2022 Volume 87 Issue 2 Pages 149-169
The transition from the occurrence of death to mourning does not happen automatically. It requires some steps based on their worldviews, such as making distance for mourning. This paper examines the changes of burial practices and the restructuring of the view of life and death among the Bugakhwe, one of the San groups in the northern Okavango Delta, in Botswana.
In the past, they mourned death through movement of camp after a burial. This was how they distanced themselves from death. Through contacting the neighboring pastoralists, the Bugakhwe adopted a new burial practice of using medicines for purification. This led to a shift from dealing with death in an imagined world based on actual experience to in an imagined world where the dead are absolute beings. The paper depicts how the Bugakhwe have repainted their imagined world where death and their dead are unfolded, in response to sedentarization and changing realities.
