Paper short abstract:

This paper takes a close look at Ghanaian obituary banners. It gives ethnographic context about their production, design, and usage, asking what functions they perform and how their aesthetics and materiality achieve these before the background of colonial history and changes in mortuary practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes a close look at Ghanaian obituary banners as a commemorative format that has become widely popular in the Ghanaian south in the past couple of years. It gives ethnographic context about the production, design, and usage of funeral banners, asking what functions they perform for the community and how their aesthetics and materiality help to achieve these, also before the background of colonial history and changes in mortuary practices. Focusing on the materiality of these image-objects, the paper unpacks the intertwined relationship between the sculptural but flexible representations of the dead and the image-like but inflexible qualities of dead bodies.

Building on Alfred Gell’s theory of the art nexus, this paper shows how the dead in a Ghanaian Ewe town are made into art-like objects, which serve as indices of various intentions invested into them by the living. To that avail, understanding how the transformation of images, the transformation of dead bodies, and the transformation of the dead into new kinds of ancestor-persons are linked is crucial. By reading material processes of transformation alongside processes of transforming significations and social transformation, the paper suggests that obituary banners are in fact ‘more than images’, due to their material properties and their incorporation into active practices of commemoration and mourning.