Heavenly Protection and Family Unity
The Concept of the Revenant among Elderly Urban Women
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8933079 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gillian Bennett (University of Sheffield, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 96 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 87-97 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Folklore (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0015-587X • E-ISSN: 1469-8315 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0015587x.1985.9716335 |
| OpenAlex | W2001711375 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 6 |
fieldwork which sought to discover both the supernatural beliefs of a modern urban community and also the rhetoric and other techniques through which those beliefs were presented to others. During that time I interviewed 140 people resident in Gatley, a middle-class suburb of Manchester. Most of the informants attended the same church, consulted the same medical practitioners and used the same shops, so they were a fairly homogeneous group of people. Informants were contacted through my father who was then the local chiropodist, interviews being carried out in his surgery among willing participants. My father was my co-worker, using his long association with his patients to reassure them and put them at their ease in what might, in other circumstances, have been a difficult situation. Chiropodists' patients are, by nature of their complaints, predominantly women in middle or later life. The informants fell into three groupings. Women between 40 and 60 years old, men over retirement age, and women between 60 and 95. The group of elderly ladies was by far the largest group (97 of the total), so they were used as the main sample, the smaller groupings serving as contrast and comparison. I used a free interview technique based on a questionnaire. The questions, relating to many matters broadly supernatural, were used to promote conversation rather than slavishly adhered to. Where informants were willing to talk freely they were encouraged to do so. 79 women from the main sample group responded to questions about encounters with the dead, and it is from their conversation on this topic that this work developed. One of the interesting results of using a free interview based on a questionnaire was in discovering the women's approach to discussions of belief. It was, for example, comparatively rare on any topic for them to simply answer 'yes' or 'no.' In four out of five cases women appended some form of explanation or justification. These explanations for the most part were appeals to experience, and the appeals to experience in turn were for the most part personal experience stories. When the answers were affirmative and the questions 'delicate,' the proportion of narrative was particularly high. In the case of questions about the possibility of encountering the dead in this life, 80% of affirmative answers were accompanied by personal experience stories. The content of these narratives therefore may be fairly assumed to reflect quite closely the type of belief transmitted among the women of Gatley
Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · History · Medicine
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1985 - 2021 (37) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |