Liminal meanings: sexually charged Giriama funerary ritual and unsettled participant frameworks

This article analyzes women's obscenity in Giriama funerary songs, and argues that the unresolved meaning of these songs can be characterized in terms of the contests over their participant frameworks. I begin by suggesting a distinction between metapragmatically explicit rituals with clearly established participant frameworks, and metapragmatically opaque rituals characterized by ambiguous and potentially resistant liminal behavior that tends to lack a clear participant framework. The conflicted social role of the Giriama womens' songs instructs us about the ways in which the multiple affordances of liminal ritual, in conjunction with destabilizing social change, can give rise to contests over ritual meaning.