Bodily grief work meets Christian interiority: The Meru case

Abstract

This article focuses on a dramatic emotional expression of grief and explores how the traditional mourning practice–played out by Meru women, in northern Tanzania–encounters Christian interiority. The Meru have been exposed to modernization and westernization, through colonization, missionization, and later through independence, development projects and global neoliberal economy, but according to the Lutheran church, mourning women still behave like pagans. The article explores the gendering of emotions and the symbolism of the womb which seems to be the seat of female emotions and the idiom of life and death and tries to understand why women mourn their loss in an outwardly emotional way.

Notes

1 All personal names in this article are fictitious.

2 ARV treatment is used in the treatment of HIV infection. T-cell counts provide information about the immunity in the blood; the lower the T-cells, the lower the immunity. ARV treatment is not given when T-cells are too low.

3 “Epilepsy of pregnancy” is, in biomedicine, referred to as Gestosis and is fatal in the latter part of pregnancy for both the mother and the fetus.

4 Although the British took over as colonizers in 1918, the Lutheran Church remained under the Leipzig Mission until 1963 when the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania (ELCT) was formed and the Lutheran Church in Meru joined the ELCT of Northern Diocese.

5 The Christian boys were not allowed to be initiated into the age-grade system through circumcision but were circumcised by the missionaries according to the Bible. The missionary-circumcised men, however, were not correctly circumcised according to the Meru standard and thus not seen as proper Meru men. Accordingly, they were still considered uncircumcised boys and denied participation in the many social ceremonies accompanying initiation into warrior-hood/adulthood. They were harassed by their age-mate brothers and their family and kin mourned them as if they were dead; their mothers shaved their hair according to the mourning style (Spear, 1997).

6 Women, houses, and heat symbolize biological birth; this is, for example, expressed when their bodies are returned to the community of the living (see Bloch and Perry, 1987).

7 The banana plant is a crop of much significance. Besides being the staple food mainly managed and “owned” by women, it is used for animal fodder, building material, healing purposes and in ceremonial dishes to mention some of the multiple purposes.

8 Such gendered qualities are expressed through agrarian metaphors. While a female, for instance, is likened with the humble sheep, males are likened with the stronger (but also stubborn) he-goat.

9 Albeit a juridical minor, a woman keeps some of her rights and duties in her natal home throughout her life.

10 The Meru type of female circumcision, to the extent that they currently practice it, can be referred to as a “mild” form of clitoridectomy (see Haram, 2005, 2015).

11 According to the local kinship system, a woman, married or not, has a brother in her natal home who has a particular responsibility towards her when she is in need of care socially, economically, or emotionally. This relationship has a reciprocal nature and thus, a sister has certain obligations towards her brother.