Introduction: Discourses of Death

As intimated in Chapter III, analysing the articulation of political authority in funerary material culture requires appreciating the symbolic language of death and its, at times, subversive character underlying discordances and contradictions of funerary ideology vis-à-vis reality. Anthropological studies have widely demonstrated how ritual acts in general are misstatements of reality, and death rituals in particular are generative acts of an ideal social order. Indeed, the tomb can be a ‘crystallised embodiment of the ideal community,’ and through it ‘an idealised material map of the permanent social order’ is constructed. More generally, studies on the archaeology of death have extensively validated the notion that there is no mirroring between funerary context and reality; rather the former becomes a locus for the ideological representation of the latter. Hence, whilst extrapolating reality directly from burials remains an unattainable task, death rituals are worthy of analysis precisely because they encapsulate the ideological representation of a community that is enacted through them.

Other, more sociologically oriented studies on the manipulation of reality as a form of power relations, namely, Bourdieu on the notions of habitus and misrecognition, have forcefully argued for the self-reproductive system of society's structure and its power relations that is acknowledged and recognised by all social groups through the practice of habitus. Misrecognition is in this case an enlightening concept: in any specific arena of interaction, social practices are carried out according to the schemes of habitus, yet habitus itself produces a sense of (false) reality that is naturalised through strategies of power relations by certain groups. Hence, habitus is both imposed and imposing. Reality thus produced is not simply forced upon the dominated groups, but (mis)recognized as such by those very groups. Misrecognition of reality can thus be institutionally organized and guaranteed through sets of practices and rituals, as seen in gift-exchange and in the maintenance of reciprocity relations. This process of naturalisation of reality through which power relations are euphemised is all the more effective in a field where habitus operates within a ritual sphere, as around the tomb.