La idea de la muerte y los ritos funerarios en el África subsahariana. Permanencia y transformaciones

• Main Author: Jacques Barou
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Centro de Estudios Mexicanos y Centroamericanos 2010-12-01
• Series: Trace
• Subjects: Muerte; ritos funerarios; religión del terruño; antepasados; cambio cultural; sincretismo
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/trace/1584

The importance of funeral ritual in Black Africa has impressed the observers. They have analysed these rites as reflecting the group’s domination of the individual and as expressing a process of perpetual return of dead among living people. The internal evolution of traditional African religions has produced more sophisticated cults concerning prestigious ancestors, intermediate between human and invisible world. Such an evolution has prepared the arrival of the revealed faiths which have not completely transformed the funeral rites nor destroyed the beliefs in ancestors and in reincarnation. These rituals have been above all transformed by the modern life and processes like migration and rural exodus. This article uses references to the main knowledge concerning death and funeral rites in Africa and the results of two surveys made recently in Senegal and in France to analyse the meaning of the changes of the idea of death one can observe today in the south of Sahara.