Anna Niedźwiedź

Pictures at a Funeral: Visuality and Mourning in Contemporary Ghana

Images and various visual representations accompany funeral celebrations and a process of mourning in various cultures: in the past as well as today. This article focusses on ways in which burials and funerals are celebrated in contemporary Ghana and discusses various relations functioning between mourning and visuality. Based on ethnographic data collected during fieldwork in Brong-Ahafo region (central Ghana) the author analyses visuals used as well as produced during funerals: photographs and videos made during celebrations, images printed in funeral booklets, invitation letters and obituaries. Additionally a visual presentation of a dead body during the laying-in-state-ceremony is discussed as a symbolic image of a dead person. Funeral images popular in contemporary Ghana seem to be designed as if opposing the concept of death as the end of life. Pictures ‒ abundantly produced and distributed on the course of long-lasting funeral celebrations ‒ represent a dead person as an embodiment of success, vitality and wealth.
 

S. Ann Dunham: Singular and Alone. A Biography of Barack Obama’s Mother

This article recalls a discussion about Barack Obama’s mother and her biography which emerged during the course of the American presidential elections in 2008. S. Ann Dunham was a cultural anthropologist holding a PhD from the University of Hawaii and specializing in Indonesian peasant blacksmithing and cottage industry. She passed away in 1995 relatively unknown to the American anthropological world and totally unknown to the American public. Interest in Obama’s family made Dunham and her biography as well as her anthropology appear publicly. Even though she was labeled an “uncaring mother,” who was to “abandon” small Barack, a biographical book by Janny Scott published in 2011 depicts a deep and complex portrait of Dunham which does not go along with popular opinions. It is interesting to observe how Dunham’s biography has been constructed and how her family history mirrors transformation of American society and reveals entanglement between private life and anthropological interests

Cross-Cutting Itineraries: Anthropologists and Pilgrims

This paper presents selected discourses on pilgrimage which shaped both historical approaches and contemporary anthropological research. The relatively modest presence of studies on pilgrimages in the “traditional” anthropological domain is discussed and leads on to a discussion of Polish pilgrimage, research during the 19th and first half of the 20th century. This discourse is analyzed as an example of a national perspective. I then consider the central anthropological debate concerning pilgrimage which was mainly shaped by the Turnerian communitas paradigm (1978) and Eade and Sallnow’s contestation discourse (1991). Examples of more recent studies are presented with their emphasis on pilgrimage as a polymorphic and polyphonic phenomenon. The concepts of multivocality and relativity of space as well as a focus on the kinetic aspect of pilgrimage are significant topics in contemporary anthropological studies. These cross-cutting itineraries of anthropological thinking and pilgrims’ practices are depicted within the framework of the changing perspectives in studies on pilgrimage. These perspectives have significantly turned away from understanding a “pilgrimage” as an ideal and definable concept towards revealing the complexity and plurality of “pilgrimages” as well as focusing on “pilgrimaging”.
 

Ethnographic Visuality in Materials from Professor Roman Reinfuss’s Private Archive

The Yam Festival in Contemporary Ghana: Tradition Beyond Religious Boundaries

This article is based on ethnographic field research conducted in the central part of Ghana, in the Brong Ahafo region. It gives a description of two yam festivals performed in 2010 in the small town of Jema and the nearby village of Kokuma. The author depicts the meanings associated with yams in traditional indigenous cultures and vernacular religions in Ghana as well as within the broader region of the Gulf of Guinea. Contemporary yam festivals are interpreted in relation to the old symbolic and sacred meanings of the yam as “the king of crops” as well as in relation to the contemporary circumstances of African societies which are becoming modernised and less dependent on traditional agriculture. A special focus is placed on the position of chiefs, royal attributes (stools) and involvement of people from different religious backgrounds (Christians, Muslims, “traditionalists”). The concept of “sensational forms” proposed by Birgit Meyer is discussed in relation to yam festivals, which are treated here as performances generating a specific religious “style” shared by contemporary Ghanaians irrespective of their religious affiliations.