Death Is a Festival

Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

João José Reis, H. Sabrina Gledhill

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9780807854457
  9780807827734
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807862728
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This award-winning social history of death and funeral rites during the early decades of Brazil’s independence from Portugal focuses on the Cemiterada movement in Salvador, capital of the province of Bahia. The book opens with a lively account of the popular riot that ensued when, in 1836, the government condemned the traditional burial of bodies inside Catholic church buildings and granted a private company a monopoly over burials.

This episode is used by Reis to examine the customs of death and burial in Bahian society, explore the economic and religious conflicts behind the move for funerary reforms and the maintenance of traditional rituals of dying, and understand how people dealt with new concerns sparked by modernization and science. Viewing culture within its social context, he illuminates the commonalities and differences that shaped death and its rituals for rich and poor, men and women, slaves and masters, adults and children, foreigners and Brazilians.

This translation makes the book, originally published in Brazil in 1993, available in English for the first time.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Death is a Festival
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Illustrations, Maps, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Cemiterada
• 1 Setting of the Cemiterada
• 2 Brotherhoods and Baroque Catholicism
• 3 The Hour of Death: Means of Dying Well
• 4 The Hour of the Dead: Household Funeral Rites
• 5 The Pageantry of Death: Traditional Funeral Corteges
• 6 Sacred Space of the Dead: The Place of Burial
• 7 Bound for Glory: Funeral Masses and Divine Advocates
• 8 Civilizing Customs (I): The Medicalization of Death
• 9 Civilizing Customs (II): Legislated Death
• 10 Commercializing Death: Provincial Law 17
• 11 The Resistance against the Cemetery
• Epilogue After the Revolt
• Appendix. Death as a Business: Funerary Income and Expenses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index