Pain, Rhythm, and Relation: Funerary Lament Among the Punu of Congo-Brazzaville

• Published in: Yearbook for Traditional Music
• Main Author: Planeke, Carine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press (CUP) 2015
• Subjects: Music; karelian
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5921/yeartradmusi.47.2015.0097; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0740155800007827

The first anthropological inquiries into lament, led by pioneering anthropologists Émile Durkheim (1961:442–49), Marcel Mauss (1921), and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922:239–46), focused on its socially determined nature. Lament was seen as a social duty imposed on the afflicted persons that expressed the need for social cohesion rather than a sincere feeling of personal pain. Greg Urban (1988:393), in a comparative study of ritual wailing in Amerindian Brazil, reopened the question of how lament produces sociability by highlighting the way it regiments the expression of a powerful emotion such as grief. In recent decades, the individual/society dichotomy, which underlies these views on lament, has been seriously questioned in anthropology (Ingold 1996). An understanding has been developed of persons “as simultaneously containing the potential for relationships and always embedded in a matrix of relations with others” (Strathern 1996:66). In this view, lament cannot be considered a way to transform an individual expression of authentic grief into a socially regimented one, which, by being regimented, conveys a desire for sociability. Rather, this desire is the very condition that allows pain to be voiced in a manner that enhances the self in relation to the group and thus reinforces the community. As Elizabeth Tolbert poignantly states with regard to Finnish–Karelian lament: “Poised at the nexus between voice and body, self and other, the lamenter creates an intersubjective understanding of emotional pain by expressing the inexpressible, by rendering the isolation of individual mourning into an intensely communal experience” (Tolbert 2007:148).