The author is interested primarily in the social management or ‘manipulation’ of affect and in the cultural resolution of problems pertaining to death. These problems, which constitute a kind of set, are: the contradiction between the continuity of society and the discontinuity of human life (the mortality of individuals); the problem of separating one’s feelings towards the corpse from one’s memories of the deceased; the problem of separating physical, idiosyncratic aspects of the dead person’s identity from spiritual, cultural aspects. The dialectical interplay between the idea of ‘the dead as object’ (a thing-for-others) and the idea of ‘the dead as subject’ (a personfor-himself) underlies these various contrasts. The ethnographical exploration of this interplay is carried out through an account and analysis of mortuary customs among the Kuranko of northeast Sierra Leone. Ref., notes, tab., French summary.
