Link: Bereavement Practices
This paper was written for the class Death and Dying at Western Michigan University as a comparison between the bereavement practices of two disparate cultures. A brief overview is presented below and the paper is linked.
All humans mourn their dead and the Tigrayans and the members of the Muscogee Creek Nation[1] are no different. However, due to a variety of factors, their bereavement practices are significantly different. This paper will review the similarities and differences between the Tigrayans and the members of the Muscogee Creek Nation in the following areas:
- Cultural, societal, and economic factors as they relate to bereavement
- Beliefs about death
- Grief Expression
- Death Systems
- Cultural conflicts around bereavement beliefs and practices
It should be noted that it was difficult to write a comparison paper based on the provided resources as there was not consistent information provided between the articles. For instance, Bereavement Rituals in the Muscogee Creek Tribe provided significant details about the funerary customs of the Muscogee Creek Nation, but Discourses of Loss and Bereavement in Tigray, Ethiopia did not provide comparable information. Similarly, Discourses of Loss and Bereavement in Tigray, Ethiopia provided significant information about the socioeconomic aspects of death and bereavement, but similar information was not included in Bereavement Rituals in the Muscogee Creek Tribe. As a result,in the interest of writing as complete of an analysis as possible, I have supplemented the provided sources with additional articles, which are cited in the text and a bibliography has been provided.
[1] I have used Muscogee Creek Nation instead of Muscogee Creek Tribe, except in article citations, because that is how they refer to themselves.