Building on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive historical
evidence, Crying Shame analyzes lament across thousands of
years and nearly every continent.
* Explores the enduring power of lament: expressing grief through
crying songs, often in a collective ritual context
* Draws on the author’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork,
and unique long-term engagement and participation in the
phenomenon
* Offers a startling new perspective on the nature of modernity
and postmodernity
* An important addition to growing literature on cultural
globalization
Table of Content
Acknowledgments.
Preface.
1 Introduction.
PART I LOCATING LAMENT AS OBJECT.
Introduction.
2 For Crying Out Loud: What Is Lament Anyway?
3 Lament and Emotion.
4 Antiquity, Metaculture, and the Control of Lament.
PART II LOSING LAMENT: MODERNITY AS LOSS.
Introduction.
5 Cultural Amnesia and the Objectification of Lament in
Bangladesh.
6 Modern Transformations.
7 How Shame Spreads in Modernity.
8 Crying Backward: Primitivist Representations of Lament.
PART III REVIVING LAMENT: LAMENT AS KEY TROPE OF
MODERNITY.
Introduction.
9 Mourning Becomes the Electron’s Age: Lamenting
Modernity(ies).
10 Lament’s (Post)Modern Vertigo: Floating in a
Deterritorialized Media Sea.
11 Lament in a Postmodern World of ‘Revivals’.
12 Conclusion.
Notes.
References.
Index.
About the author
James M. Wilce is Professor of Anthropology at Northern
Arizona University. He has published a number of articles and is
the author of Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of
Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (1998) and Language and
Emotion (forthcoming) and the editor of Social and Cultural
Lives of Immune Systems (2003). Wilce serves on the editorial
board of American Anthropologist and the Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology. He is also the series editor for
Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture.
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