Funeral rites are commonly understood as a means by which communities reestablish normal or ideal social relationships following death. Lament, which has played a prominent role in such rites, has been studied in numer ous cultural and historical contexts as a practice that is effective on both a personal and collective level. An individual lam enter facilitates the collec tive confrontation with death through a performance that combines musi cal and verbal signification (in the forms of homage, praise, etc.) with non linguistic utterances such as stylized crying or weeping, the meanings of which are culturally constructed (Urban 1988).As a predominantly (in many contexts exclusively) feminine mode of expression, lament has more recently been examined in its relationship to gender identity (Tolbert 1990a, 1990b, 1994; Briggs 1992, 1993). In the Greek context especially, it has been dem onstrated that lament can serve as a privileged arena within male-domi nated society in which women express gender-specific concerns (Auerbach 1987; Seremetakis 1990, 1991; Caraveli 1986; Caraveli-Chaves 1980; Danforth and Tsiaras 1982). The funeral laments improvised by women on the Mediterranean is land of Corsica constitute one of the oldest and perhaps most significant oral traditions on the island. Called voceri (sing. voceru), these laments were traditionally performed over the body of the deceased and accompanied by wailing and other demonstrations of grief. The practice presumably pre dates the introduction of Christianity, and written references appear in sources dating back to 1506 (Ettori 1978:248). By the late-nineteenth cen tury the voceru was in decline and its practitioners gradually disappearing, though the practice endured in villages of the island's interior. Today, though the voceru is considered by many Corsican poets and singers to be founda tional to Corsican expressive culture, funeral laments are no longer per formed as a living tradition anywhere on the island. Though it was not customary in Corsica to sing laments for the long dead or to improvise voceri outside of the funeral context, some laments, because of their connection to significant events or their exceptional beauty, circulated orally or were transcribed. Many of these laments appeared in collections of Corsican popular song published during the second half of the nineteenth century.l Though these consist mainly of texts without melo