“Women who come to deliver condolences (y’azzun) approach the house or camp wailing (y’ayṭun), and then each squats before those family members to whom they are closest and ‘cries’ (yatabākun) with them. This ritualized crying is more than simple weeping; it is a heart-rending chant bemoaning the woman’s own loss of her closest deceased family member, usually a father. When I asked about this unusual behavior, one woman explained, ‘Do you think you cry over the dead person? No, you cry for yourself, for those who have died in your life.’ The woman closest to the person whose death is being mourned then answers with a chant in which she bemoans her loss. Women speak of going to ‘cry with’ somebody, suggesting that they perceive it as sharing an experience. What they share is grief, not just by sympathizing, but also be actually reexperiencing, in the company of the person currently grieving, their own grief over the death of a loved one. Not only may such shared emotional experiences enhance the sense of identification that underpins social bonds, but participation in the rituals that express sentiments might also generate feelings like those the person directly affected is experiencing, thus creating an identification between people where it did not spontaneously exist” (Abu-Lughod 1999: 68-69).
Ritual crying practice from the Awlad ‘Ali Bedouins of Egypt. What can we learn from the rituals of death and mourning in other cultures that might be helpful to our own? How can shared feelings of grief solidify community with strangers in our increasingly individualized world? Could bringing a practice like this into your life help you identify with others, creating bonds that are weakened by our inability to share in the most basic of human emotions? (Speaking from my own experiences here and my own difficulties of sharing emotion in death, funeral, and mourning practices.) If practices of grief within your own culture leave you wanting then re-evaluating, looking to other examples of ways of being, and trying to imagine new practices might lead to a healthier understanding of grief and mourning for your own self, your community, and maybe eventually your culture at large.
The Edited Jottings of an Amateur Anthropologist 