Digging The Days Of The Dead

Dias de muertos - "Days of the Dead" - is celebrated in Mexico each year in late October and early November. It is a family reunion in which the dead are the guests of honor who are welcomed with their favorite foods, carefully chosen gifts, and ritual paraphernalia such as candles and incense. Some of the objects show tenderness, some, a sense of perspective about life and death, and some, a frank sense of humour. In "Digging the Days of the Dead", Juanita Garciagodoy depicts various aspects of the celebration - including Prehispanic and Spanish Catholic traces on its development as well as folk and popular culture versions - and describes its changing place in contemporary Mexico. She dedicates two chapters to close readings of calaveras, figures and scenes of 'lively' skeletons that reveal details of popular philosophy about, for instance, gender and class relations and identity politics. There is also an analysis of the struggle between the traditional holiday and Hallowe'en. Garciagodoy examines in detail differences in attitudes towards death in Mexico and the United States. In part because the living do not exclude the dead from their family circle, celebrants of Dias de muertos treat death as an intimate life companion and fear it less than their northern counterparts, who tend to view death as inimical. It is indispensible for scholars interested in Mexican religion and culture.

Table of Contents:
; Contents; Illustrations; Color Plates; Acknowledgments; 1; The Dead as Guests of Honor; A Family Reunion, National Affirmation; How People Celebrate; La Ofrenda; Hanging out With the Dead; Calaveras; Public Offerings, a Politicized Catrina; Ritual Obligations; Sacred Time, Alterity; Being There; A Key Commemoration; 2; Reading Dias de muertos; Semiotic Practices; A Word About the Literature; Words and Pictures; International Attention; Romancing the Bone; Self-Portrait With Calavera; 3; Dias de muertos and National Identity; 4; Two Manifestations of Dias de muertos; In the Folk Culture of Cuetzalan; In the Popular Culture of Mexico City; Posada: X Rays of Fin de Siecle Mexico; 5; Pre-Hispanic and Peninsular Traces in Dias de muertos; Stories of Origin; Pre-Hispanic Commemorations of the Dead; Pre-Hispanic Traces in Contemporary Beliefs; Spanish Presence, Culture Shock; Historical Notes on All Saints and All Souls' Days; Death in Medieval Spain and Europe; Death in Sixteenth-Century Spain; Transgressive Syncretism; 6; Dias de muertos Versus Hallowe'en: A Fight to the Death?; No Threat to Tradition and Identity; A New Cultural Syncretism; 7; Contemporary Attitudes Toward Death; Death's Intimates; Death-Life Masks, Duality; Three Notes About Catholic Attitudes Toward Dias de muertos; 8; Reading Calaveras; Lively Skeletons: The Subversiveness of an Oxymoron; Where Have All the Calaveras Gone?; Readings of Calaveras I; 9; Feasting on Skeletons; Readings II; 10; Last Words, Last Rites; Imagining a Sociology in Dias de muertos; An Anthropology in Dias de muertos; The Politics and Poetics of Dias de muertos; Resisting Homogeneity; Setting Ofrendas, a Conversion Experience; Glossary; Appendix A:; Literary Calaveras; Appendix B:; Two Mexican Stories and a Spanish Poem; Appendix C:; Notes on Posada's Engravings; Appendix D:; A Selection of Nahuatl Poems; Works Consulted; Index;