And Unto Dust Shalt Thou Return” Death and the Semiotics of Remembrance in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Village

Abstract

This ethnographic article discusses funerary practice, Orthodox Christian ideas of body and spirit, and the ways in which people make memorials for each other on the Zege Peninsula in northwest Ethiopia. I pay special attention to gravestones because, here as in many other places, physical memorials to the dead become locations where latent uncertainties and conflicts about the relationship between spirit and matter, body and soul, and this world and the next, tend to crystallise. I show that material memorials highlight ambiguities in Orthodox attitudes to human embodiment and challenge priestly monopolies over relations between the living and the dead. Because of material chains of mediation and memorialisation, the disaggregating practices of Orthodox funerary ritual can never fully untangle the deceased from their worldly social entanglements. This article discusses controversies over mediation on the Zege peninsula, on Lake Tana in northern Ethiopia. The peninsula has several historic churches and its population is predominantly Orthodox Christian. This is a place in which disciplines of the body, especially fasting, are lynchpins of the religious regime, and in which human embodiment is regarded as the primary burden of existence but also the locus of salvation through religious work (Ephraim 1995). As I will show, it is at the point of death that ambivalence toward the body turns to outright distaste. Traditional burial practices entail the swift effacement of all evidence that a grave or a body was present. Part of their function is to render the remains of the body inert, by separating them from all that was once alive. But these practices come into conflict with personal and familial memorialisation, in which people tend to stress the preservation of some active material remainder of the person. Here the contradictions in local views of materiality, flesh, and spirit come to light, and it is these contradictions that I explore below.

The Anthropology of Death Revisited

“…Take a recent trend in Ethiopia, reported by Boylston (2015), during which people began erecting concrete graves. The materials had become affordable, and the value of individual remembrance had grown, partly as a result of the influx of new ideas (political, religious, and economic).…”