According to S.S. Sered (1994), “Religions dominated by women” are religions in which women have the roles of nurturers, healers, primary childcare providers, and emotional supporters to mothers in case of children’s diseases and premature death. Religions dominated by women are usually polytheistic since they don’t recognize a unique male authority. Taking inspiration from Sered’s work, the aim of this panel is to investigate how religions can help a mother – not necessarily a biological mother – in going through the loss of a child from a comparative perspective. We will go beyond what we call “motherhood as an institution” (Rich 1976; that is, maternal paradigms constructed by religious – usually male – authorities for believers); to focus exclusively on “mothering as an experience” (we would like to recall that, as Ruddick 1989 argues, “to mother” is a gender-inclusive verb). To put it another way, the panel does not intend to investigate eschatological theoretical issues. What we are interested in is: in which ways can concretely religion comfort a desperate mother? Do other women (also mothers?) play a role in the case of premature deaths? In ancient religions, which signs do we have of the usage of religious means by a mother to overcome the pain and remain close to her lost offspring?
Against the opinion of several scholars of the last century, we believe that the death of an infant was experienced with great pain even in the ancient world. The pain probably belonged to all members of the family, but it was certainly mostly that of the mother. Some recent research has shown that there is a wealth of evidence in myths, literary sources, archaeology (especially sanctuary female and children devotions offerings) that show how much ancient Roman and Italic populations hoped and prayed for safe and healthy birth and cared lovingly for infant and children especially in the early insecure and dangerous stages of life. In this paper we want to investigate grieve and loss especially in funerary evidence. We aim at investigating by what means mothers tried to account for their children death and by what means they tried to stay close to them after their death. Francesca Fulminante will explore funerary evidence in Central Italy during the Early Iron Age. Firstly, she will re-consider the well-known phenomenon of suggrundaria (infant burials among the houses), for which scholars have provided several explanations, but remains still not fully understood. Besides this she will search for expressions of maternal grieve or maternal presence in Latin and central Italian buried communities and try to offer an explanation either for positive or negative (hidden) evidence. Giulia Pedrucci will focus her research on the presence in the tombs of statuettes depicting women with infants. They are rather rare objects in tombs in central Italy, but they increase in Magna Greacia and Sicily. We find, for instance, figurines of the breastfeeding dea nutrix in Roman Gaul in children’s graves, but not in ancient Italy. She will try to investigate the reason for this absence and, on the other hand, why some of these objects are present in funerary contexts of the more southern territories (where, on the other hand, they are rather rare in sanctuaries, unlike what happens in central Italy).
In 1988 the concept of Hotspots of biodiversity took solid roots (Myers, N. (1988). “Threatened biotas: ‘Hot spots’ in tropical forests”. Environmentalist. 8: 187–208) and hitherto 36 large areas have been singled out all around the world. They are biogeographic regions with significant levels of biodiversity threatened by human habitation, and international organizations such as the Worldwide Fund for Nature support them. Humankind realized that men are threatening wildlife and that this will deeply damage human life itself. The idea of preserving and protecting plants and animals in their original environment is an ancient concern of human societies which was felt more in antiquity than in the Middle Ages and the modern period, after the dismission of the ancient, pagan gods.
The sacred groves of the Italic and Greek world have been the theme of a conference in Naples, at the Centre Jean Bérard, one century after The Golden Bough of James Frazer and questions were raised then, especially because of the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon. The sacred groves were precise áreas where plants and animals were protected, where violence was forbiden and thus federal meeting of different peoples could take place safely, where slaves became free and other extraordinary facts occurred. In the Near East, similar precincts were created, and we know that sometimes the Jews succeeded in destroying them. In some áreas of the world unaffected by the monotheisms sacred groves were created and are still existing. They are particularly numerous in India, where they are more appreciated now than in the past because naturalists realized that they contributed to preserving the ancient environment, with its fauna and flora, thanks to the pagan gods worshipped there. Similar phenomena are known also in Africa and in the Far East and their knowledge allows us to understand their functions, also in classical antiquity. They have been particularly important for peoples whose economy was based on agriculture and breeding of animals. Their number increased since fields were used for human purposes and human societies robbed land from wild plants and animals. A more precise distinction was made, consequently, between gods of wildlife and gods of civilization.
The aim of the contribution is to address the following questions, posed by the panel:
How does Buddhism concretely comfort a desperate mother?
Which role do other mothers play in this process?
How do Buddhist mothers overcome pain and remain close to their lost children?
My perspective combines the religious studies ethnographical (cultural tradition, material culture and the founding narrative's analysis) and the philosophy of religious emotions perspectives.
My focus will be on the narrative analysis of the two stories from the Buddhist Pāli Canon (ca. 2. CE) about grieving mothers Paṭācārā and Kisāgotamī who both lost their children and subsequently found their ways to the Buddha, became Buddhist nuns and experienced the Awakening.
The stories are significant in the emic perspective. They serve as canonical narratives and ritual templates for the tradition of religious coping with mother’s loss of children from the beginnings of the Buddhist cultural tradition till now (Film “Patachara”, Nepal 2010, Film “Ape Kaalaye Patachara, Sri Lanka 2016). However, they are often overlooked in the ethnographical and religious studies etic perspective with few exceptions (Heim 2008, Schmidt-Leukel 2017).
The case study will show that the structure of the Paṭācārā and Kisāgotamī narrative provides consolation for other grieving Buddhist mothers through “livinig trough the narrative” and experiencing the Buddhist religious emotion of compassion (karuṇa) and guidance of the meditation practice for the similarly concerned grieving mothers.
The case study will also show that the canonical narratives of the Paṭācārā and Kisāgotamī picture Buddhist mothers’ grief as religious emotion that helps the concerned mothers to find their way to the Buddhist path of the Awakening to cope with the tragic situation.
Literature:
Heim, Maria: Buddhism, in: Corrigan, John (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, Oxford 2008, 17-34.
Schmidt-Leukel, Perry: Buddhismus verstehen. Geschichte und Ideenwelt einer ungewöhnlichen religion, Gütersloh 2017.
Serikov, Vladislav: Artikulierbarkeit und Motivationskraft religiöser Gefühle, forthcoming.
A vast literature exists about mourning as a strong social event. Since Marcel Mauss (1968), mourning is linked to emotions as they are experienced by individuals and the group. For this reason, it has psychological, social and religious implications, especially for mothers, when it is linked to the loss of children. Studies showed that mothers, who experienced the suicide of their adolescent children, suffered from depression (Brent & al. 1996). The literature mentions that even though mothers are the most affected by the loss of a child, they fail to assess how their other children are coping with the same event (Hogan & Balk 1990). The maladjustment caused by death generally, and by the loss of child specifically, has been well studied in recent years (Barrera & al. 2013).
Due to the impact of death on individual social ties and wellbeing, many sociological studies shed light on strategies used by parents to cope with the death of a child. Mothers were found to cry, read, and write on loss and grief, help others, and stay alone (Schwab 1990). For this reason, the quality of mothers’ relationships with doctors and medical staff (Camacho-Ávila 2019), family and friends (Nuss 2014) may be palliative in the bereavement process. The quality of mothers’ relationships and wellbeing related with the loss of a child may be aggravated by structural violence (Sered 2005) that reflects the inequality in the face of death (Glaser & Strauss 1974). Also, the community violence (Rafanell & Sawicka 2020) may impact mothers’ mourning experience negatively. In spite of that, some studies pay attention to the fact that an uncomfortable context does not mean that mothers cannot mourn their lost children (Einarsdottir 2004).
Religious activities and religious discourse as coping strategies, among others, are most used by mothers to bereave their lost children (Ohnuma, 2007). This strategy is not only most used, but it can be the most important (Ungureanu & Sandberg 2010). For Its important weight, religious healing is becoming more and more controversial (Schoepflin 2003).
In Islam, child death and mothers grieving are still misunderstood by scholars and there is a scarce literature about the topic in a Western context (Hedayat, 2006). Such conclusions, according to our knowledge, could be said about the Moroccan context. Apart from some studies that focused on the question of child adoption even if it is banned by Islam (Fioole, 2015) and others that showed the presence of religious discourse about death during mourning (Lakhiour 2017), nothing is really done, in the Moroccan context, about mothers’ experience of grieving when they lose a child. Some recent studies had mentioned that, in the Moroccan context, the relation between mothers and their offspring tends to be characterized by secular values (Darai & Agudal 2020).
For those reasons, the present study aims to answers this question: How do Mothers experience and describe their mourning their children?