Abstract
Although women’s wailing at death rites in various cultures typically amplifies mortality salience, this ritual phenomenon is absent in the research literature on terror management theory (TMT). This study explored Yemenite-Jewish wailing in Israel as an example of how a traditional performance manages death anxiety in a community context. Observations of wailing events and interviews with Yemenite-Jewish wailers and mourners in Israel were analyzed to understand respondents’ perceptions of the experience of wailing as well as the anxiety-oriented psychotherapeutic expertise involved. The findings are discussed to propose an alternative outlook on the intersubjective adaptive value of death anxiety. After describing TMT’s view on the role of culture in coping with death anxiety, I consider the extent to which Yemenite-Jewish wailing is consistent with the premises of TMT.
Women’s wailing at death rites in various cultures consists of an improvised narrative that addresses the meaning of death and the loss it occasions. It is a special genre in oral traditions that integrates speech and weeping (Holst-Warhaft, 1995). As cultural performers, wailers dramatically match lyrical poetry with voice, words, and bodily motions to evoke affective empathy among audiences of their acquaintance (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Briggs, 1993; Danforth, 1982; Holst-Warhaft, 1995; Tenhunen, 2007). Wailing practices frequently invoke cultural symbols, beliefs, and values that are meaningful within the community that has experienced the loss. In this way, women’s wailing may be understood as a cultural instrument that identifies and reinforces the mourners’ community.
Wailing may also engineer a cultural “celebration” of death by intensifying the significance of the death, substantiating its proximity to those present, and evoking anxiety (Gamliel, 2010). However, this practice, common until the late 20th century, has not been studied in relation to existential theories. Until recently, its image as exotic and primitive, partly nurtured by research, abetted the perception of its irrelevance and excluded it from Western psychological discourse (Gamliel, 2007a). In keeping with recent studies that seek to yield an ethno-psychological understanding of the phenomenon (Gamliel, 2007a, 2014; Wilce, 2011), this article investigates Yemenite-Jewish wailing in Israel in relation to terror management theory (TMT), a leading theory in death anxiety research (Iverach, Menzies, & Menzies, 2014). By analyzing similarities and dissimilarities between this traditional practice and TMT, I aim to show how wailing is related to therapeutic perspectives.
To attain this goal, which takes account of contexts of both ritual lament (as in wailing) and daily life (in the case of TMT), two levels of reference are needed. First, the ethnographic description of wailing in a particular culture is used to refine TMT’s view of culture (including death rites) as a defense against death anxiety (Greenberg et al., 1990). Specifically, I contrast the TMT concept of “terror management,” a soothing psychological mechanism, with the wailer’s performance of “emotional management,” which proposes to treat her mourning community’s anxiety by flooding. Second, I analyze the emotional-management performance of wailing to show that the contrast holds only at the overt level of the performance and that the performance all told (including the audience’s response) relates to death anxiety dialectically. Importantly, wailing cannot be regarded as a therapeutic intervention in the Western, expert-led, clinical sense of the term. As a cultural and religious performance available to bereaved members of the Yemenite-Jewish community, however, it is widely recognized for its healing, or “therapeutic” virtues. My ethnographic work in that community highlights the similarities between TMT and traditional wailing practice in order to deconstruct the rigid dichotomies of the Western scientific paradigm and leave room for reflexivity.
This article first outlines TMT’s claims about “terror management” and “emotion management,” stressing the epistemological implications of each for the understanding of wailing. Next, an ethnographic case study illuminates Yemenite-Jewish wailing customs and the ways in which wailers may be seen as possessing therapeutic expertise. I then describe how wailing performance amplifies the grieving audience’s mortality salience (MS)—that is, mourners’ awareness of the inevitability of their own death (REF)—as well as feelings of anxiety and cohesiveness. Finally, I discuss therapeutic aspects of the amplification of MS and death anxiety in wailing, some of which are consistent with TMT claims.
Terror/emotion management: Attitudes toward mortality salience
TMT provides a framework for understanding the ways culture protects individuals from existential anxiety. Acknowledging that humans live in the shadow of relentless and potentially debilitating fear of their mortality, TMT includes a psychodynamic account, focused largely on the unconscious, of how reminders of the inevitability of one’s own death are worked through in everyday life. As research demonstrates, even when mortality concerns are a short distance outside focal awareness, they may motivate people to invoke defensive attitudes and behaviors that provide symbolic protection (Martens, Goldberg, & Greenberg, 2005). This anxiety buffer is described as culturally specific, and has two components: (a) faith in the validity of a cultural conception of reality that provides meaning, standards of value, and the promise of immortality, and (b) the belief that the individual meets or exceeds these standards (Greenberg et al., 1990). These cultural belief systems leave much room for creativity in the ways individuals strive for symbolic timelessness, including through belief in the afterworld, art, or membership in a collective and faith in its values and norms (Baumard, 2010). Given the vital role of these structures in terror management, people are highly motivated to sustain and defend them (Pyszczynski et al., 1996).
In TMT research, death rites and religion have been discussed mostly with regard to this transcendent MS-mitigating role of faith in the afterlife (Schlitz, Schooler, Pierce, Murphy, & Delorme, 2014). This narrow view of culture, which only considers its role in buffering anxiety associated with MS, reveals a need for dialogue between TMT and cultural psychology and anthropology. Such a dialogue, says Kashima (2010), should yield a more systematic analysis of cultural contents. In this paper, I wish to show how TMT may help to explicate the cultural practice of women’s wailing, as well as how a discussion of this traditional practice can help to refine TMT’s stance on the role of culture.
As a traditional death rite, wailing is generally perceived as a direct emotive confrontation with death and loss. It clashes with male-oriented “rational” and religious patterns of suppression, acceptance of divine judgment, and concern about the transmigration of the soul (Das, 1986; Gamliel, 2014). The femininity of wailing is associated with its being viewed as an “affective discourse” (Abu-Lughod, 1993), “wept thoughts” (Feld, 1995), a “symbolic force” (Briggs, 1993), and a creative medium for a subversive female message (Bourke, 1993; Holst-Warhaft, 1995; Raheja & Gold, 1994). Wailing’s subversive aspect is attributed not only to the social demands faced by women but to a female preference for the concretization of death and the fomenting of its terror by turning to the deceased, dealing with the body and the grave, loss of self-control, self-mutilation, trance, and so forth (Bourke, 1993; Briggs, 1993; Holst-Warhaft, 1995).
Notably, Yemenite-Jewish wailing developed in the context of a Muslim society in which women emote and express horror freely. In addition, dependent on domestic life and limited in outside resources, females in this society may experience a range of marital, social status, and economic anxieties surrounding the death of males in their extended family (Al-Krenawi, Graham, & Sehwail, 2002).
The notion of emotional management may enhance understanding of Yemenite-Jewish wailing as a performative medium for women’s empowerment and may be especially useful in decoding this practice designed to make a mourning community weep (Gamliel, 2010). The theoretical concept of emotional management rests on the potential effect of cultural “rules of emotion” and “rules of expression” on the individual’s inner feelings (Hochschild, 1983, 1990). The shift from cultural expectations to subjective experience is understood in terms of “surface acting” or “deep acting.” The former entails acting and impression management; the latter involves transforming inner emotions, marshaling appropriate emotions, and suppressing inappropriate ones (Hochschild, 1983, p. 35). In contrast to Scheff’s (1979, p. 115) analysis of the “ritual management of distress” and instead of reaching behind the subject’s back to extract the emotional logic underlying their actions, I focus on the performative process of wailing and the wailer as a manager of emotions with forethought. As in earlier works (Thoits, 1996), I analyze the management of others’ emotions in the specific context of wailers’ strategies vis-à-vis their audience.
This analysis reveals performative phases in which wailers steer mourners into and out of a state of protracted weeping. It confirms the relation between performance, in which melody and words are matched, and catharsis, and identifies wailing as a therapy congruent with the ideal of the psychodynamic process (Gamliel, 2007a; Vitebsky, 1993; Wilce, 2011). Unlike other research on the emotional-management characteristics of wailing, this article places the arousal of anxiety at the center of emotional management.
Death rites relate to the stimulation of death anxiety in two ways (Gamliel, 2006). In TMT research, they may be viewed both as cultural instruments for the creation of symbolic immortality (Greenberg et al., 1990) and as arenas where actions and objects (e.g., urns and caskets) serve as death reminders (Pyszczynski et al., 1996). This article makes its major contribution by offering a more nuanced, ethnographically grounded account of how death rites relate to death anxiety in a particular ritual context, and considering the implications of this account for TMT, a theory which mainly addresses death anxiety as experienced by individuals in the context of everyday life. Specifically, the case study that follows explores what happens when people are encouraged to think and feel through their death anxiety during the cultural practice of Yemenite-Jewish wailing at death rites. Of all components of the wailing performance—vocalization, motion, text—I isolate the rhetoric of anxiety, as part of the intention of the performance and the audience’s response, from the discourse of mourning. I do this to support the claim that MS is acculturated within frameworks of beliefs, values, and performance and may be psychotherapeutically desirable in some contexts.
Subjects, method, and context
I draw my findings from an anthropological study of Yemenite-Jews in Israel carried out from 2001 to 2005 and in 2011. Ethical approval was obtained from the Postdoctorat Committee at University of Haifa and the Postdoctorat Commitee at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At the time of study, only a few elderly women born in Yemen maintained the tradition of wailing during death rites; they and several elderly men were my only potential main informants. Their Israeli-born offspring still attend wailing performances but those of the second generation describe themselves as unfamiliar with or contemptuous of this tradition. Their attitudes, indicative of the internalization of Western affective values that demand self-restraint (Gamliel, 2010), mirror the kind of disapproval that fits TMT’s premise of aversion to, and the need to repress, the experiencing of death anxiety. However, I will not address such views in this discussion, which centers on characterizing a traditional form of emotional expression within community.
Most of my informants had moved to Israel between 1948 and 1953; a few had done so in the 1990s. Most belonged to the lower middle socioeconomic class and were 60 to 80 years old. They lived in towns and villages in central Israel, some ethnically mixed and others centers of the Yemenite-Jewish ethnic community. All participants spoke two languages: Yemenite-Arabic and Hebrew.
To explore the therapeutic implications of wailing, I used a participant-observer technique in homes of the bereaved and conducted 28 in-depth interviews with wailing 18 female and 10 male community members. My questions related to family background; the religious, social, and therapeutic meaning of wailing; the wailer’s performance; the audience’s experience of wailing; and the decline of wailing. Main questions addressed to wailers included: “What influenced your choice to become a wailer?”; “What are the characteristics of a professional wailer?”; “Where do the lament lyrics come from?”; “Why do only women wail?”; “Why is wailing considered therapeutic?”; “How does the performance affect you?”; and “Why isn’t wailing being passed on to the next generation?”
I recorded the encounters or documented them in writing as they occurred. When a wailing performance took place in a mourner’s home or during an interview, I experienced the thrill and anxiety that the wailer creates. Importantly, given my own Yemenite-Jewish background, I understood some of the Arabic words and the meanings of expressions and metaphors within this culture. Thus I was able to participate fully and even immerse myself in the mourners’ experience.
After documenting the encounters, I subjected all data to a thematic analysis that yielded primary, secondary, and theoretical categories following the concept-indicator model. Three stages of coding were applied: (a) open coding, in which each interview/story was read several times and assigned a preliminary code; (b) axial coding, in which themes and subthemes were generated and relationships between concepts emerged and were identified (inductive analysis); and (c) specification and modification of codes to capture both the breadth and depth of the content. Each code was grouped by main themes (deductive analysis; Shkedi, 2004).
Findings
Wailing customs
In Jewish law, close relatives of the dead “sit shiva” (Heb.: seven); that is, for 7 days after a first-degree relative’s death, they observe a set of mourning restrictions such as gathering in one home and leaving routine responsibilities to other relatives and/or members of the community.
The first 3 days of mourning are “days of tears.” This delimitation of time for emotive display is especially pertinent for women’s wailing customs, because men honor the dead differently, that is, by reading eulogies and requiems from the moment of death to the seventh day. These texts are recited almost as any other prayer service would be. My respondents described the men’s conduct in the home of the bereaved as “learning,” reading from the Bible and other sacred texts to “raise the soul of the dead.” The phrase “3 days of tears” thus refers more specifically to women’s roles in mourning, giving women affective approval of their public mourning function.
During traditional wailing practices, the wailer enters the room where the mourning women are sitting, greets them, and says “May heaven console you.” The right time to wail is “Not when the men are praying, not when people are saying a blessing, and not while people are eating. Everyone should hear.” Even after the room falls silent, the wailer has to choose the right moment to perform. “Usually they look forward [to it]. The eyes turn toward the wailer,” a respondent said. The eyes and the silence encourage her to begin. If the wailer thinks too much time has passed by without anyone lamenting the deceased, she may impose the new situation on the audience. “They talked, talked, talked,” a wailer said in describing her response to such a scene in front of a large number of women. “I said, ‘What are you doing?! Did you come here just to talk?!’ I began to wail.” A male respondent explained, “The wailer wants to say, ‘People, we didn’t just bury a cat! It’s serious! Wake up!’”
Therapeutic expertise in wailing
Respondents associated wailing with modern psychotherapy: “[Wailers] could be very good psychologists,” a respondent stated, They are wise women. They aren’t educated but they know life … A wailer has to have [special] characteristics and pure self-sacrifice. She has to have intelligence and emotion and she must understand what’s going on around her. She speaks according to that.
The comprehensible, varied, and original lyrics of the lamentation demonstrate expertise. A wailer who is judged as having “two or three words” is clearly not an expert. The adaptation of metaphors from Yemen to the current deceased was also considered evidence of great expertise. My respondents celebrated one particular wailer not only for her voice but for her innovativeness: “She inserts all sorts of unexpected things.” Her son confirmed this: “The people in every house of mourning felt that she’d made up something new.”
At the second level, the wailer is an expert in appearing to commiserate with the bereaved. Usually she buries her face in a kerchief and immerses herself in her lamentation, even though she herself rarely weeps. “It’s not that [the wailer] is heartbroken about the deceased,” one respondent said. “It’s her job. She goes there to shock [those in attendance].” “Does she sometimes shed tears?” I asked. “No, since when?! Maybe she never knew him at all.” One professional wailer expressed this differently: “Tears don’t fall. You hide your face. It’s just the words that do the crying.” A woman respondent related, “[The wailer] covered her face with a kerchief so you’d cry and say emotional things. But she didn’t cry.”
Expertise is also reflected in the status of wailing as an occupation through which women could earn some income. Most respondents described wailing as an important expertise for which the wailer deserves remuneration or, at least, an honorarium. One professional wailer said, “In Yemen, they said you have to invite a wailer, she won’t accept food or drink, you have to pay her.” Another said, “She won’t come without being paid.”
Collective in exile: The performative amplification of mortality salience through wailing
The phrase “a collective in exile” is a figurative metaphor for a group of people united in pain (Seremetakis, 1990). As the wailer performs, her audience is in an exile of sorts—a liminal and socially undefined situation (Radcliffe-Brown, 1964). Were it not for the wailing performance, much of the community would treat the home of the bereaved as a place for a social get-together. Wailing, however, gathers people who may, as Tzvia, one woman respondent said, “have no feeling for the deceased and no connection of any kind” and thrusts them into a state in which “they understand why they are there.” Temporarily, wailing unites everyone in one existential state.
During shiva, members of the community console through their very presence, which may be lengthy. They sit silently with the mourners, always ready to serve them, possibly conversing with each other quietly. Together they share the mourners’ liminal state. When they find themselves waiting—creating a void that wishes to be filled—the wailer seizes the moment. The void empowers her and contributes much to the construction of the power of wailing.
Two contrasting motions fill the liminal space, each enveloping those in attendance. First, wailing has an effect due to the audience’s motion, that is, its quiet, passive, and sometimes rather bored presence, which is construed as something of socioreligious value. The cultural importance of simply being present in the house of the bereaved during this ritual period induces the consolers to sit persistently and calls their attention to the performance. The countervailing motion is manifested in the saddening and/or terrifying contents of the lamentation. The wailer speaks of the demise of the deceased, a fate shared by every human being. She orders everyone present to contemplate the incontestable termination of life, with gravitas and tears. “Death makes people tremble. It’s scary. In Yemen, there was terrible fear, godly fear,” a woman said. When I noted that death is scary for people everywhere, she replied, “Scary everywhere, but not like the wailing that these women make.” Another woman remarked, “The wailer makes you remember death … She reminds you that people don’t live forever.” In Yemen, a third woman explained, people were scared neither of the wailer nor of the deceased’s body but of the wailer’s words, which “penetrate hearts and kidneys.” Thus, when people wait and wait and may succumb to silence and boredom, wailing is greeted ex ante as a welcome distraction. Ex post, however, this distraction forces the audience to confront something that it does not desire and that allows no possibility of distraction. This characteristic liminal tyranny of the wailing moment traps the audience members in grief and fear for themselves. The two contrasting motions—the one that brings the audience in and the one that demands its attention—represent the two types of pain (boredom and anxiety) that the mourning situation produces. The wailer plays a definitive role in this complex double-bind.
Collective weeping attests to unity and equality among all participants. This is the conscious performative purpose of wailing, as women respondents explained. According to one wailer, the wailer’s intention is blatant: “[She] wants to create crying that will make them all cry … [and] feel sad. They have to accept the sadness [together], like with one hand.” In this coercive situation, the wailer uses three rhetorical devices—representative voice, macabre words, and metaphors—to generate two feelings among those present: anxiety and unity.
Representative voice
Wailing represents a transition “from tears to ideas” (Holst-Warhaft, 1995). As speech, it has been decoded by researchers (Abu-Lughod, 1993; Feld, 1995; Seremetakis, 1990; Urban, 1988). As in Misharina’s (2011) case, I found that Yemenite-Jewish wailing functions as a representative voice that creates an encounter among possible intersubjective identities and representations (“dead,” “alive”). The lamentations span several narrative categories: narratives about the deceased, on behalf of the deceased, and on behalf of the living; personal appeals to the deceased; greeting and addressing the consolers; addressing the mourners; telling a personal story; addressing other wailers; and addressing death. For example: [Addressing the deceased:] Rachel, you’ll be amazed who’s here / Your daughter is here / Good evening, Rachel, how are you? Are you holding a candle? / [The deceased “replies”:] I haven’t got a candle / I’m imprisoned in darkness / [Addressing the bereaved daughter:] Your mother has died. It’s good for her that she died in your daughter’s home / in bed, under the blanket / and not among strangers in a hospital. / [A story about the deceased:] She’s like a flower on the roof / that needs no water / [Addressing the bereaved daughter:] Make a cradle for your bereavement / Let it dangle from your right hand / That way, you won’t forget your mother/ [The story of the death, somewhere far away, of the son of the daughter who grieves for her mother:] David was unique / He was like the waters of a spring / [Addressing the wailers:] My sisters, weeping won’t help anymore / neither will the sound of wailing / It’s all over. The performance is objectively (and socially) validated by the participants when they share its action and intensity no matter what each person may individually think about it … To a large degree, the meanings of the symbols and of the rite itself are created during the performance, evoked in participants’ imagination between the principal performers and the participants. (Schieffelin, 1985, p. 722)
Macabre words
Immediately following a death, mourners may find it hard to accept the irreversibility of death, and may experience confusion about the distinction between body and soul, the material and the metaphysical. Wailing liturgizes the irreversibility of death in a shocking way that echoes the listener’s most grotesque thoughts. Namely, the wailer sings about the deceased as a living person who has been buried and is suffering from the darkness and decomposition. By articulating the most horrifying manifestations of what has happened to the deceased’s body, wailing drives the concreteness of death into the audience members’ consciousness.
Wailing attains its goal, participants suggested, when it creates a pain that counteracts a pain—strong medicine against a strong cognitive aversion. By empathizing with the mourners’ inner experiential world, the lament evokes lachrymosity and profound anxiety. It speaks from the clutches of the vice that grips them, a confusion in which they cannot tell the living and the nonliving apart. Shvid (1984) suggests that wailing is an active mechanism that reverses the tendencies of consciousness to deny and impede. The intensity of the crisis occasioned by a death may exacerbate these tendencies so badly as to induce a pathological state. Wailing “preempts” this by stimulating the spontaneous paces of consciousness or forcibly injecting realness into the crisis. One Yemenite-Jewish woman described this as follows, noting that if concrete and realistic images of death (such as those stimulated in wailing) were repressed, they would eventually come to dominate the mourner’s mind, producing a type of insanity: The wailer has a psychological dimension … I think she’s a genius. It’s just ingenious that she makes someone cry … In wailing, I think, everyone reaches a place where you become a little mad. You don’t let it out; you don’t show it. But if you dwell on it all the time, about how my brothers died, about my mother, about all the feelings that you went through, you say, “I really was a little mad. I wasn’t realistic, I wasn’t sensible.” It’s hard to accept death. Hard to accept that that’s how it is, it’s our life. We don’t make peace with it. It’s a kind of insanity. I began to think about where the soul goes, imagined my mother lying in the ground; it drove me crazy. Suddenly you think about all sorts of little things that you usually don’t think about. Like rain: suddenly it rained [into the grave]. The song provides a refuge of sorts, allowing the poet (and the reader) to ventilate unaccepted ideas, unconscious conflicts, and repressed emotions. It allows them to break through the barriers that impede their revelation and to float to the surface. Concurrently, it reveals them to the “I” that observes it and can examine and organize them. (Cohen, 1991, p. 7)
Metaphors
Metaphors enrich wailing lyrics by urging listeners to step away from the here-and-now and its implications, such as “He’s gone,” “He was,” “How could this have happened? It’s a pity,” “He won’t come back,” and “It can’t be helped.” When I asked one widowed wailer to give me a wailing demonstration, she slipped into familiar metaphors: “My husband left the house; it was light when he went out and dark when he returned.” Then she explained the lyrical custom: “So they gave a parable. Lots of times they talked in parables. They say, for example, ‘The eagle that cries and wails for me from the great mountain, how he cries for me when I’m sad.’”
Wailing metaphors pique the imagination by speaking of places where objects talk and feel, eagles cry, and flowers on rooftops exude wisdom. As stories of transcendent beauty, they do more than invite people to enter; they may also ensnare the addressee in particular ways of conceptualizing a death event. In other words, this aesthetic gift allows the wailer to take control of the interpretation of the death. It establishes a verbal momentum that leaves no doubt about how precious the deceased really was, how badly he or she will be missed, and how the pain of his/her loss “burns,” “sickens,” and “drowns you in the sea.”
“He has taken the step down, never to return,” cries the wailer in an allusion to the fate that awaits all living beings. The “step” is the body’s descent into the grave en route to its final rest. The metaphors steer the imagination to the brink of an abyss and instill anxiety about the existential void that lies ahead. The ceasing to exist of a familiar and beloved person demonstrates the arbitrary power of death and the individual’s utter inability to counter it.
The metaphorical work at play in wailing also includes blurring the boundary between the wailer herself and the archetypical mother figure in a way that connects death anxiety with abandonment anxiety. For example, one wailer chanted in Yemenite-Arabic, “My heart is full, mother; to whom will I recount [the pain]?” While this participant used the expression to show me how she bemoaned her mother’s absence, findings suggested that the reference to mother is often also used in a metaphorical way. The community knows this lyrical expression well and respondents agreed that it may bring to immediacy the sense of abysmal loneliness that the absence of one’s mother creates. When Yemenite-Jews hear it in public, their faces become masks of anxiety and sorrow, irrespective of whether their mothers are alive or not. This evocative reaction reverberates from the depths of the dictate of separation that life imposes and mocks the denial that pervades people’s mundane activities. The wailer expresses herself in the most deeply buried words of a terrified soul whose anxieties render it childlike, innocent, and far from any form of evil. She says, I know what’s deep inside you, my friends. The roots of your fears are intertwined in yourselves and in me. I’m just like you. You’ll let me press your most fear-provoking buttons because you trust me. For a few moments, I’ll be like a loving mother to you if only you allow my act of “undressing” to affect you, because I strongly express that pain.
The use of the metaphor, an utterance that is both “extraordinary” and “justified,” creates special intimacy among those who understand its deeper meaning, who are reasonably deemed capable of hearing it—and, indeed, uttering it—with understanding (Cooper, 1986, p. 158). The metaphor unites those who utter it and excludes those oblivious to its symbolic secret.
In wailing, the audience members are invited to listen to a monologue that is tailored to their own cultural knowledge. In what the audience imagines to be a dialogue, the wailer assumes roles and tells the story in metaphorical coinages. The most picturesque metaphors, those that strike deep into the audience’s spirit, seem to be the most appreciated. These metaphors establish the exclusivity of the wailing arena for the cultural cognoscenti (Cooper, 1986). The resulting intimacy is one of the domains of the emotional event that unfolds among the “collective in exile.”
Discussion: TMT and the management of anxiety sociability in a wailing culture
The different status of MS in TMT and women’s wailing ostensibly reflects a dichotomy of modernity versus tradition in attitudes toward death. In modern contexts, “Death has been reduced to an exit pure and simple, a moment of cessation, an end to all purpose and planning” (Bauman, 1992, p. 130). This modern, secular perception of death clashes with the traditional metaphysical concept of death as a portal and of life as a corridor. Lacking the basis for the absolutization of life meanings, the former leaves modern people with “very limited resources of language, symbol, and ritual to bring the event of death into some kind of helpful perspective” (Irion, 1993, p. 97). Accordingly, it makes sense to expect that while TMT, grounded in the modern conception of death, considers anxiety in MS a problem that elicits violent responses, denial, and repression in everyday life (Baumard, 2010), traditional wailing bridges life and death ritualistically (Gamliel, 2006), enculturating mourners’ anxiety by deliberately arousing MS, and, as I show below, treats anxiety as a coping tool for adjustment challenges.
In most cultures, then, wailing is a case that challenges the significance of anxiety in TMT (Baumard, 2010; Pirutinsky, 2009; Schlitz et al., 2014) and the tendency in theory to leave culture with only the role of anxiety buffer. This schematic presentation, however, does not fully express the complexity of the Yemenite-Jewish wailing culture’s attitude toward death. The analysis that follows assesses the implications of several TMT premises in this traditional case and evaluates the function of death anxiety in this wailing culture.
Obviously, if members of wailing cultures were not typically repelled by death, there should be no need for an expertise that would challenge their propensity to deny. This propensity, evident even in a house of mourning, encourages the wailer—who knows of it—to perform in order to force those present “to understand why they are there.” Among Yemenite-Jews, however, the anxiety amplification of wailing is countered by its limitation to 3 of the 7 days of mourning and to fixed times of the day. The existence and limitations of the expertise indicate that the culture manages the level of MS that its members desire. It is thus important to remember that wailing and TMT have different contextual reference points—the former referring to culturally prescribed ritual contexts and the latter to the daily life of individuals.
In the Yemenite-Jewish mourning culture, women’s wailing is deemed inferior to men’s eulogy mainly because it is perceived as nonreligious. The strongest evidence of this corresponds to TMT in the most important function of religion, its afterlife orientation (Gamliel, 2007b). In contrast to other researchers’ views (Misharina, 2011), I believe that this orientation is conspicuously absent from the wailing ritual, as evidenced by the wailer’s representation of the deceased’s “voice.” The wailer enunciates this “voice” from the gloom of the grave and accompanies it with contents that continue to express its humanness, as if the soul had never left the body and the venue. Thus wailing transforms a death event into an arena of intense anxiety that withholds the consolation offered by belief in the afterlife, one that may lower individuals’ defenses against death and be considered a therapeutic tool (Schlitz et al., 2014). As TMT predicts, however, my respondents clearly associated wailing with MS and justified the limits applied to it, noting, “The wailer does work that’s too much.”
MS must be brought to a peak insofar as the culture dictates for both the bereaved, who experience deep grief and confusion, and for the mourning community, which endures the crisis of a member’s death from a safer emotional distance. This raises two additional questions: How is intensive MS channeled in the wailer’s therapeutic “work,” and what comforting transcendent alternative to the afterlife narrative does this therapy offer?
Wailing therapy, my findings show, is grounded in a dialectic relation between acute anxiety and deep sociability, contingent on the existence of a mourning community that values weeping as a form of respect for the dead. The wailer can invoke three tools to amplify MS in the house of mourning and transform her audience into a collective in exile: a polyphonic discourse about death and the deceased in a representative voice, macabre descriptions, and metaphors unique to this cultural group. The anxiety-arousing potential of these strategies in the vocal-emotional performance of wailing is probably much greater than the technique most commonly used to induce MS in TMT studies: an instruction to the participants to describe their emotions as they contemplate their own death and their thoughts about what will happen to them at and after the moment of death (Burke, Martens, & Fausher, 2010(. By the same token, the collective context in which the anxiety is generated erects a buffer against it, that is, the methods used to amplify MS may also create profound empathy: The polyphonic discourse represents and involves the audience, the macabre descriptions illuminate the shared contents of the irrational intimate imaginations of those present while exposing them empathetically, and the metaphors reinforce the sense of understanding that is shared by the “we” group only. The performative outcome is uninhibited, shameless collective weeping that lasts for minutes.
The therapeutic advantages of the wailer’s anxiety management for the individual far exceed the utility of cathartic weeping (Gamliel, 2007a; Wilce, 2011). Furthermore, as TMT studies on members of non-Western cultures attest, the management at hand does not appear to relate to the maintenance of self-esteem (Du et al., 2013). This collective weeping has a circular mental structure: it signals strong identification with the “in-group”—the coalescence of people around beliefs and values—but it is the same people who, ab initio, give this weeping legitimacy. The collective weeping lends the collective’s worldviews powerful confirmation. Urban (1988) explains: Loss occasions the wish to overcome loss through sociability, and it is this sociability that is signaled through adherence to a culturally specific form of expression of grief. One wishes to signal to others that one has the socially correct feelings at the socially prescribed times. (p. 393)
Recent TMT studies that revisit the functionality of death anxiety for quality of life (Iverach et al., 2014; Pyszczynski & Kesebir, 2012; Schlitz et al., 2014) have relevance to our understanding of wailing therapy. Studies based on TMT attribute positive effects to anxiety, and might argue for the value of flooding therapy, which undermines denial and promotes accommodative coping with death. The premise that life derives its meaning from the experiencing of darkness and emptiness is fundamental to the lament (Gamliel, 2007b), making the traditional practice of lamentation a source of insights for continued study and, perhaps, a basis for therapeutic models.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the author wishes express thanks to the following organisations for funding. The Research Authority, the Department of Psychology at the University of Haifa, the Lady Davis Foundation and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.