ArticleThe British journal of sociology2022
"If no one grieves, no one will remember": Cultural palimpsests and the creation of social ties through rituals.
Article in The British journal of sociology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mourning ritual participation, subjective well-being and prosocial behaviour among the Luhya people of Kenya.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Understanding deep disadvantage at the end of life: A nationwide analysis of unclaimed deaths.Social science & medicine (1982) · 2025Article
- Differences in proximal and intimacy-related defense mechanisms among patients with cancer in different psychological stages of dying.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- "If no one grieves, no one will remember": Cultural palimpsests and the creation of social ties through rituals.The British journal of sociology · 2022Article
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Classic sociological theories hold that rituals offer opportunities for community integration and cohesion. Rituals allow people to come together across many differences and experience similar thoughts and feelings. Death rituals raise existential questions about the purpose of society and generally foster preexisting social ties. This paper examines the efforts of a US community of volunteers who gather to bury unclaimed, or "abandoned," babies. Drawing on ethnographic research over a two-year period, we advance the concept of cultural palimpsest to capture the process by which a gathering of strangers turns a potentially divisive political issue in to a community forming event. We find that in their efforts to mourn babies to whom they have no connection, these volunteers temporarily foster new social bonds that allow them to work through unresolved grief. Similar processes of ritualistically inverting social meanings occur whenever people gather to turn potentially negative into group forming events.
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