Eating and Drinking with the Dead in South Africa

Radikobo Ntsimane’s chapter is an examination of the intersection of food and death among the Tswana and Zulu peoples in South Africa, discussing the function of funerals in feeding the living, and the ways in which funerals can help socially and economically sustain a community. His analysis of the shift in the economic sustainability of funeral feasting in times of scarcity and widespread diseases such as AIDS in Africa is both valuable and important, providing a social and cultural critique that forces the reader to think about the function of funerals, and their effects on the community. In this chapter, the reader understands that the funeral attendants are dying to eat, both literally and figuratively.

Alcohol Consumption, Transgression, and Death

Christa Shusko’s chapter focuses on how alcohol-drinking rituals mimic the drinking of blood (really a “blood” punch) in male fraternity groups. Shusko’s chapter examines how the living face death and form community through food, albeit through male bonding rituals of consuming alcohol and reenacting illicit and horrific acts. Shusko contends that alcohol acts as both conduit and medium through which the living come to terms with both death and the macabre. Unlike Graham, who argues that the absence of alcohol reinforces Protestant, and particularly Baptist identity, Shusko points to the use of alcohol as a cohesive agent that brings the community together.

Sweetening Death

“Sweetening Death” presents a comparative analysis of the role of sugar and its transformation in funeral foods, remembrance rituals, documenting the ways the dead are perceived and understood as active or passive actors in their afterlives. Sugar, though widely available in the contemporary world, was initially utilized in memorialization and funereal practices because it connoted a particular status to the dead, though it is now ironically a staple of the lower classes and a symbol of malnutrition. The comparison in food bereavement and memorialization rituals highlights a distinct difference between the function of food on the American table in comparison to the Mexican or Chinese context, revealing that while food functions to largely aide the bereaved and reintegrate the grieving into their social network without the deceased in the American context, it literally functions to feed the dead in Mexico and China.

The Eating Ritual in Korean Religiosity

Jung Eun Sophia Park’s chapter examines the function of food in Korean funeral rituals and memorial festivities in Buddhism, Korean Catholicism, and memorial activities. Park gives the reader a rich descriptive analysis of the various foods and their meanings in honoring the Korean dead, in the food ritual of Young San Jae, describing how food is utilized as a way to connect the living with the dead ancestors.

Moroccan Funeral Feasts

David Oualaalou discusses the role of couscous in emphasizing Moroccan identity and mourning the dead. Couscous, through its ordinariness, and because it is an everyday staple, underscores the role of death as a part of life—as something not only unavoidable, but necessary in order to truly live as a Muslim. He also traces the shifting influences of class and status on these traditional mourning staples, noting that because of globalization and capitalism, Muslim funerals in contemporary Morocco are becoming less concerned with communal bereavement and are instead stressing the individual’s life through expensive shows of wealth and class through more complicated and expensive foods.

Starters

In modern society, food, life, and death have developed a rather precarious relationship with one another, as food consumption, class status, and notions of health are rapidly shifting, globalization is changing and increasing our food choices, and society is becoming more multi-cultural. Both death and food, in their rapidly changing states, must be examined and studied. Death in this book operates as a framing mechanism to allow food to play a central role in life and meaning giving, food as nourishing not only in substance, but also in significance.

The Circle of Life

Lacy Crocker and Gordon Fuller’s chapter considers bagels as a symbol of the eternal return of life in the midst of death. Crocker and Fuller’s chapter focuses on the symbol of the eternal cycle of return, with the bagel’s roundness illustrating the wholeness of death as a completion of life. Crocker and Fuller’s chapter reveals that the Jewish conception of death emphasizes the importance of life, and seeks not to dwell in the shadows of death.

Funeral Food as Resurrection in the American South

Joshua Graham writes on the role of funeral foods in the American South, examining how these foods function in helping Southerners come to terms with their grief, in light of theabsent deceased. He examines the role of several foods and drinks (particularly the absence of alcohol) common in Southern Baptist culture in funeral repasts, and questions the lack of current American scholarship on “continuing bonds theory” in American grieving customs. Graham makes a compelling argument for its application in his chapter, while offering the reader a richly textured ethnography of contemporary American funeral feasts.

Chinese Ancestral Worship

Emily S. Wu examines the meaning and symbolism of food in Chinese funerary rites, delving into the rich Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist textual tradition to underscore her fieldwork observations of food as both boundary marker and boundary breaker. Wu connects the material remnants of the corpse with the symbolic functions of food, richly demonstrating the role of bone, pork and wine in mediating the worlds of flesh—both living and decaying.