Bodily grief work meets Christian interiority: The Meru case

This article focuses on a dramatic emotional expression of grief and explores how the traditional mourning practice-played out by Meru women, in northern Tanzania-encounters Christian interiority. The Meru have been exposed to modernization and westernization, through colonization, missionization, and later through independence, development projects and global neoliberal economy, but according to the Lutheran church, mourning women still behave like pagans. The article explores the gendering of emotions and the symbolism of the womb which seems to be the seat of female emotions and the idiom of life and death and tries to understand why women mourn their loss in an outwardly emotional way.