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traditional society. I As a polluted and dangerous state staining the ordinary "profane"
course of life. it introduced a special or "sacred time," An essentially different behaviour
was to be substituted for that applying to everyday as symbolic expression of this
exorcisiz.ing of death, the enemy and "stranger:"
In Richard's Harbour as soon as someone got sick to a degree where there
was little hope, to me it seemed as jf a sort of different atmosphere took
over. Everyone became concerned about the sick person and the first
words spoken to anyone you met would be an inquiry into the condition of
"poor old uncle/aunt. ". When the person was lying on his
deathbed and his death seemed obvious, the people seldom \Vent fishing.
I can remember my mother telling me to behave myself because somebody
was dying. 2
The cognition of death, indeed, was drawn from the symbols and behaviour
Newfoundlanders regarded as characterizing the stranger, the most abnonnal category with
which they were familiar. Outsiders to the small and stable outpon villages were once
apprehended as suspicious if not roundly malevolent. A "non-resident death" occurring in
the community, as in the case of shipwrecks, meant symlx>lic contagion of the worst kind.
The strange corpse would be waked in the church, but never in any of the community
houses for fear that "the corpses of two residents of the house would soon be brought
OUL") Through their association with death, the deceased but also his/her close survivors,
the "mourners," were temporarily set aside from the group owing to their symbolic
contamination with the deceased and its own unfixed Oiminal), hence dangerous, SlalUS:
During mourning, the living mourners and the deceased constitute a
special group, situated between the world of the living and the world of
the dead, and how soon living individuals leave that group depends on the
closeness of their relationship with the dead person. 4
The transitional period of the mourners was a counterpart to that of the deceased. In
Cat Harbour and many other ewfoundland communities, this discrimination was
signified in terms of a general black and white symlx>lism: outsiders could be spoken of as
the "blackest kind of strangers," the devil was "the black man," men were "getting blnck"
when drunk and violent, C.atholics were held to be "pretty dark" in this all Protestant
community, and mummers and mourners were referred to as "the dark ones." This
symlx>lism confined the latter into a distinct category:
I MU FLA FSC 68-3/98; other such pracliccs consisted in covering all mirrors and
suspending all cleaning in the wake room.
2MUNFLA ms 68-20, p. \-2.
3MUNFLA FSC 65·2/86.
4 Van Gcnncp. Rites 147.