Tag: dying

Dying as Transformation to Ancestorhood: The Sherbro Coast of Sierra Leone

People who live in the Sherbro coastal area of Sierra Leone have a social organisation based upon descent from named ancestors and acestresses. Ancestors, the living, and those not yet born constitute a great chain of being. This continuum of existence is punctuated, and made discontinuous, by rites of passage (birth, puberty, death). Dying is a period of categorical ambiguity in which a person is still among the mundane living, but babbles of the past, a sign that he or she is also in the Continue reading →