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This article relates three contexts crucially defined by the experience of grief and distress among the Warao, an Amerindian population of Venezuela: ritual wailing performed by women at death, in front of the corpse; drunken intoxication, which essentially takes place on 2 November (the Day of the Dead), during and after visits to cemeteries; and discursive references, in the course of ordinary interactions, to the fact that one will cry, or has cried, for someone else. It shows how emotional states can be intentionally managed and yet experienced as moving forces, and stresses the ethical efficacy of sorrow, which accounts for the funerary and memorial practices of the Warao. Le présent article fait le lien entre trois contextes fondamentalement définis par l'expérience du chagrin et de la détresse chez les Warao, une population amérindienne du Venezuela : les lamentations rituelles des femmes au chevet du défunt après un décès, l'ivresse, qui marque principalement le 2 novembre, jour des Défunts, pendant et après la visite au cimetière, et les références discursives dans les conversations ordinaires au fait que l'on va pleurer, ou que l'on a pleuré, pour quelqu'un d'autre. L'auteur montre comment les états émotionnels peuvent être gérés intentionnellement mais en même temps vécus comme des forces motrices, et il souligne l'efficacité éthique du chagrin, qui explique les pratiques funéraires et mémorielles des Warao.

Using tombstones as ethnographic sources, this article examines the introduction of writing into the field of death ritual in an Yi community in Yunnan Province, China. Most Tibeto-Burman-speaking peoples in Southwest China abandoned cremation in favor of burial in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, following a loss of political autonomy and a massive influx of immigrants from the interior. Inscriptions on stones, erected over buried corpses, shifted textual agency from skilled readers to knowledgeable or powerful writers and created links between state authority and the bodies of the dead. Stones became replacements for corpses, doors to the underworld, narratives of lives, and textual diagrams of kinship relations. Yi used stones to create new ways of conceptualizing and reaffirming social relations among living descendants. And they made much of the connection of writing with state authority, inserting their dead into the national time of revolution as the state's beneficiaries or victims.

This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.

The Mochica culture developed on the northern Peruvian coast between a.d. 100 and 800. A zooarchaeological study of the remains discovered in graves at four main ceremonial sites-Sipán, San José de Moro, El Brujo, and Moche-provides evidence of 12 sacrificed species including domestic animals such as llamas, dogs, and guinea pigs, and wild animals such as bats and parrots. A comparison of zooarchaeological data with Mochica iconography shows that animals served a variety of ritual purposes, for example, as mortuary food and as guides for souls of the dead in the afterlife. They were also considered to be mediators between the world of the living and that of the dead. This study enhances our understanding of funerary and sacrificial rituals linked to animals in Mochica society as well as in the central Andes.

In central Flores, local people represent obligatory exchanges of objects at funerals as signalling a cessation of relations between affinally related groups, thus contradicting a well-established local principle whereby affinal relationships transcend the lives of individual participants. Illuminating this contrast is a mortuary context that comprises rites emphasizing separation and a particularly negative view of the dead to the exclusion of a more positive representation of relations between the dead and the living expressed in religious ideology. However, as a purely ethnographic analysis cannot actually resolve the contradiction, consideration is given to cognitivist perspectives, and especially approaches focusing on counterintuitive features of ritual and religious representations that contradict ordinary understandings of things. /// Les populations du centre de l'île de Florès représentent les échanges obligatoires d'objets lors des funérailles comme le signal de cessation de relations entre des groupes liés par affinité, en contradiction avec un principe local bien établi selon lequel les relations d'affinité survivent aux personnes concernées. Cette opposition est éclairée par un contexte mortuaire comprenant des rites qui mettent l'accent sur la séparation et sur une vision singulièrement négative des morts, excluant la représentation plus positive des liens entre les morts et les vivants qu'exprimerait l'idéologie religieuse. Une analyse purement ethnographique ne suffit cependant pas à résoudre cette contradiction, et il faut donc recourir à une perspective cognitiviste, et en particulier à des approches axées sur les aspects apparemment contre-intuitifs du rituel et sur les représentations religieuses qui contredisent l'entendement habituel des choses.

This article focuses on the study of the Early Iron Age necropolis of Esfola, taking into account the burial rituals of the site (the architecture, the funerary objects and the human skeletal analyses are dealt with in the context of ‘burial ritual’ studies). This research will contribute to the body of knowledge on Early Iron Age necropolises with enclosures, typical of the Beja and Ourique regions in southern Portugal, i.e. Vinha das Caliças 4, Monte do Bolor 1–2, Cinco Réis 8, Carlota and Palhais. All these sites identified in the southern Iberian Peninsula allow us to characterize the funerary rituals practised in this region during the Early Iron Age.

After a century of research, there is still no widely accepted explanation for the spread of farming in Europe. Top-down explanations stress climate change, population increase, or geographic diffusion, but they distort human action reductionistically. Bottom-up explanations stress the local, meaningful choices involved in becoming a farmer, but they do not account for why the Neolithic transition in Europe was so widespread and generally unidirectional. The real problem is theoretical; we need to consider the transformative effects of human–material culture relationships and to relate humans, things, and environments at multiple scales. This article views the Neolithic as a set of new human-material relationships which were experimented with variably but which had unintended consequences resulting in an increasingly coherent, structured, and narrowly based social world. This interplay of local human action and emergent causation made the Neolithic transition difficult to reverse locally; the Neolithic was easy to get into but hard to get out of. On the continental scale, one consequence of this was its slow, patchy, but steady and ultimately almost complete expansion across Europe. As a metamodel, this accommodates current models of the local origin of farming while linking these to emergent large-scale historical patterns.

Horses began to feature prominently in funerary contexts in southern Siberia in the mid-second millennium BC, yet little is known about the use of these animals prior to the emergence of vibrant horse-riding groups in the first millennium BC. Here, the authors present the results of excavations at the late-ninth-century BC tomb of Tunnug 1 in Tuva, where the deposition of the remains of at least 18 horses and one human is reminiscent of sacrificial spectral riders described in fifth-century Scythian funerary rituals by Herodotus. The discovery of items of tack further reveals connections to the earliest horse cultures of Mongolia.

Archaeologists have proposed that quite a number of structures dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A and B in southwest Asia were nondomestic ritual buildings, sometimes described specifically as temples or shrines, and these figure large in some interpretations of social change in the Near Eastern Neolithic. Yet the evidence supporting the identification of cult buildings is often equivocal or depends on ethnocentric distinctions between sacred and profane spaces. This paper explores the case of Göbekli Tepe, a large Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Turkey that its excavator claims consisted only of temples, to illustrate weaknesses in some kinds of claims about Neolithic sacred spaces and to explore some of the problems of identifying prehistoric ritual. Consideration of the evidence suggests the alternative hypothesis that the buildings at Göbekli Tepe may actually be houses, albeit ones that are rich in symbolic content.

The term 'hybrid' has been widely incorporated into recent peacebuilding scholarship to describe an array of peacebuilding endeavors, including hybrid peacekeeping missions, hybrid criminal tribunals, hybrid governance, and the hybrid peace. However, while widely deployed, hybridity itself is under-theorized and variably applied by scholars. Major concerns arise, therefore, concerning the concept's usefulness for peacebuilding theory, policy, and practice. Most problematically, while some scholars use hybridity descriptively to illustrate the mixing of international and local institutions, practices, rituals, and concepts, many today deploy hybridity prescriptively, implying that international actors can plan and administer hybridity to foster predictable social experiences in complex postconflict states. This latter literature, therefore, assumes predictable relationships between the administration of hybrid institutions – of law, of governance, or of economics, for example – and the provision of peacepromoting local experiences of those institutions – experiences of justice, authority, empowerment, etc. This article argues that these assumptions are flawed and illustrates how a disaggregated theory of hybridity can avoid such errors. This theory distinguishes between four levels of hybridity – institutional, practical, ritual, and conceptual – characterized by their variable amenability to purposeful administration. The article illustrates how prescriptive approaches that assume direct and predictable relationships between institutions and experiences fail to recognize that concepts underpin local understandings and experiences of the world and, therefore, play a mediating role between institutions and experiences. Using examples from Sierra Leone, the article shows that while concepts are always hybrid, conceptual hybridity is inherently resistant to planned administration. As a result, internationally planned and administered hybrid institutions will not result in predictable experiences and may even result in negative or conflict-promoting experiences. The article illustrates the dangers of assuming any predictable relationships between the four levels of hybridity, and, therefore, between the administration of institutional hybrids and the predictable provision of positive local experiences.