Landscaping Death. 'Journal of Material Culture' 8(2): 215-40 (original) (raw)
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Landscaping Death: Resting Places for Cornish Identity
Journal of Material Culture, 2003
This article explores the cultural construction of death and revival in Cornwall. In examining the ways in which these issues intertwine with the affirmation of local landscape identities, it surmises that an obscure and diffuse sense of 'deathliness' exists that generates collective and contested topographical memories and perceptions. By offering ethnographic interpretations of how people relate to contemporary burial places as well as a material culture analysis of prehistoric and derelict industrial environments, the article reveals three ways in which Cornishness rests in iconographical settings and material elegies. (1) from a prehistoric pedigree, where death and ancestry connect to expressions of folklore and custom; (2) through the ties that mortality has with the past's dangerous local industries; and (3) from the symbolic death brought about by the extensive emigrant diaspora or the dissipation of identity from tourism and immigration. These factors illustrate that enduring tangible aspects of identification are perpetuated by a partial relating back to dying-out ways of life. I thus propose that the prominence of death itself becomes a significant yet ambivalent material metaphor-a motif for shaping personhood and advocating solidarity.
Dragging the corpse: landscape and belonging
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A speculative archaeology of excess: Exploring the afterlife of a derelict landscape garden
This dissertation explores the contemporary archaeological record of Retiro, a derelict 19th-century landscape garden and summer estate located in the town of Molde on the north-western coast of Norway. The main topic that this thesis investigates is the consequences of acknowledging Retiro with its excess of unruly and apparently ruinous characteristics, as heritage. This involves focusing on the concrete characteristics of Retiro’s contemporary environment, from the garbage littering the forest floor to the plants that cover its undulating topography. An underlying motivation for this inquiry is to investigate an alternative, or more precisely, oblique way to approach and describe Retiro. This investigation is not founded on the ambition of improving conventional historical research or cultural heritage management, but instead explore a way of observing and including things that are usually overlooked in these ways of representing and handling the material past in the present. Thus, the goal is not to be reductive and instead focusing on expanding horizons based on on-site surveys. To do this the research relies on empirical observation and experience derived from repeated on-site surveys of Retiro. One of the central conclusions of the research is that concern for material heritage sites like Retiro, through oblique and inclusive approaches, can be a foundation for an environmentally oriented archaeology of the contemporary world. This is by no means a revolutionary or radically new assertion, as archaeology has always in some form dealt with the environment; i.e. things that are not human or outside our control. Nevertheless, my hope is to demonstrate how archaeology can contribute to unique ways of describing a contemporary environment, on track with how other academic disciplines have contributed to the development of ecological and environmental studies in the humanities and social sciences. To achieve this, it is necessary to include the apparently natural and non-human aspects of heritage sites, and acknowledge that anthropogenic heritage is also partly constituted by – and exists in constant dialogue with – non-humans, like plants, fungi, and polypropylene. Our material legacies are not only inherited by humans, but also by non-humans. Importantly, a focus on these non-human aspects does not necessarily side-line human concerns. Rather, I argue, such focus serves to inform our understanding of how our heritage experience is formed and inform through the vibrant afterlife of the past.
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.
1999
This paper reviews research on deathscapes, particularly by geographers in the last decade, and argues that many of the issues addressed reflect the concerns that have engaged cultural geographers during the same period. In particular, necrogeographical research reveals the relevance of deathscapes to theoretical arguments about the social constructedness of race, class, gender, nation and nature; the ideological underpinnings of landscapes, the contestation of space, the centrality of place and the multiplicity of meanings. This paper therefore highlights how the focus on one particular form of landscape reveals macro-cultural geographical research interests and trends.
“Death and the Cultural Landscape”
Forum UNESCO, 2006
The burial ground is one of our most fascinating cultural landscapes. One might say it is the cultural landscape par excellence. If culture is at bottom impelled by an awareness of mortality, to create something that transcends finitude, it is here (in the cemetery and its monuments) that culture is at work on a most instinctual level. In the face of time, death and loss, culture is always already a "factory of permanence" (Bauman, 1992, p.4), to borrow the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's phrase. Reflecting on the way culture mediates but also projects an illusion of triumph over death, Bauman cites Elias Canetti, who writes: "The purest expression of culture is an Egyptian tomb, where everything lies about futilely, utensils, adornments, food, pictures, sculptures, prayers, and yet the dead man is not alive" (Qtd in Bauman, 1992, p.31). Even for the everyman of less despotic cultures though, the tomb is intended to reassure life, amidst the flux of nature and the ravages of time, of some kind of continuity, of persistence hereafter.
Death, disposal and social memory - towards a definition of funerary landscapes
Death has always been an integral part of human experiences, and the research into its appropriation within past societies is vital to our understanding of past human life. Archaeological landscapes constitute an amalgamation of possible environmental and abstract perceptions of past human societies; some of the most intriguing of these are funerary landscapes. Although the potential of funerary archaeological landscapes for providing information on past societies is quite high, only a handful of studies, within Europe, have focused on this topic, and although they usually provide a brief discussion of the construction of these landscapes, a definition of what a funerary landscape might be has not been put forth. This paper discusses the special types of archaeological landscapes from a phenomenological perspective of the experiences of past human space and presents a possible definition for use in future research. The main argument is that the special mixture of environmental variables unique to every timespan and region, combined with the funerary process of death, disposal and social memory results in the perception and constant re-creation of funerary landscapes in the social memory of past peoples. The importance of such landscapes is seen in the fact that they might be used in discourses of legitimisation and ideology in the constructions of various types of social power.
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