Abstract
I focus this project on lamentation as a form of ethical witness. In traditional religious settings and in literature, laments serve to reinscribe particular loss in all its human power. In their raw emotion, their refusal to forget and their will to remember, female laments in particular can be perceived as “dangerous,” uncontrollable. Lament has received some attention in Humanities studies, mostly in relation to the study of ancient and contemporary rural Greece. My focus and my contribution, for scholars and general audiences in the Humanities in our own time of social, personal and political trauma, is uniquely comparative, greatly expanding the range of female lament examined to date by bringing together Greek, Greek Christian, South Asian Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish sources and traditions. Using methodologies of comparative literature and the comparative history of religions this study uncovers pre-modern roots of female witness in the service of a virtue ethics whose condition is that of mourning – forms of particular love that are inevitably works of tears. Not closure of grief, but its complex, even artful, recognition. To study the voices of female lament is not merely to ponder a fascinating though arcane world of old stories or the practices of traditional rural communities, but to discover resources for a contemporary particularist ethics, one rooted not only in attentiveness to personal pain and personal witness, but through affective contagion, to the pain of others, potentially giving rise to the possibility of awakening empathy and compassion, and not only rage or revenge.
Presenters
Steven HopkinsMari S. Michener Professor of Religion and Asian Studies, Department of Religion, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Lamentation, Female lament, Gender, Comparative Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Mourning, Love
