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Student resources to accompany Anthropology: Asking Questions About Human Origins, Diversity, and Culture, 3e:
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The Film: Funeral Season
Directed by Matthew Lancit
color, 87 min / 60 min, 2011
Courtesy of Documentary Educational Resources
“We pray to our ancestors but we do not worship them. You, you need an intermediary, the priest. But for us, our intermediary is the ancestor who is sitting next to God,” says Poundé, the old Cameroonian ethnologist, to the young Jewish director from Canada. And with this conclusive statement, everything becomes clear: the funerals in memory of “the dead who are not dead,” organized several days or even years following the burial, the chants, brass bands, and traditional dancers who accompany and punctuate the village rituals. The ancestral rites struggle to survive in a continuously westernized society of consumption by parading wealth and excess for all to see — even the dead.
Funeral Season takes the viewer through the red dust of Cameroon's laterite slopes and into the heart of the Bamileke country, where one funeral flows into the next. These death celebrations provide an opportunity to see elaborate costumes and masks, festive songs and dances, and lavish feasts, while illuminating the communal links which bind the Bamileke as an ethnic group and society. Along the way, the director befriends his guides and becomes increasingly haunted by memories of his own ancestors. At times, the dialogues alienate him from the locals; at other times they bring the two closer together. Like the dead and the living, they belong to two different worlds often mirroring each other.
There is a lightness to be found in this subjective ethnographic film which imaginatively and symbolically turns the gazes of two different worlds upon each other.
Why this clip is important:
Culture shapes everything from the most mundane aspects of life, such as the clothing people wear and the meanings they give to it, to a community’s most expressive activities, such as funerals, parades, feasts, and so on. Symbols, traditions, norms, and values lie at the heart of culture, and this film clip explores how they interconnect to create a distinctive approach to, in this case, funerals and mourning rituals among the Bamileke of Cameroon. In placing himself in front of the camera and showing his own attempts to make meaning of Bamileke funerary beliefs and practices, the filmmaker, who is Canadian and Jewish, also demonstrates how the process of understanding another culture is filtered through his own cultural lens. This clip shows the power culture has to make certain meanings and behaviors—which are quite “artificial” or humanly-constructed—feel normal and taken-for-granted. It is the cross-cultural nature of the encounter here, though, that makes those cultural meanings stand out and become recognizable.
To think about and discuss:
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