, 84, 86 lament for, 201 Marx, Karl, 159 Marxism, 74, 120 triumphalism of, 159 masculinism, 162 mass media, 13, 215 matam, 124 –5 Matlab, 41 Mauss, Marcel, 159 Maybury-Lewis, David, 160 McCutchan, Steve, 206 –7 McLaren, Anne, 25, 30, 74, 145, 201, 223 Meade, Michael, 197 Mecca, pilgrimage to, 105, 106 media, new, 170, 171, 180–91 mediascapes, 13 mediatization, 186 Meier, F., 60 melancholy/melancholia, 157, 167, 168, 217 Melanesia, 122, 123 melody, 29, 35– 6 Memorial Day, 114 –15, 200 memorialization, 44, 195 memorization, 173 memory conflicts of, 77 discourse of, 150 and forgetting, 76 – 8

265

of genres, 96 as power, 7 sensuality of, 78–9 as social phenomenon, 80 social and public, 66, 79 strength of, 155 and wrath, 62 see also amnesia men, 3 as lamenters, 51, 69, 107 literary activity of, 63–4 men’s movement, Jungian, 197 Mende, 6, 7, 8–9, 168 messaging, instant, 182 metaculture, 12–14, 27 as concept, 32, 42, 218 defined, x, 58–9 effect on lament, 21, 56, 144 of newness, 31, 97–8, 101–2, 141, 148, 149–51, 170–87, 209–10 and origins of shame, 140 revision of Urban’s model of, 17 shifting, 64, 100 of tradition, 61, 151, 172, 174, 219 metadiscourses, 27, 69, 76 about women’s performance genres, 131 religious and secular, 106 meta-discursive response, 15 meta-emotional response, 15–16 metaindexicality, 178 metalament, xii, 165, 169, 185, 186, 195, 218 metalanguage, 41 metanarratives, 97–8, 113 dystopic and neoliberal, 98 metapragmatic, 177 meaning of lament, 32 metastories, 4 middle class, 127–8 and nostalgia, 216, 217 Middle East, 102, 121

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Index

Millennium: Tribal Wisdom and the Modern World, 160 Milosevic, Slobodan, 4 mimesis, 156 missionaries, missionization, 74 –5, 109, 112–15, 186 Australian, 113, 114 mock-laments, 51 modernism, literary, 163– 4 modernity(ies) and backwardness, 16, 128 capitalist, 158, 220 civilized, 145 and consciousness of loss, 17, 165, 215 contradictions of, 73–5 as discourse, 156 –7 and erasure of lament, 70 globalizing, 97 Indian, 99–100 Janus-faced model of, 11, 77, 155, 168 and lament, 158 – 60 late, 8, 78, 79, 93, 97, 99, 120, 122, 129, 155, 167, 170, 181, 192, 196, 198, 214, 216, 220 and memory, 76 –96 metaculture of see metaculture, of newness as metanarrative, 97– 8 multiple, 98, 112 myths of, xiii–xv as narrated imaginary, 156 and postmodernity, 220 project of, 66 and religion, 101 scientific, xiv as set of promises, 157 as shifter, 11, 103 as term, 11–12 theories of, 97–9 see also tradition, and modernity

modernization, 186 features of, 113 monolingualism, 137 monotony, 128, 151, 175 Montreal Massacre, 164 Moore, Undine Smith, 24 mortification, 119 mosques, 94–5, 201, 206 mourning behavior, 118–19 Moussawi, Ibrahim, 125, 150 movement, 31, 35 mp3 files, laments as, 205–6 músúúsá, 25 Mueggler, Erik, 54 Muharram rituals, 124–5 Munda, 182 Munir (Bangladeshi boy), 91, 100, 130 Murdoch, Rupert, 181 Murman, J. W., 111 Murrell, Samuel, 209 music, structure in, 173 musical instruments, 30–1 musicality, 14, 35–6, 80 and voice, 32–3 Muslims, 70, 101, 190 Bangladeshi, 60 and Hindus, 201–2 Ottoman Turkish, xiii Shia, 13, 53, 74, 89, 105, 121, 124–6, 150, 200, 204–6 Sunni, 205–6 see also Islam My Fair Lady, 178, 219–20 “My Father, My Heart,” 184–7 Mymensingh, 131 mystical power (of lament), 168 mysticism, Jewish, 12 myth and legend, 147 nakedness, 125 shame and, 122 narcissistic wound, 122, 202

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Index Nasrin, Taslima, Shame, 121, 225n nation-states, 123, 180, 181, 198 National Endowment for the Humanities, xv National Public Radio (US), 58, 149, 202, 205 nationalism co-optation of lament, 200 – 6 in Finland, 161 in former Yugoslavia, 4 Hindu, 188–9, 201–2 and lament revival, 203– 4 romantic, 45, 161 Native Americans see Tlingit Natural Death Movement, 195 naturalness, 36 Nature, 159 Nekrásov, Nikolai, 145 Nenola, Aili, 34, 39, 52, 111–12, 175, 181, 209–11, 217, 218 neocolonialism, xi neolament, 215 neoliberalism, 99 Nepal, 123 New Guinea, 42, 79, 117, 186 New Testament, 136 New York, 101, 116, 124, 129 New York City, 178 New Zealand, xv Nigerians, 38, 50 nonlinguistic lament, 36, 40 Nonnus, 63, 144 norms, 31 North America, 112 nostalgia and consumerism, 216 death-oriented, 216 in England, xv and ethnomusicology, 184 –7 as failed mourning, xiv in Finland, 193– 4, 214 and folklorization, 198

267

and iconoclasm, 120, 155, 180, 209 and loss, 177 middle-class, 216–17 in modernist discourse, 157, 160–1, 175 and sensory memories, 78 thematization of, 216 in US literature, 146–7 nostalgic “we,” 192 objectification of lament, x, 21, 57, 60, 61, 63, 68, 69 objectivism, 214 objectivity, 140 obscenity, 105 Oceania, 112–13 O’Neill, Eugene, Mourning Becomes Electra, 157 ω-objects/products, 172, 179 Opala, Joseph, 6, 7–8 optatives, 29 Optimism, Age of, 157 oral performances, 23, 26 Oregon, 215, 216 Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), xii Orientalism, xiv, 59–60, 62, 89, 103, 106, 119, 139, 142–3, 145–6, 149, 150, 189, 190, 219 orientation metaphor, 139–40 Orthodoxy, 110, 111 see also Greek Orthodox Church; Russian Orthodox Church Oska, 185–6, 190 O’Suillebhain, Séan, Irish Wake Amusements, 134–7 Otherness and American Christians, 207 and antiquity, 60, 62–3 and authenticity, 103 and “backwardness,” 120, 132, 139

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Index

Otherness (cont’d) and bereavement movement, 17 Christianity and, 144 dark Other, 166, 169 death of Other, 216 discourses on, 140 –3, 187 and emotion, 15, 55 and “fakelore,” 214 and folk genres, 106 and healing, 197– 8 loss of, 159, 164 modernist obsession with, 160 Others as lamenters, xii, 129, 157, 167–8 Others as living past, 158 –9 and repetitiveness, 151 rituals of Others, 196 romanticization of, 163 and Self, 118, 125– 6 Ottoman empire, xiii, 145 out-of-control state, as culturally coded, 51–2 paganism, 134, 136 Pakistan, 74, 92, 115 Panama, 26 Papua New Guinea, 27, 36, 74 –5, 113, 186, 191, 192 paradoxes, of lament, 18 Paraiyar, 42 parallelism, 34 parasitism, cultural, 210 pardA, 127 Paris, xiii Parish, Lydia, 7 parodies of folk genres, 105– 6 paroxysmic utterances, 38 Parry, Milman, 151, 175 participation in lament, 183 author’s, ix, xiii, xv, 28, 214, 216, 221 Partition (India and Pakistan), 92

passion, as danger, 49–51 passivization, 183 Patai, Raphael, The Arab Mind, 129 patina (of antiquity), 15, 57, 58–9, 187 patriarchy, 59, 189, 190 Paxtun, 46, 115–16 Peirce, Charles, 223n performance, x collective, 124 commodification of, 124 and emotional states, 44 lament as, 22, 32–4, 46–7, 56, 86–7 particularity of, 33 as reproduction, 148 performance-shame, 124 performative acts, 9, 47 performativity, 56, 199 and ritual, 48–9 persuasion, 28, 114 Perttunen, Arhippa, 162–3 the phantasmatic, 194, 198 phantasmatrix signifier, lament as, 167 Phrynicus, The Capture of Miletus, 65 Pinault, David, 125 pious weeping, 59–60 plainte, 25 planctus, 144 Plato, 61, 70, 109, 118 Plutarch, 65 poetics, local, 29, 33, 34 poetry, 22–4, 65, 104 epic, 202–3 poetry slams, 23 politeness, 26, 179 political function of lament, 28, 30, 49, 200–6 Polo, Marco, 158 polyphonic lament, 80 pop-culture, 218 Porter, James A., 26, 31, 36, 133 positivism, 2, 162, 219

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Index possession see spirit possession (post)coloniality, xi, 107 postmodernity/postmodernism and anthropologies of, 170 malaise of, 56 self-consciousness of, 214 Six Feet Under and, 220 as terms, 11–12, 157 and tradition, 17 tropes of, 194 Potamia, 50 –1 potlatch ceremonies, 114, 199–200 Powell, Israel Wood, 114 power symbolic, 127 technologies of, 109 practice theory, 160 pragmatic meaning, 177 predictability of lament, 176 presence, crisis of, 52–3 pride, national, x, 123 priests, 26, 68, 133–8 Primitivism, 15, 16 binaries of, 143– 4 primitivity, 51, 56, 62, 74 –5, 120, 121, 139– 44, 159 and death, 195 healthy, 164 prisons, 118 –19 privatization of affect, 93 and lament, 99 pronouns, 190 –2, 195 protest, 12, 25, 42, 49, 82, 100, 105, 132, 220, 227 Protestantism, 109–10, 111–12, 117, 134, 150, 206–7 proto-Orientalism, 144 Pryse, Bishop Michael, 147, 148 psalms, lament, 28, 59, 207, 208–9 psychoanalysis, 159 psychological individualism, 129, 130

269

psychopomps, 29 psychotherapy, 1 Punjab, 45, 87, 92 Puritans, xv Pyramid Texts, 67 questions, grieving, 29 Qur’an, chanting of, 108 racial oppression, 148 racism, 120 Rafi, Mohammed, 99 Rahman, Masibur, 45 Raj, British, 96, 104, 106, 108, 130, 131, 188–90 Ramayana, 69, 92, 95, 182, 188, 190 Rastafarianism, 208–9 rationality, 15, 109–10, 215 rationalization, 74, 76, 94, 116 raudud, 205 reciprocity, 79, 199 reconstruction, 170 recontextualization, 209 recordings, 160, 167 Reddy, William, 44 referentiality, 9, 122, 130 reflexivity, 93, 177, 218 Reformation, Protestant, 109–10 reggae lyrics, 208–9 regime, emotional, 186 regime of language, 108 reification of text, 61 rejoicing, following lament, 30 religion Bengali, 108 and capitalist modernity, 101 and opposition to lament, 24 rationalization of, 94 reformism in, 93 and ritual mourning, 204, 206–7, 217

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Index

religion (cont’d) as technology of forgetting, 77, 87 see also Catholicism; Christianity; Islam remaindering, 160 Renaissance, 158 repetition, 174, 175 internal, 151, 173 see also monotony replication, 172–3, 177, 179 representation, 11, 42, 63, 88, 182 repression of lament, 10, 57 see also suppression of lament resemblances, 29 resistance, 10, 13, 86, 120–1, 130, 132, 140, 149, 150, 165, 188 respectability, 127– 8, 130 resurrection attempts, 29 of Jesus Christ, 144 retrospection, 147 revenge, 28–9, 49–50 revivals of lament, 17, 193–214, 217, 219 rhetoric of grievance, 30, 194 Rich, Adrienne, “A Woman Dead in her Forties,” 164 Rithambara, Sadhvi, 201–2 ritual cathexis of, 216 efficacy of, 66 –7 healing, 26 healthy, 195 lament as, 11, 23 military, 44 and performativity, 48 –9 Robbins, Joel, 122–3 Robertson, Roland, 216 Romania, 202 Romantic literature, English, 163 Romanticism, 45, 140, 157, 159, 161

romanticization, 86, 89, 93 of lament, 149 of the Other, 163 Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 85 Rosaldo, Renato, 85 Rosenwein, Barbara, 55 Rounakari, Tuomas, 46, 47, 213, 221 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 140, 163 Rudaali (The Funeral Wailer), 167 rural lament, 162 Rushdie, Salman, 100 Shame, 121 Russia, 45, 144–5, 213 and Finland, 161 see also Soviet Union Russian Orthodox Church, 110, 145, 211, 213, 217 sa-yalab, 113–14 sacred space, 198 Saddam Hussein, 205 Sahlins, Marshall, 122–3 Said, Edward, 142 Orientalism, 59, 150 sajjo, 45 Samarra, al-“Askariyya mosque/shrine, 206 Sangh Parivar, 201 Sardinia, 29 Sarv, Vaike, 151, 175–6 Saryu River, 201 Sass, Louis, 78 “savagery,” 139 saya:lab lament, 185–6, 186, 191 Schieffelin, Bambi, 74–5, 194 Schmidt, Cynthia, 6, 8 scholarship and lament revival, 210, 211–12 metacultural, 177 schools, public, 199–200 science, and anthropology, 170 scripture, as label, 109

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Index Second World War, 112 secularism, 59, 76, 106, 194, 199, 201 Self and authenticity, 102 and civilization, 159 construction of, 60, 63 and emotion, 55, 123 and Orientalism, 142 Russian national, 144 and suffering, 106 –7 technologies of, 99, 101, 109 self-abuse, bodily, 118, 141 self-consciousness, 124, 145, 157 self-control, European, 141–2 self-flagellation, 124, 150, 204 selfhood, 124 modes of, 101, 106 self-injury, 38, 50 self-laceration, 124 self-marginalization, 108 self-mortification, 118 –19 self-referentiality, 93 self-reflexivity, x Selknam, 141–2 semiotic theory, 171 Sen, Keshub, 108, 182 Senegal, 50 sensory exchange, 79 sensory memories, 78 –9 sentimentalism, 44 Serbs, xii–xiii, 4, 202–3, 205 Serematakis, C. Nadia, 27, 78 –9, 83, 195 Serrano, Angel, 6 setting/situation, 27– 8 Setu, 32, 151, 168, 175, 183 sexual games, 30 Shakespeare, William, xv Hamlet, 156 shamans, xiv, 26, 28, 29, 80, 123, 186, 197, 217

271

shame and backwardness, 16, 50–1, 145 challenged by performance, 216 collective/ national, x, 92, 118, 122, 202, 219 cultures of, 128 and emotion, 55 globalization of, 73, 118 and guilt, 128–9 of intelligentsia, 105 and modernity, ix–x, 118–38, 219 as “narcissistic wound,” 202 origins of, 140 overcoming, 211 and pride, 122 sexualized sense of, 188 shifting nature of, 123 as vulnerability, 183–4 women and, 128 of young urban women, 110 Sharma, Akhil, “If You Sing Like That for Me,” 73, 99, 100 Shaw, George Bernard, Pygmalion, 178, 220 Shia see Muslims, Shia Shia-modernity, 125 shifters, 11, 103, 182 Sicily, 220 Sierra Leone, 5, 7–9, 168 signifier, death of, 194 signifying processes, 157 Silverstein, Michael, 177–8, 218 sincerity, 99, 101, 112, 134 and self-control, 14 Six Feet Under, 1, 220 slave trade, 6, 7, 8–9, 24, 148 Smith, Gordon, 146 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collection, 141, 193 social functions of lament, 28–9 social memory, 15 lament as, 84–5

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Index

social sciences, 159 social theory, 97, 98, 122, 215, 218 socialism in former Yugoslavia, 203 in Romania, 202 socialization, emotion as product of, 43–4 sociolinguistics, 177– 8 solo laments, 23, 28, 80 Solon, 28, 31, 50, 65–6, 70, 100–1, 132, 202 Somé, Malidoma, 197– 8 Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, 197 Song Dynasty, 149 sorcery, accusations of, 28 South Asia, 50, 69, 88, 95– 6, 99–100, 127, 142 see also Bangladesh South Park, 181 Soviet Union, 203 SPEAKING mnemonic, 27–32, 40 spectacle, society of the, 182–3 spectatorship, 183 speech, and social status, 178 speech acts, 177, 178 speech forms, 178 Spencer, Herbert, 140 spirit possession, xi, 132 spontaneous lament, 23, 34, 43, 76, 100, 102, 109, 132, 150, 163, 166, Table 2.1 Srebrenica, xii–xiii Sri Lanka, 27 stage fright, 124 stance, directional, 139– 40 StarTV, 181 Stählin, Gustav, 144 stereotyping, negative, 178 Stewart, Kathleen, 186, 216, 217 storytelling, 116 structuralism, 119

structure, 32, 35 structures of feeling, 93 subjectivity, 17, 41, 73, 84, 106, 113, 116, 159, 182, 183, 203–4 subversion, 42 suffering, 106–7, 116 Sufi lament, 84 Sufism, 104 Suleyman, 81–3, 88, 89, 92, 94, 95, Fig. 5.1 Sumbanese, 113 Sumeria, 26, 30, 142 Sunni see Muslims, Sunni Suomalaisen Kirjalli Seura (SKS) see Finnish Literature Society suppression of lament, 82–3, 85, 92–3, 104, 112 Sweden, 161 symbolic domination/power, 127 synecdoche, lament as, 16 Ta Dare Mano Paro village, 141 taboos, 139, 195 Taiwan, 181–2 Tamils, 42 Paraiyar women, 160 Tarabay, Jamie, 205 Taussig, Michael, 159 ta“ziyeh, 124, 150, 204, 205 technologies of forgetting, 15, 77, 85, 98–9 new, 13, 109 use of term defined, 98–9 television, 171, 181 Serbian, 203 Tenhunen, Anna-Liisa, 3, 10, 39 Tenjami, 6, 8–9, 168 Terror (France), 44 text, 1, 33–40, 61 and context, 32–3 “textual attitude,” 150

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Index textuality, 32, 40 –1, 150 lament and, 14, 22–3 musical, 35– 6 thanatos, 215 theocracy, 205 theodicy, 10, 12, 59 theology, 12, 70, 90, 125, 207 liberation, 207 therapy church-based, 207 culture of, 148, 197 lament as, 183 thrênos, 25, 63, 65 Tibet, 158 time limits on grieving, 148 linear sense of, 140, 188 time-space, transformation of, 16 Tito, Josip Broz, 4, 203 Tlingit, 17, 50, 114 –15 potlatch songs, 199–200 Toepke, Alvaro, 6 Tolbert, Elizabeth, 46 –7, 51, 110, 211 tradition, 23, 88, 139, 150 in Iran, 205 Jewish, 164 metaculture of see metaculture, of tradition and modernity, ix, xiv–xv, 11, 15, 84, 103– 4, 161, 187, 209–10, 214, 218 rehabilitation of, 170, 175 represented as ancient, 59 traditionalization, 90, 102 trance, 132 Transatlantic Passage, 6, 8 translation of terms, 31 transmission, 174 chains of, 61, 90 transnationalism, 181 Trauerspiel, 12, 159 traumatic memory, 96 Trawick, Margaret, 160

273

Trilling, Lionel, 101 Trinlay, Amchi, 158 triumphalism, 159, 160 trope, lament as, 10–11, 155, 156–7, 163, 167, 201–2, 203 Tuam, Synod of, 135–6 Tukanoa, 52 Tuonela, 47 Turks, 3, 4, 203 Turner, Lorenzo, 5–8 Twain, Mark, 218 typification gaps, 95–6 ululation, 38 uncanniness, 141 unconscious, 159 United Kingdom see Britain United States of America bereavement movement in, 196 culture of, 129–30, 148 funerals in, 197 potlatch ban in, 200 religion in, 207 revival of lament in, xv “unmeaning” as term, 133, 141 untouchability, 160 Ur, 142 Urban, Greg, 11, 12–13, 17, 42, 129–30, 161, 170, 171–7, 180, 192, 195, 218, 226n urbanization, 93 urban renewal, 95 Uukuniemi, 213, Fig. 11.2 Ancient Culture Week, 213 vanishing, 227n Vaudeville, Charlotte, 142–3 ventriloquism, 168–9 vertigo, linguistic, 17, 182 victimhood, xi, 145–6 vijaya songs, 105 vilApa see bilAp

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Index

violence, 15, 50, 78, 186 imperialist, 104 male-male, 92 and modernity, 137– 8 political, 121 viraha, 104, 105 vocatives, 29 voice crying, 36 quality of, 24, 35, 47 voluntariness see involuntariness Wagner, Richard, 163 Wahhabi movement, 105, 115 wailing, 25, 31, 36, 50–1, 52, 129, 139, 162, 186 and martyrdom, 201 professional, 13, 100, 103, 143 see also weeping wake amusements, 134 –7 wakes, 23 wall of sound, 80 Walter, Tony, 195, 196 Warao, 28, 31, 186 Wari’, 119 Washington, DC, anthropology meetings in, xii “we,” uses of, 17, 192 web-mediated discourse, 187–9 Weber, Max, 10, 12, 74, 76, 109–10, 159, 160 websites, 182 weddings, 10, 25, 27– 8, 45, 132, 163 see also bridal lament weeping, 33, 119, 121 by infants, 122 loss of, 197 loud, 3, 45, 50, 59, 90, 130, 131, 140 silent, 73, 100, 129, 131, 143 stylized, 13 see also wailing

weirdness, 141–2 West Africa, 168 Whole Earth Catalogue, 199 Wickett, Elizabeth, 29, 38, 48–9, 68, 115, 120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, x Wittrock, Björn, 157 Wolof, 50, 168–9 women bodies of, 64, 92–3 as creatures of passion, 96 Egyptian, with arms raised, 48–9, 68, Fig. 2.1 empowerment by lament, 51 fears of domination by, 86 Greek, 28, Fig. 6.1 improvisers of lament, 28 Iranian woman at airport, xii–xiii Irish, 134–8 lament associated with, 2, 3, 24, 28, 31, 51, 57, 63–4, 69, 70, 89 “lament-loving,” 63 likened to animals, 69 Maniat, 79–80 marginalized, 164 and masculinism, 134 Oriental, 144 performance genres, 131 as performers, 23, 162 and shame, 128 Sicilian, 220 Solon and, 50 South Asian, xi urban, 110, 116 world music, 187, 193 worthlessness, feeling of, 122 written laments, 143 Yugoslavia, former, 4, 17, 202–4, 219