Matthew Gandy’s 2012 proposal of cemeteries as spaces where ‘heterotopic alliances’ can flourish, stemming from his reading of Foucault’s 1964 work on heterotopias, questions the ability of cemeteries to be places where strange forms of life, both human and non-human, can meet and form unexpected networks. The point of this communication is to contradict and complete Gandy’s theorization. We discuss Gandy’s idea of the cemetery’s “queerness” through the analysis of 32 French cemeteries’ rules and regulations. […]

This paper investigates the relationship between public cemetery management and public records management in South Africa. The intersection of South African cemetery management and archives and records management has not previously been explored and represents a rich area for further research. In order to build a common ground for reflection and recommendations, this paper centres on the present regulatory framework for cemetery records management and how records management principles are understood and implemented by cemetery managers. […]

The title of the paper refers to the book When the Cemetery Becomes Political which raises the question: How can a cemetery – a place for the dead – evolve into a space that cultivates a political dynamic? This question gains increased significance in times of war when new graves emerge daily, the pain of war is often very physical and place-based: the experience of suffering is tied to matter and to place, both as tragedy unfolds and long after. […]

The burial landscape of the 17th-century in North America is an ever-present feature of historic cities across the northeast seaboard of North America, where many early European settlers landed. These burial spaces, which reflect not only the traditions from the setters’ home country, also show the development of new funeral and burial practices that would evolve and shape how we respond to the same events today. In this paper, based on my PhD research, I will demonstrate how burial grounds developed in the 17th century by British, […]

In Australian cities, historic cemeteries once located at the urban fringe are now central. To accommodate growth, many have been relocated or pared down, making way for parks. This article draws on an ongoing project examining the tension between memorialization, urban ecology, and recreation. It focuses on the attempts of community groups to digitally and physically document burials and maintain headstones in Pioneer Memorial Parks: cemeteries turned into parks where (most) headstones have been removed, but human remains linger belowground. […]

Land burials as opposed to cremation were traditionally supported by the Chinese owing to their strong beliefs of the afterlife, filial piety, and geomancy. However, cremation rates in Singapore for the Chinese and non-Muslims have risen significantly from 10% in the early 1960s to 97% in 2017, becoming the country’s default body disposal method. It is thought that the Chinese were discouraged from burying their ancestors in favour of cremation because of the Singapore government’s persistent and intense acquisition of Chinese cemeteries to regain land for national development. […]

The cemetery movement (ca. 1825-1850) was partly a reaction to the decay of Anglican churchyards and crypts, particularly in cities. Through private capital, promoters built cemeteries independent of parochial authorities, fuelled by a demand from wealthy urban classes and Nonconformists for alternative burial options. However, the Church’s reaction to these projects proved uneven: at a time when State-sponsored church construction was at its zenith, some viewed cemeteries as undermining the church’s spiritual monopoly over the dead, […]

Durkheim ([1912]2001) argues that the notion of sacred and profane exist in every religion of the world. Sacred is ideal and transcends everyday existence. The profane or unholy embraces those practices, ideas, persons, and things that are regarded with an everyday attitude of ordinariness, utility and acquaintance. The profane is also believed to contaminate the sacred. All Indic origin religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism) consider the body as mortal (Nashvar). In India death (mrtyu) is not opposite, […]

When I began my research, I naively believed there would be a complete list of all the cemeteries in the UK and Ireland that I could use to underpin my research on public engagement. I was wrong, so I began one. This is a review of the interesting information I discovered whilst attempting this Sisyphean task; the lessons about the development of these sites that I learnt along the way – when does a cemetery start being a cemetery, […]

The Zoroastrian burial ground in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, was opened in 1862 and constitutes a continuing record of Zoroastrian presence in the UK. The only burial ground of its kind in Europe, it adds to a continuing narrative of how the Zoroastrian diaspora adapts to changing political and cultural circumstances. Accordingly, the phrase We are like sugar in the milk refers to how Zoroastrians will merge into, and contribute positively to, a host society. Whereas Zoroastrian burial practices in South Asia and Iran are carried out as sky burials in ‘towers of silence’, […]

Trinity Burial Ground on Castle Street, Kingston upon Hull, was opened in 1785 as an off-site expansion to the small graveyard that has lain around Holy Trinity Church, in the town centre, since the thirteenth century. Authorised by Act of Parliament in 1783, Trinity Burial Ground was one of the first civil institutions to be built beyond the town walls, as the corporation broke the bounds of the medieval defences. The period saw the construction of a succession of purpose-built docks and the rapid expansion of commerce, […]

We cannot overlook the primary function of our cemeteries, giving our dead their final resting place. However, the past few years, a lot of contemporary secondary and tertiary functions and uses have been developed on cemeteries in many European cities and municipalities. Local residents have discovered the secondary uses of cemeteries as places to find peace and quiet within their living environments, tourists and educational groups have discovered the historic cemeteries as places to discover the history of death and dying (tertiary). […]

This is a study of deathscapes at the margins of Europe, Denmark and Cyprus, focusing on cemeteries in their respective capitals. By employing comparison and situating the emergence of cemeteries within the two societies’ different socio-historical trajectories, we challenge key assumptions on cemeteries put forth by historians and sociologists related to cemeteries’ inexorable secularisation and the democratic prerogative of everyone, not just the elites, to their posthumous presence as named individuals. Specifically, we show how in Denmark’s case the predominance of social democracy entailed a preference for erasure in communal, […]

As part of a larger project researching Liverpool’s nineteenth-century cemeteries, investigations into the archives held by Liverpool City Council regarding Toxteth Park Cemetery (established in 1856) led to the discovery of some significant documents. Alongside historic plans of the cemetery, a large collection of monument illustrations was uncovered, drawn in the nineteenth-century by the cemetery’s resident masons, George Muir and Andrew Laidlaw. Over 240 illustrated papers were found, hitherto forgotten for over a century. Exploring these, […]

The post of cemetery chaplain emerged in parallel with the creation of the first wave of nineteenth century proprietary cemeteries. Appointed by companies and, from the 1850s, Burial Boards their function was solely to read the burial service. At cemeteries where a large number of interments took place in common graves, a ‘public reading time’ was held where unrelated families were present for a communal reading of the burial service by the chaplain. This continued until the dramatic shift towards cremation in the post-war years effectively brought an end to such ceremonies.The repetitive nature of the chaplain’s task, […]

The constant population growth leads to a physical expansion of urban areas, resulting in a denser built environment with the overlapping of services to support human needs. For this reason, verticalization became necessary to optimize land use and occupation in large cities, where there is a limited amount of available land for new buildings. In this context, a building typology that has been facing these issues is the cemetery because of its increasing need of land for new burials. […]

Cemeteries are an integral part of the cityscape, which as a societal function are responsible for the interment of the deceased in a dignified manner. They are imbued with cultural, historical, religious and emotional significance – as a site for grief, reflection and contemplation they also have a significant physical presence in the city. Cemeteries are a somewhat hidden issue in urban planning in Sweden today, but as a land intensive development that locks the land from future reuse it is paramount that the complexity is examined. […]

This paper reviews cemetery publications over the last twenty years and considers current trends and new directions. In these two decades, cemetery research has included contributions from the humanities, social sciences and sciences and its international reach has expanded substantially, echoing the expansion in geographic scope of death studies. The study of cemeteries has also benefitted from a spatial turn within a number of disciplines: within death studies, conceptions of ‘deathscapes’ or ‘necroscapes’ has expanded the range of questions asked of all locations where death is encountered. […]

‘Truelove and Dear are names which would suggest a very amicable partnership, yet they are owned by a couple of St. Kilda citizens who are continually at war with one another.’ – The Age, 1903. The story of Charles Truelove and Nathaniel Dear reads like a plot arc on a television soap opera. Both were employees at the St Kilda Cemetery in Melbourne, Australia during the late nineteenth century. Dear, an independent grave decorator, loved to hate Truelove, […]

This presentation is based on interviews and archives analysis conducted in 2019 in Sète, France, and aims at underlining the role of the burial reselling process in France in the evolution of a famous cemetery and the sociology of the person buried there. The Cimetière Marin (maritime cemetery) is a well-known cemetery in France, thanks to Paul Valéry’s poem, “Le Cimetière Marin”, and has a unique situation, as it faces the Mediterranean Sea from a hillside. […]