Chapter 5. Feasts to Send-off the Dead: with Special Reference to the Jopadhola of Eastern Uganda Kiyoshi Umeya ABSTRACT: Taking the example of Jopadhola in Eastern Uganda, this chapter indicates that the feast conducted by the deceased one’s okewo (a male child of a daughter who has left the family due to marriage) after each ritual during the series of funeral rituals has a significant social meaning. Alcohol functions as a way to ease social reintegration of the deceased one, the bereaved family, and other community members during the ritual by serving as a communication tool among the dead and the living. People have been reducing the scale of this feast in the past few years for financial reasons. While this is intended only as a reflection of the modern status of this society, it has led to an unexpected result; it has become a cosmological issue as well, as it leads to relinquishing the method for properly controlling the power or agency of the dead. The Jopadhola believe that people who are unable to send out the dead properly are threatened by the curses of the dead. Based on primary materials obtained from anthropological fieldwork conducted during my long-term residency in the community, this chapter describes the dialectics of modernity and autochthony. KEYWORDS: agency of the dead, feast, funeral rites, Jopadhola, modernity, Uganda Introduction The Jopadhola1 are an ethnic group distributed across Eastern Uganda. Their land is called Padhola, literally ‘the place of Adhola,’ the legendary leader of the migration of the Jopadhola ethnic group from Bahr el Ghazal in South Sudan.2 In Padhola, feasts are fundamental and occupy an important position in various funeral ceremonies such as yikiroki (rite of burying), liedo 1 For more detailed ethnographic data concerning the Jopadhola, cf. Umeya (2014; 2015; 2018a, 2018b; 2019a; 2019b; 2020a; 2020b). 2 Ogot (1967: 65–83)
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