"And Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return" Death and the Semiotics of Remembrance in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Village
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4317752 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tom Boylston (0000-0003-2722-1463, University of Edinburgh, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 281-302 |
| Publication date | 2015-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Material Religion (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1743-2200 • E-ISSN: 1751-8342 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17432200.2015.1082745 |
| OpenAlex | W2253963085 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 30 |
This ethnographic article discusses funerary practice, Orthodox Christian ideas of body and spirit, and the ways in which people make memorials for each other on the Zege Peninsulain northwest Ethiopia. I pay special attention to gravestones because, here as in many other places, physical memorials to the dead become locations where latent uncertainties and conflicts about the relationship between spirit and matter, body and soul, and this world and the next, tend to crystallise. I show that material memorials highlight ambiguities in Orthodox attitudes to human embodiment and challenge priestly monopolies over relations between the living and the dead. Because of material chains of mediation and memorialisation, the disaggregating practices of Orthodox funerary ritual can never fully untangle the deceased from their worldly social entanglements
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Mediation · Memorialization · Personhood · Political science · Semiotics · Social science · Sociality · Sociology · Soul · Theology · Thou · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy
Placing the dead
The philosophy of Peirce
Epilogue… Anxious Transcendence
Introduction
Food, Life, and Material Religion in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity
Death and the Regeneration of Life
Les îles de la mémoire
Prey into Hunter
Forget Colonialism
The Stripping of the Altars
Land Tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia
We Have Never Been Modern
Resettlement and Famine in Ethiopia
A Problem of Presence
The Anthropology of Christianity
Rituals of Forgiveness and Structures of Remembrance
Resettlement and Famine in Ethiopia
The Cult of the Saints
The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336
Land Tenure Among the Amhara of Ethiopia
Graves, ruins, and belonging
Semiotics and the social analysis of material things
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,43 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |