Abstract
Much current thinking about the political importance of folk rituals is influenced by the work of Antonio Gramsci and EP Thompson. Gramsci discouraged the conceptual separation between modern culture and popular folk culture, believing that folk practices had the potential to challenge hegemonic beliefs and “bring about the birth of a new culture.” Thompson felt that folk practices were contexts in which working class people could define and express their own values, which could be “antagonistic to the overarching system of domination and control” (Limón:1983:42). Working from the premise that ethnic celebrations in the United States represent a “public sphere” where conversations about identity and politics occur, this essay focuses on the communication of political messages during Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States. Using insights from EP Thompson’s essay, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” I will discuss how US Day of the Dead rituals frequently operate along a “moral economy” of social protest, encouraging moral reflection on issues of political importance and revealing dimensions of repression normally overlooked by the dominant culture. Similar to the protests of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile and Argentina, politicized Day of the Dead rituals in the US allow what Michael Taussig has called “the tremendous moral and magical power of the unquiet dead to flow into the public sphere, empower individuals and challenge the would be guardians of the nation state” (Taussig:1994:280).