Forgetting Your Dead: Alienable and Inalienable Objects in Northwest Tanzania

Abstract

Recent studies of the cultural construction of memory have drawn attention to the ways in which processes of remembering depend on the success of forgetting. Forgetting, by these accounts, is not merely an ineffective attempt to retain information, or an unintended consequence of the production of new forms of knowledge. Rather, forgetting can in some instances be seen as an intentional and purposive attempt to create absences that can be crucial to the reconstruction and revaluation of social meanings and relations. For Haya men and women in the Kagera Region of Tanzania inherited goods, or heirlooms, and the sociocultural practices that animate them, exhibit qualities in which the relation of remembering and forgetting are dynamically interrelated. This essay offers an assessment of Haya inherited valuables as elements in a process of objectification, a sociocultural process of value generation and transmission in which both remembering and forgetting are integrated dimensions. [memory, commodification, inalienability, mortuary, Haya] Introduction Recent studies of the cultural construction of memory have drawn attention to the ways in which processes of remembering depend on the success of forgetting. In spite of the dichotomy commonly drawn between these processes, forgetting, by these accounts, is not merely an ineffective attempt to retain information, or an unintended consequence of the production of new forms of knowledge. Rather, forgetting can in some instances, be seen as an intentional and purposive attempt to create absences that can be crucial to the reconstruction and revaluation of social meanings and relations (Lass 1988; Derrida 1986; Munn 1986; Battaglia 1992). For Haya men and women in the Kagera Region of Tanzania inherited goods, or heirlooms, and especially the sociocultural practices that animate them, exhibit qualities in which the relation of remembering and forgetting are dynamically interrelated. Such objects have the capacity both to establish and concretize the memory of social beings, and social relations and therefore to transmit knowledge and substance across generations. Moreover, through this process of objectification, they also permit, indeed they ensure, the dismantling or forgetting of certain aspects of these relationships. This essay offers an assessment of Haya inherited valuables as elements in a process of objectification, a sociocultural process of generating and transmitting knowledge and value in which both remembering and forgetting are integrated dimensions. Objectification, Permanence, and Inalienability Inheritance has long been critical to Haya constructions of memory, but not always by means of the same practices. The control and conversion of a variety of objects have undergone important transformations over the last century, transformations that have had significant consequences for the ways in which Haya men and women remember, as well as forget their forbears. The meanings of these transformations relate to yet another pervasive dichotomy in the study of objects and their transactions, namely the contrast between and commodities. Analyses of commoditization often argue that the spread of market transactions, consumer goods, and the medium of money creates a severance in the intimate links of persons to the objects they possess. The commodity, then, becomes the form in which objects become alienable things, in contrast to the inalienable bonds engendered by (Gregory 1982; see also Taylor 1991 for a recent African example). But, as Haya men's and women's control of inherited objects makes clear, some purchased commodities acquire the most intimate of connections with their owners, while what might be thought of as gifts can become decisively disengaged from their owners in certain contexts. This variety of practices surrounding the disposition of valuables in Haya society leads me to suggest that the contrast of commodities with gifts-and the qualities of alienability and inalienability on which this contrast is premised-might constructively be reconsidered. …