Death and Ritual Crying: An anthropological approach to Albanian funeral customs

This book offers an inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural approach to the Albanian traditions around death and mourning. It explores the emotional relationship between the mental image of death and crying and highlights the transcendental potentialities of ritual funeral crying as a technique, tool, and medium in a boundary-situation. The extensive variety of socio-cultural responses to death as a crisis of continuity and a final catastrophe and the symbolic representations of after-death and nothingness in folk belief and metaphysics are re-examined in the light of phenomenology in order to demonstrate that in face of death human reality discloses only its 'self-identity in otherness'.