Death Practices Among the Circassians in Israel: An Ethnolinguistic Study

This paper investigates the death practices in the largely undocumented linguaculture (interwoven ways of speaking and living) of the Circassian-speaking village of Kfar Kama in Israel. It employs two approaches, ethnography and the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Through the ethnographic approach, the paper provides a detailed account of what happens from the moment a person dies in Kfar Kama to the 40^th-day memorial. Using NSM, the paper presents eight explications (simple definitions) and cultural scripts (short texts capturing cultural norms) related to death practices in Kfar Kama. The findings contribute to the fields of linguistics, thanatology, and anthropology, among other fields.