Final Rites Research Articles

“Building Community through Death”: Freed African Religiosity and Faith-Based Social Networks in Nineteenth-Century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil

This article adds to existing discussions on slave religions by offering the analysis of four post-mortem testaments left behind by formerly enslaved African women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia to elucidate the different roles that faith and religiosity played within their lives, communities, and understandings of self. After contextualizing these primary sources within the relevant historiography on African and African descendant religiosity in Atlantic slave societies, it focuses on the centrality of baptisms, strong pleas for forgiveness, elaborate funerary arrangements, irmandade membership, and lives spent within the precepts of Roman Catholicism present in the testaments. It also considers the realities of enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade as important factors that shaped the considerations of freed Africans when faced with the imminence of death. In a world where life was fleeting, death became a major site for community formation, for the assertion of principles, and for exercising agency. The proximity of death and the realities of Atlantic slave societies shaped libertos’ considerations of justice and honor, as well as the final rites they required for their dignified passage to the afterworld. This article concludes that Africans in the diaspora constantly managed, negotiated, and enlarged the small spaces for self-determination, and for the preservation and recreation of identities and communities, with which they were left, while they also carved out other parallel spaces for themselves. Among these, Roman Catholic-derived religious communities and affiliations, and the continuation and creative adaptation of African religious practices, were of essential importance to the identities and community formations of libertos.

Nurses’ perceptions of barriers and supportive behaviors in end-of-life care in the intensive care unit: a cross-sectional study

Background and aimPatient deaths are common in the intensive care unit, and a nurse’s perception of barriers to and supportive behaviors in end-of-life care varies widely depending upon their cultural background. The aim of this study was to describe the perceptions of intensive care nurses regarding barriers to and supportive behaviors in providing end-of-life care in a Chinese cultural context.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted among intensive care nurses in 20 intensive care units in 11 general hospitals in central and eastern China. Instruments used in this study were general survey and Beckstrand’s questionnaire. Data were collected via online survey platform. Descriptive analysis was used to describe general characteristics of participants and mean and standard deviations of the barriers and supportive behaviors. The mean and standard deviation were used to describe the intensity and frequency of each barrier or supportive behavior following Beckstrand’s method to calculate the score of barriers and supportive behaviors. Content analysis was used to analyze the responses to open-ended questions.ResultsThe response rate was 53% (n = 368/700). Five of the top six barriers related to families and the other was the nurse’s lack of time. Supportive behaviors included three related to families and three related to healthcare providers. Nurses in the intensive care unit felt that families should be present at the bedside of a dying patient, there is a need to provide a quiet, independent environment and psychological support should be provided to the patient and family. Nurses believe that if possible, families can be given flexibility to visit dying patients, such as increasing the number of visits, rather than limiting visiting hours altogether. Families need to be given enough time to perform the final rites on the dying patient. Moreover, it is remarkable that nurses’ supportive behaviors almost all concern care after death.ConclusionsAccording to ICU-nurses family-related factors, such as accompany of the dying patients and acceptence of patient’s imminent death, were found the major factors affecting the quality of end-of-life care. These findings identify the most prominent current barriers and supportive behaviors, which may provide a basis for addressing these issues in the future to improve the quality of end-of-life care.

Raptor

Raptor Stella Lee (bio) White cloud sighs stretch across a cornflower horizon. Saturday afternoon feels like a cage as the fan drones on and the bars soldered to the window cut up my view of the world outside. I look out and lazily scan over the same vista: snow, ice, buildings, brick, glass, skeletal tree branches. Day in and out the panorama is the same, same expectations of sunlight glistening, same small puddles on the rooftop, the generators humming. This grey landscape of asphalt dotted with pockets of crystalized water makes a runway to you. I see you. Redtail, white belly, onyx talons, piercing beak. Your slick feathers are like a fading dream. In the heat a carcass whistle. You float and feathers circulate, your curved beak bears the final rites of your prey. Wild and fierce, you perch upon my rooftop. Entrails leisurely plucked apart from the chest. You tear into tendons and cover your wings in blood, your talons dig and dance deep into flesh. There is no longer a body just bones and muscles animated by your hungry movement. I want to get closer to hear you tearing and pulling. Your powerful muscular yellow legs stained in prey. [End Page 81] Stella Lee Stella Lee is a bisexual, Puertorican mother, wife, teacher and Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn poet. She is a fall 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Cave Canem Fellow. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Satire and Hypocrisy Related to Death Rituals in Pagglait and Ram Prasad Ki Tehrvi Movies

Death is inevitable. Different cultures have different notion regarding death and rituals related to it. Indians take death as a festival and there are certain rituals related to it. The movies Pagglait and Ram Prasad ki Tehrvi depict satires on the 13 days rituals of death. It is reflected that how these pious final rites are modified and turned into forced obligations rather than sacred customs, in the modern world. They also comment on the position of women, especially widows, in society. Besides, the movies also focus on the traditions and rituals regarding death which were once considered sacred and holy have been reduced to nothing more than flexible customs prone to changes according to people's convenience.

The role of the furnace in Karelians funeral and memorial rites and folk medicine

Introduction. The article studies the role of the furnace in funeral-memorial rite and folk medicine of the Karelians. The study examines the functions of the furnace at all stages of the funeral-memorial rite, starting with the death of a person. The authors address the issue of the function of the furnace in folk medicine, focusing on healing and protective magic, which also traces the furnace with one of its functions: an intermediary between the earthly and the afterlife. The relevance of this study is determined by the absence of special works based on Karelian material, as well as in comparison with the Finno-Ugric and Slavic peoples. Materials and Methods. The material for the study was the funeral-memorial rites of Karelians and Karelian folk medicine studied using comparative-historical and comparative-comparative methods. Results and Discussion. This article analyzes the functioning of the furnace in funeral-memorial rites and folk medicine of the Karelians. The analysis considered the data of the Baltic-Finnish peoples (Karelians, Finns, Vepsians) and, more generally Finno-Ugric peoples. In addition, it reviewed the information about the traditions of Russians who originally lived at the same territory with the Karelians. In the course of the study, it established the common features in the rites at all stages of burial of the studied peoples, and in folk medicine at the moment of a person passing away when a dying person departs to another world and. Conclusion. Household items, funeral ceremonies and folk medicine appearing in funeral rites, as well as some representatives of the fauna were endowed with the ability to be an intermediary between the earthly and the underworld. Among the household items, a furnace and its utensils associated with the cult of ancestors, which were endowed with cathartic and apotropic functions and played a crucial role in the final rite of a person’s life cycle. According to data on Karelian folk medicine, it was believed that a dog, a snake and a crow have a connection with the “other” world, where diseases come from. For example, a dog was used in medical rites to remove the disease from the world of people to the «other» world. In some cases, both a dog and a furnace appear in the process of treatment.

How the Tiwi Construct the Deceased’s Postself in Mortuary Ritual

ABSTRACTIn this paper I will discuss Tiwi mortuary rites as a transformative, relational process in which the deceased’s postself is created. The deceased’s self is fashioned and manifested after death through a series of ritual practices performed by specific relatives. This approach allows me not only to stress the concern Tiwi people show about being remembered after death but also how this concern defines each participant’s ceremonial role and constitutes one of the mortuary ritual’s major aims. The deceased will be remembered as portrayed in the final rites.

Katydid

Katydid Chapman Hood Frazier (bio) Green leaf’s staccatoin summer’s heatunseen but heard like a hiss keeping itsbliss as an ostinato of urge.This instinct itches air alive in whisper and distinctas dream till it sings a shrillchant distilling the dark. Its two-note syllablean angel’s green declension,a season’s mean inflection that begins in spring’s silenceas a grey scab hidden on the undersideof stem till it rises as the harbinger of heaton beech and maple, oakand long-needled pine, a savory nymph that by Julywill keep the night seared whitein song until September’s dying light [End Page 76] leaves its green beneath the forest’sfloor to survive until first frost’ssacrifice in starlight its final rite of becomingthe way all gods must diein their understory of urge until they’re releasedfrom the green worldinto this trinity of one. [End Page 77] Chapman Hood Frazier Chapman Hood Frazier is a Professor in Residence for James Madison University and was a poetry editor for The Dos Passos Review and guest-editor for the Hampden Sydney Poetry Review. He has published poetry in a variety of publications including The Virginia Quarterly Review, The South Carolina Review, and Appalachian Heritage, and is currently working on a collection of interviews with contemporary poets. Copyright © 2016 Berea College

The End of the Beginning: Environmental Apocalypse on the Cusp in Scott Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners; InVoice; Road’s End; & The Outside

Scott Fotheringham’s novel The Rest is Silence and Nicolas Dickner’s novel Apocalypse for Beginners both mix coming-of-age narratives with environmental destruction through apocalyptic events. Similarly, concerns about global environmental destruction populate the bildungsroman in fiction from nuclear-era texts such as John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids to ongoing narratives such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam series. However, both Fotheringham’s The Rest is Silence and Dickner’s Apocalypse for Beginners integrate coming-of-age narratives with apocalyptic threats to the characters’ environments that climax at the edge of a point-of-no-return and then subside without having completely eradicated the living environment beyond recognition. The two novels represent a rethinking of how apocalyptic threat effects the world: these texts reject the idea of immediate doom represented by, for example, fiction focused on nuclear destruction, and the notion “’[t]hat there’s no problem that can’t be fixed with a good old end of the world’” (Dickner 89).....inVoiceimountainssoured with bitterroot stumps at half mastiibarren logs float in biers, await their final rites —plywood and profitiiithe wind tuneless without branches to pluckthe outsidea swing forwardout the windowand into somethingbreaking bough into somethingfinding medicinein pain and poison

Surviving the exit exam

The exit exam (intercollegiate specialty examination) is the final rite of passage for surgical trainees. 'Old-system' SpRs like us have spent many years as SHOs, several more years in research and are then lucky enough to become registrars. The final years of training have been spent developing specialist operative skills and gaining as much practical experience as possible before taking on full responsibility as a consultant surgeon. During these years learning the craft of surgery is at its most intensive. The prospect, therefore, of a sudden return to a theory examination is a daunting one.

The Fremantle Labour History Walk

For those willing and able to see out the Perth Conference, the local Branch organised a final rite, the 'Fremantle Labour History Walk', which actually consisted of a bus tour, museum visit and the guided walk in Fremantle itself. We began, mercifully perhaps, by simply being seated as the bus carried us around the city. A very special mention must be made of Stuart Reid's commentary which provided unique insights for the visitors. We signalled our support for the campaign against the Court Government's industrial relations legislation by taking in the Workers' Embassy and, scrutinising the temples of WA Inc en route, we headed to Fremantle.

Ethical and practical considerations in palliative child care and the support needs of parents and siblings

Death is one of the few certainties in life and yet it is the one event that most people avoid contemplating until forced to do so. When considering death and dying it is assumed by most to occur in old age and in hospital. The death of a child is a devastating loss which can cause the most distressing and long lasting grief (Davey, 1995). According to “Childhood cancer UK” the number of children developing cancer in the United Kingdom has remained constant over the past 30 years (about 1300 new cases each year), with only two-thirds of children with the disease being treated successfully. In Britain 32 per cent of cancer deaths occur at home (Bean, 1994) however only a small proportion of these will be children. Despite the deaths of children at home being a statistically small group it must not be ignored due to the great emotional impact it has on the individual, family, health workers and often local community. The changing status of children in the UK means that health care professionals must uphold childrens' rights whilst working in partnership with parents. A balance must be found between the traditional protectionist and paternalistic attitude of care and the liberationist approach. This can only be achieved through communication and collaboration between families and members of the multi-disciplinary team allowing the promotion of constructive problem solving The key aim of palliative care is to give the child as good a quality of life as possible in the time remaining with freedom from distressing symptoms including pain. Every health professional working with a dying child who has pain should give consideration to the complexity of pain, it's unique and diverse effects and engage the entire family and health care team in planning interventions and providing support to the child and to each family member (Graner, 1976). Siblings, parents and health professionals may be profoundly affected by the experience of the death of the child, therefore, each multi-disciplinary team must develop formal coping strategies to deal with the possible psychological disturbance and to facilitate adjustment after the death of the child. Martinson, writes of her greatest encouragement which came from the parent of a dying child; “No matter if it culminates a full life or a life shortened much too soon, does death have to be terrorising? There are many to rejoice and aid in the event of birth, as with the patient that can be helped, but for those going through the frustration of ‘not getting better’ when science and the masses, sometimes even family and friends who can no longer face them, have deserted, could there be a greater challenge or more considerable need for help?” (1976, p. 13) This is a powerful message for health professionals caring for children in the end stages of a terminal illness. It is at this time that the family and dying child are in most need of the consistent, expert and humane relationships provided by the caring professions. The challenges are immense but great reward lies in the privilege of being intimately involved in this final rite of passage through life.

"Where Do We Come From...."

dresses, it is traditional for outgoing presidents of our organizations to speak to their memberships as a kind of final rite. Generally, the theme is one in which the wisdom accumulated during the preceding year is shared with at least those in attendance, if not with the expanded professional constituency. Perhaps our wisest, Dr. Maxwell Finland, attempted to establish a negative tradition by not giving a speech at all! I am certain that my concern over what to say, and how to say it, has been no greater than that of my predecessors. Interestingly, when I have sought advice from colleagues on odd occasions, the responses went something like this: Give them a straightforward, scientific address. Make it a political statement. meeting format has been changed drastically, so why not eliminate it altogether? The latter had not occurred to me, but it certainly could not be faulted for attractiveness. As a matter of fact, I had just about decided to take this course except that I found myself being gnawed at by a question which has been put to me repeatedly this past year. Generally, this has been during visits to infectious disease units when more than one fellow would ask me,

Pavlov’s “Demon” and Gogol's “Overcoat”

On Sunday, February 24, 1852, the epilogue to the tragicomedy which was N. V. Gogol's life was played out in the University Chapel in Moscow. Curiosity seekers, government officials, members of high society—“people who had not wanted to know Gogol during his lifetime,” Khomiakov bitterly remarked later—thronged the final rites performed over the writer’s emaciated body. Among the crowd in the chapel was Gogol's old acquaintance, N. F. Pavlov (1803-64), a former serf, actor, university student, law clerk, and journalist who had made his way into Moscow’s beau monde and had married a wealthy heiress.

The Strategy of the TSR-2

In preface to Royal United Service Institutions monograph on complex history of ill-fated tsr-2 British tactical strike reconnaissance aircraft, I wrote: This study was inspired by melancholy spectacle of a great nation forced to cancel an important military aircraft. The aircraft was considered by Air staff to be a necessary piece of hardware even though financial necessity eventually compelled its cancellation. Tsr-2 was conceived at a time when 'Geneva Spirit* had given way to heightened international hostility under impact of Khrushchev's world-wide political offensive. The project was finally axed when Britain's imperial commitment was undergoing its final rites in South-east Asia. Throughout this period away from public gaze, with a mysterious life all of its own, project seemingly flourished. Like monasteries of preReformation England project attracted speculation about riotous spending and scandalous conduct.1 The significance of tsr-2 can be seen clearly in both military and technological spheres, but it was one of accidents of history that its rise and demise should reflect and perhaps accentuate -a more basic change in Britain's position than had occurred at any time since sixteenth century. When tsr-2 was at drawing board stage of development, in that rather curious embryonic way that military aircraft emerge from aspirations of airmen and technological hopes of designers, Britain ran half of Africa, dominated Red Sea Gulf area, and had undisputed claim to maintain the peace in Indian Ocean, British Africa, and large tracts of Southeast Asia. By time tsr-2 was scrapped in 1965 Britain's imperial decline had become an irreversible fact although, of course,

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

IN Ancient Greece, the change of one generation of the Olympic games to the next was symbolized by the passing of a torch, the flame of which was never allowed to die. We have a ritual in our Academy wherein the president, when he retires, passes on a report of the accomplishments of his presidential year and the new president catches the torch and carries forward the flame in what I hope will be a never ending ascension of our traditions. My predecessors were men of dedication and experience in our profession, and they accounted for their stewardship in the final rite with words of grandeur and wisdom. Some of you have heard most, if not all, of the presidential addresses that have been given since our Society was founded in Detroit, 35 years ago. Knowing this, I approach this moment with some trepidation and with a humble spirit, but with the conviction that I must say the things to you that are in my heart and mind. Before I go further, I must acknowledge that my ascension to this highest honor that may come to any pediatrician came unexpectedly because of the passing of our friend and colleague, who had been nominated to serve this year. The passing of Harold Flanagan and Frank Douglass, your last president, was a sad loss to the Academy, for in their lives they practiced the precepts of the Academy and its founding principles. We sincerely memorialize their many contributions to the cause of children's health and their love of humanity.

Nuer Marriage Ceremonies

Marriage among the Nuer is brought about by payment of bridewealth and by the performance of certain ceremonial rites. The rites cannot take place without the payments, but transfers of cattle do not by themselves bring about the union. Both are necessary and they proceed in a connected movement towards the full establishment of the union. Each enforces and reinforces the other. The bride's people can, by holding up the rites, put pressure on the bridegroom's people to make the payments due to them, and the bridegroom's people can, by withholding the cattle, induce the girl's family and kin to advance the ceremonies. First one pedal is pressed down and then the other as the marriage is propelled to its appointed end, the birth of children and the sharing of a home. It is undertsood that payments should have reached a certain point before a certain rite is held, and the performance of the rite is a recognition of the transfer of cattle up to that point. Payments of cattle and marriage rites therefore tend to alternate, though there is no fixity about the alternation and no marriage is exactly the same as another in this respect. The new social ties of conjugality and affinity are made stronger by each payment and by each ceremony, so that a marriage which is insecure at the beginning of the negotiations becomes surer with every new payment and rite; both sides, by the giving and receiving of cattle and by joint participation in the rites, becoming more deeply committed to bringing about the union. Therefore a marriage which has reached the final rites may be regarded as a stable union and will generally prove to be so.