Freud,Durkheim,and Death among the Sebei

Abstract

The Sebei, a Nilo-Hamitic people of Uganda, regularly hold in conjunction with their funeral rituals, a kind of moot in which all creditors must establish their claims on the estate. They also determine details regarding inheritance of both property and wives. As a result, the mourners enter these rituals concerned to protect and further their personal and private interests at the very time when such cupidity is most unseemly. Thus structured into the funerary customs is a strong sense of guilt. Sebei funerals focus on the polution of a generalized death rather than on the body or the soul of the deceased. This polution is seen as a response to this guilt, which derive not so much from feelings about the deceased as it does from sentiments among the living, which the fact of death (rather than the dead man) has brought to the fore.