Wearing Memories: Clothing and the Global Lives of Mourning in Swaziland

This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women's memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Golomski, Casey (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Taylor & Francis [2015]
In: Material religion
Year: 2015, Volume: 11, Issue: 3, Pages: 303-327
Further subjects:B Women
B Pentecostalism
B Clothing
B Memory
B Swaziland
B Intersubjectivity
B Mourning
B Global
Online Access: Presumably Free Access
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Summary:This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women's memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced through clothing and its material efficacy, current global ideologies of immaterial mortuary ritual associated with Pentecostalism have emerged as contraries to this local, intersubjective grief work. This article describes how such contrarian ideologies paper over existing global aspects of people's entangled relations with the dead - in three biographies of women and their objects - thus showing that memory work is not limited to people, goods, or ideas that flow between nations and expanding notions of the global and gendered practices of personhood.
ISSN:1751-8342
Contains:Enthalten in: Material religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2015.1082719