BSAS Seminar: Matthew Carey, Love without Grief: on Losing a Child in the Moroccan High Atlas
Matthew Carey is an Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. Previously, he has been a Visiting Professor at Collège de France in Paris and a Teaching Fellow at University College in London. He holds a PhD and MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Hovedinnhold
This paper explores the reasons behind muted grief for infants among in the Central High Atlas of Morocco. Though people claim to love small children a great deal, oftentimes they scarcely mourn their passing. Arguing against materialist readings of death without weeping, I suggest that in the case at hand it can only be understood by looking at local conceptions of love, emotional attachment and infancy. What sorts of emotion do children evoke, and how does this help us to understand people’s reactions to infant death, as well as parent-child relations more generally?. [infant-death, mourning, emotions, subjectivity, Morocco]