Overview

This text describes how Asante in present-day Ghana shape and give meaning to their funeral celebrations. One could expect a traditional ritual, centred around the extended family and around beliefs about death and ancestorship, to reduce in importance under the influence of modernity, including individualization, urbanization, markey economy and Christianity. The opposite scenario is taking place in Ghana. Funerals are, more than any other ceremony, only gaining more and more in scale and importance. Technological innovations like mortuaries, mass media and electronic apparatus have enlarged possibilities and have given the funeral new dimensions. The large amount of time, effort and money that people spend on funerals is by no means unique for the Asante. Funerals not only reflect transformations in society, they also offer people a space to work out changing social patterns, differences between city and village, lifestyles and cultural preferences, in fact, to stage images of life.

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Marleen de Witte is an anthropologist at the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. This study on the funeral celebrations of the Asante has won the prize for the best study in anthropology and sociology in 2000 at the University of Amsterdam.

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