A presentation from the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Conference held on 19 November 2012.

1. Department of Geography & Environmental
Science
Death in the family as a vital
conjuncture?
Intergenerational care and responsibility
following bereavement in Senegal
Ruth Evans, r.evans@reading,ac.uk
BSA Death and the family symposium, 19 Nov. 2012
© University of Reading 2007 www.reading.ac.uk

2. Theoretical perspectives
• Diversity and fluidity of lifecourse transitions that are
mediated by axes of social difference
• Vital conjunctures : ‘a socially structured zone of
possibility that emerges around specific periods of
potential transformation in a life or lives. It is a temporary
configuration of possible change, a duration of
uncertainty and potential’ (Johnson-Hanks, 2002: 871)
• Death in the family as a vital conjuncture for family
members of different generations?
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3. Theoretical perspectives
• Ethics of care (Tronto, 1993; Sevenhuisjen, 1998) –
human interdependence
• Embodied, relational nature of care following
bereavement:
– Care and responsibility for those who are bereaved
following death of family member
– Continuing bonds with deceased after death can
retain material dimension (Ribbens McCarthy and
Prokhovnik, 2012)

4. Research context: Senegal
 ‘Triple heritage’: African, Islamic,
colonial (Bass & Sow, 2006)
 Large multi-generational households
 Rapid environmental, economic and
social changes in Sahel region
 Rural poverty: 67% of poor households;
almost 75% of these live in chronic
poverty (Fall et al., 2011)
 Inheritance practices more favourable
for women in Senegal than in other
African countries (Peterman, 2011)
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5. Methodology
 Snowball sampling with 20 Serer families in
groundnut basin, Sine Saloum delta, Dakar
‘banlieues’
 In-depth semi-structured interviews (51):
 Women (12) & men (6) whose spouse had
died
 Young women (5) and young men (5) whose
mother/father had died
 Other family members (6)
 Religious and community leaders (7)
 NGO staff and strategic professionals (11)
 2 focus groups with women’s groups (9
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participants)

6. Participatory dissemination
 Research report (Fr and Eng)
 7 participatory feedback workshops; coproduction of a DVD
 Seminar with strategic stakeholders, researchers &
participants
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7. Care and responsibility among
widows and widowers
• Sorrow and loneliness
• Untimely and multiple deaths difficult to reconcile
• Responses to death shaped by religious and cultural
beliefs about the continuing presence of those who have
died in world of the living:
“Among the Serer, if you don’t respect the period of
widowhood, it will haunt you, either you will suffer a
misfortune or something similar. For us, customs have to be
respected, because we say that the dead are not dead, they are
living”. (widow, aged 56, living in Dakar)
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8. Care and responsibility among
widows and widowers
• Embodied care and continuing bonds after death
expressed through:
– mourning rituals
– widows and sons did not cultivate husband’s/father’s
fields year of loss
– remarriage practices
– memories and imaginings of deceased spouse
– child fosterage practices
– inheritance practices
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9. Mourning rituals
• Widows –mourning period associated with highly
embodied practices and restrictions (4 months 10 days
for Muslims; 6 months – 1 year for Roman Catholics)
• Widowers – 40 days of contemplation, stay at home and
don’t work, sexual restraint
• Differences in adherence to customary practices
• End of mourning period marked by spiritual cleansing
ritual
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10. Remarriage practices
• Strong social pressures on younger women and on men
to remarry after mourning period
• Levirate remarriage - cultural practice that fosters
continuing bonds with deceased husband through
surviving kin:
“I will treat him like my former husband, because it’s my
husband, my husband is still in my heart, but since we know
this [custom]...” (widow who remarried her husband’s
younger brother three weeks after his death)
• Husband’s wishes for widow to continue to live with her
children and his relatives
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11. Remarriage practices
• Older widows not under pressure to remarry and many
did not want to remarry
• Widowers with children – remarriage as way of finding an
alternative for deceased wife’s nurturing and social
reproductive role in house?
• Widowers’ concerns about how new wife would get on
with the children, financial situation and continuing grief
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12. Memories of deceased spouse
• Embodied experiences of loss in particular places:
imagining physical presence of spouse in home/ garden:
“When I arrive home or I find myself in my orchard, every
time I go there, I used to imagine that she was going to come
and find me there. When I get home, I imagine that on my
arrival, I will see her opposite me. That lasted months,
almost a year, every time I found the children at home, I
think, that happened. So, it’s really hard” (widower, who
lost two wives and his mother within one year)
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13. Child fosterage practices
• Young children sent to be cared for by other relatives to
meet care needs and reduce the pain of loss:
“He was still a baby, at that time, he wasn’t weaned yet. I
gave him to her [his sister] to lessen the pain, we had to take
him far from home, but when he grows up, I will bring him
back home. When he is old enough to go to school, I will
bring him back and send him to school. Because he was a
very young child who was still very fragile, you understand, if
he was at home, the pain would be greater, so I took him
there”. (widower with six children)
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14. Inheritance practices
• Care of person who died shown through ensuring their
wishes regarding inheritance were fulfilled and customs
and religious practices observed
• Most land and property usually transferred to next
generation through patrilineal inheritance practices
according to Islamic and/or customary law
 Inheritance disputes were rare; co-wives without sons,
daughters and young sons more likely to be
disadvantaged
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15. Care and responsibility among
bereaved youth
• Expectation that adult children will
support the family as part of
‘intergenerational contract’:
“It is true that the community will
console you, will support you but
noone can do as much as your
deceased husband would have done.
Only the children can grow up and
support their mother as their
deceased father would have done”
(women’s group in rural area)
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16. Care and responsibility among
bereaved youth
• Shift in generational responsibility in some households as
some young men become household head
• Care of siblings entrusted to eldest son before father’s
death:
“One day, I was leaving for the fields, it was nearly Tabaski [Muslim
festival], he called me and said: ‘I am very tired, I know I am going to die,
I want you to look after the children well, because they are vulnerable; I
know you are still young, but I entrust them to you’. Since then, I observe
these instructions very carefully. They also do everything I tell them to,
they obey me. Their mother also looks after me more than my own
mother would have done. She is very grateful ”. (young man, aged 25,
who lost his father and uncle)
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17. Care and responsibility among
bereaved youth
• Increase in young women’s social reproductive activities
within the home
“It’s my daughter [aged 16] who makes every effort to do it [
the domestic work] [...] She looks after everything, really,
she’s exhausted” (widower with 7 children)
• Young women’s involvement in paid domestic work to
support family following loss of male breadwinner
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18. Continuing bonds
• Embodied experiences of loss in home: loneliness,
tensions with surviving parent
• Effects of loss in school environment :
“The loss of my parents affected me a lot. At that time, I was
doing the Troisième [third year of secondary school] and I
failed [...] I was thinking about them when I was in class”.
(young woman aged 20, who lost both parents within
two weeks)
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19. Continuing bonds
• Movement to another household to deal with memories:
“[Talking of her younger sister] She said that if she stays
here, she will not really be able to learn because if she stays
here, she only dreams of my father, that’s why she left to go
there”. (young woman, aged 15, whose father had died in
a fishing accident, whose sister moved to another village
to live with other relatives and study there following
father’s death)
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20. Vital conjunctures and re-imagined futures
• Heightened awareness of ‘intergenerational contract’
and kinship responsibilities towards widows, siblings
• Enhanced maturity and resilience:
“losing my mother and my father changed lots of things,
because after their death, I had courage, because I had to
work to look after my brothers, and later, I said to myself
that it was God’s will and I had the courage to learn to be
someone who achieves in life” (young man, aged 26,
studying at university, who lost both parents )
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21. Vital conjunctures and
re-imagined futures
• Relational nature of young people’s goals and imagined
futures:
“Beside my father, I was a child, but now I have set myself a
target: to help my mother because she’s the only one I have
left, so I must do all I can for her”.
(young woman, aged 27, who lost her father and
qualified as a teacher)
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22. Wider kinship responsibilities
• Reliance on maternal relatives in times of difficulty:
– Providing for orphaned children and widows with
weak ties to husband’s family
“It’s my brother who is responsible for feeding us, he works, he
copes and the rest of us, we farm [...]
They [the children] hardly suffered because they didn’t live with
their father, it’s their maternal uncle who takes care of them. In
fact, their father was old, so it’s their maternal uncle who has
always been responsible for them” (disabled widow, living with
her 6 children in household with her parents and her
widowed brother and his children)
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23. Wider kinship responsibilities
• Reciprocal sibling relations - inter-vivos transfers and
investments in property, education , pilgrimage to
Mecca etc. could be significant
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24. Conclusion
• Death of close family member represents a vital conjuncture
for many families
• Significance of particular deaths depends on culturally specific
meanings of relationships
• Embodied, time-space practices of care and responsibility
following death are produced by and reproduce socio-cultural
differences and inequalities:
– Age and generational position/ marriage status
– Gender
– Religion, ethnicity
– Co-residence and intra-household relations
– Locality, access to material assets and resources
– Education, skills and livelihood opportunities
– Social capital, incl. access to social protection.
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25. Further information….
Evans, R. (2012) 'Inheritance, Access to Resources and
Poverty in Serer Families in Senegal', Research Note 1, Walker
Institute for Climate System Research, University of
Reading, May 2012, http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/28983/
Please contact Ruth Evans for further information about the
study: r.evans@reading.ac.uk
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26. References
Bass, L. and Sow, F. (2006) ‘Senegalese families: the confluence of ethnicity,
history and social change’, in Oheneba-Sakyi, Y. and Takyi, B. (Eds.), African
Families at the Turn of the 21st Century, Westport: Praeger Publishers, pp.83-102.
Fall, A. Antoine, P., Cissé, R., Dramani, L., Sall, M., Ndoye, T. et al. (2011) The
Dynamics of Poverty in Senegal: Chronic Poverty, Transitional Poverty and
Vulnerabilities, Policy Brief, LARTES National Studies No.27, January 2011.
Johnson-Hanks, J. (2002) On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a
Theory of Vital Conjunctures, American Anthropologist, 104, 3: 865-880.
Peterman, A. (2011) ‘Widowhood and asset inheritance in Sub-Saharan Africa:
empirical evidence from 15 countries’, CPRC Working Paper No. 183, CPRC.
Ribbens McCarthy, J. and Prokhovnik, R. (2012) Caring after death and embodied
relationality , paper presented at Critical Care conference, University of
Brighton, 13-14 September 2012.
Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998) Citizenship and the Ethics of Care. Feminist Considerations
on Justice, Morality and Politics. London and New York: Routledge.
Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries. A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New
York and London: Routledge.
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