Remembered / forgotten: The Cemetery and the Creation of Place (original) (raw)
Related papers
Place and identity: What can we learn from the dead?
Craft and Design Enquiry, 2015
In his book Last Landscapes (2003), Ken Warpole notes that, for a number of reasons, cemetery architecture is the most conservative aspect of the institutions and practices surrounding death and memorialisation in the West. This is starting to change, with designers and architects responding to the groundswell of sentiment demanding that we moderns modernise our ceremonies and associated institutions. In the following essay, I look at the different demands and opportunities in urban and rural cemetery design, and focus on the multifunctional roles that cemeteries have played in the past and might yet play again. This essay is the meeting place of previous work on paddock architecture in the Australian landscape and a recent project looking at death and the landscape. I am interested in the ways that design might respond to the nexus identified by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as ‘reactionary religion and progressive technological medicine’ (2013: 421), which can bar the possibility of a dignified death and a dignifying place for the dead among the living. This doesn’t mean a return to the ostentation of Victorian mourning rituals or adopting the ‘death as party’ practices of Ghana or Mexico—which isn’t to say we can’t learn anything from these. Instead, the task seems to be finding a way to give meaning to the values of specific lives and the contexts in which they are embedded, and to provide better support structures (both material, atmospheric and symbolic) for those who gather around the absence created by the departed.
Conflict Landscapes: Materiality and Meaning in Contested Places, 2021
Landscape is complex and slippery, a concept rather than a single place in historical time, a cultural image as well as a physical location (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988: 1). It is, fundamentally, a palimpsest of multi-vocal overlapping layers possessing different meanings for those who choose and engage with an aspect important to them. Each layer represents a physical engagement with space and time, and thus a world of social experience and imagination. Landscapes possess memory-making and memory-evoking qualities that connect to our cultural, emotional, and spiritual lives (Basso 1996), and so can serve as sensuous metaphors of identity. In this sense, every landscape embroiders the past with the present. How much more so for landscapes of modern conflict, those bloody markers of industrialized war, the defining human activity of the twentieth century; created by the suffering and death of those whose remains have become part of the terrain-sometimes indistinguishable from, and at one with, the shattered earth and debris of war. These landscapes possess arguably the most intense and enduring legacies of pain, suffering, redemption, sacrifice, and in a world of materiality, of broken objects large and small. Such places are not simply the fossilized remnants of battle-space, but rather volatile dynamic entities, constantly changing their shape and significance for successive generations who engage with them in new and often unpredictable ways. Conflict landscapes are proactive, stationary yet ever-changing, and open to many kinds of interpretation and representation. As Schäuble (2011: 52) observes for the Second World War Partisan landscapes of the Croatian-Bosnian borderlands, The land does not allow its inhabitants to forget and is in turn also not allowed to forget as the people of the region persistently charge the territory 1 THE DEAD AND THEIR SPACES Origins and meanings in modern conflict landscapes Nicholas J. Saunders 4 Nicholas J. Saunders with commemorative meaning and erect monuments and religious shrines to that effect. Volatility is a characteristic here-for while in the immediate aftermath of the conflict the dead haunted the memories of the living, 'since the 1980s the living seem to haunt the dead in an attempt to secure them as allies for their changing political endeavours' (ibid.: 53). Here, I explore modern conflict landscapes from the perspective of the First World War as the event which created and perpetuated the idea and the reality of such places, so different in intensity and scale to the landscapes of pre-twentiethcentury conflict. I do so in part because the legacies of 1914-1918 include the effects which the multidimensional nature of that war have had on many if not most subsequent conflict landscapes (e.g. González-Ruibal 2008; Garfi 2019), of which, as I write, the area around Idlib in northwestern Syria is the most recent (Anon. 2020). I do not deal here with other kinds of First World War landscapes-those focused on military training, the Home Front of munitions factories and other economic wartime activities (Saunders 2010: 202-212; Brown 2017; Cocroft and Stamper 2018), and cemeteries, though these are equally the result of modern conflict. For my purposes, I deal with battle-zone landscapes and draw mainly on the evidence of three case studies-the Western Front (France and Belgium), the Italian Front (Italy and Slovenia), and the Middle East (Jordan). Each of these reveals distinctive elements which illustrate the complex and enduring nature of historically recent conflict landscapes and their infinite capacity to shape-shift meaning, significance, emotion, and cultural and political resonance. At once physical and metaphysical, all landscapes are made by and for people, and those of the First World War still conceal many of the individuals who created them between 1914 and 1918, either as undiscovered bodies, body parts, or millions of microscopic bone fragments. In such places, literally and figuratively, human beings and landscape have become one. Lying sometimes just centimetres beneath the modern land surface, these landscape makers sometimes return, bursting forth into the modern world by virtue of urban construction, motorway building, accidental explosions of ordnance, and sometimes archaeological excavations. Here, time, space, history, memory, and chance intertwine, most notably (and emotionally) perhaps when families who had forgotten or never knew of their First World War ancestors are informed that they have been found. At such times, a paradox is born-absence becomes presence with a phone call or email, a name is erased from the list of the missing, and temporal and geographical distance collapses (see Saunders 2017). The human cost of creating First World War landscapes was often described day by day, sometimes hour by hour, in memoirs and regimental (and private) war diaries, producing what must be some of the most exhaustively documented, personalized, and spiritualized locations ever to be considered for archaeological, anthropological, and historical study. Despite this, the remains of those who
Chapter 12. Spatial Narratives of Death, Memory, and Transcendence
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 2008
Analysis of the spatial and historical dimensions of mortuary expressions, and explicit recognition of their basis in personal, social, and symbolic memory, are the foundations of an emerging approach to the archaeology of death. Spatial representations of death are viewed in this perspective as elements in the ritual creation and maintenance of personal and social memories of the dead to serve the needs and interests of the living. Examination of a wide range of case studies shows that the scale and form of mortuary expressions are a function of the social and political scale for which memories are relevant and the circumstances in which their representation remains meaningful and effective. The growth and transformation of these expressions over time can therefore be read as a historical narrative of individual choices made in response to spatial representations of the immediate past and perceptions of current and anticipated social and political circumstances.
Building Anew: Spaces of Grief and Memories of Death
Theory and Event, 2022
This article analyzes the investment of contemporary political techniques in the destruction and building anew of urban spaces of violence in relation to the politics of collective memory. Using the framework of necropolitics, I show that the spatial methods of necropolitics, such as destruction, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare, work to regulate collective memory on both the involuntary and traumatic levels. Critical engagement with the necropolitical work of memory, opens the possibility of another kind of archive that forges counter-memories from out of necropolitical spaces.
Hallowed Ground, Place, and Culture : The Cemetery and the Creation of Place
Space and Culture, 2006
Throughout most recorded history, human societies have used various types of cemeteries for burial purposes; this theme points to humanity's need to construct a meaning behind death and reflect life into the places where the dead are interred. Whether the bodies of the deceased are placed in the ground, within elaborate tombs, or simply in the presence of ancient or contemporary monuments, their location holds symbolic meaning as well as practical historical meaning for the surrounding living community. This article explores cemetery culture and architecture and their contribution to the social construction of the cemetery landscape. After exploring the historical development of the modern cemetery, the cemeteries of New Orleans, Louisiana, are used as a case study to illustrate how the cemetery, as a place, is influenced by culture and has cultural significance.
Cemeteries as cultural landscapes
Mortality, 2003
This review calls attention to two classics which challenged me to grapple anew with fundamental questions: why do we have cemeteries, and what they are about? So many different things go on in cemeteries beside disposal and mourning. Why? And how do these various activities influence how we define and think about cemeteries? In 1930, W. Lloyd Warner brought the anthropological research model developed during his study of the Australian aborigines to his research on Yankee City, a New England community selected as a microcosm of the larger American society. The fifth volume in the Yankee City series interpreted the collective symbolic life of the city and included a section on the cemetery. The book's initial chapters dealt with the economic and socio-political symbolism ordering the community, while the concluding chapters integrated Freudian symbolism and Christian iconography. This review concentrates on those chapters where Warner presented a theoretical and methodological model, exploring the characteristics and multiple meanings of the cemetery as a cultural landscape. Drawing on Durkheim's theoretical lead, Warner analysed the cemetery as a 'collective representation', a sacred, symbolic replica of the living community that expressed many of the community's basic beliefs and values. Materially, the cemetery is a specific type of socially bounded space where daily funerals and Memorial Day celebrations ritually order relationships between the spiritual dead and the secular world of the living. The funeral symbolically removes the
POLITesi - Archivio digitale delle tesi di laurea e di dottorato, 2020
From a historico-philosophical reading of graveyards and their development into the modern cemetery form, the thesis investigates the political scope of funerary spaces by articulating concepts of territoriality, politics, and monumentality. The role of architecture as the formalising element of death will be illustrated through paradigmatic examples in history, with fictional or unrealised project for cemeteries offering a glimpse into the potential for cemeteries to operate either as enforcers of societal norms or as transgressors to them. The central portion of this work puts forth a succinct architectural theory for the contemporary large-scale cemetery. Arguments are drawn from a range of urban theories, in particular those of Aldo Rossi in L'architettura della città and of O.M. Ungers in Die Stadt in der Stadt. The contradictions that arise from such an operation are not wholly denied nor embellished. Instead, a series of exits towards expanded readings of death in the contemporary city are proposed. These ramifications are characterised by the problematisation of death and its spaces outside of traditional architectural theory and towards issues of identity, nationhood, and signification in the age of global migration flows and the dissolution of unitarian identities. With a critical understanding of death and monumentality established, the thesis shifts its attention to one specific cemetery case, Cimitero Maggiore in Milan, and develops a global analysis of it on both urban architectural levels. Accompanying the text are a series of schemes and illustrations by the author which suggest an alternative mode of thinking of the cemetery's future by proposing analogies to the city and its diverse architectural types. This graphic conclusion posits the possibility of conceiving an architecture for death which fosters open-ended narratives for a society increasingly marked by diversity in faith, norms and identity.
Embodied Memories of Place and People: Death and Society in an Early Urban Community
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 2008
Relationships to places may also find expression through the agencies of myth, prayer, music, dance, art, architecture, and in many communities, recurrent forms of religious and political rituals. Thus...places and their meanings are continually woven into the fabric of social life, anchoring it to features of the landscape and blanketing it with layers of significance that few can fail to appreciate.
Identity of Place – Revitalization of Memory. Home, Sanctuary, Cemetery
In this article I attempt to explore the relationship between identity and memory. If we define identity as a sense of belonging to a community with which one shares ideals and values, we shall arrive at the conclusion that, memory and continuity, especially in the face of the „liquid modernity” of our times, may play the pivotal role in preserving, and even have the power to restore that identity. Revitalization of the space, the process which consists in giving it back the significance it has lost, should therefore be accompanied by the parallel intellectual process of restoring the memory. Human existing has been inevitably defined by shaping and imbuing with meaning the three basic categories of space: the home, the sanctuary, and the burying ground. Following the train of thought of J. Tischner, I look into their significance for our culture, and discuss three examples of thus understood revitalization of the memory: Szetejnie – the birthplace of Czesław Miłosz, a tiny Lithuanian village which has become a centre of creative activity and the living symbol of Polish-Lithuanian reconcilliation, Wierszalin – a settlement in the midst of the Knyszyński Forest, near Supraśl, where the pre-war self-professed prophet, Eliasz Klimowicz, preached the end of the world, and whose legend and personality stand behind the conception of the avant-garde internationally acclaimed Theatre Wierszalin, and Jedwabne – the symbolic monument-cemetery, as a terrifying example of denying the place its identity, of choosing not to remember. By putting Jedwabne under scrutiny we may perhaps be able to understand the process of transformation of space, in which a home and sanctuary become at once a cemetery. This may not just happen to a village, or a city, but may also – as the experience of the Shoah has shown in the case of Polish Jews – touch the whole country. Keywords: revitalization, identity, memory.
For part of its short tenure, the Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery (1870-1890), served as the largest African American cemetery in the District of Columbia. However, no sooner than it was founded, local residents and city officials conspired to have it subsequently condemned and the land reappropriated. Largely succeeding in their efforts to remove the cemetery and the memory of those interred, the lives of more than 8,400 African Americans and several European Americans remain concealed underground for more than a century. In 2005, soil erosion revealed the remains of several burials and with it the memory of the historic cemetery resurfaced. Using data acquired from an on-going archival and archaeological survey, this paper will demonstrate how deliberate attempts to erase the historical memory of the African American presence have coincided with the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the capital of the United States of America. Furthermore the case of Mt. Pleasant Plains Cemetery serves as an ardent reminder of importance of maintaining public memory in the face of urban development.