Paper short abstract:

The expression of grief within the context of a death ritual in Mani (Greece) is in the core of this paper. By examining a case study of a two fold ritual we will discuss emotion regulation and the dynamic of grief within death ritual.

Paper long abstract:

In Inner Mani, right above the gates of Hades in Southern Peloponnese, there is a particular co-existence of two quite different death ritual traditions: the archaic tradition of Klama, in which female mourners lament the deceased in 8-syllable improvised verses and the Orthodox Christian funeral ceremonial practice. Those two traditions, practised one next to the other, while they assimilate aspects of one another, they also often contradict one another, as they substantially differ in their cosmologies. In the past two years I have been carrying out an ethnography on how emotional expression is prompted or regulated under those two traditions, as well as in the particular case of their coexistence. In this paper, a singular case of a death ritual is presented, in which the deceased person was mourned by female lamenters into a church, in absence of a private space suitable to accommodate his Klama, and right after his Klama was over, the Christian orthodox ceremony was undertook by the local priest. By presenting the power struggles and conflicts which occurred in the shared space of the church in this distinct case, we will be examining the dynamics of emotion expression within Death Ritual.