The Mourner's Dance
What We Do When People Die
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When her daughter's fiancé died suddenly, Katherine Ashenburg was surprised to see how her daughter intuitively re-created the traditional rituals of mourning, even those of which she was ignorant. Intrigued, Ashenburg began to explore the rich and endlessly inventive choreographies different cultures and times have devised to mark a universal and deeply felt plight.
Contemporary North American culture favors a mourning that is private and virtually invisible. But, as Ashenburg reveals, the grieving customs of the past were so integrated into daily life that ultimately they gave rise to public parks and ready-to-wear clothing. Our keepsakes, prescribed bereavement garb, resting places, mourning etiquette; and ways of commiserating from wakes to Internet support groups remain clues to our most elemental beliefs, and our most effective means of restoring selves, and communities, unraveled by loss.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When her daughter's fianc died suddenly in early 1998, Canadian journalist Ashenburg was forced to confront contemporary Western culture's ambivalence about mourning especially for the death of a young person. Lacking the rites and rituals that more traditional societies offer, we mourn as best we can; even so, we act in ways that bear close similarities to mourning rites across times and cultures. Into her loving and intimate account of her own family's grief, Ashenburg weaves descriptions of mourning rituals from a broad range of traditions. She explores postmortem treatment of the body; wakes, funeral ceremonies and prayers; burial and cremation; gender roles; and such customs as condolence letters and mourning clothes. Ashenburg's approach is thematic and selective: from reburial of bones in rural Greece to suttee (widow-burning) in India; from the tearing of clothes in Jewish culture to Scarlett O'Hara defiantly dancing in her widow's weeds in Gone with the Wind. Rich in such detail, the book overlookds other relevant subjects: it touches on collective mourning in England for British royalty, for example, but doesn't consider the ways in which entire societies have grieved for victims of the Shoah, the gulag or those in a mass grave. But though its treatment of anthropological themes may be selective, the book eloquently makes the point that mourning is a necessary and transformative experience. Because mourning is both personal and communal, it demands greater societal attention.
