Paper short abstract:

This ethnographic account of France's first natural cemetery examines how the transnational natural death movement has been translated into a local context, by highlighting the economic, spiritual and ecological drivers behind this urban space for a greener future of re-enchanted cemeteries.

Paper long abstract:

Starting in the 1990s in England, a silent revolution of funerary practices and cemetery design labeled as the "natural death movement", swept over various national contexts, creating a transnational narrative embedded and expressed in local funerary cultures. France, hopping on the natural funeral hearse fairly recently by opening its first natural cemetery "Cimetière naturel de Souché" in Niort in 2014, adapted an approach to laying their dead to rest which combines an urban scarcity of space with a desire for autonomy from economically and ecologically costly funeral practices. This ethnographic account took the cemetery as a starting point to examine and reflect the changes in the material as well as immaterial funeral culture in a contemporary, European city. By using qualitative methods specific to anthropology, insights about conceptualizations and notions such as continuity, nature and culture, gift giving and reciprocity, purity and respect, memorialization, as well as attitudes about death and the afterlife could be gained and compared to the broader movement. Informants ranging from two generations of Niort's cemetery management, employees of funeral homes, gravediggers, as well as visitors share a space with heterogenous approaches to its utilization and (meta-)physical qualities. This natural cemetery as an urban deathscape and heterotopia, extends meaning making processes beyond its biodegradable fences to reflect pressing objectives concerning urban planning, landscape regeneration, waste management and the need for spiritual interconnectedness between humans, nature and the dead.