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- Convenors:
-
Noa Vana
(Tel Aviv University)
Yana Feldman (Ashkelon academic college)
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- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Few ethnographies explored the everyday life in cemeteries. We invite contributions that engage in ethical, political, social, and cultural queries in these social sites. We aim to expand the anthropological gaze and initiate a discussion that blurs the boundaries between life and death.
Long Abstract:
Anthropology considered the "end-of-life" and the relation between death, dying, and society since its earliest days (e.g., Durkheim, 1915). Places associated with death and dying have long been the focal of academic research (e.g., Sudnow, 1967). There is also a considerable body of work on cemeteries, their definition, types, purposes and uses, design, mourning behavior, and so forth (e.g., Mosse, 1991). However, there has been only a handful of scholarly work that situated its projects as ethnographies of the everyday life in cemeteries (e.g., Nielsen & Groes, 2014). We invite contributions from researchers who are interested in presenting papers that engage with cemeteries as an intersection between the dead and the living. We specifically encourage authors to submit papers that explore cemeteries as urban public spaces, cultural and political landscapes, and meeting points where the state and community share a mutual responsibility for the dead and the living. For example, we would like to ask how political, legal, and moral actions are taking place in cemeteries? How exclusion and inclusion practices in cemeteries (e.g., a burial outside the cemetery gates or in a special section) depict identity-making processes? How affect and transformation are performed in cemeteries? Etc. We aim to advance a discussion that will blur the "social line of demarcation separating the 'dead' from the 'living'" (Baudrillard, 1993, p. 127). Thus, expanding the realm of anthropological studies by asking questions regarding ethics, responsibility, exclusion, political protests, etc. in a field in which they were rarely discussed and researched.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Noa Vana (Tel Aviv University) Yana Feldman (Ashkelon academic college) Haim Hazan (Tel Aviv University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic research of Israeli military cemeteries we contend that the practices that shape the space of these cemeteries exclude several groups of fallen soldiers, depict identity-making processes and manifest a challenge to the Israeli ethos of equality among its fallen soldiers.
Paper long abstract:
The Israeli ethos of military cemeteries reiterates the mythical equality of the fallen soldiers - Herein lies the corporal next to the general. The literature, both academic and prose, is brimmed with examples underlying and glorifying this mythos, and Mt. Herzl, Israel's national cemetery, is portraited as its prime illustration.Based on an ethnographic research of diverse Israeli military cemeteries we contend that the state's religious regime enacted by the military employs the military cemeteries' space to exclude several groups of fallen soldiers while masquerading this exclusion in plain sight. For example, soldiers who are not Jewish, according to the Rabbinic Halacha (most of whom from the Former Soviet Union), are buried in a segregated section. Their graves are divided from the other plots using landscape architecture, e.g., benches, trees, etc. The graves of soldiers who committed suicide are also separated from the other plots. However, those are segregated by utilizing a small additional space between the plots. The naked eye can barely detect it; however, it does correspond with the Rabbinic Halacha. The families of these fallen soldiers, through their everyday practices, protest against this exclusion and challenge the Israeli ethos of equality in military cemeteries. For instance, they add planters to "their" plots. Something that other families are unable to do due to the limited space between the plots. We conclude that these practices that shape the space of Jewish military cemeteries depict identity-making processes and manifest a challenge to the Israeli ethos of equality among its fallen soldiers.
Sally Raudon (University of Cambridge)
Paper short abstract:
Hart Island, New York City’s cemetery of last resort, is best known as a place for the forgotten: it’s physically isolated and public visits are forbidden. Yet, escalated by Covid, its burials illustrate intensely negotiated issues of identity and social ties between the living and the dead.
Paper long abstract:
For 150 years, Hart Island has been New York City’s burial site of last resort for anyone unclaimed or unidentified. Yet it does not accord with how most New Yorkers imagine a cemetery, with its massed unmemorialised burials by inmates, and visits strictly controlled by the Department of Correction. It is by definition excluded from everyday New York life. When Covid meant Hart Island was six times busier than usual in Spring 2020, images of its burials only sharpened public unease.
Disposal is an identity-making process, literally and symbolically fixing in place potential claims of kinship, religion, race, vocation and locality that may have fluctuated during life. Communal disposal is rarely neutral - Hart Island is exceptional as a massed burial ground in a stable democracy - but those buried there have been released from all other groups to be marked only as New Yorkers.
The bureaucratic processes of directing a body for burial on Hart Island - or preventing it, or authorising who might visit - illuminate which relationships and identities count between the living and the dead, and how these are made legible to the state. Covid has complicated these practices, particularly through negotiations around proposed temporary burials and long-term morguing in refrigerator trucks. Based on 15 months of fieldwork, I ask whether it is also the meaning and authority of the state itself, and the family, that becomes constituted in such moments - especially when the next of kin is ambiguous in identity or themselves disenfranchised.
Sergen Bahceci (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
I examine the everyday relations that Turkish Cypriot villagers have with various and seemingly radically different spaces of the dead to examine the striking nonchalance that they express towards all of them. I argue that this is due the immanence ascribed on all dead.
Paper long abstract:
I focus on the reproduction of everyday nonchalance towards the dead in a Turkish Cypriot village, which has within its bounds a number of different spaces that belong to the dead. Firstly, there is the village cemetery which has since the 1960s been the main ground where the villagers bury their own dead. Secondly, there is the ground of an older cemetery, over the most of which now stands a public school and a ‘sacred’ shrine/tomb, said to be of a historical ‘Ottoman martyr.’ Thirdly, the village is also home to several ‘public secret’ mass graves where Greek Cypriots prisoners of war, who were captured and murdered after their month-long invasion of the village was brought to an end by Turkey’s invasion of Cyprus in August 1974, lie. Based on long-term research in this village, I examine the everyday relations that these Turkish Cypriot villagers have with the various spaces of the dead. I focus my discussion on the striking ‘nonchalance’ that most villagers express in relation to these spaces, which I argue is due to the ontological immanence that villagers ascribe to all dead without attention to the circumstances of their death or pre-internment ethnicity. For example, it is widely known that 26 Greek Cypriots were lying inside the deep water well in the village mosque’s yard until a recent UN exhumation removed their remains. The villagers say they never considered the place affectively ‘any different’ than any other. Indeed, most villagers visit the mosque only for funerals.