GRIEF AND SOCIAL NORMS

Tomas, a five-year-old Ifaluk boy, contracted meningitis and was comatose within twenty-four hours. Relatives and friends began to gather at his parents' home. Female relatives washed the feverish body until the efforts seemed futile; then male relatives took turns holding the semi-rigid form, weeping as they cradled it. “At the moment of death, a great wailing went up. The dead boy's biological mother, seated on the floor mats near him, rose to her knees as if she had been stabbed and pounded her fist violently against her chest. The adoptive mother … began to scream and throw herself about on the ground.” The whole house was filled with crying, “from low moaning to loud, wrenching and mucus-filled screaming to wailingly sung poem-laments, and continued without pause through the night. Both men and women spent tears in what seemed … equal measure.” (The Ifaluk believe that those who do not “cry big” at a death will become sick afterwards.) Anthropologist Catherine Lutz found the proceedings “shocking”: like many young Americans, her only contact with death had been “the subdued ritual of one funeral.”

One afternoon in Bali, Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan's housekeeper, a young Balinese girl, came to her to ask for several days off. She was smiling and laughing. Asked for her reason, she told Wikan that she wanted to attend the funeral of her fiancé, in a distant part of the island.