Paper long abstract:

The shape of funerals has been subject to intense debate in Kyela District in Tanzania, a district that also happens to have the second highest prevalence of HIV in the country. Based on fieldwork between 2000 and 2002, I will explore changes to 'Nyakyusa funerals', in a village where burials sometimes took place on a daily basis. In 2002, a series of bylaws were passed, addressing what were described as 'misleading traditions' (mila potovu) of the Nyakyusa. A large proportion of the mila potovu forbidden by the bylaws are concerned with funerals, inheritance, and the resolution of the disputes that so often follow the death of fathers. Furthermore, the bylaws are explicitly concerned with the role of women in maintaining 'misleading traditions', in particular their excessive demands on men to provide food and beer at funerals, and anxiety on the part of men that funerals create opportunities for women to meet their lovers, and contract sexually transmitted infections or HIV. With regard to inheritance, the bylaws are concerned with the rights of widows - to refuse levirate and to continue living in the home of their deceased husband. Although fears about AIDS and the practicalities of maintaining demanding and expensive funerals in a context of high adult mortality frame today's debates, I will consider the debates about 'tradition' also in the context of the ethnographies of Monica Wilson, and argue that the bylaws constitute a challenge to the notion of 'Good Company' after which her most well known ethnography was named.