In the Western world, there are hygiene regulations for dealing with dead bodies, but for the most part, a fear of the spirit of the dead no longer plays a significant role. In those cultures where a dead husband continues to haunt the living for a long time, everything that has been in contact with the body can be declared “unclean”: the house where the body is laid out, the shroud used to wrap the body, the clothes he once wore, the cup he drank from, etc. Everything around or belonging to him is impure, and this uncleanness is first and foremost projected onto the woman with whom he has spent so many years of his life, as if death has touched not only him, but also her.
As soon as death comes and the news begins to make the rounds, in many communities the status of widowhood is made visible in a range of different ways. A widow may need to spend time in isolation, she may be forbidden from talking to other people, or even forbidden from greeting others and being greeted by them in return. She may have to wear an obligatory mourning dress or have her head shaved. She may even have to continue wearing the clothes she had on at the time of her husband’s passing or be forced to wear ragged old clothes. She may furthermore be forbidden from washing herself, sometimes for weeks, in a further effort to reinforce her uncleanness, as well as to make her unattractive to the spirit of her deceased husband.
Certain traditions force widows to live in isolation for several months, due to a fear that her presence will infect not only other people, but also the local market, the soil and even the water. A preoccupation with the deadly infectiousness of widows is found in multiple places across the world. It is no surprise therefore that rituals have been created to dispel the fears of the living and to undo the threat posed by the deceased. Examples of these were first recorded by anthropologists in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century.
For the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea, among whom Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski conducted fieldwork during the 1910s and 1920s, it was strictly forbidden for the family of the deceased husband to touch the dead body. They were not allowed to wash, decorate, embrace or bury the corpse, as this was considered deadly to them. So these tasks were exclusively carried out by the widow and her own family.
In Papua New Guinea’s Oro province, the contagiousness of a dead man’s wife was considered so dangerous for the rest of the community that the widow was forced to spend her period of mourning in an isolated place. The prescribed period of isolation for the amone doru (“grieving widow”) depended on the season, and particularly on the local food situation. Depending on whether there was an abundance of food or a scarcity, this period of isolation could vary from a few months to an entire year, during which the widow was not allowed to be seen or heard by other members of the community. If she needed to leave her isolation for some reason, she had to cover her head in a cloth made of the hammered tree bark, as she was considered a harbinger of bad luck.
This compulsory isolation can also take on more extreme forms. In countless examples from across India’s caste systems, widows are forced into social exclusion; they are expected to spend the rest of their lives following the strict life of an ascetic, filled with prayers and rituals for the sake of her late husband’s soul, in the hope that she will once again be married to him in the next life:
[She was] sleeping on the ground, and eating only one simple meal a day, without honey, meat, wine, or salt, wearing no ornaments or coloured garments, and using no perfumes. In medieval times widows were also expected to shave their hair […] And any breach of her ascetic discipline not only made her liable to a very unhappy rebirth, but also endangered the welfare of the soul of her departed husband, who might suffer in the afterlife for the shortcomings of his other half on earth…Moreover, a widow was inauspicious to everyone but her own children. Wherever she went her presence cast a gloom on all about her. She could never attend the family festivals which played so big a part in Hindu life, for she would bring bad luck on all present. She was still a member of her husband’s family, and could not return to her father. Always watched by the parents and relatives of her lord, lest she broke her vows and imperilled the dead man’s spiritual welfare, shunned as unlucky even by the servants, her life must often have been miserable in the extreme.
These fears and rules still exist to this day, especially in remote rural areas.
The fear of a dead husband’s sprit is projected onto his widow. In comparison, widowers only mourn for a short time before they quickly take a new wife. Whether dead or alive, a wife seems to have little impact in patriarchal societies. In contrast to the spirit of a deceased husband, who will continue to plague his wife, the ghost of a deceased wife is presented as something to be ignored during the remainder of the widower’s life. This major difference is entirely down to the hierarchical structures of traditional societies.
In smaller communities where she is constantly under scrutiny, a widow cannot transgress from the behaviour required of her. She may be threatened with her husband’s ghost getting angry with her as soon as she steps out of line. Her many humiliations are equally signs that she, whether temporarily or not, is no longer part of the community. During this mourning period, be it six months, a year or longer, there are often restrictions on having sex and/or eating (especially foods deemed rich or indulgent). If a prohibition on sex is violated and leads to pregnancy, her in-laws may start suspecting her and the man in question of complicity in the death of her husband.
In some traditions, the final goodbye between the widow and the spirit of her husband is sealed with a farewell ceremony. This ceremony may include a libation, in which the widow pours out water or another liquid onto her husband’s grave from a calabash that is broken immediately afterwards, as is the case in some West African traditions. In others, the widow may also have her nails clipped and her head completely shaved. These rituals are often preceded by painful, lonely and at times severely humiliating experiences.
Excerpted with permission from Widows: A Global History, Mineke Schipper, Speaking Tiger Books.
