João José Reis, Death Is a Festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

In Death is a Festival, João José Reis examines an intriguing, unlikely occurrence: a rebellion against a cemetery. In 1836, in the city of Bahia, a diverse group of people protested a law that, invoking reasons of public health, prohibited church burials and gave a private company the monopoly on interments in Salvador. What began as a group of confraternities formally protesting a law that went against both their social mission and their economic survival unfolded into the Cemiterada: an angry crowd stoning a recently built cemetery on the outskirts of the city. To make sense of this event, Reis offers a vivid reconstruction of the economics and politics of dying in nineteenth-century Bahia—and the disruptive effects of emerging discourses of modernity, civilization, and hygiene.

The Cemiterada was not an isolated event. It broke out during a turbulent period of free and enslaved people uprisings in Bahia, a deeply unequal, unfair, and racially eschewed place at the time. Two revolts bracket the Cemiterada: in 1835, the revolt of the malês (enslaved African Muslims and freedmen) and in 1837 the Sabinada, a serious insurgence where rebels occupied Salvador for four months. The people of Bahia were no strangers to the logic of rebellions. Yet, as Reis shows, the revolt against the cemetery remains a special case. Drawing from a wide range of archival sources—travelers’ accounts, wills, laws, newspapers, medical journals—, Death is a Festival argues that the reasons behind this revolt lie beyond mere economic interests and antiquated religious fervor. Although both played an important role, the defense of religious ideas and practices regarding death, the dead, funeral rites, and concepts of “purity” drove the conflict and its aftermath.

Dying reflected and reinforced social inequality in Bahia. The rituals, symbols, and practices surrounding death mirrored the economic system and social hierarchies. From hiring poor people to attend or cry at a funeral, choosing grave clothes, to the number of candles bought for the occasion, many Bahians planned these rites carefully to project certain images. Fifty priests looked better than ten. Ostentation, desire, and devotion lie at the core of the arrangements of funerary symbols and practices. But dying also reflected a way of life: noisy, pompous, contradictory. Contingent yet carefully posed, rituals and ceremonies often intermingled the sacred and the profane, inverted social hierarchies, and weaved once disconnected communities—a world where death entailed both weeping and dancing. Sacralizing death meant celebrating life.

Anthropologists do extensive fieldwork and write constantly on death, dying, and the worlds that surround them, especially in Latin America. Two years after the publication of Death is a Festival, Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, a rather bleak portrait of death in Brazil, appeared. In his book, Reis adopts an anthropological lens to offer a “thick description” of every detail of funerary practices and beliefs in Salvador. He deploys classic anthropological works, such as Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage and Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process, to unpack the narrative and meaning behind these rites, their relationships with social structures: put simply, how they make sense. Reis also cites more recent works of anthropology, such as Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason, but only to discuss the possible meaning of red shrouds (p. 103).

But Reis’ work differs in a meaningful way: he was not there. Being a historical study, his thick descriptions draw heavily from foreign chroniclers, who apparently attended these events regularly and jotted down every detail they could remember, like most anthropologists do. Britons, Frenchmen, and a German mercenary, left invaluable records of funerary rites in Brazil. Reis masterfully exploits these sources, but by not questioning their motives, their standpoints, he reproduces the making of otherness that these documents entail. They wrote some things down and not others for a reason; they let some things slide because they seemed normal and focused on exotic details to engage and surprise, as anthropologists did. The book and its readers would have profited immensely from a reflection on his sources—or better: his coauthors.

Death is a Festival closes with the medicalization of death, and the laws and policies that shaped public health in nineteenth-century Bahia. Doctors held views on death, religion, civilization, purity, and burials that differed drastically from traditional, Catholic Brazilian tradition—the intersection that produced the Cemiterada. Reis traces this battle, the eventual triumph of the hygienists in discourse, and the dismal failure of their policies in their implementation stage. Going back to the concrete law that triggered the revolt and its motives, Reis successfully sheds light on his subject (the introduction reads differently the second time). The previous chapters filled with detailed descriptions and stories, however, yield the broader message of the book. In the words of Octavio Paz: “Tell me how you die, and I will tell you who you are.”