Ruptures and Continuities of the Personhood
With regard to funerary treatments in the lowlands of South America, two apparently opposite theses have been developed. One supports the idea that the mortuary practices aim to achieve the rupture between the living and the dead. On the contrary, the other points to the concern to prolong the continuity between the deceased persons and what they were during their lifetime. Through an examination of the funeral ceremonies, but also of the practices regarding the dead, the case of the Wayùu of Colombia highlights an intermediate posture, which oscillates between the abolition and the preservation of the deceased and of his memory. This ambivalence reflects a notable concern for the joy of the yoluja, the form that individuals take after their death. In this article, these latter are particularly understood through their «territorialization» and their attributed ontological properties. The aim is to show that the paradigmatic base that presupposes the existence of two stages of mortality – and the anonymization of the person according to a temporality modelled on the biological process of decomposition of the bodies – allows a variety of possibilities regarding the articulations between rupture and continuity. The proposed developments also aim to highlight the fact that, in order to understand these articulations, it is beneficial to inscribe funeral practices in a broader relational complex, which connects the living and “their dead”.