Funerals and the politics of emotion

This chapter presents a detailed ethnography of the funeral rituals of the Roma of Ceuaş. It describes how a funeral ceremony unfolds and how musicians participate in it. The ethnographic description points to the instable and open-ended distinction between the “relatives” (neamuri) of the deceased and the “outsiders” (străini). These two groups interact on an essentially emotional level: the former are under pressure to express their grief to the latter, who are themselves on the lookout for these expressions of feeling. The chapter highlights the key differences between the tears of the neamuri, who cry “with full throat,” and those of the străini, who “cry inside.” The final part of the chapter presents an interpretation of the Roma funerals. Ritual actions, including wailing and playing music, seek to nudge the relationships between the living and the dead, and the neamuri and the străini, toward the positive emotional poles of piety and pity (milă) and away from the negative poles of fear and shame (laja).