Between psychoanalysis and lamentation:

Anthropology as the work of mourning

Charles L. Briggs
University of California, Berkeley

for Feliciana and my father

Dear Dr. Freud,

I hope that you don’t mind my writing you. People might think it a bit strange to address

myself to a dead person, casting the living as over-hearers. But my letter is precisely about that

subject, so this mode of address seems uncannily appropriate, should you forgive me for using

one of your own favorite expressions. And this type of intimacy, which I hope does not seem

inappropriate to you, might help me think/feel out loud about some very unsettling issues. I have

the sense that in this way I can reflect on what you and other psychoanalysts have said about

mourning without seeming to intrude on a vast field or challenge the authority of contemporary

psychoanalysts and specialists on the subject. My goal is rather to open up a dialogue that might

help both psychoanalysts and anthropologists rethink their own fields of endeavor.

Addressing you more intimately in this fashion also seems to be a more comfortable way

to create a space to talk about feelings of ambivalence that I harbored for decades with respect to

your essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” When I first read it, I was overwhelmed with the depth

of your engagement with the mourning process, your appreciation of its complexity and

contradictions. As for so many other readers, I was captured by your phrase “the work of

mourning” and by your sense that mourning is not pathological, such that “we look upon any

interference with it [by psychoanalysts] as inadvisable or even harmful.”1

It was your account of the contradictions of mourning that engaged me most intensely in

intellectual terms; now that I have lost my own privileged distance from mourning, it is what
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also draws me in affectively as well. On the one hand, you emphasized "the absorbing work of

mourning" that involves its "distinguishing mental feature … a profoundly painful dejection,

abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, [and] inhibition of all

activity." You beautifully stressed how withdrawal of attention from other phenomena is

associated with the psychic process of reinternalizing the image of the dead person, inviting us to

reflect on how "Each single one of the memories and hopes which bound the libido to the object

is brought up and hyper-cathected."2 In characterizing "the absorbing work of mourning," you

emphasized how the psychic process of recovering and reinternalizing the image of the dead

person produces "a turning away from reality" through "the medium of a hallucinatory wish-

psychosis," creating the sort of fantasy world in which we allow ourselves to believe that the

deceased never really died or will once again return. Your essay beautifully juxtaposed this

desire with an opposing dimension of mourning that you called "the testing of reality."3 Here

“[r]eality passes its verdict—that the object no longer exists—upon each single one of the

memories and hopes through which the libido was attached to the lost object.”4 Something else

that I liked about “Mourning and Melancholia” is that you never seemed to solve for us the

question of how we move between these states and what might prompt this transition, and I want

to occupy that space here in a very specific way without thinking that I have to re-solve it.

My ambivalence emerges in how you seem to escape this question by projecting the

relationship between the two dimensions temporally. I was unsettled by your sense that the

"normal emotion of grief"5 unfolds regularly, "bit by bit," until grief "is undoubtedly

surmounted."6 I worried about how you seem to construct the temporality of mourning as linear,

wondering if the movement between hyper-cathexis and reality testing might be more

fragmentary, reversible, and cyclical. I felt some of my ambivalence slipping away as you

stepped back from the linear temporality in later works. In my book, you perhaps most clearly
 3

moved beyond it in Civilization and Its Discontents, suggesting that sexual love provides a

model for all love and for “the strongest experiences of satisfaction” and “the prototype of all

happiness.”7 Nevertheless, you noted that it also prompts recognition of our vulnerability by

rendering us “dependent in a most dangerous way on a portion of the external world,” given that

our “chosen love-object” can expose us to extreme suffering when lost through “unfaithfulness

or death.”

I have read work your essay inspired, such as that by Melanie Klein, Juan-David Nasio,

Jean Laplanche, Jacques Lacan, and my Berkeley colleague Judith Butler, and I want to put some

of their insights into the conversation. But I can imagine you might be thinking—“what can an

anthropologist, one not even trained as a psychoanalyst, possibly teach me about the

psychoanalysis of mourning? What could he have to say that would be new and interesting?”

Fair enough. So please give me a few minutes to put “Mourning and Melancholia” in dialogue

with some other folks who have equally significant things to say about the work of mourning.

My goal is not to critique you, nor certainly to think that my training in anthropology or my

experiences “in the field” afford me some sort of privileged ethical position. To the contrary, I

want to tell you how your essay and other psychoanalytic works were immensely helpful to me

in working through a difficult situation in which I was thrust in the Orinoco Delta rainforest in

July of 2008, one in which I was interpellated into what turned out to be both the work of

mourning and the work of epidemiology. The most prominent way that mourning is structured

there is through laments. Without in any way suggesting that lament performers solved problems

left unresolved by psychoanalysis or vice-versa, I think you might find that poetic and acoustic

features of this lamentation provide ways of rethinking the temporality of mourning—and the

raise questions of embodiment, circulation, and the politics of grievability that you might find

interesting. Let me begin by telling you what led me back to your essay.
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On the Threshold in Muaina

Speaking of ambivalence, it was one of those scenes that is both unimaginable and whose

horror you know intimately, where your feet seem to be pulled along by a desire to get it over

with—and yet susceptible at any point to the urge to turn and run. The doorway, flooded with

tropical sunshine, led to a darkened interior that would confront us with our first direct encounter

with death. Not just any death, but a body claimed by an epidemic of a “mysterious disease,” the

third in this small settlement where the rainforest meets the Caribbean in eastern Venezuela, a

fraction of a wave of strange fatalities in the region. We had been invited to a meeting, a sober

encounter in which calm voices would provide clues that might add up to a diagnosis, but this is

what we saw:

[film clip from Web page]

First our eyes were directed to the right side of the house, where a wisidatu healer with

graying hair and an extremely kind face was treating a young man who lay before him in a

hammock. His song, which called on hebu pathogens to leave the body, taking the diarrhea and

cramps with them, was completely drowned out by the voices of five women and one adolescent,

who became visible as we took another step forward along the dock. Standing directly opposite

the doorway we saw a young man lying in a coffin, bringing our senses—visual and auditory—

into disconcerting alignment. The faces, transformed into masks of grief and fatigue by more

than a day of mourning, belonged to Florencia Macotera, mother of Mamerto Pizarro, the third

Muaina resident to die from the unknown disease; she was accompanied by Mamerto’s

grandmother, and two aunts, sister, and brother. The exhaustion that would have ordinarily

muted their voices by this time had been overpowered by heightened emotions springing from

knowledge that they would soon be taking him by canoe to the cemetery.
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This scene brought me back to your essay, raising several issues that I want to lay out in

this letter. The work of mourning was undertaken there through an acoustic and bodily

materiality that opened up contradictory rhythms as people moved between hyper-cathexis and

reality testing. You reflected on how listening to your patients interpellated you, as the analyst; I

want to reflect on how the work of mourning initiated in Muaina made claims on me and on

other listeners, including other who had come for the meeting. I have tried to listen closely to the

poetics and acoustics of the Macotera-Pizarro family’s laments and how they connected the work

of mourning to bodies; I hope that will agree that the reflections on mourning that they

embedded in their laments and the stories they told can provide new insights into psychoanalytic

perspectives on mourning. These wailed words made particular kinds of demands on me as a

listener, such that I was interpellated as an over-hearer who would circulate these words in

extending the acts of witnessing and worlding they were undertaking and challenging the lethal

medical profiling that produced an epidemic.

An Epidemic, a Mystery, and an Unconventional Epidemiological Team

Another thing that troubles me about your engagement with mourning, Dr. Freud, is the

way you focused on the figure of “a loved person.” Psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in expanding

on your insights, uses this figure too. Like your justly famous case method, I think that it might

be useful to think through this family’s experience in order to bring materiality, acoustics, and

embodiment in the work of mourning more closely into focus. I think that learning more about

the epidemic and why these particular people died at this time in this area is crucial for

deepening your understanding of the work of mourning.

With child mortality hovering around 40% in many indigenous communities, death is an

everyday presence.8 I was thus drawn into discussions of health, healing, and death shortly after I
 6

began conducting fieldwork there starting in 1986, and practitioners decided to train me as a

healer. Then in 1992-1993, some 500 Delta residents died from cholera—a bacterial infection

that can be prevented and treated—suggesting the inadequacy of health infrastructures and the

indifference of regional health authorities to indigenous lives and deaths.9 Walking by accident

into the middle of the epidemic, I felt that if my anthropological training and experience were

ever to be of significant value in the lives of the people with whom I had worked, that was the

moment. I thus teamed up with Venezuelan public health physician Clara Mantini-Briggs for 15

months. We helped set up nursing stations in areas lacking health care and took health education

to nearly every community in the vast expanse of the Lower Delta. Seeing that the outcome of

the epidemic was greater stigmatization of the indigenous population and even less access to

government services, we conducted research, eventually publishing Stories in the Time of

Cholera.10 When the Spanish edition appeared, health officials in President Chávez’s socialist

government deemed the book valuable as a blueprint for confronting health inequities, and

Warao activists found the intersection between various critical perspectives useful in thinking

about why both health policies and media representations had such negative impacts—and how

the indigenous social movement could confront them.

By 2008, our work focused on socialist health care in urban areas. We returned to the

Delta in July 2008 in order to use funds generated by Stories to work with healer Tirso Gómez,

his daughter, nurse/EMT Norbelys Gómez, and residents in one area, Siawani, in creating a new

model for health care. Discovering deaths associated with symptoms we had never encountered

before, we visited the local clinic—only to be stopped on the steps by an old friend, Conrado

Moraleda, President of the local Health Committee. Generally a calm, avuncular man of about

65, his voice was filled anxiety and urgency as he quickly told us about an epidemic that began

in Mukoboina, a community of 75 residents.11 7 children died between July and September of

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2007 and one the following January, he told us. One mother, Odilia Torres, lost 3 of her 4

children, and a whole new settlement of grave houses appeared in Mukoboina’s cemetery. Then

children started dying in neighboring communities.

When symptoms developed that no one had seen before, the parents first took their

children to healers, including the man we saw through the doorway, but they were unable to

help. The doctor in the nearest clinic, some 30 minutes away by motorized canoe, couldn’t save

them either. Patients were referred to hospitals in the state capital and then neighboring

metropolitan areas, but they all died. Conrado worked with the resident physician in pressing

authorities to act. Regional Health Service officials sent teams to investigate. A Cuban and a

Venezuelan epidemiologist visited, but they couldn’t figure out what was killing the children.

Activists then took their case to the state legislature, leading to a public confrontation with health

authorities that was covered by the local press, but all that came of it was more inconclusive

investigations, accusations that parents might be giving their children poisonous fruit or fish or

that healers might be killing their patients; they denigrated Conrado and other activists as

“gossips” and “liars.” When the epidemic resurfaced in June 2008, Conrado and his brother

Enrique decided that they could no longer count on the regional government to diagnose the

disease and stop it, so they were organizing their own investigatory team. He told us that we had

to join his effort, and he named the roles we were to assume—Clara as doctor and I as

anthropologist and documentary photographer—and told us how to play them.

At first I felt a great deal of resistance, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. But Moraleda

is an old friend, and it was, as in the cholera epidemic, a kind of put-up-or-shut-up situation; we

could not refuse. Enrique Moraleda knew that the family would be burying Mamerto that day.

He decided that our efforts should begin next to his body, with the sounds of laments literally

ringing in our ears, thereby locating our efforts precisely within the space of mourning. Why did
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he choose to begin in Muaina? Why next to a dead body? And why specifically that of Mamerto

Pizarro?

Muaina, you see, was established by one of the most charismatic and insightful

indigenous leaders in Venezuela, Librado Moraleda, Enrique’s and Conrado’s brother; Librado

was one of my dearest friends. A socialist long before Hugo Chávez Frías became President,

Librado founded Muaina near the coast as a model community. Paulo Freire would have loved it.

Moraleda, an educator, sought to create a critical pedagogy that would take dimensions of

indigenous knowledge-production and agricultural and fishing practices and juxtapose them with

access to Spanish, literacy, and “Western” forms of knowledge. He also founded the Indigenous

University of Venezuela, which embodied these principles in a higher-education context for

students from around the country. He wanted to train a new set of leaders who could challenge

racism and its deep institutional tentacles in Delta Amacuro State. Mamerto’s father, Indalesio

Pizarro, was his motorboat driver during a time that Moraleda was politically organizing delta

communities, and that is when I met him. I only met Florencia Macotera, his wife, after Mamerto

died. But then cancer claimed Librado’s body, and he felt his vision slipping away. Sensing

qualities of leadership in Mamerto, he enrolled him in the Indigenous University, where

Mamerto quickly distinguished himself by his intelligence, charisma, and vision. Within three

years he had written two short book manuscripts and translated portions of the new Bolivarian

Constitution into Warao.

Then Librado died. Having gained Chávez’s attention, the national government continued

to support Muaina as a model community. In 2008, when we arrived, a government contractor

was working there, hired to build new houses, a clinic, school, and community center. But

Moraleda was not around to counter the structure of racism in the contractor’s designs. They

built fully enclosed houses, despite residents’ requests that walls be left open to permit
 9

ventilation in a tropical climate. The nearly flat roofs with flimsy tarpaper leaked so much that

the particle board walls (particle board, in a rainforest?) turned to mold even before the houses

were finished. It could be a model of culturally-incompetent architectural design. Having

returned temporarily from the University, Mamerto and his younger brother Melvi worked for

the contractors, turning trees from surrounding forests into boards. Shortly after Mamerto died

the contractor left, leaving wages unpaid, houses unfinished, wires hanging everywhere, and a

jumble of toilets crammed into one house. The promise of modern sanitation, an end to

astronomical rates of infant mortality, became a Duchampian fountain on steroids in a living

museum of modern lies and false promises. At the same time that Pizarro and Macotera were

mourning their first-born son, Muaina was lamenting the death of its socialist dream. Librado’s

brother Enrique had not placed us next to just any corpse—he was mourning the death of his

brother’s dream yet again.

Laments and the Complex Temporalities of Mourning

I hope that by the time you finish reading my letter you will see that lamentation can

extend your insights regarding the work of mourning in three ways. The first of these revolves

around poetics. One of the reasons that I am particularly drawn to your Jokes and Their

Relationship to the Unconscious and The Interpretation of Dreams is that there you elucidate

how language is not just a referential apparatus but rather suggest how people engage the formal

properties of language reflexively in using poetics performativity to constantly reconstitute the

psyche.12 Oddly, you seem to have left poetics behind in "Mourning and Melancholia”; I missed

your reflections on the discursive genres that enter into the work of mourning and the role of

poetics in both hyper-cathexis and reality testing. Here I think that the laments sung for Pizarro
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and research by anthropologists and folklorists on lamentation might bring your concerns with

poetics and mourning into dialogue.

In the delta, women immediately begin to bathe the deceased with their tears, their voices

transformed through icons of crying—poetic features mimicking “natural” features of the crying

voice.13 Female mourners compose hours of laments combining refrains expressing their

relationships to the dead (mauka, ihi sana, me! ‘my son, oh pitiful you!’) with textual phrases

exploring biographical dimensions, experiences lamenters shared with the deceased, and how

s/he died; they also project bleak futures.14 Lamentation packs heavy-lifting parts of the work of

mourning into a day or two in a world without refrigerators and pantries in which mourners feel

too sad to garden, fish, or eat until the corpse is buried.

In some areas of the world, laments have no semantic content, and in other places they

are more standardized, lacking such poetic and indexical specificity.15 Nevertheless, many

lament forms provide rich cartographies that construct—rather than simply represent—precisely

how hyper-cathexis and reality testing both constitute the work of mourning and reconfigure the

social world. Finnish lamenters address the dead through phrases that turn strands of shared

experience into metaphorical names and use poetic repetition to retrace memories “again and

again, only changing the angle of vision slightly.”16 In Bangladesh, dialogic and indexical

features of laments enable women to imbue "troubles talk" with multiple social and interactional

dimensions.17 One of my oldest and dearest friends Steven Feld, has focused on how the poetics

of Kaluli laments in New Guinea create the possibility of feeling in particular ways. He

emphasized the importance of quoted speech in what you termed hyper-cathexis, tracing how

words exchanged with the person who died live dialogically in both deceased and mourner,

continuing to shape both voices and identities. Feld also points to how laments string place

names into “paths” that trace how mourner and deceased shared affectively-charged spaces. He
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thinks that you failed to appreciate the acoustic and bodily materiality of crying and the crying

voice; he suggests that lamenters do not simply discharge preexisting emotions but create,

gather, and energize thoughts and feelings, pasts and futures.18

Okay, now that I have introduced you to Mamerto and his family and to laments, let’s

listen again to the laments that his mother, grandmother, and brother Melvi sang for him during

the scene I described earlier. Melvi commented on how well they got along, the way they played

together as children, traveling with their parents to their mother’s natal community to garden,

and working together constructing houses: “We milled lumber together; you would get up at

dawn to put diesel in the big generator, and then we would plane and finish the boards.”

Mamerto’s grandmother remembered that he sometimes slept in her house and brought her fish.

Florencia Macotera, Mamerto’s mother, reflected with pride how he studied at the Indigenous

University of Venezuela.

As you clearly appreciated in Jokes and Dreams, grasping the role of poetics involves

listening closely to particular examples, so let’s examine Melvi’s lament:

1. Mano, oko daobasa serebuya makina eku,

My brother, we were making boards together in the sawmill,

2. ama ihi mamoae diana.

now you have left me.

3. Ihi yakerakore aniaokawitu karamuyaha hatanae,

When you were well you used to get up right at dawn,

4. planta aida esohoyaha gasoi hatanae tatukamo,

you filled the large generator with diesel,

5. oko yaotaya yoriwere dao sepeyaha,

we worked alongside one another planing the wood,

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6. ihi mate yakerakore, wabanahakore,

while you were still well, before you died.

7. A ma ihi momi wabae.

Now you died apart from me.

Here we see the most characteristic feature of Warao laments—a complex musical, grammatical,

and poetic counterpoint between what I call textual phrases, verses that place us as listeners in

the affective intensity of sharing between Melvi and Mamerto, and refrains that starkly call

attention to the definitive nature of Mamerto's death. Lines 1, 3-5, and 6 are textual phrases; the

focus is more textual than musical, consisting of bursts of words that invite listeners—including

other lamenters—to absorb their semantic content and poetic/musical contours. As listeners, we

stand alongside Melvi as he watches Mamerto get up each morning at dawn, fill the generator,

and then plane boards with his brother. Melvi uses grammatical features that suspend time,

placing the Melvi, Mamerto, and listeners in the middle of the scenes that the two brothers

shared together; they seem to unfold before our ears as we are absorbed by their temporal and

spatial features. Melvi attaches the present tense marker -ya to verbs serebuya (1, 'making

boards') and yaotaya (5, working), placing us in the midst of these actions as they are unfolding.

Karamuyaha (3, 'getting up'), esohoyaha (4, 'filling'), and sepeyaha (5, 'planing') use both present

tense and a durative aspect form –ha. These forms, which linguists call tense-aspect features,

created tiny imagist poems that placed listeners in the middle of actions as if we were sharing

these moments with Melvi and Mamerto as they unfold, projecting them as of potentially

indefinite duration; they accordingly come to affectively saturate the social world of the fictive

present that Melvi was constructing.

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One thing I find remarkable is how insights into the work of mourning evident in the

poetics of this adolescent’s lament evoke work by psychoanalysts who have built on your essay.

Melanie Klein suggested that mourning returns adults to the “infantile depression position,”

which is produced, in her view, by loss of the mother’s breast. Although I am more at home with

the positive view of mourning as non-pathological that you develop in “Mourning and

Melancholia,” I do think that Klein added a great deal to our language for talking about

mourning.19 She suggested that young children build internal images of external objects

(particularly mother and father), thereby possessing them inside their bodies as internal objects.

This world of internalized objects is not static but changes continually through the incorporation

of new people and experiences, real and fantasized. She echoed your insightful comments on the

terrible pain of mourning, arguing that it is produced by losing the person in the real world,

which induces 1) distrust of the external world in general, 2) loss of the image of the deceased in

the internal world, and 3) a shattering of this carefully constructed internal world as a whole.

Klein suggested that the work of mourning requires the mourner “to rebuild with anguish the

inner world, which is felt to be in danger of deteriorating and collapsing.”20 Here each mourner

begins to rebuild her or his internal world, which collapsed first after the death of Mamerto’s

younger brother, Dalvi, followed by Mamerto’s death. The poetics of lament are crucial here in

how they took images from a shattered external world and imbued them with wholeness,

immediacy, and a sense of the real, as Jacques Lacan might put it, thereby constantly giving

laments and listeners alike opportunities to internalize these images and rebuild their shattered

internal worlds.

I think you might appreciate the work of Juan-David Nasio, an Argentine-born student of

Lacan, who followed you in tracing how love progressively dominates our internal world by

taking in the image of someone we love in such as way as to “cover him or her over as ivy
 14

covers a stone wall.” I would add that in grief we seem to painfully retrace how our love for a

person has attached itself “in very particular places of the wall, in its cracks and crevices,”

revealing more closely than we had ever realized before how deeply and minutely our lives

became intertwined.21 Exploring the poetic construction of each memory provides a means of

affectively following these vines, which similarly lead within Mamerto and the lamenter

simultaneously, tracing how these experiences linked them psychically, thereby resulting in the

intense pain and disorientation of mourning to which you point—we lose parts of ourselves as

the same time that we lose an-other.

The poetics of lamentation do not, however, draw performers and listeners deeply into

hyper-cathexis alone. Having created these temporal and spatial bubbles, Melvi then bursts each

one with verb endings that are past and punctual, particularly –nae; these forms, which

sometimes appear at the end of textual phrases (3 and 4), are the dominant grammatical element

in refrains (here lines 2 and 7). In other words, lamenters move between hyper-cathexis and

reality testing rapidly, often within single lines. This raises the question of how we might think

about the temporalities that characterize the work of mourning. You wrote that "withdrawal of

libido is not a process that can be accomplished in a moment, but … one in which progress is

slow and gradual,” a linear process that unfolds regularly, "bit by bit," until grief "is undoubtedly

surmounted." 22 Here is a point where subsequent psychoanalysts have disagreed. Although Klein

referred to "the slow process of testing reality in the work of mourning," she emphasized the

conflicting emotions that emerge in juxtaposing "passing states of elation … due to the feeling of

possessing the perfect love object (idealized) inside" with intense sorrow, distress, and hatred.23

Klein thus productively left room for iterability, arguing that grief moves in waves.
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Jean Laplanche productively charts the temporality of mourning in his evocation of

Penelope in Homer's Odyssey.24 She famously embodied her mourning for Odysseus in weaving

a shroud for his father, frustrating her suitors for three years:

‘Young men, my suitors, now my lord is dead,

let me finish my weaving before I marry….’

So every day she wove on the great loom—

but every night by torchlight she unwove it.25

Laplanche used this metaphor to disagree with your account: “Penelope does not cut the threads,

as in the Freudian theory of mourning; she patiently unpicks them, to be able to compose them

again in a different way.” Moreover, this work is nocturnal, far from the conscious lucidity to

which you point in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Laplanche suggests that this work requires

time, it is repetitive (thus the iterative verb form), and that “it sets aside a reserve.”26 I like the

materiality of Laplanche’s metaphor.

Here questions of temporality begin to deepen our understanding of the nature of the work

of mourning and what this labor produces and transforms. In “Mourning and Melancholia,” you

seem to invoke what us social scientists would call a functionalist logic, similar to how British

social anthropologists of the first half of the twentieth century saw cultural phenomena as

reasserting the social status quo. My colleague Judith Butler suggested that your work here

“implied a certain interchangeability of objects as a sign of hopefulness, as if the prospect of

entering life anew made use of a kind of promiscuity of libidinal aim.”27 She calls into question

the linearity that informs your distinction between mourning and melancholia, which would

equate mourning with forgetting, with “being able to exchange one object for another.” She
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argues, nevertheless, that you later changed your mind, admitting in “The Ego and the Id” that

reincorporation of the lost attachment “was essential to the task of mourning.”28 Here is where

she reframes the work of mourning: "one mourns when one accepts that by the loss one

undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever" (2004:21). Perhaps mourning opens up a

space between attachment and loss, between pushing the limits of our capacity to connect with

others—even to the point at which it takes on shades of the death wish—and our recognition that

psychic, bodily, and material survival can force us to sever the bonds that we most cherish. Both

the deepest pain and some of the deepest creativity are unleashed as we fully inhabit these two

contradictory processes and constantly create a space that stands between them.

Feld places a similar observation at the heart of his efforts to rethink laments, which he

calls song-texted weeping.29 In extensive work on Kaluli music from Papua New Guinea, Feld

suggests that lament performers imagine futures at the same time that they powerfully

reconfigure pasts and presents, projecting how social and natural worlds will be transformed by a

particular death and the work of mourning. Here is one of the points that moved me to write you,

to think that I might have something to contribute to psychoanalytic thought about mourning.

The poetic features of laments don’t just “represent” the work of mourning that is occurring

gradually within the psyches of each individual mourner. The work of mourning seems rather to

entail a constant movement back and forth between hyper-cathexis and reality testing, projecting

a bodily, acoustic, and collective blueprint for both the work of mourning.

I feel as if we have remained too much thus far within the realm of the psyche, and I want

to talk about how lamentation positions the body of the mourner in relationship to those around

her, a theme that Nadia Seremetakis raised some years ago in writing on Greek laments.30 The

sociologist Erving Goffman wrote an essay entitled “Response Cries” that has intrigued me for

decades.31 He suggests that such utterances as “ouch” or “whoops,” uttered suddenly after some
 17

kind of mishap, signal a temporary loss of control. Providing what appear to be natural,

involuntary indexes of the emotional and/or physical state of the utterer, they seem to provide

listeners, even strangers, access to our internal states. Nevertheless, “response cries” are

conventional signals whose utterance is shaped by our perception of those around us: children

learn to emit different response cries when they drop something in the presence of peers,

grandparents, or teachers. Goffman’s formulation captures how such expressions seem to

transparently, automatically convey what is happening within an individual body at the same

time that they engage social relations, asking over-hearers to interpret signs of internal distress as

constituting their utterers as particular types of social beings.

Now Goffman, despite his genius, was given to anecdotal examples. Being an

ethnographer and having been asked by Mamerto’s relatives to record their laments and listen

closely to them, I think that attending to their acoustic and poetic features can open up both

Goffman’s concept and how poetics provides guidelines for the work of mourning. In laments,

pain similarly adopts the acoustic features of moans and wails at the same that that it is stylized.

Warao lamenters use “creaky voice,” low pitch, high volume, and a special voice quality or

timbre—the suppression of the “singer’s formant” between 1.8 and 3.8 kHz.32 That these are not

read as consciously-stylized features, as in storytelling, but involuntary, transparent

embodiments of internal, affective states; this construction of the relationship between acoustics

and affect reportedly generates their compelling effects on listeners. Lack of conscious mediation

affirms the force of lament discourse: “what they're crying is entirely true; they couldn't cry lies.”

Listeners say they cry along “behind” lamenters, internalizing their words and reflecting on the

vines that linked them to the deceased. Laments are thus elaborate, prolonged series of response-

cries that provide seemingly unmediated reflections of internal states and model how listeners

should hear them and what they should feel. Reflecting on spirit possession, Vincent Crapanzano
 18

suggested that such outbursts can be therapeutic when their expression is structured.33 The dual

positionality is not just lodged in the content of utterances, as Goffman’s examples would

suggest, but in an acoustics that is unsettling, inescapable, demanding.

Listening, Polyphony, Circulation

If I stopped telling you about lamentation here, I would help sustain a vision of mourning

as individual and intra-psychic, and I am hoping to draw you deeper into the more social view

that you began to articulate in “The Ego and the Id” and Totem and Taboo. Their status as

extended response cries makes them seemingly transparent indicators of psychic and bodily

states and powerful forms of sociality simultaneously. The laments sung for Mamerto point to

two important collective dimensions of the work of mourning.

First, Mamerto’s relatives performed laments collectively. One person took the lead in

the singing at any given moment, contributing themes were taken then up by others. The

remaining lamenters did not voice the same exact words or sing at precisely the same time or

with identical pitch or voice quality; rather, each singer transposed lines composed by others to

reflect her or his own relationship to Mamerto and the most affectively-charged aspects of her or

his own experiences with her. In musical terms, this relationship between voices is called

polyphony. Feld has referred to this feature of laments as "lift-up-over-sounding," in which

voices intersect, inform, and mutually superanimate one another, creating a collective voice that

leaves room for individual creativity.34 The voices of Mamerto’s relatives were coordinated in

terms of pitch, volume, affective intensity, and timbre as well as content—yet without giving up

their individuality.35 The lamenters composed poetry, listened to the other lamenters (particularly

while singing their refrains), wove their voices together, and performed their compositions

simultaneously.
 19

Second, houses in Muaina largely lack walls; thus, wherever you are, you occupy the

acoustic space of mourning. Even if Mamerto was not your relative, the pain was inescapably

inside you. Y our eardrums vibrated with the frequency of the pain expressed by Macotera and

the other wailers. More distant women relatives and nearly all men listened in silence, but they

were listening to every word. As Nadia Seremetakis argued for Greek laments, listening engages

a broader sensorium and interpellates the body.36 As Charles Hirschkind suggested for Islamic

sermons on cassettes, listening is not a passive response but requires listeners to locate

themselves in affective/ethical soundscapes.37 Here the differences and similarities with

psychoanalytic listening are interesting. Following up on your insights, Lacan defined

psychoanalysis as practices of listening. Lacan was struck by “the subject’s relation to his own

speech, in which the important factor is rather masked by the purely acoustic fact that he cannot

speak without hearing himself” and by “the fact that he cannot listen to himself without being

divided as far as the behaviour of the consciousness is concerned” (1977[1966]:181). This

double relationship to one’s speech produces a splitting of the subject. In analysis, patients learn

to listen to their own speech, including its silences and the multiple voices that constitute it, just

as the analyst’s subjectivity revolves around practices of listening. Lamenters do not speak of

listening to themselves or learning about their own work of mourning directly, but they do note

that they are constantly listening to what other performers are singing. Here they are also

listening to their own voices as they have been incorporated into those of their co-performers.

Ah, but this point leads me once again to feel as if I am leading you astray or

foreshortening the scope of the journey that I have asked you to take with me. We have taken

mourning out of a purely intra-psychic realm to embrace the relationship between performers

and their connection with listeners, but I think we are stuck in what J.L. Austin referred to as the

“total speech situation,”38 striking the analytical limit that Jacques Derrida criticized in his
 20

acrimonious debate with John Searle. Derrida sought to locate performativity not in originary

acts of speaking but in iterative movements in which “something new takes place.”39 Discourse,

he suggested, is neither free floating nor locked in contexts, passed along from context to

context. Rather, Derrida argued, “this iterability is differential, within each individual ‘element’

as well as between the ‘elements,’ because it splits each element while constituting it.”40 This

raises Butler’s central issue of the way that bodies and identities are constituted through the

iteration of discourse, enabling people’s creative interventions into acts of naming that

performatively construct them, sometimes violently.

The issue of iterability is crucial, because it links up with the charge delivered to us by

the lamenters, who asked us to listen to their words in such a way as to participate actively in

their circulation. We were interpellated to help them turn bodies, diseases, time, and space into

representations and make them mobile, enabling them to travel to Caracas and move officials to

act. Nevertheless, I am not sure that Derrida’s rather general account of the importance of

iterability is adequate to get us off on the right foot here. Given that that the deaths were

attributed to an epidemic, particular types of iterability were required, ones with poetics that

were quite different than those found in laments—and lodged in a different language, Spanish.

Here we might have to think together a bit more closely about what makes things mobile, able to

circulate. British sociologist John Urry suggests that such phenomena as walking, bicycles, cars,

and airplanes have come to seen as immanent embodiments of mobility because of the broad

transformations of bodies, landscapes, the built environment, and social relations that enabled

them. Urry reminds us that the same processes produce forms of immobility simultaneously.

Imbuing scientific and medical objects with mobility imposes particular sorts of

requirements. French science studies scholar Bruno Latour suggested that scientific facts and

concepts are often projected as “immutable mobiles”—as capable of traveling anywhere without
 21

changing their significance.41 Doctors should mean the same thing when they say “this is a case

of cholera” in the Delta of Bangladesh as they do in Delta Amacuro. What is regarded as “gold

standard” medical knowledge should circulate globally, at least among medical and scientific

professionals. Knowledge about cases and deaths is similarly supposed to work its way

systematically from rainforest communities to Tucupita to Caracas and eventually to the World

Health Organization in such a way that information is neither lost nor distorted en route. My

former colleagues Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star argued that rendering diagnostic

categories and statistics mobile requires two things.42 First, practices, epistemologies, and

technologies must be deployed at each site in which they are (re)produced. For example,

reducing some 500 cholera deaths to 13 involved case definitions, inadequate health

infrastructures, great limitations on the availability of laboratory testing, racial profiling, and

pressure from politicians. Second, as science studies scholar Steven Shapin has suggested, as

scientific epistemologies and practices were emerging in seventeenth-century England, a voice

was being created to go with them—one that was marked by projecting qualities of generality,

abstraction, independence from bodily and social particularities and self-interest.43 Accordingly,

Bowker and Star suggest that these complex indexical histories generated at each site must be

erased if categories and statistics are to become mobile and authoritative, to be clothed in voices

of science and medicine.

And here epidemiological erasure brings us back to mourning. Butler connects issues of

iterability with what happens when mourning cannot become public, when certain expressions of

grief cannot circulate. In the face of racial inequalities, she argues, "certain lives are not

considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized." These politics of grievability fashion certain

deaths into national leitmotifs and deem others inconsequential or simply ungrievable constructs

associated hierarchies of lives as well: "if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life."44 Herein
 22

lies the power of the project initiated by the parents and advanced by the Moraledas—not simply

to stop further deaths from the epidemic but to demand that their children's lives become

grievable more broadly—to ask President Chávez to join them in their work of mourning.

Herein lies the fundamental contradiction that the six of us faced in carrying out what the

parents charged us to do in their laments and narratives—which parents in Mukoboina and

elsewhere had been pressing Conrado and Enrique to do for months. But the task was

formidable. Neither the laments sung over Mamerto’s body or the narratives unfolding in front of

us in the adjacent house were likely to travel beyond the Lower Delta, nor were they likely to

interpellate epidemiologists, health officials, or journalists. We were asked to construct a

classically epidemiological formulation, “X people died from Y disease over Z period,” that

would have the mobility to reach these social actors in Caracas and prompt them to collaborate

with residents in Muaina and elsewhere in ending the epidemic. But the regional government had

been working to prevent the circulation of discourse about the epidemic from reaching

journalists and laypersons and particularly national officials. Making it mobile would clearly

involve a change in language, from Warao to Spanish, and a change of genre, from lamentation,

political rhetoric, dispute mediation, and personal narrative to epidemiological report. But the

cost of creating mobility would be too high if we severed indexical links to bodies, both those of

the three corpses and their relatives, affects, and the indigenous knowledge production and

leadership that had led to their production. When news of the cholera epidemic in the Delta

circulated to Caracas in 1992-1993, they turned into a durable discourse of Warao people as

dirty, ignorant, incapable of participating in biomedical treatment, and as responsible for their

children’s deaths, one that rationalized their (mis)treatment by bureaucrats for 15 years. How

could we be sure that representations of this epidemic would retain a distinct content, different

indexical histories, and achieve quite different medical and political effects?
 23

Death, Diagnosis, and the Ambiguous Consequences of Mobility

We were faced with “an unknown disease” that had stumped epidemiologists for a year.

In Muaina, a novel juxtaposition of dispute mediation, personal narratives, and epidemiology

unfolded that enabled the latter to break out of the narrow questioning that constrained previous

investigations and turned the parents’ narratives into forms of witnessing that countered the

social deaths of their children. Nevertheless, at the same time that all of this was taking place, a

young woman lay in a hammock in the house next to the one in which the meeting was taking

place. We learned that it was Elbia Torres, Mamerto’s wife, and that she was not feeling well.

Starting the following morning, our investigation was punctuated by visiting her early each

morning and then in the evening when we returned. Clara and Norbelys monitored her symptoms

closely. Tragically, they could not arrest the disease but rather only provide palliative care to

diminish her symptoms, which progressed from headache, fever, generalized body aches,

tingling in the feet that progressed to numbness and partial paralysis, strange neurological

sensations, difficulty swallowing, sensibility to touch, and fear of water (hydrophobia). This

experience enabled Clara, an excellent clinician, to diagnose her symptoms as consistent with

rabies. Remembering that rabies can be transmitted by bats, I recalled that Mamerto and his

younger brother were bitten nocturnally by vampire bats a month before developing symptoms—

a common incubation period. We documented 37 cases through the relatives’ narratives, and all

of them were characterized by the same basic set of symptoms.

And then came the horrible realization—everyone bitten by a bat, unless the bat is

confined or tested, should be vaccinated for rabies. The vaccine is 100% effective in preventing

the disease, and rabies is 100% fatal.45 Thus, Elbia, Mamerto, and the others died from acute

health inequities. As Enrique stated in opened the meeting, if the epidemic had emerged among

non-indigenous elites in the capital, health authorities would have reacted swiftly: “It seems as if
 24

the lives of us Warao, our lives—we aren’t worth anything.” Thus, does it matter that the death

that sparked the work of mourning was perceived as part of a pattern of genocide, of marking

people as expendable?

All supporters of the revolution, we framed our work as supporting government efforts to

confront health inequities and bring the fundamental social right to health care, guaranteed by

Venezuela’s Constitution, to the low-income and indigenous that had formed foci of Chávez’s

policy initiatives. Nevertheless, Ministry officials in Caracas initially refused to see us or accept

our report, denying its mobility. “You should have stayed in Delta Amacuro State, and delivered

it to officials there,” they insisted. “We told them over and over again,” Conrado countered, “and

they didn’t listen.” A three-hour standoff ensued in the lobby. The indigenous members of the

team held their ground. The situation attracted the attention of national health reporters and

Simon Romero of the New Y ork Times. When the photographer for the national reference

newspaper, El Nacional, appeared, Enrique passed out my photographs of Elbia and her

relatives, taken an hour before her death. Enrique, Norbelys, and Tirso each held a photo. In

recirculating their account of the epidemic, they wanted to keep the parents’ images and their

wailed words attached to our words—to prevent them from becoming abstract numbers or

further “proof” of indigenous stereotypes. As 30,000 press accounts of the epidemic circulated

worldwide, these photographs accompanied words that articulated efforts by indigenous leaders

and parents to produce knowledge about the epidemic and force the government to act. From the

start, their goals for our work went beyond the current epidemic—it was about breaking the

racial barrier—or scaling the Berlin Wall, in Enrique’s words—that denied indigenous people

rights to produce knowledge about health, circulate their accounts beyond the Delta, talk to

reporters, and shape health policies.

 25

Anthropological Counter-Transference and Epidemiology

Okay, I know that I told you earlier that this whole thing elicited resistance within me,

and I have not entirely repressed my promise to tell you why. True, I was not in the house and

next to Mamerto’s body, except for a few minutes, and I did not wail. So how did the laments

call me to listen?

I sat all morning on the floor at Enrique feet—he wanted me to be well-positioned to

film the event. It was uncomfortable. Here I am referring less to the uneven, rough-hewn boards

beneath me or the hours I spent squinting through the viewfinder of the camera and video

camera, as still as possible. Much more significant, however, was the pain that radiated

acoustically out of the house next door and merged with the distinct poetics of pain emerging

right in front of me in the narrators’ accounts of watching their children, nephews and nieces die,

reporting their symptoms and repeating their last words. The acoustics of laments shot the more

linear narratives through in ways that trebled their affective charge and complicated their

narrative structures; words were exchanged between the two sites and genres occasionally. As

refracted through my ears and eyes, the floor, the brilliant sun reflected off the river, the faces of

the people around me, and a glimpse of Mamerto’s wife, who lay ill in the next house, these

sounds, poetics, and images seemed to form vines that seeped inside of me, looking for my own

“cracks and crevices.”

I lost my own daughter, Feliciana, in 2002, and this was the first time that I had listened

to Warao lamentation following her death. As you might imagine, it placed me anew with my

own work of mourning. I, too, asked once again, over and over why she had died and how I

might have prevented it. In 2002, I too, tried to grasp hold of her presence and embed it so

deeply within me that somehow, magically, she might reappear. After she died, all night long I

heard women lamenting for Feliciana. Delta women later debated whether these were the voices
 26

of departed lamenters or whether I was internally composing laments, unable to render them

audible. I didn’t care—they helped me survive that night.

So there you have the locus of my apprehension. When Conrado demanded that we join

him in investigating the epidemic, I realized that we would spend days listening to parents

talking about the loss of their children. It’s not that I avoid the topic. To the contrary, I was

trained as a grief counselor, and I regularly lead groups of parents in exchanging narratives that

similarly render the work of mourning poetic and collective, albeit without the singing. But this

was different. There was no going home after one of the “groups” in the Lower Delta, we rather

just went on to the next community. Moreover, I had not accompanied parents as they lost their

children, and I had not photographed their faces as they watched them die.

Nevertheless, these memories did not dislocate me into a distant, introspective world.

Nasio wrote that internalizing the loved person affords reflections of other internalized objects,

“as a mirror broken up into small, mobile fragments of glass on which confused images of the

other and of myself are reflected.”46 My cameras, still and video, became for me that day a series

of precisely located fragments of glass that refracted the way that “confused images of the other

and of myself [we]re reflected.” I had worked as a documentary photographer decades earlier,

but I left photography for anthropology. Being interpellated by Conrado as anthropologist and

photographer, the demand to produce images that would circulate, seems to have inspired what

your daughter, Anna, might have called “regression in service of the ego,” joining my two

identities. The photographs of Elbia, her parents, and other parents who lost children traveled to

Caracas, became part of the approximately 30,000 stories worldwide that reported the epidemic,

and are now part of a photographic exhibition that also responds to the parents demand to ask

lots of people to see their children and learn how they died.
 27

My resistance may not have been misplaced. Enrique never called me to the white plastic

narrator’s chair, and I never told my story. And so I paid the price. After six years of the work of

mourning, my grief seemed to slip back in time, engulfing me once again in the pain you so

powerfully invoked. It took me a couple of years to find ways to make the vines, cracks, and

crevices that linked me to Feliciana feel like they could again produce futures and forms of

connections rather than enmeshing me in disappeared pasts.

Conclusion: Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, and the Work of Mourning

I don’t want to take more of your time, Dr. Freud, not do I want to exhaust the patience of

my over-hearers. My ambivalence about Mourning and Melancholia has now given way to

appreciation—thank you for giving me a way to find that space between hyper-cathexis and

reality-testing. But before I close I would like to reflect a bit on what I can take back from our

time together—and with Mamerto’s relatives and the people in the Lower Delta who confront

rabies and racialized fatal inequalities of other types.

I think that the laments for Mamerto and your essay together pose a fundamental

challenge for anthropology; they might lead us to rethink anthropology as not only studying but

as becoming the work of mourning. By issuing this provocative challenge, I certainly do not

mean that anthropologists should only study death, that is physical death. I have been talking,

however, about social death as much as the cumulative effect of rabies. Indeed, Veena Das

suggests that laments do not simply mourn physical death but both social death and “the harm

done to the whole social fabric” (2006:48, 59), an insight that provides an opening to. W.E.B.

DuBois’s reflection on his son’s death. DuBois suggested that African Americans are constantly

split through a “double consciousness” that requires subjects to see themselves through the racist

lenses of whites. If you had read DuBois’ powerful reflection on the dead of his first child,
 28

published in The Souls of Black Folks in 1903, it might have complicated your construction of a

generalized “loved person.” DuBois projects his newborn vis-à-vis “the Veil,” a black-white

borderline etched through racism, as facing a life that would “sicken his baby heart til it die a

living death,” “choked and deformed” by racism (1990[1903]:154). I have also learned a lot from

the way Franz Fanon connects mourning, racism, and social death in analyzing how racial power

and the violence of colonialism seize bodily spaces and imaginations and inhabit psyches in such

a way that racialized bodies become “clad in mourning” (1967:113). I am certainly not arguing

for vulture anthropology, in which scholars would wait for death and circle around it. What I

take away from the work is rather four things that might, I think, help us think about the poetic,

ethical, and material entanglements of anthropology.

First, I think that we have a lot to learn here about how ethnography splits us between the

desk and the field, in Marilyn Strathern’s terms—or some of us between multiple desks

(meaning different practices of entextualization with different collaborators in different genres

for different audiences), multiple sites and interlocutors, and different modes of engagement—

including trying to help end an epidemic and incurring the wrath of a socialist government with

which I identify. There is a lesson her about how we are called simultaneously to intensively

connect but just as intensively to disconnect and at the same time to occupy a space that is

between them. And, like the lamenters, to constantly face both the impossibility of being in this

position and also its inescapability.

Second, here laments connect with “the new ethnography,” the way that anthropologists

have come to realize that how they tell the story matters deeply. I have tried, in my letter to you,

to not just “analyze” or “explain” the poetics of lamentation but to inhabit them, to move

intensively between engaging you, other psychoanalysts, and anthropologists as well as

 29

lamenters, health professionals, journalists, and activists in the Delta, trying to acknowledge all

the while that I have very limited rights to these different spheres, let alone to bridge them.

Third, perhaps the deepest lesson here is that anthropologists, too, are listeners, and that

listening similarly requires openness to hearing how it is that we are called to listen and the

political and ethical dimensions of that listening. I certainly do not mean that anthropology as the

work of mourning would require us to carry out what everyone tells us to do; if I listened to the

Venezuelan government, I wouldn’t be talking about their refusal to recognize the epidemic or to

vaccinate the people bitten by bats. But I think that it would prompt us to understand that

listening involves challenges to circulate discourse in particular ways, making us more reflexive

about how we make things mobile.

Finally, I think that we have to think about the deep indexicalities that shape the

discourses in which we participate and how our ethnographic claims over them recognize some

dimensions and strip away others. I think that recognizing this claim, when we choose to do so,

entails rejecting Michael Taussig’s contention that bringing in the referent places us on the

wrong side of representation—we should restrict ourselves to looking at the violence entailed in

circulation and performance alone.47 To claim to circumvent the politics of representation, to

write non-representationally, can involve complex forms of stripping. Who dies, in the end, does

matter.

Well, I don’t know what this letter means to you, but I feel as it if has opened up a lot of

space for me. You might complain that I am trying to get psychoanalysis on the cheap by

choosing a dead analyst, one whom I can’t pay. But somehow talking with you has given me

more freedom to stay a bit longer with one of your ideas than would normally be allowed, a

chance to make more creative connections with some very painful but meaningful experiences in
 30

the Delta—ones that I really did work through in psychoanalysis. And my own work of

mourning. But that’s another story.

Your friend,

Charles

Notes

Acknowledgements. With this sort of project, even alluding briefly to acts of generosity and

kindness constitutes a daunting task. The honor that Florencia Macotera, Indalesio Pizarro, and

Melvi Pizarro bestowed on us by sharing their work of mourning on the day they buried

Mamerto and reflecting on their lives during a day spent together in Siawani still fills me with

wonder. I thank the other parents of other children who died in the epidemic and local

representatives for their remarkable efforts to commemorate their children's lives and confront

the epidemic, as well as Conrado and Enrique Moraleda and Norbelys and Tirso Gómez for

including us in their investigation of the epidemic and the broader project it sparked. The School

for Advanced Research and the Latin American Studies Association both assisted the project by

generously awarding us the prizes for Stories in the Time of Cholera that we used in funding

work on the epidemic. Jed Sekoff helped me confront the effects of my failure to take the white

plastic narrator's chair in Muaina on my own work of mourning and launched me on the project

of connecting the epidemic with psychoanalytic accounts of mourning, as well as suggested

crucial sources. Maureen Katz pointed me to Laplanche and offered friendship and

encouragement. Audiences at Columbia University, UC Santa Cruz, and the Societé

Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore (SIEF) provided excellent comments. Clara Mantini-

Briggs, as always, was a harsh critic and insightful interlocutor.

 31

1
Freud 1925[1917]:153.
2
Freud 1925[1917]:154.
3
Freud 1925[1917]:154.
4
Freud 1925[1917]:166.
5
Freud 1925[1917]:152.
6
Freud 1925[1917]:166.
7
Freud 1963[1929]:38.
8
See Wilbert and Lafée-Wilbert 2007. When most babies die before their parents can reach the

clinic, official statistics miss most of these deaths.

9
Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003.
10
Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003.
11
INE 2001.
12
Freud 1960[1905] and 1965[1900].
13
Urban 1988.
14
Briggs 1992.
15
Urban 1988.
16
Honko 1974:33; see also Nenola-Kallio 1982.
17
Wilce 1988.
18
Feld 1982, 1990.
19
Klein 1948[1940]:312.
20
Klein 1948[1940]:321.
21
Laplanche 2004:31.
22
Freud 1925[1917]:167, 166.
 32

23
Klein 1948[1940]:321, 322-323.
24
Laplanche 1999[1992]:251-252.
25
Fitzgerald 1963[1961]:22.
26
Laplanche 1999[1992]:251-252.
27
Butler 2004:21.
28
Butler 2004:20-21.
29
I’m continuing to call these forms “laments,” because I am currently living in Europe and am

interested in connecting with the people in Finland and elsewhere who have thought so long

about what they refer to laments.

30
Seremetakis 1991.
31
Goffman 1981.
32
Briggs 1993.
33
Crapanzano 1973.
34
Feld 1990.
35
Briggs 1993.
36
Seremetakis 1991.
37
Hirschkind 2006.
38
Austin 1962.
39
Derrida 1977[1972]:40.
40
Derrida 1977[1972]:53.
41
Latour 1987.
42
Bowker and Star 1999.
43
Shapin, A Social History of Truth.
44
Butler 2004:34.
 33

45
Plotkin (2000) summarizes the clinical literature on rabies.
46
Nasio 2004:34.
47
Taussig 1989.
 34

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