Marriage practices in the Majority world may differ considerably from dominant cultural ideals in the Minority world of ‘romantic love’ and ‘companionate marriage’ based on monogamous relationships. Similarly, mourning in the ‘Rest’ of the world often diverges from assumptions within Anglophone bereavement studies of a ‘grieving journey’. This paper provides a gendered, spatial, relational analysis of responses to the death of a spouse in Senegal, based on in-depth interviews with Serer women and men in rural and urban communities. A heightened sense of relationality with the deceased surrounded widows' bodies, with permeable boundaries that needed to be contained and “purified” through widowhood-mourning practices in order to restore social cohesion. For men, the space of the home was transformed, sometimes unbearably, by the loss of a wife and mother due to their central role in home-making practices, transforming men's relational being. ‘Embodied relationality’, alongside material constraints, also shaped perspectives on remarriage. The paper reveals the diverse material, embodied, spatial, and often explicitly gendered, ways that the effects of the death of a spouse may be manifested in the experience of the living person and draws attention to the permeable embodied boundaries of ‘relational being’ that encompass the living and the dead.

多数世界的婚姻习惯可能与一夫一妻制的基于“一夫一妻制”的“浪漫之爱”和“同伴婚姻”在少数族裔世界中的主导文化理想大不相同。同样，在世界“其他地方”的哀悼通常与英语丧亲丧亡研究中关于“悲痛旅程”的假设有所不同。本文基于对塞内加尔配偶死亡的反应进行了性别，空间，关系分析，其基础是对农村和城市社区的Serer男女进行了深入访谈。与死者包围的寡妇的身体之间的联系感增强，需要通过丧葬哀悼的方式来遏制和“净化”渗透的边界，以恢复社会凝聚力。对于男人来说，房屋的空间发生了变化，有时难以忍受，由于夫妻在家庭实践中起着重要作用而失去母亲，从而改变了男人的关系。“体现的关系”，加上物质限制，也塑造了关于再婚的观点。这篇论文揭示了多样的物质，体现的，空间的，并且通常是性别明确的方式，可以在活人的经历中体现配偶死亡的后果，并提请人们注意“关系存在”的可渗透的体现边界，即包括生与死。