Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses changing death practices in contemporary Greek society. Overcrowding in urban cemeteries, the ongoing austerity regime, and the recent legalization of cremation recontextualize moral traditions of care that saturate human remains with significance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses death practices in contemporary Greek society, and the moral traditions of care that saturate human remains with significance. Ethnographers of “traditional” Greek death practices emphasize time as a symbolic operator; mourning and preparation of the corpse at home, a church funeral, and burial in an earthly grave are followed some years later by the exhumation of the bones and their deposition in a family or village ossuary. At stake in the intervening time is the decomposition of the flesh, as well as the extension of the dead person’s membership in the community of the living, when mourners can visit the grave.

My preliminary research in Athens suggests that, along with severe overcrowding in urban cemeteries, ongoing austerity in Greece has reduced and changed the quality of the time that transpires between burial and exhumation of the dead ritually undertaken (and paid for) by urban families. In addition, cremation – historically opposed by the Orthodox Church – was legalized in 2018. These changes raise questions about time, tradition, and responsibility that refract quite recent shifts in the organization of public space and material resources.

Anthropologists have long argued that care for the dead fosters relations of care among the living. This paper extends that argument, juxtaposing “orthodox” and “heterodox” burial practices in Greece to explore changing ideas about the physical and moral integrity of the body, what happens to it after death, and what that process requires of the living in terms of “proper care.”

Paper short abstract:

Hart Island’s trench burials occur without ceremony. The public shock as Covid victims were buried here belied how it has operated largely unchanged for 150 years. I contrast bereaved relatives’ yearning for ‘normalcy’ with how NYC solves the problem of providing funerals of last resort.

Paper long abstract:

What troubles people about Hart Island, New York City’s public burial ground? When drone footage emerged of Covid causalities being buried by inmates in trenches, the images became a key symbol of authorities’ struggle to deal with the death toll. New Yorkers were shocked. Yet this was nothing different from what the City usually did, just faster and in greater numbers. Funerals were never possible here.

Sometimes those with relatives buried on Hart Island strived to secure a disinterment. Others made a peace with it, even when the burial had occurred without their knowledge, but longed to rectify the lack of funeral with other rituals. But the Department of Correction has historically restricted visits and prohibited memorialisation. As one relative told me, ‘I just want to be able to wake up and decide that today I’ll go visit my daughter. No planning, I’ll just go, like a normal cemetery.’ A Hart Island burial solves some political, economic and social problems of what to do with the dead, but it also creates new difficulties. As such, I use this case to analyse the ‘social tension often found between concern for the dead in general with anxiety over the dead in particular’ (Engelke 2019: 33). Who would it help if Hart Island’s cemetery became more normal – and what social problems might this illuminate?

Paper short abstract:

Lost embryos and fetuses don't exist as social persons, yet some people are compelled to create spaces and enact ritual to commemorate their loss. Our research demonstrates the evolution of religious, political, and material practices in Spain from the mid-20th century to the present day.

Paper long abstract:

Is an embryo without a heartbeat a corpse? Has a stillborn fetus died, or never lived? And if they never existed as social persons, why commemorate their loss? These questions are at the heart of the burgeoning movement in Spain to create private and public spaces of remembrance for lost pregnancies. Such spaces have proliferated recently, and our research on the use of ritual in perinatal loss demonstrates an evolution of religious, political and material practices, as illustrated by the following cases: A sickly newborn, born in Asturias in 1942, baptized by a neighbor with water from the sink so that he could be buried in the town cemetery, while his older sister still recalls other, unbaptized stillbirths who had to be buried "on the edge of a vegetable plot"; a boy stillborn in 2015 and interred in the local Catholic cemetery, while the remains of his mother's third pregnancy, an 8-week miscarried embryo, are buried in the family's backyard next to the body of a beloved pet; a couple who buried not a body, but a box, full of tiny clothes, pacifiers and toys - the only material things they had to connect them to their first child, a pregnancy lost at 10 weeks. Our research into the diverse spaces being created and used to ritualize pregnancy losses is informed by LeFevre's (1982) and Ségaud's (2007) work on the production and use of space, as well as contemporaneous work on the material culture of pregnancy loss by Layne (2003).

Paper short abstract:

A recent shift in Czech law enabled burying human fetuses of any gestational age, granting them status of “human remains”. Whereas it extends bereavement opportunities for parents with prenatal loss, it also produces controversies, as exposed in my ethnographic research of Czech contexts of prenatal loss.

Paper long abstract:

Recent amendment of the Czech Act on burial services (ratified 2017) allowed arranging funerals to dead human embryos, fetuses or stillborn babies of any gestational age. This shift was largely pursued by civic initiatives which demanded to rectify situations, in which ‘bodies’ of miscarried fetuses or stillborn babies could not have been released for funeral because of their legal status of ‘medical waste’ that had to be disposed of lawfully.

Ethnographic research I conducted in 2021 among Czech middle-class women who experienced prenatal or perinatal loss revealed how this legal shift impacted their bereavement trajectories and healthcare services they received. The research also documented how prenatal death started to emerge gradually in public spaces - whereas in the form of material sites of commemoration or virtual space of verbal or visual commemoration and aestheticization of prenatal/perinatal loss. Materialization of the prenatal death served as both an argument for and a proof of relevance and gravity of such a loss.

Although fetal funerals or attending public memorials for the unborn is not a first choice for every bereaved parent, the idea of fetal “rights to be buried” is becoming more and more acceptable and feasible among the Czech public. In this paper, I will present the legal transition of fetuses from “anatomic-pathological waste” to “human remains” and discuss controversies surrounding this shift that kept emerging within my ethnographic research of Czech contexts of prenatal and perinatal loss.