From the 1950s to the 1960s, China witnessed a significant transformation in private cemetery property rights. Historically, preceding the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the execution of land reform, the authorities implicitly sanctioned the transaction of lands designated for private cemeteries. The government upheld individual ownership or usufruct rights to these burial grounds, instilling confidence among Macao’s residents, who were under Portuguese colonial dominion, to buy or rent cemetery plots within mainland China. […]

This dissertation’s focus is finding evidence of grief for women who died in childbirth in the Victorian era. The grief and mourning practices of the era were researched, with extra focus on what was expected from masculine mourning of the husbands. The attributed identities, in life and in death, of these women and their place in society was also researched and parturition medical procedures of the time were called into question. This was accomplished by researching primary sources such as cemetery records, […]

As George Orwell already warned in the 1940s, ‘fascism’ is one the most used and misused – and least studied – words in the recent history of humanity; however, in no other country except Italy it can still make some sense. Vanished from History with the death of its founder, Benito Mussolini, and basically removed from the Italian political scene after the disappearance of the MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano) in 1995, fascism nevertheless continues to exercise a fascination in small groups which, […]

The later 19th and early 20th century saw the erection of numerous opulent cemetery monuments which incorporated bronze sculpture. These ranged from single reliefs to substantial sculptures, such as the dramatic group at Brookwood Cemetery by George Wade to Lady Matilda Pelham-Clinton (d. 1892), in which a grief-stricken mourner weeps over a draped corpse while an angel hovers overhead. They have not been considered as a group before and are notable both for their aesthetic quality and for their special place in the fin de siècle British cemetery. […]

Someone dies in eastern Bangalore and happens to be Hindu, invariably Sowri Raja gets a call. Sowri Raja is the seventh-generation grave digger working and “living” in the Kalpalli Hindu burial ground. There has been an upgrade in the graveyard two decades ago. The city municipality has developed a high-tech crematorium which is managed by Sowri Raja’s brother Kutti. The front office of the cemetery is handled by Sathya, Sowri Raja’s daughter. Does it sound like a case of nepotism? […]

On March 11, 2011, the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region resulted in the deaths and disappearances of over 22,000 people. The remains had to be managed through a process that included searching for and collecting the bodies, their systematic administrative registration, identification, and the return of their remains to the families for funeral procedures, specifically cremation, in accordance with Japanese funerary customs. However, in the Ishinomaki region, a major coastal city in the Miyagi prefecture, […]

Tamara Ingels will bring new and innovative insights on the role, interpretation and possibilities of intergenerational dialogue within our death care and managing (historic) cemeteries. Starting from her own practice as a cemetery consultant and cemetery guide/docent, she developed a set of practical techniques and educational ideas. These focus on an adequate methodology for the intergenerational dialogue in a cemetery context and on the impact of this method on lifelong learning strategies within these unique places. […]

During the two world wars, Britain’s wartime enemy lost their lives in all corners of the country. German soldiers and civilians died in internment camps from sickness, disease and wounds, while in the skies above, German airmen died in First World War Zeppelin raids and in even great numbers some 25 years later during the Battle of Britain. Yet there are very few signs of these large-scale losses today. Despite the enemy generally being buried near where they died, […]

The emergence of new disposition technologies such as electric cremation, CNG-based cremation, biomass-based gasifier cremation, and improved wood crematoria (IWC) have opened a new area of death and technology in India. However, in the contemporary science, technology, societies (STS) literature intersection between death, belief and technology is less explored. The socio-political, cultural and economic structure is different in both the countries, India and China. The Confucian belief influences traditional China while, Hindu belief influences disposition technologies in India. […]

Reading Old Cemetery and Newbury Newtown Road are two early examples of Victorian garden cemeteries set up in Berkshire before 1850. We consider them as sister cemeteries, not only as they are located in the same county, had similar priorities around public health and civic pride when they were setup but also share connections in terms of families or individuals buried in their sites. Both have active special interest volunteer groups and organise regular community engagement events. […]

This paper discusses the emergence of nature burial in the Netherlands by drawing attention to the politics of defining this practice. On the basis of qualitative interviews and the systematic mapping of nature burial sites, it discusses how is nature burial defined, and by whom? What practices are included and excluded by these definitions, and why? By tending to such questions, the paper draws attention to the often-overlooked politics of nature burial. As a ‘green’ or ‘natural’ death practice, […]

Britain has a long history of memorials for battles and martyrdoms, erected for celebration rather than mourning. The first war memorials dedicated to the ordinary soldiers (Waterloo and the Crimean War) were erected in cemeteries, with the themes of celebration and mourning mingled. But in the 1860s, a decade after the Crimean War monuments, memorials began to be erected in cemeteries to commemorate lives lost in maritime disasters, followed by the end of the century by commemorations of purely civilian landbound disasters. […]

Though Ireland possesses a rich death tradition, such traditions appear absent for infants and more specifically, stillborn infants. This absence is understood in Western culture to be a response to Christian theology and its teaching regarding the liminal status of the unbaptised. Stillborn children were unable to receive the rite of baptism and thus remained unbaptised and consequently were not permitted to be buried within their spiritual community, resulting in separate burial. Burials thus occurred in designated Children’s Burial Grounds (Cillíní) which date ‘overwhelmingly’ to the post-medieval period (Murphy, […]

The expanding footprint of urban Asian settlements and increasing living standards have put pressure on cemetery sites. Public health narratives and the sanctity associated with death matters in Asian urban landscapes have fed into the rhetoric of cemeteries as undesirable heritage spaces. Often lacking protection, many cemeteries have been exhumed, cleared, and relocated to allow room for new developments and infrastructure, risking the survival of this quiet element of the urban cultural patrimony. Within an Asian context, […]

This paper examines two extramural cemeteries of Istanbul from its Byzantine and Ottoman past, focusing on how they shaped the spatial and social boundaries of the city. From antiquity to the present day, communal cemeteries have been located outside the city’s borders. In the 4th century, when Constantine built his city on the peripheral necropolis of Severus’ Byzantium, new cemeteries began forming outside the Constantinian wall. In the Ottoman period, the land outside the Theodosian walls was established as the city’s legitimate burial place and continues its function to this day. […]

In 1895 Smithsonian ethnographer and second-generation Irish man James Mooney noted that “The bodies of those lately buried turn over in their coffins when a suicide is deposited among them. So strong is the feeling in regard to self-destruction that in the rare instances where suicide has occrd [sic] the neighbouring cemeteries hav [sic] sometimes been guarded for days by parties determined to prevent the burial of the body near their departed kindred”.
The body of the suicide was rejected by both the living and the dead. […]

This paper seeks to provide a foundational understanding of how the funerary innovation of the alkaline hydrolysis (AH) of human corpses is likely to be adopted in the United Kingdom by covering four key areas of concern:

What does history tell us?
What do current funerary trends tell us?
What influence might the climate crisis have on changing normative funerary practices?
What does AH’s popularity in the USA tell us about its potential in the UK? […]

The 19th-century burial crisis in urban churchyards was ultimately resolved through the creation of cemeteries. Some of these were open to all denominations from the beginning, but others limited those who were accepted. In Liverpool, cemetery access was delayed for Roman Catholics, and there were few churchyards of that denomination, so when St. Patrick’s in Toxteth opened in 1829 it became a very popular choice for burial until compulsory closing of the city churchyards in 1854. […]

Densely populated cities aim to facilitate the multifunctional use of urban public spaces within the context of the intensive and rational use of limited space resources. Cemeteries are an integral part of any city, but their use is deeply influenced by social factors. The recreational use of cemeteries varies, especially across cultural contexts and even within similar contexts. Based on the experiences of other Western countries, this article examines what recreational potential cemeteries and post-cemetery parks have in Poland. […]

Cremation has been a more frequent choice than burial in the United States since 2015, moving toward a decade of transforming funeral traditions. The growing popularity of cremation niches attests to the change in cultural memory as commemoration moves from official declarations to personal, narrative, and multifaceted memories. The inclusion of objects, photographs, and brief documents in a niche creates a sense of a person’s life in a complex, rich way that is not available on a gravestone. […]