Abstract
Funeral rites are commonly understood as a means by which communities reestablish normal or ideal social relationships following death. Lament, which has played a prominent role in such rites, has been studied in numer-ous cultural and historical contexts as a practice that is effective on both a personal and collective level. An individual lam enter facilitates the collec-tive confrontation with death through a performance that combines musi-cal and verbal signification (in the forms of homage, praise, etc.) with non-linguistic utterances such as stylized crying or weeping, the meanings of which are culturally constructed (Urban 1988).As a predominantly (in many contexts exclusively) feminine mode of expression, lament has more recently been examined in its relationship to gender identity (Tolbert 1990a, 1990b, 1994; Briggs 1992, 1993). In the Greek context especially, it has been dem-onstrated that lament can serve as a privileged arena within male-domi-nated society in which women express gender-specific concerns (Auerbach 1987; Seremetakis 1990, 1991; Caraveli 1986; Caraveli-Chaves 1980; Danforth and Tsiaras 1982).