Uncanny experience and its meaning-making as moral experience

Mencej, Mirjana (author)

Anthropological, historical, and folkloristic studies have shown that there is a close connection between morality and cosmology in many cultures and that the dead, as spirits, play an important role in upholding moral norms and expectations and respond to their violation. However, these studies have rarely endeavored to highlight the unique individual experiences behind the general argument. In this article I focus on individual experiences. I will argue that encounters with dead agents are moral experiences within which moral problems can be fruitfully negotiated, leading to their possible resolution. More specifically, based on the fieldwork I conducted in 2016 and 2024 among the Muslim population in the rural areas of central Bosnia, I will trace the ways of personal coping with the consequences of violations of moral rules of behavior, as culturally encoded in Bosnian Muslim culture, and the search for their meaning.

• Language: English
• Keywords: the dead, ghosts, cosmology, morality, moral norms, ethics of care, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Muslims, Islam
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FF - Faculty of Arts
• Publication date: 01.01.2025
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: Str. 345-371
• Numbering: no. 4, 72
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-171129
• UDC: 27-565-055.2(37)"-0017"
• ISSN on article: 0029-5973
• DOI: 10.1163/15685276-07204010
• COBISS.SI-ID: 245047811
• Publication date in RUL: 07.08.2025

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Numen
• Shortened title: Numen
• Publisher: Brill
• ISSN: 0029-5973
• COBISS.SI-ID: 3887628

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: mrtvi, duhovi, kozmologija, etika, moralne norme, Bosna in Hercegovina, muslimani, islam

Projects

• Funder: Other - Other funder or multiple funders
• Funding programme: ERC
• Project number: 101095729
• Name: The roles of the agency of the dead in the lives of individuals in contemporary society
• Acronym: DEAGENCY

• Funder: ARIS - Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency
• Project number: P6-0187
• Name: Etnološke raziskave kulturnih znanj, praks in oblik socialnosti