“Laments Are Made by Life and Pain”: Ethnographic Interviews as a Context for Performing Greek Death Laments

Abstract

This article investigates how death laments were constructed by their performers as a genre and acquired their meaning through ethnographic interviews conducted in three Greek mountain villages in 2017. The analysis is based on anthropological and folkloristic performance-oriented research. The situational communication with and about laments, especially the process of negotiating an appropriate performance, proved to be a fruitful source of knowledge about the local lament genre. It is argued that the role of musical features of performance, such as the tempo of singing, could be established as prominent in the process of constructing the local genre of the death lament in the interviews.