Audio/Video Recordings of Mourning Rituals

Death wail of a Torres Strait Islander
Death wail, male vocal solo
Death crying, male vocal solo
The death wail is a keening, mourning lament, generally performed in ritual fashion after the death of a member of a family or tribe. The practice is most commonly associated with Indigenous Australian peoples. These British Library recordings were made on wax cylinders by the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, Australia in 1898.

South Indian Funereal Wails
Background, recordings and analysis of traditional weeping songs and wails performed by professional South Indian mourners.

Waiwai mourning chant
The Waiwai people are indigenous to Guyana and the north central area of the Brazilian Amazon close to the border with Venezuela. Traditional dances imitate movements of local animals and birds.

Funeral ceremony of the Tiwi
Youtube clip. The Tiwi are indigenous of the Tiwi islands in Australia. Mourning rituals include body painting and not feeding oneself (being fed by others). Narrative dances ritually depict everyday life and historical events.

Funeral ceremony of the Aboriginal
Youtube clip. Contemporary Aboriginal Australians of the Arnhem Land. Warning: images of the deceased.

Aguaruna Mourning 1977
From Anthropology Professor Michael F. Brown: "This is about 5 minutes of an intensive mourning event in the Upper Amazon of Peru. A young man had died, apparently of complications from dysentary, but . . . who knows what actually killed him? Anyway, the audio quality is pretty bad because I had the tape machine in my backpack. It sounds chaotic and it was. Toward the very end of the tape, though, you can get a sense of the unusual way women keen at such events. It's a musical form of extreme weeping that is hard to sort out from the noise of others screaming, men crying and shouting out threats to the unnamed sorcerers who took the man's life. It was even more intense in person than it sounds on the sample." Read an excerpt of Prof. Brown's fieldnotes here.