Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities,Contexts,and Comparisons

Introduction

Diversity in social life is shaped by a multitude of factors: It involves systematic power dynamics, inequalities, and social structures; it also involves the variable meanings people give to their lives and experiences; and these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. This article focuses primarily on the latter, presenting an analysis of responses to death as expressed by family members in Senegal in West Africa, exploring the ways in which interviewees “made sense” of their experiences, in the circumstances of their lives. The discussion considers such “sense-making” in relation to the three main, interrelated, contexts apparent in the interviews: families, religion, and material circumstances. By attending closely to interviewees’ own understandings of family deaths, we present some striking themes of both divergence and commonality with “bereavement” ¹ experiences as theorized and researched in Anglophone and Western European contexts.

In contemporary globalized worlds, diversities may involve multiple, dynamic, cross-cutting cultures, but despite such manifest diversities, it is still extraordinarily hard to see the depth of “our own” cultural assumptions and understandings of the world (Klass, 1999): What it means to be a human being, what it means to be a child or a family member, what a “good life” looks like, what it means to experience a significant death, and what “support” might entail. Furthermore, the available evidence of how people experience death and its aftermath in diverse Majority ² world contexts has been largely concerned with customs and behaviors rather than meanings and experiences, entailing a “conceptual and disciplinary split in which the grief of modern Westerners has been psychologised and medicalised, while the mourning or ritual behaviour of premodern and non-Western others ³ has been exoticised and romanticised” (Valentine, 2006, p. 57). Indeed, as Lofland (1985) argued several decades ago, “what is needed … is the willingness to replace sweeping generalizations about grief with its careful and delimited depiction” (p. 181).

When faced with issues of human suffering, such as experiences of death and loss, the empathic human response is generally to seek effective interventions to alleviate the associated pain. Such impulses have arguably shaped contemporary professional practices and social policies with regard to death and “bereavement” in both Minority and Majority worlds—albeit with different sets of issues in mind—and these in turn have largely shaped the formulation of research agenda. In the affluent contexts of Anglophone and Western European societies, research on death and bereavement has been heavily shaped by professional concerns about how best to assist grieving individuals (e.g., Breen & O’Connor, 2007; Center for the Advancement of Health, 2004), while in development studies concerned with less affluent societies, research on the emotional significance of death and bereavement has been largely overlooked by a primary focus on immediate issues of survival and economic development (see Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Bowlby, Wouango, & Kébé, 2016, for discussion of these literatures).

Consequently, when it comes to contemporary social and emotional responses to death across diverse contexts, the research evidence is very limited. This is despite the development of such subdisciplines as cross-cultural psychology and transcultural psychiatry, and some notable individuals taking work forward across the divides of psychiatry and anthropology to the enrichment of each (Kleinman, 2001) or seeking to develop a genuinely cross-cultural body of research on loss and grief (Klass, 1999; Rosenblatt, 2007, 2008). As a result, “We do not have the cross-cultural evidence to define the characteristics of normal bereavement” (Kleinman, 2007, p. 819). Yet the sparse psychological literature that does compare responses to death among different ethnicities or nationalities, even when using standardized psychological measures of grief, demonstrates significantly divergent patterns of grieving (Bonanno, Papa, Lalande, Zhang, & Noll, 2005; Klass, 1999).

The predominance of the Anglophone literature in terms of experiences of “bereavement,” then, is associated with assumptions that such Minority world perspectives and “knowledge” have universal applicability, implicating political issues of neocolonial power dynamics (Bhambra & Santos, 2017; Connell, 2014; Ribbens McCarthy & Gillies, 2018). This then obscures the risk that “bereavement” interventions, formulated within such perspectives, may not be universally appropriate and may sometimes be positively unhelpful (Kleinman, 2007, 2012). Furthermore, the underpinning taken-for-granted cultural assumptions may also lead such approaches to become unhelpfully narrowed in their application “at home,” overdependent on professional psychotherapeutic or bereavement care expertise, consequently obscuring alternative approaches and cultural resources. Seeking to broaden understandings of how people experience and respond to death, beyond the contexts of contemporary Anglophone and Western European societies, may thus have important benefits in both directions, opening up fresh insights along with new areas for research.

So what scope is there to move beyond the limitations of such bodies of work, to take the leap of imagination to gain insight into their underpinning taken-for-granted assumptions? Attending to different customs and religious beliefs is a start but only a start. Listening to the voices of people from other countries and contexts about their everyday experiences and understandings of death is also vital. In this article, we offer evidence from interviews about family deaths in urban Senegal and consider some major surprises and challenges encountered by the U.K.-based research team, giving significant pause for thought about how “we ⁴ ” think about death and bereavement in “the West.”

Theoretical Orientation

In developing our qualitative empirical study of family deaths in West Africa, the work of Klass (1999), calling for a cross-cultural model of “grief,” has been a key starting point. In addition, we drew theoretically on feminist theorizing of care ethics and caringscapes (Bowlby, 2012; Evans, 2012; Ribbens McCarthy, 2012a; Ribbens McCarthy & Prokhovnik, 2014; Tronto, 1993) and the notion of a family death as a “vital conjuncture” (Johnson-Hanks, 2002; Evans, 2014) that was likely to be associated with significant changes in various aspects of family members’ lives. For the present discussion, we also draw on an interactionist sociological approach to discuss how people “made sense” of family deaths through a theoretical focus on meanings-in-context.

Although others (e.g., Thompson et al., 2016) argue the value of sociological approaches to death, dying, and bereavement in general terms, we here present our empirical work through a particular theoretical lens of interactionist sociology. Our approach focuses upon the localized, face-to-face aspects of social lives while also acknowledging the ways in which such localized interactions are bound up with (globalized) power dynamics, inequalities, and institutional structures. ⁵ An interactionist sociological approach is sparsely apparent in some previous work (notably Lofland, 1985; Nadeau, 1990), while others have taken a broadly social constructionist approach to theorizing and researching “grief” as an emotion (e.g., Neimeyer, Klass, & Dennis, 2014; Rosenblatt, 2001; Walter, 2006; Wambach, 1986). A particular feature of such a sociological orientation, resonating with anthropological approaches, is that the research does not start with a theoretical model of how “emotion” may manifest itself and be named, understood, or evaluated, thus seeking to have “fewer cultural blinkers” (Klass, 1999, p. 160).

In seeking to understand our Senegalese interviews, our primary framework here draws on hermeneutic approaches which put human meaning-making center stage, as (often taken for granted) efforts toward dynamic sense-making, within the circumstances in which people find themselves, giving rise to a view of “meanings-in-context” (Ribbens McCarthy, Doolittle, & Day Sclater, 2012). As Jakoby (2012) says, “the issue of meaning is central to the understanding of grief” (p. 686), but two caveats are necessary here: First, meanings do not stand alone, since they both constitute, and are constituted by political, social, material, and cultural contexts, in which structures and patterns of power are ever present (Ribbens McCarthy et al., 2012). ⁶ Indeed, Jakoby (2012) points to some of the ways in which power dynamics relate to localized experiences of death, including the social status and power of the relationship with the deceased, the ways in which resources and social position interact with coping styles, and the significance of socially patterned feeling rules. It is also important to note that meanings may themselves be the site of cultural struggles in many arenas, including academic debate itself, for example, whether grief and suffering can be usefully understood as a disease (Granek, 2017; Kleinman, 2007, 2012; Kleinman & Kleinman, 1991).

Second, while it is possible that an emphasis on meaning may be particularly fruitful for multidisciplinary approaches to understand experiences of death (and indeed has become a major theme in therapeutic work–Neimeyer, 2001), it is important also to be aware of disciplinary differences in terms of the meaning of “meanings” (Ribbens McCarthy, 2006). Notably, here we use “meaning” as a sociological term rather than a therapeutic one to refer to the ways in which social actors “make sense of” their experiences and the circumstances in which they find themselves. In this usage, “meaning” is neither more nor less functional but simply an inevitable core feature of how humans engage with life. Although such meanings may sometimes be verbalized ⁷ (as in the present research interviews), they may also be signified in both powerful and mundane ways through symbols, actions, and objects. But, in line with critiques of the dichotomy between grief (as inner feelings) and mourning (as outer practices) (Jakoby, 2012; Klass, 2014), we are not working with a clear boundary between emotion and practice. Indeed, we add a further aspect to this critique when we argue that the distinction between emotional and material dimensions of death is particularly unhelpful and inappropriate in the context of Senegal.

In turn, considerations of “context” implicate a variety of theoretical and empirical frameworks, drawing on multidisciplinary perspectives, including:

localized temporal spatial environments

The immediate contexts of the interviews themselves, of course, presented particular temporal spatial environments and interactional dynamics (Squire, 2008), but aspects of all these contexts were relevant to our interviewees’ meaning-making and each may bring specific aspects of social life into focus. But in using the notion of meanings-in-context, we highlight a particular ontology that refuses to see “contexts” as somehow “external” to individuals, ⁸ or meanings as somehow “individually created” outside of context. In this sense, then, contexts cannot be separated from the meanings which help to constitute them nor meanings from the contexts in which they are embedded.

We next briefly introduce the study and the general Senegalese context, before discussing the analysis of the interviews in terms of three major emergent or themes – family relationships, religious frameworks, and material issues – as these are powerfully bound up with meaning-making. In attempting to provide such a holistic overview—one of the potential contributions of a sociological perspective (Thompson et al., 2016)—our discussion of each theme is necessarily brief, but we seek to convey some major meanings-in-context, as participants sought to “make sense” of their experiences. Finally, we offer a brief tentative discussion of how these findings highlight broad divergences and commonalities (Jullien, 2008/2014) with experiences of death in (diverse) Anglophone and Western European societies.

Researching Experiences of Family Deaths in Urban Senegalese Contexts

Our study provides the first in-depth understanding of responses to death, care, and family relations in a contemporary urban West African context. We aimed to investigate the material and emotional significance of the death of a close adult relative for family members, undertaking interviews with two members of each family, where possible, of different generations. Altogether, we interviewed 59 family members living in a range of circumstances, contacted through local nongovernmental organization (NGOs) and community leaders. ⁹ We also undertook 17 interviews with local, municipal, NGO, and religious leaders, and held focus groups with young people and with adult women, involving a further 24 individuals. ¹⁰ In addition, a total of eight workshops, involving previous interviewees and focus group participants, as well as government and nongovernmental representatives and Islamic and local leaders, were held a year and a half later, as part of a participatory dissemination process. This enabled us to present our ongoing analysis, ask for more extensive clarification on certain issues, and discuss our interim conclusions.

Our analysis combined thematic and intergenerational case study approaches, paying close attention to language and styles of talk (Callaghan, Gambo, & Fellin, 2015; Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Kébé, Bowlby, & Wouango, 2017). The latter presented significant challenges, with major overall differences from the in-depth individualized narrative style of “grief journeys” apparent in qualitative studies in Minority world contexts (e.g., Valentine, 2008; Wambach, 1986). Although we started out using open-ended life history approaches, in-depth accounts of individual life courses were almost entirely unforthcoming. By contrast, detailed accounts of the death of their family member often provided vivid narratives of events and experiences leading up to, and at the time of, the death, but with few accounts of what might be described by more psychologically oriented theorists as an “inner” psychological grief process over time after the death. Analysis therefore involved detailed processes of translation, interpretation, and pain-staking reflexive discussions within the team of five researchers, drawing on the voice-centered relational method (Mauthner & Doucet, 2008) and an ethic of care framework (Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Bowlby, Wouango, & Kébé, 2017), to develop some understanding of the experiences being conveyed. ¹¹ Our overall endeavor comes close to the vision of Kleinman and Kleinman (1991) in which we seek to understand “local moral worlds … not as a representation of some other reality (one that we experts possess special power over) but rather as an evocation of close experience that stands for itself” (p. 293).

In broad brush strokes, setting the general scene for our localized study, Senegal is sometimes described as having a triple cultural heritage of African, Islamic, and French colonialist origins (Bass & Sow, 2006). Although the majority of the population (94%) practice Sufi Islam, it is a secular State, with a plural legal framework (Bass & Sow, 2006; Evans, 2015). A minority of the population (4%) are Christians (primarily Roman Catholic) or animists or other religions (2%) (Agence Nationale de Statistique et de la Démographie [ANSD], 2013). In Senegal, Islam is often practiced through affiliation to a variety of hereditary brotherhoods (four main ones) which have significant political presence, while Catholicism is part of the French colonial legacy. At the same time, these classifications cannot be used to necessarily indicate everyday religious practices and beliefs, since all religions become significantly inflected by local customs and contexts (Wikan, 1988), and religious meanings will be drawn upon and adapted by people in their everyday lives (Klass, 1999). Indeed, Villalón (1999) describes maraboutage (following a particular religious leader who is considered to have powers to manipulate spiritual forces) as carefully cultivated in all spheres of life in contemporary Senegal, while Gifford (2016) suggests that Islamic practices may consequently become bound up with traditional African practices. In our own interviews, brotherhoods were rarely mentioned, but there was considerable syncretism between customary practices linked to ethnicity and religious practices, which were nevertheless predominantly framed in religious terms.

In recent years, Senegal has seen significant increases in its urban population, constituting 45% of the total population in 2013 (ANSD, 2014). Our research was located in two major cities, Dakar and Kaolack, focusing on two contrasting localities in each, one more central and one more peripheral. Chronic poverty affects 27% of households in Dakar and 37% in other cities (Fall et al., 2011), while the majority of children in Senegal as a whole are at risk of one or more indicators of multiple deprivation (Ministère de l’Economie, des Finances et du Plan. ANSD, DGPSSN, UNICEF Sénégal et EMAP, 2014). The population is diverse in terms of ethnicities, with Wolof being the largest, and some evidence suggests that ethnicity may be linked to poverty (Fall et al., 2011). Mortality statistics are compromised by the low level of registration of deaths, but overall life expectancy was stated to be 65 years in 2013, while the mortality rate is lower in the Dakar region (at 5.2%) than in any other city or area (7.6% in Kaolack) (ANSD, 2014).

The majority of households in Senegal have an extended family structure, with urban households somewhat smaller (average of 7 members) than rural ones (average of 10) (ANSD, 2014) but with household sizes comparatively larger than elsewhere in Western or Central Africa (Jacquemin, 2010). African customs of fosterage are apparent, with almost one third of households either sending or receiving foster children (Beck, De Vreyer, Lambert, Marazyan, & Safir, 2015). The majority of the population are married in monogamous unions, but over a third of married people live in polygamous arrangements (ANSD, 2014).

The scarce literature available on death in Senegal highlights the social importance of funeral and widowhood practices across ethnic groups (Faye, 1997; Ndiaye, 2009; Thomas, 1968/2013). Despite their restrictive and potentially coercive nature, Ndiaye (2012) suggests that widowhood practices may be regarded as a form of healing, individually and collectively. In relation to burial, funeral arrangements, mourning, and inheritance, practices are said to have mingled Islamic, Christian, and indigenous expectations and traditions (Sow, 2003).

We turn next to explore family and community networks as key sites of meanings-in-context for experiences of death and loss. We focus here on the family death itself and the practical and emotional implications. The longer term consequential changes in people’s lives and relationships are beyond the scope of the present discussion (but see Bowlby, Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, & Wouango, in progress).

Family and Community as Contexts and Support

“Bereavement” in predominant Anglophone perspectives is largely seen as something that happens to an individual, who has experienced a personal “loss,” provoking an emotional intrapsychic challenge. But while in all societies, whether recognized or not, a death also has broader social implications, it has been suggested that in Africa particularly, death is understood first and foremost as a community event (Nwoye, 2000, 2005 discussed by Njue et al., 2015), in societies which place central importance on the “family.”

In our interviews, it became quickly apparent how much family members relied on each other, for daily survival, for emotional and practical support, for opportunities to succeed in life, and to manage in times of crisis, all of which fundamentally shaped the meaning of the death. Furthermore, while the term “family” itself has been extensively debated and explored in academic work (Ribbens McCarthy & Edwards, 2011), for our interviewees it was an understanding of “family” as a collective unit that predominated (Ribbens McCarthy, 2012b), with the survival of this unit as a crucial concern after a significant family death (Nordanger, 2007), resonating with the African concept of ‘Ubuntu’ (discussed further below).

We’re united. My aunts; my mother’s younger sisters often come here and we meet. We talk, we drink tea like we used to when my mother was here. We’re really united. (Abdoulaye, 30-year-old son of deceased mother)

Although African families are said to be characterized by considerable diversity; nevertheless, Oheneba-Sakyi and Takyi (2006) argue that most African countries share common themes, such as an emphasis on the extended family, multiple marriage forms, high levels of childbearing, differentiated gender roles, and strong intergenerational ties, constituting, “a dynamic social institution with members coming and going” (p. 2). A household can be defined as having members who do not necessarily reside in it, but to which they contribute economically and socially, and more than one household may therefore claim an individual as a member (Bass & Sow, 2006). “Families” are largely (but not exclusively—Diop, 1985/2012) understood in terms of blood relationships but these ties could also extend to close neighbors and friends. ¹² Furthermore, reciprocity is central to such personal ties and informal relationships (Iyenda & Simon, 2006).

Our research accords well with these broad themes. We found that highly complex urban family and kinship networks, based in fluid and sometimes dispersed households linked to particular rural villages, work very differently in Senegal compared with Western European and Anglophone societies. Since family ties were pervasively described as absolutely central for any sense of security, it seemed to be generally imperative to maintain family relationships at all costs. This could be both a source of constraint and of great support after a death. A few interviewees thus referred to disputes about inheritance but might prefer not to express their views to other family members: “It wouldn’t have made any sense to quarrel. I preferred to let it go” (Cheikh, aged 77 years, son of deceased mother) while others spoke warmly of family support:

They’ve supported me like my father, they’ve supported me like my mother. (Selbe, aged 13 years, daughter of deceased father)

The death of a close family member therefore needs to be understood according to these meanings of family as a cohesive support system comprised of a flexible set of relationships that are central to life, in the context of the ongoing struggle for survival and stability, and the absence of any systematic formal welfare provisions (Evans et al., 2016). Such meanings of family were shaped by wider communal ideals and values of “unity,” “solidarité,” and social cohesion.

Indeed, the overwhelming majority of our interviewees reported receiving financial and moral support from such informal networks immediately after the death of their relative. ¹³ Relatives, friends, and neighbors organized arrangements for the burial, provided condolence money, offered advice and guidance, and helped them not to feel alone.

… the whole family, neighbours, everyone comes and everyone tries to comfort you. There’s also the moral support. People also give something to contribute even if only on the first day. (Boubacar, aged 44 years, after the death of his brother).

Younger people also spoke of the importance of the support from their friends: “It was very difficult for me at the beginning but my friends who live in the neighbourhood were there every day” (Fatoumata, aged 21 years, after the death of her brother). N’diogou, a young man aged 29 years who had lost his mother, was a lone more critical voice in our interviews, when he said, “You know, after a death, people don’t even have the time to look at you.”

We found it initially quite paradoxical, then, how far the language of being alone, empty, in a void [French, un vide] (Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Kébé, et al., 2017), was pervasively apparent in the interviews.

I feel alone today. (N’daye, aged 17 years, after the death of her mother)

We also noted in our analysis how the person who had died was most often described in terms of their family role, rather than their particular personality. Some interviewees and many workshop participants described how the deceased relative who had died, particularly a mother or father, was irreplaceable because of the part they had played within the family unit as a whole.

… for us Africans, the eldest [brother] is the father, that’s all. When he dies he also leaves a void. (Boubacar, aged 44 years, after the death of his brother)

Religious Meanings as Comfort and Control

If families are one aspect of the communal framing of death and loss in Senegal, religion provides another communal worldview, and support networks that are central to the organization of social life, as described earlier, with major implications for responses to death. This contrasts with affluent Anglophone and Western European worlds, which: “… celebrate individual freedom and personal autonomy. Many westerners therefore feel grief should reflect not community or religious expectations but the griever’s unique personal attachment to the deceased” (Walter, 2017, p. 92).

Furthermore, even in the United States where religious affiliations are much stronger than in Western Europe, religion (primarily Protestant Christianity) has been theorized and researched almost entirely in terms of individual religious beliefs rather than religion as community and culture (Becker et al., 2007). It is noteworthy, by contrast, how far the various forms of Islam emphasize community rather than individual beliefs (Esposito, 2018), linked perhaps to the perceived role of Islam as a central organizing feature of communal life (Bass & Sow, 2006; Creevey, 1996).

Indeed, while family in Senegal may be seen as the basic fabric and motivation of much of everyday living and survival, religious frameworks were key to the ways in which many interviewees sought to make sense of the death and to cope with their feelings (Evans, Bowlby, Ribbens McCarthy, Wouango, & Kébé, 2018). It was clear that religion could be extremely valuable in this regard, although it could also act as a form of social regulation. This was true for both Muslim and Catholic interviewees, although there were also differences in practices between the two main religious groups in our sample (for more details see Evans et al., 2016, 2018).

The religious framing was thus a key for underpinning the acceptance of the death itself, along with practices for the care of the dead, as well as solace and consolation for the living (Klass, 2014). In this regard, Islamic religion as a feature of social life has to be understood in terms of its specificities in Senegal, as outlined earlier, inflected also with long-standing ethnic values and practices. Thus, N’diouga (a 63-year-old widower) explained that the Wolof word Mounieul, translatable as “endurance,” was often used in relation to the need to accept death, in a way that resonates strongly with the view of “accepting God’s Will” expressed by many Muslims:

Like they say in Wolof, “Mounieul” [you must persevere]; that is, you must be aware that everything perishes so it’s not worth creating a drama. You must remain strong; everyone does, yes, even women.

Participants’ accounts thus rarely gave medical details, with the most frequently mentioned biomedical references concerning chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure, diabetes, or cancer. Yet many of the Senegalese interviewees gave detailed narratives of the circumstances and events surrounding the death, indicating a form of meaning-making around the death that may not be recognized as a “causal” explanation in more Anglophone terms (Eisenbruch & Handelman, 1990; Sogolo, 2003). Besides a few intimations of mystical illnesses, other sorts of accounts for the death might also be hinted at. For example, in the case of older deceased family members, some were reported to have had some sense of premonition—“Maybe she had death sickness … she knew she was going to die” (Samba, aged 51 years, speaking of his grandmother). Premonitions might also be hinted at through narratives of warning events that had occurred in the lead up to an unexpected or violent death of a younger person. These participants thus appeared to make sense of the death, especially untimely and accidental deaths, through thinking about events and interactions with the deceased in the days before the death. These features of the interviews perhaps chime with Gifford’s (2016) comments about the significance of “an enchanted religious imagination” in Senegalese life, which may be associated with a holistic narrative of the death invoking a sense of destiny or fate, rather than a search for causality in Anglophone and Western European terms.

By far the most frequently cited way of making sense of and accommodating the death in continuing everyday lives was that it was “God’s Will,” which was mentioned spontaneously by a quarter of participants, both Catholics and Muslims, particularly the older generation (discussed further in Evans et al., 2018). Furthermore, while it was a minority who referred to God’s Will in narrating the death itself, it was apparent across all the interviews that religion was the primary, socially approved, source of comfort, and for Muslim interviewees particularly, this included accepting the death as “God’s Will,” since “Islam means submission to the Will of Allah” (Alladin, 2015, p. 112). In addition, though, accepting God’s Will meant that “too many tears” might be discouraged. So, while religious beliefs were clearly important and a source of meaning and solace for many people, they could also be linked to an idea that too much weeping and audible distress is unacceptable as it reveals an inability to accept God’s Will. Thus, Ibrahima (aged 44 years) expressed his private shame at his inability to “accept” his mother’s death 2 years ago:

… this gap we’re still feeling until now. Sorrow; I’m even ashamed to think of her to tell you the truth, because I still haven’t accepted this death. I pretend that she’s still here. That’s what helps us to keep going.

No other family members were expected to follow specific mourning customs, but there were descriptions of practices of giving offerings, praying for the dead, and remembering the deceased in religious anniversary events (see Evans et al., 2018). There was the possibility too that bereaved family members might find that the death strengthened their religious beliefs and practices, or that religious faith was an important legacy from their deceased relative. As Ouly (aged 31 years) commented about her mother: “She had faith and she asked us to be pious and to have faith.” In these various ways, then, religious meanings were invoked as central frameworks for understanding the death and for making sense of how to respond.

The Emotional Life of Materiality

In this third substantive section, we bring into focus the material contexts of these narratives of family deaths, considering how interviewees’ made sense of the death in circumstances which often entailed a basic shortage of resources and a pervasive sense of precariousness (as apparent also in some of the earlier quotes about the significance of family support). For people living in such difficult circumstances, it has sometimes been suggested that there is little scope for “emotions,” which may perhaps be regarded as a “luxury” (Demmer, 2007). However, this may in itself reflect the assumptions of affluent Minority worlds, and Western European categorical thinking (Jullien, 2008/2014), which sharply demarcate between “emotions” and “materiality,” as well as between subjective and objective worlds, in which the objective material world is seen to be “external” to individual consciousness and emotion. In this section, we seek to set such assumptions to one side and explore the intricate interweaving of emotional and material experiences.

These understandings of resource-constrained contexts such as Senegal therefore raise particular theoretical issues which entail stepping outside mainstream “Western” cultures even more markedly than considerations of family and religious contexts. Here, it is particularly important to keep in mind the significance of meanings-in-context, since, from an Anglophone perspective, material objects are generally regarded as existing independently of their socially constructed meanings. ¹⁴ A focus on meanings-in-context challenges such an ontological position, bringing meanings into play as themselves constituting the material world in significant ways, even as materiality constitutes a crucial context toward which meanings are invoked and created in processes of sense-making.

The somatization of grief has been recognized by researchers for some time in many cultural contexts (Horwitz & Wakefield, 2007; Rosenblatt, 2008), including, to some degree, the embodied experience of loss and relationality after death in Anglophone countries (e.g., Ribbens McCarthy & Prokhovnik, 2014). Thus, “emotions” may be experienced in embodied terms rather than through verbal expressions of an internal state of feelings. This was clearly part of the experiences of our Senegalese participants:

The relative is part of the family. Whatever their age if you lose a relative it’s as if you’ve lost a part of your own body. (Focus group participant)

An exploration of these significant theoretical issues is beyond the scope of the present article. But in discussing the material circumstances narrated in interviewees’ accounts of family death in Senegal, two points are crucial. First, materiality appears not only in terms of memorializing and transitional objects but also as a fundamental feature of what it is that constitutes the loss associated with the death. In this regard, responses to death have a material core which is particularly evident in such resource-constrained contexts. Second, while there was little discussion in the interviews of an interior emotional experience of loss and grief over time, we do not interpret this as meaning an absence or limitation of emotional experience. Indeed, brief but powerful evocations of emotional pain were apparent in many interviews. Rather, we seek here to develop a more holistic view of emotion as bound up with the materiality of experience. In this sense, accounts of the material circumstances associated with the death (particularly noticeable among widows struggling to provide for their children) may be understood, at the same time, in themselves, to be narratives of emotions.

Thus, while contemporary Anglophone research and literature has primarily neglected the material significance of bereavement (with some limited exceptions, especially more recently ¹⁵ e.g., Corden & Hirst, 2013; Marris, 1958/2014; Woodthorpe, Rumble, & Valentine, 2013), the meaning of family death for the Senegalese interviewees was deeply embedded within its material significance. In this regard:

material hardships had emotional consequences,

And it is this last feature which perhaps stands furthest outside of long-standing Anglophone perspectives.

For these Senegalese households, the death of an adult family member might have very serious material consequences—aspects of family death which have featured prominently in existing African research literatures (discussed in Evans et al., 2016). Interviewees’ narratives resonate with this expectable pattern, with consequences ranging from children’s maintenance and school attendance, to the entire household sliding into chronic poverty, or even being dispersed, with fosterage of children being part of some accounts. Alongside the practical tasks of daily living, the need to meet the costs of housing, property, and rent in urban areas featured often. And while the broader support from family and neighbors was much valued, some interviewees mentioned how this might be quite short term or less available to those from family networks or neighborhoods with fewer resources. Material support (as one-off financial or practical provision) from other agencies, such as local government, NGOs, or employers, was even more sparse and idiosyncratic (mentioned by six interviewees), and almost all interviewees said they were not aware of any such formal support being available. But for some (six interviewees), membership of a women’s rotating credit and savings collective (tontine) to which they had made regular contributions in the past, or belonging to a youth or cultural association, might be a (short-term) source of financial support, while a further five had received such support from religious, educational, or other local leaders. Inheritance practices, and the sharing of the deceased’s belongings according to Islamic customs, was usually expected in Muslim families and was arranged between family members, occasionally with the involvement of an imam (see Evans, in press). The material and emotional significance of inheritance objects and possessions might be bound up together, an experience that perhaps resonates across both Majority and Minority worlds (Finch & Mason, 2000). Djibril (aged 42 years) explained that his aunt’s daughter, who used to sleep in the room with her, was allowed to keep her mother’s clothes and other belongings:

I think that maman’s clothes are still in the wardrobe until now. They suggested taking out the clothes and sharing them with relatives so that each family member can have a souvenir of maman but […] they didn’t want to insist too much because as maman’s daughter, she was too attached to her, they didn’t want to push her …

The emotional aspects of such material remembrances have been recognized in some Anglophone discussions (e.g., Hallam & Hockey, 2001; Miller & Parrott, 2009), but some narratives of loss from our Senegalese interviewees referred to personalized aspects of the material consequences of the death without giving voice to any explicit emotional indications of “grief.”

When he used to come home, he usually brought bread, local yogurt, and since the start of Ramadan, I still hadn’t seen the bread that he used to bring home. (Selbe, aged 13 years, after the death of her father)

Here, emotional connections and care are expressed through material and practical support for the family; the loss of the relationship and all the emotions that surrounds this is thus denoted through the lack of such ongoing support. From a contemporary Anglophone perspective, to refer to personalized remembrances in such material terms might be interpreted as indicating an instrumental, materialist, attitude to relationships. But we suggest this imposes an interpretation—judgment even—based on a distinction between material and emotional life that may be specific to contemporary affluent Anglophone and Western European contexts (as discussed earlier). Where material circumstances impose everyday hardships and struggles to meet basic needs, the emotional pain and the material consequences of the death are such that one compounds the other, in ways which are hard to comprehend for those from more affluent circumstances, sometimes leading to fearfulness and even despair. Indeed, the Wolof word for loss is niak, which can also mean lacking, nothing to lose, or poor. The multiple meanings of the Wolof word niak suggest how the death of a relative may have interlinked emotional and material consequences, which is not conveyed through the French (perte) or English words for loss (Evans, Ribbens McCarthy, Kébé, et al., 2017). As a Roman Catholic priest said, when it’s an economic void as well as a social and emotional void, “that has another dimension, and that is felt even more painfully.”

Many interviewees, particularly young people, gave very brief elaborations of their feelings in direct terms: “I felt bad,’ “It hurt,” “I was sad,” and ‘I was grief-stricken.” With so little direct elaboration in our interviews, it becomes difficult to interpret emotional experience. The Wolof phrase, dafa meti (c’est dur/it’s hard), for example, was used in the vast majority (80%) of the family interviews, often multiple times. It was used both to describe emotional responses to the death, as well as difficult material circumstances and struggles to support the family in other parts of the interview. This brief language of it’s hard, was very striking and powerful, potentially encompassing a range of complex feelings and material hardships, bound up together, and linking also with the notions of Mounieul/endurance and niak/loss—also meaning poor—discussed earlier.

Emotions may thus be interwoven with material circumstances in complex ways, such that it may not be appropriate to understand them separately in many African contexts (Cole & Thomas, 2009). And collective feeling rules, or emotional regimes (Reddy, 2001), may mean that this is seen as an entirely appropriate response to death—as seen with the Senegalese religious framework discussed earlier which inhibits the outward expression of “too much” emotion. This perhaps resonates in a U.K. context with the inhibitions (e.g., the “stiff upper lip”) of emotional expression of grief (in public at least) in relation to the levels of loss experienced during the two major 20th century wars (Jalland, 2013), when particular feeling rules were encouraged in ways considered important toward the needs of the continuing war effort.

Making Sense of Family Deaths: Some Brief Comparisons and Conclusions

There are no worldwide standards for determining whose view of how to deal with death is most valid … [and] no emotions or emotional expressions that are universally present at a death.(Rosenblatt, 2015, p. 28)

In conclusion, we consider Rosenblatt’s statement in the light of our discussion of family deaths in urban Senegal. Our analysis has invoked a sociological notion of meanings-in-context, bringing into focus the ways in which people seek to make sense of their experiences in the contexts of their everyday circumstances. This differs from more directly interventionist, therapeutically oriented approaches that seek to evaluate what contributes toward “healthy” or “unhealthy” bereavement, since, as Rosenblatt cautions, we lack the basis for determining such judgments. Indeed, our more sociological approach hopes to shed light on diversity in people’s everyday responses to family deaths, and in the process, enable reflection on features of Minority world cultures that are taken for granted (Klass, 1999). Our theoretical framework points to the likelihood that meanings-in-context are indeed likely to vary systematically between varying cultural locations, in terms of how certain aspects of the potential pain and disruption of death are made more or less visible, and experienced as more or less problematic (with due regard to Lukes’, 2008, caveat about the limitations of moral spreadsheets of gains and losses). And at the same time, we are mindful of Jullien’s (2008/2014) discussion of the immense difficulties in exploring what may be “common” and what may “diverge” across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts, ¹⁶ as well as Squire’s (2008) caution against losing sight of the particularities of personal narratives while seeking to understand the genres of their cultural contexts.

A major risk is the creation of stereotypes of “cultures” as fixed, monolithic entities, in which divergences are highlighted as categorical “differences,” failing to take account of the fluidity and intersectionality of such patterns while also overlooking what is common across diverse contexts. For example, there has been a view that affluent Minority worlds have developed an inability to deal with death, breaking the continuity between approaches to life and death found in other societies (Palgi & Abramovitch, 1984). But this may underestimate the struggles also occasioned by death in Majority ¹⁷ worlds (Folta & Deck, 1988).

Certainly, the narratives of our participants resonate across Senegalese and U.K. contexts in that the pain of particular deaths may be felt deeply—albeit expressed verbally in very divergent ways. People may thus commonly struggle to deal with the consequences, as well as finding comfort from memories of their deceased relative, and the impact they are considered to have had on their lives (discussed further in Evans et al., 2016, 2018). But they also diverge in significant and patterned ways that result from the fact that the death is about a (set of) relationship(s) which is or are embedded in, and shaped by, particular material, social, economic, historical, and political contexts. In this regard, it is important to consider both the immediate contexts of our interviewees’ family lives and relationships, but also broader structural issues including religious, political, and economic processes and power dynamics more broadly as these play out in, and are themselves shaped by, local contexts (Harris, 2010).

The focus on meanings-in-context draws attention to the personal experience of both what is lost and how to respond. In this article, we have particularly considered just three major contexts of family, religion, and materiality, while other major issues, of varying degrees of generality, have been omitted or only briefly referred to, ranging from broad political contexts, social dynamics of gendered and generational power relations, to specific circumstances such as the age of person who died, and whether expected or not. At the same time, it is important to recognize that the distinction we have made here between family, religious, and material contexts is a heuristic device, since in practice these are themselves deeply intertwined to provide an overall fabric for living, albeit there may also be multiple contradictions, nuances, and complexities. This interweaving of various threads can be seen in the following example, comprising elements of religion, materiality, and family obligations in which Simone, a 39-year-old Catholic widow, relates how her children had spoken of the promise their now-deceased father had made the previous Christmas, of a Christmas tree the following year, and they had remembered this.

I said, “But God is all powerful. I don’t have money but God can bring someone who’ll bring money and we’ll buy other trees.” And it’s as if he himself has heard my prayers! The president of my association, and the treasurer … they gave me an envelope … so the next day I bought the fir … I did everything! You see what that did for them? I told them, “You see, your papa sent people to give us money. You see, you should never say, ‘never’ … Papa had said it and he kept his word … ” And it really helped them. (Simone, 39-year-old Catholic widow)

Overall, then, our discussion raises the possibility of tentative points of comparison between these Senegalese interviews (bearing in mind the particularities of our sample) and research concerning “bereavement” in U.K. contexts ¹⁸ pointing toward what we might consider (from the first three authors’ primarily Anglophone U.K. perspective) to be strengths and limitations of each, including such issues as:

Senegal

Strengths: strong immediate family and community support that also provides motivation for “carrying on,” a framework for acceptance of the death, and shared customs that provide consolation.

United Kingdom

Strengths: attention to the individual emotional impact, as a process involving some sense of personal recovery.

Almost two decades ago, Klass (1999) called for limited but open-minded research by which “we” may seek to understand “our own culture” better, but also learn deeply about another “tradition,” not in terms of its “official” version but in terms of how it is actually experienced. We note that this call seems to have gone largely unheeded. We hope that our study has reaffirmed the value of such an approach, both in the contextualized understanding of experiences of family death, and what may be learned about key dimensions of its diversity.