二次葬 (Second Funeral) の社会学的意味 : アフリカの事例

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“Second funeral” might be defined as a series of death rituals excluding those directly connected to the disposal of the corpse: burial, first cremation and so forth. Generally two roles of the second funeral have been distinguished: it makes a dead person get possession of a full spiritual status; and it ultimately deprives the person of every right and duty he had been carried on while he was alive. These roles may well be termed as a ritual and a sociological role, respectively.In his intensive study of the Tallensi Fortes (1945, 1949) referred to these two roles. The sociological role was later much more enlightened when Mandelbaum (1954) demonstrated the Kota second funerals restore the equilibrium in disturbed social relations as well as they reconfirm the group solidality by bringing peoples together into the funeral. Nadel (1954) also introduced the fact that the sccond funerals contribute to the maintenance of the order in social ranks in the Nupe societies. Recently Goody (1962) discusses an obligation of a LoDagaa heir to perform a second funeral in favor of the man from whom he had inherited his property.Out of these initial roles of the second funerals a hypothesis might be drawn: that searching into some possible logical and functional correlations among these roles. As a society is composed of complexes of particular status and role, and is a complicatedly woven network of various rights and duties, any individual has to carry out each complex of rights and duties assigned to the status he occupies. The whole society might be disturbed if thus integrated individual ceases to fulfil his assignment. At his death, then, a person be soon replaced by another so that the latter may complete the performance of rights and duties having been assigned to the former.These rights and duties of a member of a society are inseparably attached to the property and status one occupies, and so when a death occurs inheritance and succession be carried out without any delay. In reality, however, this hasty delivery usually accompanies some difficulties of considerable degree. Close kin of the dead person have already been much disturbed by the sorrow and fear caxused by the death. They are also burdened with their duty to perform troublesome procedures accompanied with the mortuary rites. Being thus distracted, the heir, supposedly a close kin of the dead person, can hardly fulfil his unexperienced role unless he be given certain length of time interval after the occurrence of the death. Moreover an inheritance or a succession often brings about certain controversies over the amount of the share and the order of successors. These may throw the kin into entangled dispute and confusion.These difficulties may safely be removed if the delivery is taken place after some length of time has passed since the death occurred, only a nominal delivery be practiced soon after the death, though. Thus the requirements are successfully gratified by the performance of a second funeral, by which property and status of the dead person are fully transferred to the control of his heir, widows are remarried and the dead person himself be finally displaced away from the world of the living.

著者

大森元吉
広島大学教養部

二次葬 (Second Funeral) の社会学的意味 : アフリカの事例

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