The embodied containment of contagious power by women in specific ritual categories is also a feature of funerary practices, together with the notion that containment cumulatively changes a person's substance. Bereavement, as a life experience, leaves a cumulative trace in people's bodies. This affects both men and women. The once bereaved acquire a degree of immunity from the ravages of death power, and can assume specific roles at the funerals of others. The funeral process is structured around the imagined transition of a dead person into a spirit, achieved through the manipulation of a series of parallel identifications between the dead person and the circle of key mourners, who are most closely identified with the body (cf. Goody 1962: 188; Wilson 1957: 49). It is the extent of this identification which makes possible the series of repeat funerals which constitute the extended funeral process without, as in the case of the secondary burials described by Hertz (1960) and others (Pina Cabral 1980; Bloch 1971, 1982; Huntingdon 1973), an actual body to rebury.

The identification between mourners and deceased is most pronounced for those women closely related to the dead, who wear around their necks strips of cloth (lijemba) representing both corpse and shroud until the funeral process is over. The identification between women and houses serves to identify female mourners with the corpse, and what happens to both the core bereaved and to the corpse closely parallels what happens to the mwali.