Abstract
This paper focuses on the Catholic rituals of death in southern Italy, analysing religious rites and social practices from a socio-pragmatic perspective. The paper is divided into two parts. The first centres on the description of funerary rites (both their religious and social aspects) among southern Italian Catholics; the second is an analysis of the funeral homily. The study draws on Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory (PAT) (Pragmatics: an introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 2001, Pragmatic acts. In: Brown K (ed) Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, Elsevier, London, pp 5–11, 2006) and the “applied perspective” of Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT) (Giles H, Coupland N, Coupland J, Accommodation theory: communication, context, and consequence. In: Context of accommodation: developments in applied sociolinguistics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 1–68, 1991; Giles H, Ogay T, Communication accommodation theory. In: Whaley BB, Samter W (eds) Explaining communication: contemporary theories and exemplars. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, pp 293–310, 2007). The data presented consists of a semi-structured interview with a priest working in a key parish in southern Italy (Catania – Sicily) (Here, I feel it is only right to express my deepest gratitude to G. Resca, parish priest of the Chiesa Cattolica Parrocchiale dei Santi Pietro e Paolo in Catania, for his help and his sensitivity towards this research.); a corpus of funeral homilies gathered using the ethnographic method of participant observation, and other information from anthropological studies on grief management in southern Italy. The analysis will provide further evidence that funerary rites are pragmatic acts within the “pragmeme of accommodation” as defined by Capone (La Linguistique 46: 3–21, 2010a: 6). In addition, the paper will show that funerary pragmemes (and funerary practs) are subject to diachronic mutability and synchronic variation processes.
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Notes
- 1.
Capone (2005) construes pragmemes as utterances transformed by the forces of context. These transformations “reshape the original illocutionary value of a speech act by adding contextual layers of meaning, or even may change the illocutionary value of the speech act” and “are based on knowledge of a number of principled and conventional interactions between utterance meaning and certain contextual and situational configurations” (Ibid: 1360).
- 2.
This type of pragmatic act may be likened to Kecskes’s (2010) situational-bound utterances (SUBs), (i.e. Kecskes indicates that the pragmeme “inviting someone to take a seat” can actually be realized by the following SUBs: “Why don’t you sit down, Please take a seat; Sit down, please, etc.” (Ibid: 2894). See also Kecskes (2000, 2013).
- 3.
As Salmani Nodoushan (2015) notes, for the Shiites, prayers begin to be recited at the dying person’s deathbed, both by the dying person themselves and the people gathered at their bedside, because “It is believed that this will guarantee the “salvation” of the deceased and will attract God’s favor and mercy for him/her.” (Ibid: 943).
- 4.
Sometimes when a person knows they are going to die, they personally select the clothes they will wear once dead and leave instructions with close family members.
- 5.
Female professional mourners could be found in some southern regions of Italy until the 1960s. The Catholic Church then banned what had become a profitable business. As reported by Palmisciano (2003: 102), “The practice of allowing people who did not know the deceased to take part in the funerary rite, to intone laments or guide the ritual lamentation and are paid to do so, can be seen in all ancient cultures, and also in those modern ones at an ethnographical level.” [Author’s translation]
- 6.
In the past, the bodies of the wealthy deceased were carried to the cemetery in a horse-drawn carriage accompanied by a band playing funeral marches. The last funeral to be celebrated with a band was in Montecalvo Irpino (a small town in Campania in the province of Avellino) in 1989 (Siciliano 2007).
- 7.
Salmani Nodoushan argues that “this new routine is decreed by religion, but evidence can be provided to support the belief held by some people that the routine is, at least to some extent, controlled by culture” (Ibid: 944).
- 8.
This formula contains a clue to the Christian belief in the survival of the soul. The priest does not say “who we entrust to your mercy” but “who trust in your mercy”, because the deceased’s soul remains alive and continues to exist in the afterlife.
- 9.
For this reason, there exist Lectionaries from which a priest can draw when choosing the Readings and Psalms.
- 10.
Wisdom of Sirach [16–23].
- 11.
Matthew 24: 43.
- 12.
Book of Job, Chapter 14.
- 13.
Matthew 5: 13–16.
- 14.
Matthew 25: 31–46.
- 15.
Luke 12: 35–40.
- 16.
Luke 18.
- 17.
Matthew 19: 13–15.
- 18.
Mark 10: 13–16.
- 19.
The criteria used to transcribe the homilies are based on the conversational transcription system described by Matranga (2007). Transcription symbols include: (N) name; [abcd?] interrogative intonation; [abcd!] exclamatory intonation; [abcd.] conclusive: falling intonation; [abcd,] suspension: rising-falling intonation (when the separation between topic and comment follows a clear intonation pattern); [abcd] Italian code ; [abcd] dialect code (Sicilian); [abcd] emphasis that serves to highlight the emphasized segment; [- abcd -] parenthetic clauses that interrupt the linearity of speech in order to introduce specific points or further analysis; «abcd» direct quote; [abcd…] suspended speech; (…): indicates that a part of the discourse has been omitted; [/] brief pause; [//] medium pause, up to three seconds; [///] long pause, up to five seconds; [ABCD] full volume (at the top of the voice).
- 20.
Matthew 7: 24–29.
- 21.
Matthew 5: 13–16.
- 22.
Matthew 7: 24–29.
- 23.
Matthew 5: 13–16.
- 24.
This paper presents a limited number of examples. Many studies are available for a detailed comparison of the changes that have occurred in western funerary rites, such as Brancato (2007), De Gubernatis ((1890) 1971), De Martino (1975), Sozzi (2001), Thomas (1976). Interestingly, Salmani Nodoushan (2015: 945) also observes that Shiite funerary rituals “are still more or less the same”, but over time “city life is changing many of these patterns”.
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Assenza, E. (2017). Catholic Rituals of Death and Funeral Homily: A Socio-pragmatic Survey in Southern Italy. In: Parvaresh, V., Capone, A. (eds) The Pragmeme of Accommodation: The Case of Interaction around the Event of Death. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55759-5_2
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