@article{2025:hland:greek_wome,
title = {Greek Women, Death and Food},
year = {2025},
note = {Women’s memorial services for the dead and their accompanying gifts
constitute an important aspect of Greek death rituals. It is crucial
to include women’s perspectives if we want to understand rituals,
therefore attention has to be paid to the meals and food offerings at
the tombs, the importance of a series of commemorative ceremonies
after the burial involving gifts, the days dedicated to the dead. Food
is central in Greek religion, because the rituals are performed to
ensure the food supply. The dead control the fertility, consequently
the death cult is a central feature in religious festivals. Since
women are responsible for the food, they are the main performers of
the rituals dedicated to the dead to ensure the food. Based on the
values of Greek women, their roles may be called a poetics of
womanhood, the point of which is to show how to be good at being a
woman, when performing death rituals. Every Saturday morning women
demonstrate their poetics of womanhood by their cleaning abilities
when washing their tombs at the cemetery before arranging their
food-offerings, thus maintaining the social relations with their dead.
In addition to the memorial services performed within the family
sphere there are annual collective festivals dedicated to the dead,
when women bring food to the cemetery. Based on first-hand field work
carried out by the author since the 1980s, the article examines these
rituals dedicated to deceased persons in which women’s offerings of
food and other gifts at tombs are central for the preservation of the
community.},
journal = {Anthropos},
pages = {183--196},
author = {Håland, Evy J.},
volume = {120},
number = {1}
}