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Paper short abstract:

In the the ceremony known as the Souls' Banishment, among Tepehuan people of Mexico, a ritual specialist uses prayers to mediate between the souls of the dead and their living relatives, in order to secure their permanent separation and keep each group in its own distinct realm.

Paper long abstract:

Among the Tepehuan people of northern Mexico, some feelings and emotions are strictly socially sanctioned. When a death occurs, the mourning relatives must restrain themselves from crying and otherwise visibly expressing their grief, so as not to prevent the dead from peacefully leaving the world of the living. Departing from these social conventions can end in another dead, since this demonstrates to the dead the grief caused by the events. Commonly, the mourning relatives dream about the dead telling them how much they miss them and how starving they are. Once again, the living people must resist and avoid showing their feelings to their dead relatives. This situation is brought to a close through the performance of the ceremony known as the Souls' Banishment, which centres around the prayers performed by a ritual specialist. This ceremony must be carried out a year and five days after the death. In this presentation, we analyze this ceremony and the prayer known as "the dispatch", exploring the aesthetic oral dimension sought by the specialist recurring to different poetic resources to assuage the feelings of the living and the dead. The ritual specialist is a master of discourse, and in these situations he must display his skills as a diplomat, mediating between the realms of the living and of the dead, in order to convince the dead to leave the living world peacefully and separate themselves from their relatives.