Deathscapes

Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance

James D. Sidaway, Avril Maddrell, Avril Maddrell

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317154389
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze fisiche
• Categoria: Geografia

Death is at once a universal and everyday, but also an extraordinary experience in the lives of those affected. Death and bereavement are thereby intensified at (and frequently contained within) certain sites and regulated spaces, such as the hospital, the cemetery and the mortuary. However, death also affects and unfolds in many other spaces: the home, public spaces and places of worship, sites of accident, tragedy and violence. Such spaces, or Deathscapes, are intensely private and personal places, while often simultaneously being shared, collective, sites of experience and remembrance; each place mediated through the intersections of emotion, body, belief, culture, society and the state. Bringing together geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, cultural studies academics and historians among others, this book focuses on the relationships between space/place and death/ bereavement in 'western' societies. Addressing three broad themes: the place of death; the place of final disposition; and spaces of remembrance and representation, the chapters reflect a variety of scales ranging from the mapping of bereavement on the individual or in private domestic space, through to sites of accident, battle, burial, cremation and remembrance in public space. The book also examines social and cultural changes in death and bereavement practices, including personalisation and secularisation. Other social trends are addressed by chapters on green and garden burial, negotiating emotion in public/ private space, remembrance of violence and disaster, and virtual space. A meshing of material and 'more-than-representational' approaches consider the nature, culture, economy and politics of Deathscapes - what are in effect some of the most significant places in human society.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Bringing a Spatial Lens to Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance

Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway

Deathscapes is an edited collection which focuses on the relationships between space/place and death, bereavement and mourning in western societies (with examples from the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the UK and USA). Contributors are drawn from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (geography, sociology, art, history, psychology, health, planning and architecture), reflecting both the ‘spatial turn’ within the wider social sciences and humanities, as well as the growing engagement with death, mourning and memorialisation within geographical research. The inspiration for the collection came from the Death, Dying and Disposal 8 conference (held at the University of Bath, UK, September 2007), where there was a notable recurrence of papers explicitly addressing spatial themes from varying disciplinary, theoretical and empirical perspectives. A number of those papers have been rendered into chapters here, supplemented by some invited contributions.

The first section of this introduction examines the significance of space and place in relation to death, mourning and remembrance. This is followed by a discussion of ‘deathscapes’ as a concept, with the final section outlining the content of the chapters, their insights and linkages.

Bringing a Spatial Lens to Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance

Death is at once an everyday – universal — occurrence, and an extraordinary experience in the lives of those affected (Maddrell 2009b). Within contemporary western discourse, death itself is often described in spatial terms: a ‘final journey’, ‘crossing to the other side’, ‘going to a better place’; but the experiences of grief and mourning are typically represented in temporal terms: ‘time heals’, ‘give it time’. Nonetheless, grief and mourning are experienced and marked in space, as well as time. As Maddrell (2010: 123) has argued elsewhere:

Mourning is an inherently spatial as well as temporal phenomenon, experienced in and expressed in/through corporeal and psychological spaces, virtual communities and physical sites of memorialisation …[these include] individual mappings of bereaved people’s experiences of significant spaces/places and how these change over time, how they are expressed though performance in space, written as corporeal, landscape or literary texts; and how these individual [and collective] emotional maps impact on particular places.

Thus death and bereavement are intensified at certain sites (such as the regulated spaces of the hospital, the cemetery and the mortuary) but affect and unfold in many others: the home, public spaces, places of worship, and sites of accidents, tragedy and violence. They are both intensely private and personal, while often simultaneously experienced and expressed collectively and publicly. Furthermore, these experiences of death, dying and mourning are mediated through the intersections of the body, culture, society and state, and often make a deep impression on sense of self, private and public identity, as well as sense of place in the built and natural environment.

Work within death studies has long focused on the hospital, the battlefield, the cemetery or crematorium and the undertakers; but research from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds has begun to recognise and articulate the significance of different spaces as spaces per se, rather than simply an area or institution — a container — where things happen. This attention to the significance and particularity of space can be seen in Morris and Thomas’ (2005) analysis of the negotiations around the desire to die ‘at home’; in Hockey et al.’s (2005) nuanced account of domestic space after the death of a partner; as well as in studies of the cemetery as social space (Francis et al. 2005), the crematorium as ritual space (Grainger 2006) and the hospice as palliative space (Worpole 2009).

In parallel, emerging work within geographical research is addressing new perspectives on space/place through interrogating death, loss and remembrance (e.g. Johnson 1995, Hartig and Dunn 1998, Teather 1998, Kong 1999, Foote 2002, Cloke and Pawson 2008, Maddrell 2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, Sidaway 2009, Wylie 2009); these are topics which have yet to be explored fully within geographical research, but which clearly relate to existing work on identity, memorialisation, sacred place and geographies of emotion and affect. Here we draw on reflections on space and place, including the material, representational and what Lorimer (2005) describes as the ‘more-than-representational’, liminal spaces of emotion and affect (Anderson and Smith 2001, Bondi et al. 2005, Smith et al. 2009). We are also mindful of marked social changes within western society and how these have impacted on different ideas and designations of space: the growing role of technology which has impacted on engagements with virtual space; how the characteristics of what can often be described as a simultaneously secular and post-secular society has resulted in a fluidity in defining sacred place discursively and geographically; and, not unrelated, how space becomes politicised and contested.

This edited collection considers many other sites and practices that connect the living and the dead, beyond those of burial or cremation. There is the obvious significance of the cemetery, crash site or war memorial, as spaces creating their own emotional geographies for the bereaved, but, as indicated above, if we probe further there are other types of space pertinent to our understanding of death and mourning conceptually and in terms of practical care of the dying and bereaved. There is the body as space, the corporeal living and dying person. There is the domestic space of the home; as site of dying and death, and locus for private, individual and vernacular remembrance, aspects of which are increasingly seeping into the realms of public space in ‘spontaneous’ or informal memorials. Other quotidian spaces interpellate us, often unawares, speaking to us of loss and consolation. These can be the everyday micro-spaces of the chair, vehicle, or bathroom shelf, or the more public spaces of the park, social club or school (see Hockey et al. 2005); each having the potential to assault the bereaved with a sense of loss or bring back fond and comforting memories. They can also be the places which were central to the deceased’s identity formation such as the seat in the bar, the sports club, place of worship or workplace. The increasing significance of ‘virtual’ forms of space can be seen most notably in the growing number of online memorial sites on which to log grief and tributes, a new form of narrative space and memorial art, e.g. www.gonetoosoon.co.uk and the Nevis Partnership book of remembrance (see www.nevispartnership.co.uk, Maddrell 2010). Having outlined the variety of types of space, the second point to stress is the significance of those spaces. Whatever the type of space, it is through this engagement with, or being engaged by, particular spaces that their status shifts, they are transformed from mere physical areas into places (see Tuan 2001, Cresswell 2004) through being endowed with meaning and significance. Personal events, experiences and relationships, as well as wider historical, cultural and political associations, meld to give individuals a sense of ‘place’, which may be positive or negative. This may, in part, be shared with others in a collective view of place, but much may be personal, individual. This sense of place is accessed in the present and through memory and because of its significance engenders emotion and affect. For the bereaved various significant places can become sacred, sacred to the memory of the deceased, and to understand this we need to look at, but also beyond, the memorials and graves, which often bear that textual epitaph.

While more work needs to be done around the negotiations of memorials within private familial space, the conflict arising from sustained performance and inscription of remembrance in public space is well documented, notably in the case of more informal roadside memorials (e.g. see Hartig and Dunn 1998, Clark and Franzmann 2006) where death is considered by many to be ‘out of place’, not in its ‘proper place’ (Petersson, this volume). This idea of ‘in/out of place’ (Cresswell 1996) is at the heart of many of the individual and collective negotiations around death, dying, mourning and remembrance in contemporary western society. Ultimately it is found in each individual’s evolving relation to the absence-presence of the deceased and the places associated with them. It is reflected in debates about expressions and markers of private grief in public spaces and related disputes of what constitutes ‘sacred’ ground; it is found in the creation of innovative forms of vernacular memorialisation in virtual space, the secular domestic shrine and the memorial bench in a favoured location. Benches, in common with other spaces of remembrance, exemplify the intersection of different narratives and performances of loss and remembrance. They are material, representational and more-than-representational: there is the subtext of their form and location; the explicit, if brief, text found on plaques ‘storying the deceased’ (Walter 1996, 1999, Neimeyer 1999); and the performances of remembrance, the maintainance of ‘continuing bonds’ or ‘letting go’ of the deceased which attending the bench invites. For all their solid materiality they can be seen as spaces of threshold, with liminal qualities (Maddrell 2009a), where each narrative, or more accurately, set of narratives, needs to be read in its individual context. Writing about memorial benches placed ‘in loving memory’ on the coast of Cornwall at Mullion Cove, leads John Wylie (2009: 279) to see ‘absences at the heart of the point of view’ and to argue that: ‘the entire experience of the memorial benches at Mullion Cove seemed to me to be sensed more in terms of a slipping-away, a letting-go, a failing to grasp or even to touch’. In contrast, Maddrell’s (2009a) analysis of the memorial benches in Peel, Isle of Man, demonstrates that many articulate belonging, rootedness in the locality and the continuing attachment of the bereaved to the deceased. These benches can be seen to constitute a sort of ‘third emotional space’ between home and cemetery/crematorium, which affords a public mapping of private emotion; a place where ongoing negotiation of absence-presence can happen and expressions of mourning and remembrance ‘can be located and negotiated in the medium term’ (ibid..); a threshold space where the work of meaning-making can be pursued – including that of ‘letting go’.

As memorial benches illustrate, just as the sense of sacred has become less confined, more fluid, in contemporary society, so too have forms of memorial, remembrance practices, and their location. Thus, in addition to the act of dying and bodily disposal, it is this creation of performative as well as inscribed space/ place of remembrance which transforms everyday landscape into deathscape.

Deathscapes

The idea of a variety of ‘scapes’ as a means of understanding contemporary social processes was proposed by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990, 1996). His reference to the interplay of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finacescapes and ideoscapes has since been supplemented by an edited collection on ‘borderscapes’ (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007) and taken up in work on ‘memoryscapes’ (Ballinger 2003). In a similar context of places, spaces, sites, flows, disjunctures and landscapes, we might think of deathscapes. The idea of deathscapes was set out by Kong (1999) and employed by Hartig and Dunn (1998) in relation to informal memorials for road accidents. A search on Google reveals several other texts that have adopted the term, in a range of contexts. We are adapting the broad heading of deathscapes to invoke both the places associated with death and for the dead, and how these are imbued with meanings and associations: the site of a funeral, and the places of final disposition and of remembrance, and representations of all these. Not only are those places often emotionally fraught, they are frequently the subjects of social contest and power; whilst sometimes being deeply personal, they can also often be places where the personal and public intersect. Deathscapes thereby intersect and interact with other moments and topographies, including those of sovereignty (sovereignty-scapes), memory (memory-scapes) and work, life and beauty (landscapes). Thus, as another edited collection that chose to use the ‘scapes’ suffix noted in its introduction:

Cultural geography understands landscapes as repositories of contesting interpretations of the meaning of a piece of land and of its appropriate use. Landscapes denote different and contesting technologies of the self…They assert particular moral geographies that denote a hierarchy of land use, and in this way act as an instrument of governmentality, attributing a sense of correct and incorrect behaviour. (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007: xxv)

Of course, western society is no stranger to the mechanisation of death. Yet the focus in Deathscapes is not on sites and spatialities of genocide (see O’Lear and Egbert 2009). We are acutely aware that the notion of deathscapes cannot be causally invoked without also conjuring with war, destruction, violence and genocide. Indeed, as one of us has argued elsewhere; ‘ … as critical geographers we should therefore seek to remember and reconnect the spaces, places, homes, and, indeed, graves … that have been thereby forgotten with those that are repeatedly remembered.’ (Olds et al. 2005: 478). With time, battlefields (of all kinds) become caught up in other narratives; the meanings of the Somme, or Dresden continue to evolve in the twenty-first century. And as they came into vision and have been mobilised within political discourses since the end of the Second World War, the crimes conducted by Nazi Germany and its allies have shaped wider understandings of genocide. Holocaust became a term applied to both the state-orchestrated process of destruction of life and to the threat of wider destruction via nuclear weapons that accompanied the Cold War. In his intoxicating account of the visible and invisible legacies of the Cold War, Tom Vanderbilt notes how the absence of direct battles between the superpowers, means that this ‘war’ is not subject to the same memory work that many of its component parts (Korea, Vietnam – each with their own controversies) have received. Vanderbilt (2002: 135) claims that:

All wars end in tourism. Battlefields are rendered as scenic vistas, war heroes are frozen into gray memorials in urban parks, tanks and other weapons bask outside American Legion posts on suburban strips. That the Cold War, the so-called ‘imaginary war’ that was never actually fought (apart from proxy conflicts) – its Atlas missiles never launched, its atomic cannons never fired, its massive retaliations never employed – makes its tourism somewhat odd. This tourism curiously combines ‘what if’ with ‘what was’; as one tours never-before-seen secret installations that seem familiar, one is looking at abstract doomsday scenarios poured in hard concrete.

Perhaps it was the difficulty of imagining the scale of death that unleashing nuclear weapons could produce that lead to the discourse of Holocaust. Indeed the genocide that also came to be signified by the term is hard to comprehend in scale. What does the murder of millions of people look like? A pile of discarded shoes or the ruins of a furnace become the symbols of mechanised deathscapes.

Reviewing the literature on the Holocaust (or Shoah as many prefer to term the attempted destruction of European Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators) Andrew Charlesworth (1992: 469), remarks on his experience in leading student field-courses to the sites of Europe’s former death camps:

One geographer with a visible sign of distaste has asked me how I can take students to a place like Auschwitz-Birkenau. No such distaste would have been expressed if I had taken them through the monumental imperialist landscapes of Berlin. Yet the heart and anus of European civilization are inextricably linked. To turn away from one is to cheat intellectually.

Charlesworth evokes the language of disgust for a good political purpose. More widely however, the taboos and silences around ‘everyday’ death and dying are frequently expressed in either euphemisms or with revulsion. Yet this is a geography that touches all of us. And although some of the chapters that follow do consider violent death, multi-victim tragedies and war, more often they are about the more mundane spaces and sites of mortality. Nor are they only about that; for with death come loss and the bitter-sweetness and power of remembrance. The latter is – as we have noted (and some of the chapters that follow investigate) frequently mobilised by (and shapes) individuals, communities and states. Indeed, in Flynn and Laderman’s (1994: 51) words:

Throughout history, human communities have converted the dead into sources of living power by grafting symbolic structures onto them and their places of internment. The impact of these structures on society, however, indicates that the ‘dead’ are understood as more than physical remains. The dead can be imagined also as memories, spirits, or deities, and the physical or spiritual locations where they reside are essential to the vitality of the symbolism … When conflict arises and the meaning and handling of the dead are disputed by interested parties, the battle for control can lead to important changes in both identity and the distribution of power.

Although they write of Native American cultures, other landmark studies work from diverse localities in Europe and North America indicate this power was finessed in the twentieth century there and has endured into the twenty-first (Ballinger 2003, Johnson 2003, Young 1993, Verdery 2000). For example, Graham and Whelan (2007: 2) highlight a number of politicised and contested sites of remembrance:

As in the US ‘Deep South’, where commemoration meshes public memory of the Civil War, Civil Rights, and unequal power … practises and sites of commemoration in Northern Ireland serve as icons of identity and spatializations of memory that transform neutral spaces into sites of ideology.

In Northern Ireland, as in many other places where sectarian, ethnonationalist and ideological divisions endure, graves, memorials and commemorati...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Bringing a Spatial Lens to Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance
• Part I At the Threshold – Living with Death
• Part II Spaces of Burial Taboo, Iconoclasm and Returning to Nature
• Part III Negotiating Space for Memorialisation in Private and Public Space
• Part IV Art and Design in Service of Remembrance and Mourning
• Index