Avoidance Speech After a Death: A Documented Cross-Cultural Pattern

Many indigenous societies observe a taboo against speaking the personal name of someone recently dead, a practice documented widely among Aboriginal Australian peoples and among a number of Native American, Melanesian and Southern African communities, without belonging to any single one of those traditions as its origin or its exclusive property. The Encyclopedia of Religion describes the underlying concern as typically twofold, that naming the dead may recall or disturb the departed spirit before it has properly completed its passage, and that hearing the name spoken may cause the bereaved renewed and unwanted grief, both concerns treating the name itself as carrying an active connection to the person rather than functioning as a neutral label. Communities observing the practice commonly employ a circumlocution, a description or a substitute term standing in for the name, or temporarily avoid using any word that closely resembles the sound of the name, a linguistic accommodation that can, in cases where the resemblance is close and the community small, touch a surprising amount of everyday vocabulary for the period the avoidance is observed. Taboo, Franz Steiner's classic study of the anthropological category, cautions against reading every such practice as expressing an identical underlying belief, since the documented cases vary in duration, in strictness and in the reasoning communities themselves give for observing it, even where the outward shape looks similar from one tradition to the next.