Mourning Rituals Research Articles

The Experiences of Grief in Bereaved Women Following the Death of Their Husbands During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Qom, Iran: A Phenomenological Study

Background and Objectives: The death of a loved one is one of the most difficult and stressful life events in the world. The effects of death caused by COVID-19 on the mental health of individuals and families are of great importance. This study aims to elucidate the experience of grief in bereaved women following the death of their husbands due to COVID-19 in Qom, Iran. Methods: In this phenomenological study, 12 bereaved women were selected using a purposive sampling method. The information was collected using semi-structured interviews until reaching data saturation. Results: The data analysis led to the extraction of 3 main themes and 10 sub-themes: Complicated grief (ambiguous loss, farewell with no embrace, grieving alone), unconventional grief (strange death, deviation from religious burial customs, virtual mourning), and grief outcome (spiritual experiences, moral panic, social stigma, distrust in healthcare providers). Conclusion: The grief of bereaved women due to the death of their husbands by COVID-19 differs from their mourning for the death caused by other diseases in two aspects. Firstly, according to the majority of women, the cause of death was unclear. This situation intensified their grieving and mourning. Secondly, due to the specific nature of COVID-19 and the necessity of quarantine, they were restricted from having funeral and religious mourning rituals according to the prevalent culture, which resulted in an incomplete mourning process. Gaining spiritual experiences is one positive aspect of grief in women. It is recommended to provide support and care by the healthcare system during pandemics for families, especially bereaved women, to reduce the negative effects of grief.

Contextual Representation of Mourning Rituals: A Case Study of Rural Punjab (Pakistan)

This study is conducted to explore the mourning rituals performed in the rural area of Punjab Pakistan. Specifically, the research focusses on the dynamics between culture and death rituals signified through different religio-cultural practices. The qualitative methods are used employing ethnographic research design. To analyze the data, the thematic analysis technique is used. The study found that the people in rural areas of Punjab perform different rituals on death to show their emotions and intensity of grief. The results show that people in this area practice rituals following their religious and cultural beliefs to please the soul of the deceased as well as to show their reaction towards grief. The findings of this study reveal that wailing, crying, cutting one's body and burning the stick of sage are a few of the mourning rituals that are commonly prevalent in rural Punjab to express grief. Moreover, different folklores are also sung to dialogue the departed soul with other community members and God, which is a great source of attention seeking for showing massive grief. Nature of death and economic disparity is also played a major role while expressing the grief. Generally, the bereaved families use such rituals to get an escape from the grief. To sum up the study found that the death rituals to express and share individuals’ grief are decline in the culture of rural Punjab.

Experiences and needs of Chinese women after a stillbirth: a qualitative phenomenological study

ObjectivesWe aimed to explore the lived experiences and needs of women after a recent stillbirth event.DesignQualitative phenomenological study.SettingThe current study was conducted in a tertiary obstetric hospital in East China...

Transnational grieving: The lived experience of Overseas Filipino Workers who lost their loved ones due to COVID-19

This study aimed to gain an insight into the lived experience of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who lost their family members due to COVID-19 during the lockdown in 2020. Five OFWs volunteered to participate in this study and underwent online semi-structured interviews. An interpretative phenomenological approach guided the data analysis, through which four major themes were derived: (1) experiencing the emotional strains of unexpected death while physically distant; (2) enduring the absence of traditional mourning rituals; (3) managing grief from a distance; and (4) finding closure through physical and symbolic presence. These findings shed light on how OFWs experienced loss and grief during the lockdown, as well as how they coped amidst the distance and eventually finding a degree of closure.

Becoming a Tradition: Presentation of Ti Qin Opera in Funerals in Chongyang County, China

Ti Qin Opera, a popular local performing art in Chongyang County, Hubei Province, China, was mainly performed during the birthday celebrations of the local people and the Chinese Spring Festival to enliven the atmosphere. However, in the last two decades, Ti Qin Opera has been frequently performed at funerals, forming a new practice—the mourning ritual—which has been widely accepted by the locals and has become a tradition. In this regard, two questions arise: Why does Ti Qin Opera appear at local funerals? How did the mourning ritual become a tradition? This study applies an ethnographic approach to investigate the performance of Ti Qin Opera at funerals. The emergence of the mourning ritual in funerals is attributed to the emotional need for filial piety and the local people’s competitive mentality. The family of the deceased believes that if other families hire a Ti Qin Opera troupe to perform the mourning ritual, their family should not miss out on holding this last event for the deceased. Ti Qin Opera performers rely on their reputation and prestige accumulated over the centuries, and acceptance by the locals is a key factor in making the mourning ritual a tradition. Increased economic status among the Chongyang people and, subsequently, better financial capacity to hire Ti Qin Opera troupes further contribute to the development of the mourning ritual tradition.

Mapping a Mobile and Embodied Grief: Adaptable and Portable Mourning Practices in A young Yu’s Mourning Rituals

Abstract This article discusses A young Yu’s single-channel video artwork Mourning Rituals (2022) and the way it examines loss across personal, ancestral, historical, and geographical registers and suggests that mourning rituals in our contemporary world must be adaptable and portable. A 22-minute performance-based work, Mourning Rituals reimagines the Korean ssitkimgut ritual, during which the spirits of the deceased are cleansed and guided into the afterlife, reinterpreting and regenerating it for contemporary, diasporic contexts. Considering mourning as an embodied practice, Yu maps grief and mourning across four locations with personal and political significance. Interweaving scenes from these filming locations throughout the looped, non-linear video allows the work to also reflect the complex ways grief and mourning unfold over time.

The Crying Statue in Early Qing Drama

Should the theatrical fantasy of a statue coming to life involve an actor performing the role of a thing, or a prop taking the place of a human? Proceeding from contests between Hong Sheng 洪昇 (1645–1704) and acting troupes over the staging of the “Crying Statue” 哭像 (Kuxiang) scene in his dramatic masterpiece Palace of Lasting Life (Changsheng dian 長生殿), this article examines how the figure of the living icon became a focal point in broader struggles to conceptualize the relationship between theater and rituals of mourning. Actors staged this complicated scene as an “auspicious sacrifice” (jiji 吉祭), one that foregrounds the transcendence of love over lifeless matter. Hong, conversely, insists on the function of the scene as an “unpropitious rite” (xiongdian 凶奠), a solemn meditation on mortality and the collective expression of grief. By redirecting focus from the object to the space and social dynamics of mourning, Hong questions the drive to bestow on things a life that is not their own.

Partition of India and Museums as Cultural Memory

Partition of the Indian subcontinent generated a trauma which has not subsumed even after seventy five years. ‘Post memories’ as well as ‘prosthetic memories’ of partition continue to haunt generations born much later. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Partition qualifies as a ‘monumental traumatic event that resists understanding and integration’. Several factors contribute towards this lack of ‘integration’. A major one being, that Partition in its immediate aftermath was relegated to the realm of the “unspeakable.” No public memorial of partition existed until 2017. This paper seeks to examine how memorial spaces, and museums help in allowing for ritual mourning and enables healing in instances of corrosive cultural trauma.

Sondheim from the Side

This article is a short introduction to ‘Sondheim from the Side’, the Special Issue on the late influential American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, which focuses on the reception experience of minoritarian artists and critics to his body of work. Historicizing the impetus for the collection in the wake of Sondheim’s death in November 2021, and citing a number of queer and feminist scholars on the politics of reception – including Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Jane Gallop, Eve Sedgwick, David Román and Carolyn Steedman – this article theorizes the emphasis that the collection places on critically generous, first-person articles that centre rather than occlude the author’s social location and affective experience of various works, and it links this emphasis to methods in the field of performance studies. Borrowing from Special Issue contributor Gabrielle Hoyt and Jewish rituals of mourning, the introduction also frames the collection itself as a kind of prayer, or Kaddish, for the deceased artist.

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

Ghost-Stitching American Politics

“I could not give him the funeral he deserved”: The role of alternative mourning rituals during the pandemic

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, measures were enforced that constrained people's ability to engage in conventional funeral and mourning rituals, which in general serve as vital mechanisms for coping with the experience of loss. This study aimed to investigate how these limitations affected early grief symptoms and the influence of alternative mourning rituals (paying tribute on social media, lighting candles in memory of the deceased, and using objects of the deceased) on moderating the relationship between individuals' perception of these limitations (such as being unable to perform the present body ceremony or fulfill the funeral wishes of the deceased) and the intensity of the grief symptoms. The study involved 227 participants, aged between 18 and 77 years, who had experienced the loss of a loved one during the pandemic. Results demonstrated that higher levels of perceived limitation in funeral ceremonies are associated with greater intensity of grief responses. Paying tribute on social media and lighting candles in memory of the deceased person moderated the relationship between the perception of limitation in fulfilling the deceased’s wishes in relation to the funeral ceremonies and the intensity of the grief responses. Using objects moderates the relationship between the perception of limitation in performing a present body ceremony and the intensity of the grief responses. Results underline the relevance of psychological flexibility, in particular concerning alternative morning rituals, that can be used as a way of buffering the impact of the perception of limitation in funeral ceremonies on the intensity of grief responses. This study offers a distinctive insight into bereavement during the pandemic, highlighting the role of flexibility in morning rituals in mitigating the deleterious effect of ritual restrictions on bereavement outcomes.

“What Means This Carnage?”: Civil War Soldiers’ Bodies, Recuperative Projects, and the Army Medical Museum

This essay is about bodies in war and a bone collection. In 1862 during the American Civil War, the US War Department established the Army Medical Museum with the mandate to collect morbid anatomy from the battlefield. It was a dramatic response to the existential crisis posed by wounded and dead Union soldiers. Its creation engaged two differing mid-19thc. epistemological orientations devoted to the care of the human body: the emerging field of medical science and antebellum mourning rituals. Treating the museum as an object of material culture, I track its visual strategies to grapple with war’s carnage and national dissolution.

Women, Rituals, and the Domestic-Political Distinction in the Confucian Classics

In this article, I show that women are depicted in the early Confucian texts not primarily as undertaking household duties or nurturing children but rather as partaking in rituals of mourning and ancestor worship. To make the argument, I analyze, besides the more philosophical texts like the Analects and the Mencius, texts known as the “Five Classics,” which describe women in their social roles in much more detail than the former. What women’s participation in rituals reveals, I contend, is that the domestic-political distinction does little to illuminate the philosophical vision offered by the early Confucian texts. Relatedly, while women’s involvement in communal religious rituals has also been noted about early Greece, the political import of such participation is even more pronounced in the Confucian case. Specifically, I show that, by embodying intergenerational continuity, the mourning and ancestor rituals that women partake in are foundational to the Confucian state.

Shadow Performance in Iran

Abstract This study argues, contrary to some opinions, that shadow performance existed in Iran from at least the tenth to the twentieth century. Through a textual analysis of newly discovered ancient texts, two plays specifically, this study shows how shadow performance originated in the Indian subcontinent, was transported from Iran to the historical region now known as Iraq, and then spread to Egypt, developing over time through its historical progression. This study also looks at the reasons for the decline of shadow performance in Iran, including the centuries-old Iranian Sufi criticism of the form and the establishment of the Safavid dynasty, which introduced Shiism as the official religion of Iran in the sixteenth century. Certain Iranian Sufisms considered shadow performance debaucherous until the fifteenth century. After the sixteenth century, influenced by the Turkish Karagöz, shadow performance was considered a theatrical form associated with Sunni infidels. Consequently, shadow performance was replaced with Muharram mourning rituals, ritualistic forms that reflect Shia identity.

"I Decked Myself Out in Pink"

"I Decked Myself Out in Pink"

In Memoriam

Throughout the long nineteenth century, individuals engaged in rituals of mourning to help deal with loss and grief. Objects were vitally important to Victorians and Edwardians as commemorative artefacts that clearly embodied the deceased and acted as a stand-in for their lived presence. For many people, books served as secular relics, with the safe confounds of the endpapers used to document the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, express feelings of anguish, or pass down books informally to other family members. Despite the high cultural value of these inscriptive marks, they have been surprisingly overlooked by researchers. Thus, this article is the first to shed light on these types of inscriptions in Britain (1870–1914), using a small dataset collected from a secondhand bookshop. Applying a combination of archival research and textual/multimodal analysis, I discuss the ways in which inscriptions helped individuals to manage loss, provided protection and therapy, and enabled relationships between the deceased and the bereaved to be maintained. I also draw attention to an inscriptive practice — the in memoriam inscription — that appears to have been predominantly used by the working and lower-middle classes. Overall, I argue that book inscriptions should be given equal importance to other relics of death, such as hair jewelry and memorial cards, as they were heavily embedded in broader rituals of mourning and served as aids in the process of grieving.

(RE)THINKING SUFFERING AND MOURNING THROUGH COVID-19 PHOTOGRAPHS IN INDIA

This article offers a close textual and visual analysis of some of the most iconic photographs of the COVID pandemic’s second wave in India, to examine how they evoke violence both within and outside the photographic frame, and become sites of critical reflection. The pandemic’s second wave witnessed a proliferation of images in social media and online news portals representing mass deaths, corpses floating in rivers, and mass funerals executed in makeshift crematoria. Pointing out how the widely circulated photographs deployed an excess of violence to represent death as a dreaded event external to life, this article contends that the violence in these images not only evoked shock and horror but also interrupted mourning both in the private and the collective realm, furthered through violence in the images and the interruption of familiar mourning rituals for those dead. Deriving from Ariella Azoulay’s idea of the ‘civil gaze’ to ‘watch’ photographs, the article explores how these photographs configure a space of critical reflection and responsibility towards those photographed, which uncovers the crucial biopolitical interfaces between disease, death, the state, and the precarity of citizens. It simultaneously deliberates on the role of the visual and the photographic gaze in foregrounding these intersections.

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's Three Circles of Light beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

“Time Meant Nothing”: A New Reading of Pietro di Donato's <i>Three Circles of Light</i> beyond Autobiography and Stereotypes

On the “Mythological Retelling” of Su Tong’s &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Binu&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt;

The purpose of this paper is to compare the selection and construction of many ancient versions of Meng Jiang Nü’s story in the text of Binu, and to contrast the “mythological thinking” and “folk thinking” contained in the text. In this way, the modern reflections on the story of Meng Jiang Nü, which has been passed down for thousands of years, are explored. First, the focus of this paper is on the theory of “Archetypal Criticism” throughout the text, and then this thesis will concentrate on the relationship between the story of “Meng Jiang Nü crying at the Great Wall” and the writer’s retelling of the text. The breakthrough of the latter over the former is the inheritance and development of “mythological thinking”. Therefore, this paper will focus on the structure of thinking embedded in Binu, including mythological thinking, and the unique innovation of “new mythology”—“folklore mythological thinking”. In the archetypal criticism, the meaning of the text is related to the contradiction between desire and reality, and the myth is expressed in the form of “ritual” and “dream”, which represent the “narrative content” and “meaning content” of literature respectively. Therefore, this paper explores the mythological thinking of Binu through the rituals of burial and mourning. In addition, the integration of “mythological thinking” and “folklore” in the text of Binu is manifested in two aspects: “human-animal consubstantiation” and the use of folklore resources. Secondly, two important applications of “archetypal theory” in Binu are the metaphors of “tears” and “gourd”. Finally, this thesis will explore the role they play in the “retelling of the myth” in Binu.

Mourning for Tammuz: Prophecy and Projection in Ezekiel 8:14

Abstract While many commentators take Ezek 8:14 at face value, ancient Near Eastern parallels call this understanding into question. Both East and West Semitic sources indicate that mourning rituals for a goddess’s dead consort were carried out in state-sponsored temples that symbolized the goddess. Since this does not accord with what is known about the Jerusalem temple in the early sixth century BCE, it is probable that the visionary writer of verse 14 has projected onto the temple observances for the dying god that did not belong to it. There are indications, however, that his mourning rites were also observed in less formal settings. Women were prominent participants in these popular rituals (as they were in funeral observances in general). It is likely, therefore, that the author of verse 14 knew of mourning rites for a dead god observed in Judah outside of the temple context. Since Ezekiel indicted illegitimate cultic activities that took place throughout the nation for defiling the central sanctuary, the vision of ritual mourning for Tammuz buttressed the prophet’s claim that YHWH had decided to abandon the temple. As it is uncertain that women in Judah called the dead god “Tammuz,” the use of that divine name may come from Ezekiel.