Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity, and the Exaggerated Death of Lament

For millennia, lamenting expressing grief through crying songs, often in a collective ritual context both sustained and challenged communities around the world. Like all artistic processes, it at once defines and transforms humanity s deepest feelings. In recent centuries, however, communities that once joined together in lament have rejected it, in apparent shame. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive historical evidence, James Wilce analyzes lament across thousands of years and nearly every continent, illustrating human commonalities and cultural diversity. In doing so, he offers a new perspective on modernity and postmodernity by demonstrating their fundamental relationship to lament.

Intimately researched through participant observation, Crying Shame is a provocative investigation into our capacity to shed tears and to feel shame, the changes that threaten the survival of lament traditions, and lament s enduring power.

Acknowledgments.

Preface.

1 Introduction.

PART I LOCATING LAMENT AS OBJECT.

Introduction.

2 For Crying Out Loud: What Is Lament Anyway?

3 Lament and Emotion.

4 Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament.

PART II LOSING LAMENT: MODERNITY AS LOSS.

Introduction.

5 Cultural Amnesia and the Objectification of Lament in Bangladesh.

6 Modern Transformations.

7 How Shame Spreads in Modernity.

8 Crying Backward: Primitivist Representations of Lament.

PART III REVIVING LAMENT: LAMENT AS KEY TROPE OF MODERNITY.

Introduction.

9 Mourning Becomes the Electron s Age: Lamenting Modernity(ies).

10 Lament s (Post)Modern Vertigo: Floating in a Deterritorialized Media Sea.

11 Lament in a Postmodern World of Revivals .

12 Conclusion.

Notes.

References.

Index.

James M. Wilce is Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University. He has published a number of articles and is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (1998) and Language and Emotion (forthcoming) and the editor of Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems (2003). Wilce serves on the editorial board of American Anthropologist and the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. He is also the series editor for Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture.

"James Wilce′s new book is a stunning attempt to present lament as it currently exists cross–culturally." (Journal of Folklore Research, 21 September 2011)