Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the use and role of plastic components in Ghanaian funerary contexts and investigates their agency as materials that contain death whilst always at risk of slipping into the status of waste, polluting the environment.

Paper long abstract:

In Peki, an Ewe town community in the Ghanaian Volta Region, funerals are very public events that bring the local community and diaspora together. The transformation of the dead, from social persona to ancestral presence, occurs in different sequences of events. These depend on communal evaluations on the cause of death and on the moral status of a deceased. In the process of re-making the dead as property of the living who can exist within acceptable limitations for ancestors or spirits, durable, synthetic and plastic-based materials play an important role. In contrast to organic, bodily or otherwise ephemeral materials, synthetics such as for example plastic ribbon and cellophane foil on grave wreaths provide a sense of containment and seem to defy strong physical change. At the same time, they are also auxiliary in stripping the dead from their former identities which can then be reconstructed in funerary and ritual processes. As such, plastic materials help to materially re-make the dead and hence carry positive values when deposited in or on graves as well as in the town's communal and natural environments. The paper will discuss the use and role of plastic components in funerary contexts and investigate their agency as materials that are contain death successfully whilst always at risk of slipping into the status of waste, polluting the environment.