The Commendation of Souls: Performativity and Gender

Description

The paper draws on ethnographic research on the animist folk ritual, the "commending the souls", practised throughout Lent to reflect on the meanings and symbols that the performance acquires for their practitioners and for those who hear it and to rethink the conditions that allowed women to take the leadership and to become the main actors performing it. What does the feminisation of the ritual contingents show about women's current position in the community and the management of relations with the religious domain? It also seeks to understand how commending the souls constitutes a repertoire (Taylor, 2003) of embodied memory and how it intersects with other performing actions of its agents.

Period	22 May 2014
Held at	Universidade NOVA de Lisboa
Degree of Recognition	International