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Immortality Denied
Author(s) -
Grindal Bruce
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
anthropology and humanism quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.153
H-Index - 17
eISSN - 1548-1409
pISSN - 0193-5615
DOI - 10.1525/ahu.1992.17.1.23
Subject(s) - immortality , worship , ethnography , order (exchange) , literature , value (mathematics) , art , history , philosophy , sociology , anthropology , theology , finance , machine learning , computer science , economics
To the Sisala people of West Africa, immortality resides in the worship of the ancestors and in the mysterious spiritual powers adhering to the dual processes of death and rebirth. In this article, I present a piece of literary ethnography about the circumstances and life of one Sisala man who, by failing to attend his father's funeral and to go into the grave in order to hear his father's last words, dishonored his family and thereby sealed his spiritual death. It is also a story about the relationship between the ethnographer and a fellow human being and the mutual and often painful exchange ofpersonhood and value. It is about the shedding of tears.