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- Convenors:
-
Mariske Westendorp
(Utrecht University)
Helena Nordh (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences)
Danielle House (University of Bristol)
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- Stream:
- Urban Space
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to discuss comparatively how the study of death can be advanced by bringing anthropological and geographical insights together, with particular emphasis on the experiences, materializations, and spatializations of death in contemporary urban contexts.
Long Abstract:
This panel aims to bring together interdisciplinary approaches to the study of death in contemporary urban spaces. Traditionally urban studies has been a focus for geographers and death a focus for anthropologists, but in recent years research in these areas have been converging, contributing to a rich field of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary death studies (e.g. Arnold et al 2018; Cannell 2010; Das 2016; Hallam and Hockey 2001; Kong 1999, 2012; Lopez and Gillespie 2015; Maddrell 2009, 2013, 2016; Maddrell et al 2018; McClymont 2018; Morin 2018; Tyner 2013; 2019; Venbrux 2018; Venbrux et al 2013). Drawing on theoretical frameworks and empirical observations, this panel will explore the insights and questions which arise through cross-disciplinary dialogue on contemporary spaces and practices associated with death, disposition and remembrance in complex urban contexts, advancing a people and space centered approach to the study of death. Possible themes that could be discussed during the panel are, among others: • Urban deathscapes (including diverse, colonial and postcolonial contexts); • Ritual spaces and practices in multicultural societies; • Material, immaterial and emotional geographies of human and non-human bodies, cemeteries, remembrance sites, etc.; • Institutionalized spaces of death, e.g., hospitals, hospices and morgues; • The mobility/transport of dead bodies within, to and from urban environments; • Urban topographies of death and remembrance in buildings, monuments and landscapes. The panel will be chaired by scholars from the HERA interdisciplinary research project on death and diversity in Northwest Europe, which includes scholars from anthropology, geography, international politics, religious studies, history, planning, transport and landscape architecture.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I want to pay attention to post-socialist mourning practices, both spatial and material, in Tirana, Albania. The increasing population of the capital also translates into increasing cemeteries and the development of a unique amalgamation of their aesthetics.
Paper long abstract:
Following a long history of "'bare' death: an unmarked and uncelebrated desecration of the person (Simpson, 2018)" during the communist regime when dictatorial politics determined who counted as a person (Carrithers et al 2011: 662), or who did the remembering (Butler, 2015), most of the Albanian population has taken up new spatial and material commemorative practices. The newly found pomposity in cemetery tombs in a constant struggle to appropriate as much space as possible has become a reality. Inscription of space and place, as well as embodiment of a collective knowledge that people are free to mourn their loved ones, have transformed the city into an "[e]mbodied space [that] is the location where human experience and consciousness take on material and spatial form (Low, 2003)." Spaces appropriated by these collective representations of death consequently become new socially designated places of collective commemoration and spatially embedded experiences of death and dying (Low & Lawrence-Zúñiga 2004).
In this presentation, I further pay attention to ways that appropriations of space by cemeteries and other public practices of mourning have come to clash with development policies, causing tensions "between the values of community and efficiency in urban development (Tooley, 2017)". New mortuary practices spatially organizing the memorialization of loved ones and as such they transform into social communication strategies, according to Danforth (2004). Referencing ways of constructing personhood, I argue that democratized public gestures of memorialization and embodied knowledge of death make for a collective process of becoming.
Paper short abstract:
Following the afterlife of accidental deaths in Mumbai's commuter railways, this paper unravels their socio-material geography and micropolitics of death care - from emotional management of trauma, to material management of bodies, to the ethical burden of ensuring appropriate passage.
Paper long abstract:
Plying 7.5 million commuters daily over 400 km of track length, Mumbai Suburban Railway (MSR) is the world's busiest mass transit system. With an annual average of 3401 deaths and 3473 injuries along its lines, it is also the world's deadliest. The paper draws attention to the fact that nearly a third of the total number of people who die in Mumbai's human accidents remain untraced. This social and spatial geography of death in mobility thus bears imprints of the city's macroprocesses of labour and capital circulation that embed the city in trans-regional migratory circuits. Within the different institutions that are linked through these deaths, such as the police stations, mortuaries and public burial and cremation facilities, this produces the material effect of 'overcrowding and delay' and continuous logistical manoeuvre for accomplishing disposal of accumulating bodies amidst severe constraints of resources - money, time, labour, infrastructure and land.
Bereft of immediate social relations in the moment of departure, these deaths also posit the agents of death care in legal as well as emotional and subjective states vis a vis their 'guardianship'. This paper remains attentive to the articulations of these agents as they evaluate the differential social circumstances that frame each instance of death and perform mediatory roles by mobilising their own values, judgment, emotion, biases as well as tact and pragmatic discretions. The human accident opens a window for examining the care politics of various such 'relation-less' deaths in the city.
Paper short abstract:
This paper sensitively explores conceptions of suicide in Swakopmund, Namibia. Interpreting this small, coastal city as a 'suicide field', the paper reconfigures suicide as 'self death', positing that there are key factors missing in the study of suicide in African locales.
Paper long abstract:
In June and July 2016, just as I was finishing up the largest part of my fieldwork in Swakopmund, a city on the western coast of Namibia, researchers at Namibia's Ministry for Heath and Social Services (MHSS) were conducting their own fieldwork for what would become one of the largest (if not the largest) surveys of suicide prevalence, causes and precipitating factors to have taken place on the African continent. The results, published in only 2018, provided a fascinating - if tragic - insight into the significance of suicide practice in Namibia. Many of these deaths were concentrated in Swakopmund and its surrounding Erongo region.
During my later fieldwork, I became aware of rumours of a high level of suicide migration to Swakopmund - people, apparently, were travelling long distances in order to suicide in this small, coastal city. When I asked why that might be, the response was perhaps cryptic - 'the crocodile is stronger in the water'. Yet, interpreting this statement in terms of witchcraft reveals a different layer to suicide practice - the involvement of witches, ancestors and the world of immortal beings. Handling the topic sensitively as it should be, this paper discusses the 'suicide field', reconfiguring suicide as 'self-death' in the urban context of Swakopmund and positing that there are essential elements to African suicides which are missing from contemporary theory.
Paper short abstract:
The experience of industrial death in a slaughterhouse with incorporated transparency produces a strange paradox; death is everywhere and nowhere. Examining how death is articulated and experienced manifests an ethical act that counteracts the marginalisation of the nonhuman other.
Paper long abstract:
Emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century, the contemporary industrial slaughterhouse is a stereotypical space of death that has been removed from the urban sphere, and consequently public consciousness. An industrial pig slaughterhouse in Denmark challenges this distancing from public consciousness by offering public tours of its facility which attract up to 25,000 visitors a year. This paper draws on six-months ethnographic fieldwork in this slaughterhouse and explores how death is articulated by tour guides, experienced by guests and confronted by the workers themselves.
Ethnographic insights from public tours and the production floor convey how death is in many ways obscured from view and yet simultaneously pivotal to industrial meat production. In this way, the industrial slaughterhouse is characterised by death being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, thereby creating a terrain where life and death bleed into one another.
I draw on Jacques Derrida's work term la vie la mort / life death to elaborate on this complex terrain and illustrate how porcine bodies are deadened and enlivened by the logics of commodification.