In this paper, I intend to develop a narrative about how Ethiopians (both in Ethiopia and the Ethiopian diasporas) deal with death (with a focus on funeral and burial practices) financially, culturally, politically, and emotionally. Drawing from ethnographic interviews I conducted with diasporic Ethiopians living in Los Angeles and Seattle in the US about their experiences with Iddirs, Ethiopian “informal” insurances, I analyze ways in which people form, manage, and use iddirs to deal with death in transnational and diasporic contexts, highlighting the elasticity, changing meanings, and functions of iddirs. In doing so, I explore questions including: How are iddirs formed in diaspora? Who does what during funerals and why? What are the meanings of participating in iddirs? What are some of the mechanisms that people use to shoulder the financial, social, and emotional burdens of funerals? Are traditional funeral insurances such as iddirs serving the living, or the Dead, or both? How are practices associated to death in Ethiopia different from and similar to those practices in the Ethiopian diasporas? How is the home-diaspora nexus shaped by the repatriation of dead bodies from the diasporas to Ethiopia? What are the cultural politics of repatriation? Whose dead bodies can and cannot be repatriated, and why? Using specific stories of iddirs and their varied uses in Los Angeles and Seattle and invoking my own personal experiences with funerals of my deceased mother and two brothers, I demonstrate how practices of iddirs change over time and across various national/cultural contexts. I argue that iddirs serve the living more than the dead, providing fresh insights into the future-care for the afterlife in Africa and its diaspora.
