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ABSTRACT: Among the Maronite Christians in Lebanon, laments performed by women played a vital role in the funeral rituals until their gradual erosion beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. Today this practice has almost entirely disappeared, and its continued presence will be determined by the lifespans of the performers who are all women over the age of sixty-five. This article examines the female lament tradition in Lebanon as an integral part of the social work of mourning, and the sociopolitical and cultural factors that are leading to its disappearance. I first show how the gradual disappearance of lament has affected the expression of grief among the female mourners on both the individual and the communal levels. I then explore the impacts of modernization, immigration, the Lebanese Civil War (19751990), the advent of church parlors, and the influence of the clergy on the fading of this tradition. These factors have resulted in a new culture of mourning not dissimilar to the "modern mourning culture" that has dominated many parts of the Western world since the nineteenth century, and which discourages the collective expression of grief and promotes private emotionality and individualization of bereavement.
IT WAS a hot day on the eleventh of July in 2018, in Deir el Ahmar, a small town located in the northern Beqaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. I parked the car after a three-hour-long drive and walked with heavy steps toward my host's house. I had come to visit Nabiha Habchi or Imm Digol (as she likes to be called),1 whom I first met in 2002 while doing my fieldwork on funeral laments among the Lebanese Maronites, an ethnoreligious Christian community based in today's Lebanon. She had since lost her eldest son, Digol. As soon as she saw me, she hugged me and reproached me for my long absence. She immediately told me about Digol's death by heart attack in 2006 and shared with me her pain and suffering from losing him. After some hesitation, I asked her whether she still laments in funerals, and her immediate answer was: "Since my son died, I don't lament anymore: I only pray." She sang to me a hymn addressed to the Virgin Mary, asking for her intercession for the repose...