Concrete, Bones, and Feasts
Tom Boylston
Chapter from the book: Boylston, T. 2018. The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community.
Part of
Chapter from the book: Boylston, T. 2018. The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community.
Local narratives about the decline of hospitality in Zege go together with significant changes in burial practices. Funeral feasts used to be vast displays of status, but as these have receded, other forms of memorialization have become popular. This chapter considers a brief period in which concrete graves were widely used, showing how these graves raised significant problems for Orthodox notions of materiality and the passage to heaven, as well as for the notion that all Christians are equal in death.
Boylston, T. 2018. Concrete, Bones, and Feasts. In: Boylston, T, The Stranger at the Feast. California: University of California Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.44.g
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Published on Jan. 12, 2018