Natural Burial

Traditional - Secular Spiritualities and Funeral Innovation

Douglas Davies, Hannah Rumble, Douglas J. Davies

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781441152787
• eBook ISBN: 9781441165091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

From the 1990s the British developed an interest in natural burial, also known as woodland, green, or ecological burial. Natural burial constitutes part of a long, historical legacy for British funeral innovation; from Victorian cemetery monuments and garden cemeteries through the birth and rise of cremation to the many things done with cremated remains. The book sets natural burial in the context of such creative dealing with death, grief, mourning, and the celebration of life. Themes from sociology and anthropology combine with psychological issues and theological ideas to show how human emotions take shape and help people consider their own death whilst also dealing with the death of those they love. The authors explore the variety of motivations for people to engage with natural burial and its popular appeal, using interviews with people having a relationship with one natural burial site created by the Church of England but open to all. They illustrate people's understandings of life and death in the sacred, secular and mixed worlds of modern Britain.

1

Funeral forms, lifestyles
and death-styles

Introduction

This book is about ecological, green, natural or woodland burial, various names given to a general style of burial that began in Britain in the early 1990s and had grown to over 200 sites across the country by 2011. Each of these names carries its distinctive emphasis as the later chapters will show. Briefly, however, we might suggest that ‘ecological’ carries a science-like validation, ‘green’ suggests an element of political activism, ‘natural’ desires independence from the ‘unnatural’ interference of commercial ventures but an alliance with the organic world while ‘woodland’ carries its more specific cultural affinity with British landscape tradition. This very diversity of names does, however, indicate the variety of ideas surrounding death and the affinity that may attract some people more than others. This will become apparent in Chapters 2–4 which provide the empirical basis for this study through the single burial site of Barton Glebe near the village of Comberton, not far from the university city of Cambridge. These chapters report the thoughts of those who have or intend to use the site in due course, using materials obtained from interviews and other fieldwork activity in order to develop theoretical topics from interpretations of what various users of this site have said and done.

Although the naming of this practice differs among those who have used or intend to use such sites, as well as owners or managers of these facilities and advocates of this approach, we will usually speak of ‘natural’ burial. Though this is largely for reasons of utility and brevity, we are fully aware that the ‘natural’ will need some considerable explanation and interpretation as our chapters unfold. In Chapter 1 we introduce some of these key themes and will, subsequently, develop them in exploratory ways. Not only will this provide some cultural and historical context for natural burial practices but it will also suggest some theoretical ideas to help explain the emergence of natural burial in Great Britain as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first.

Key concepts

Individual identity in relation to kin, to place and to changing cultural values underlies many of the issues of this study and can be expanded in a variety of directions. When speaking of individual identity, for example, we find it hard in this study to think in terms of some discrete autonomy of isolated persons, and much more realistic to acknowledge individuals as part of a variety of social networks and webs of personal interest in the world at large and in the perceived future of things. This is not to say that discord or family rupture does not prompt some to exercise the choice that a market economy and consumerist motivation allow and act in stark independence. For whatever reason, however, some people do exercise choice and opt for what is, in effect, a cultural innovation. In the process their family and friends respond and come to experience a form of funeral previously unknown to them, and this causes some of them to rethink their own views and funeral plans.

In this study of a new burial practice, then, we have one example of the process of social change, one allied with changes in aspects of a person’s self-identity and social network. Many of those interviewed as part of this project were already elderly or old. Although they had grown up through the two successive eras of the dominance of traditional burial and of cremation – with a pivotal point in the mid-1960s – their option for a newer innovation shows them far from being conditioned by either of these. The old can do new things. At this early stage of innovation we find that the novel idea of natural burial has been encountered and appreciated as much through attending such an event as through newspapers or online media. The snowball effect of one person’s attendance at a single funeral that was found appealing should not be under-estimated, especially in an ageing population where funeral attendance is relatively high as peers die. Moreover, many older people are web-literate and utilize their easy access to the rapidly expanding online presence of funeral options, including those of natural burial sites.

Then, as far as kin are concerned, this potential for individual choice and natural burial is unlikely to be met with family opposition not only because of the respect many pay to personal funeral wishes but also because of widespread ecological concern over the very future of the planet. Moreover, in natural burial we find a strong potential for elements of traditional burial to be aligned with increasing doubts over the ecological credentials of cremation. At a symbolic level some deeply interesting issues arise from notions of continuity arising from the process of natural burial where on the one hand graves ‘disappear’ while, on the other, the very place where graves disappear becomes what is deemed a natural landscape and the site for an imaginative creation of identity. This imagination involves not only the one who is dying or who has preregistered for a grave at Barton Glebe but also subsequent mourners and their engagement with this area. The change from ‘space’ into ‘place’, a well-known idiom of transformation in geographical terms, involves the complex interplay of personal identity and its ongoing imaginative reconfiguration with various kin relationships and with wider cultural concerns over core values.

These core values, at least for some people, now also embrace issues of ecology. In recent years shifts in British society over the ways in which the land and its produce need to be conserved have gained high profile, not simply in abstract terms but in the most concrete of daily actions directed at household waste. Having to use different bins, bags and containers for domestic refuse itself fosters an ecological ethic. While energy-efficient vehicles with lower noxious emissions are also relatively popular concerns, these simple acts of waste disposal serve as social refinements of the practice of composting of waste organic material that has been a lively interest for millions of British gardeners across a number of generations. Refuse, as a background fact of life, is far too easily taken for granted, just as it is easily forgotten that millions of urban residents in Britain own gardens and do things with them. Gardening programmes are popular on radio and television, with major chain stores focused on homes and gardens advertising and carrying many related ‘home and garden’ products. It is in and through many of these very ordinary activities that social values make their impact, and when combined with major international debates on such issues as global warming, they conduce to a positive view of ‘nature’ and human relationships with it.

At the same time, levels of what would be regarded as traditional beliefs in life after death are relatively low and of many mixed perspectives, providing a viable opportunity for innovative views to develop. Similarly, priests are far from the only people now available and utilized for funeral ceremonies. Funeral directors may well mention the option of having a person conduct the event in ‘life-centred’ and celebratory ways that reflect the family’s values and not those of any particular religion. The British Humanist Association is also lively in this field. On a wider front, choice and options, far from being simple mantras of government over matters of health and education and of television advertisers of health and beauty products, are also realities that provide opportunity for self reflection and some degree of self-realization in terms of one’s funeral and post-death identity. So, when the notion of therapeutic landscape emerges later in this book we will be able to see in it the transformation of space to a place where, as imagination plays with traditional and innovative values and practices, images of self may also be transformed. Such images of ‘self’, along with numerous sociological accounts of ‘self’ should not, as intimated above, be read as a discourse that takes for granted some radical individualism of autonomous persons. For a great deal of ‘individual’ life in Britain remains driven by family, work, leisure, friendship and neighbourhood networks, and even though a person may hear of or encounter a cultural innovation such as natural burial and decide on this as their ‘choice’ of funeral ‘option’ it is still likely to be because of some networked experience or to have been developed in conversation with others, including family members.

Background

Following this broad introductory outline we now sketch a background of how this study came about. Certainly, this natural burial project would not have emerged without a sustained number of previous studies concerning death and funeral rites conducted by Douglas Davies since the late 1980s.¹ These began with cremation and British crematoria research supported by Nottingham University and published through The Cremation Society of Great Britain,² and continued into social surveys on attitudes to death, life and afterlife as part of a major project on religion in Britain funded partly by the Leverhulme Trust and the Church of England.³ A later project, funded by over 70 local authorities within the United Kingdom, analysed popular attitudes to forms of funeral, pinpointing the issue of reusing old graves as an attempt to increase the use of full cemeteries.⁴ That study, of over 1600 individuals interviewed in their own homes, was perhaps the most detailed and extensive account of funeral attitudes conducted in the United Kingdom up until that time. Its findings were presented to a House of Commons Select Committee on burial law reform. Davies, alongside research colleagues, added to these empirical studies a series of books embracing both academic and popular accounts of funerary rites, cremated remains and death, both from anthropological–sociological and theological perspectives.⁵

Those themes led, almost inevitably, to this account of Barton Glebe natural burial site, focusing on those who created and manage Barton Glebe, as well as on bereaved people who have relatives buried there or those who have preregistered for their own grave space. Funeral directors, too, and those who conduct burial rites here have also been interviewed. In retrospect, what may be seen as the first step of this study lay in a visit Davies took to speak to Ken West, then managing the Carlisle Cemetery and in the earliest stage of developing what would become a woodland-style cemetery in which trees would be planted over new graves. He had been responsive to questions about the use of cardboard coffins and the like and his open-minded creativity saw analogous possibilities in using a field-like area at the cemetery to develop an innovative arrangement of burial and memorialization. At that point, in the early 1990s, the idea of graves marked by trees rather than formal rows of headstones seemed innovative and yet bore some association with the use of rose trees to mark cremated remains. Not long after, through personal contacts with Stephen Sykes, then bishop of Ely, Davies was an informal discussant with people considering the establishment of a natural burial site near Cambridge, prompted by one of the diocese’s ecologically minded clergy, the Reverend Peter Owen Jones. Some years later, when the site was up and running, another personal contact, Dr Matthew Lavis, then Ely Diocesan Secretary and a Trustee of the site, suggested that it would be of real interest to study the ongoing development of the site, named Barton Glebe, in the light of his observation that a certain supportive attitude towards the site had seemed to develop among its users. Davies responded to this suggestion and their mutual interest led to a successful grant being awarded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s and the Economic and Social Science Research Council’s joint Religion and Society Programme. This took the form of a 3-year collaborative doctoral award between Durham University and The Arbory Trust running between 2007 and 2010. Hannah Rumble, joint author of this book with Douglas Davies, was appointed as the key researcher and successfully completed her Doctor of Philosophy degree in 2010, after three years of intensive research activity supervised at Durham University by Douglas Davies, whose background lies in the anthropology and sociology of religion as well as in theology, and at Barton Glebe by Dr Matthew Lavis as representative of the collaborative charity and whose original Durham doctorate lay in Geography. Hannah Rumble’s undergraduate and postgraduate Master’s degree work lay in Durham University’s Department of Anthropology. In terms of this book, the great proportion of fieldwork material and some of the theoretical concepts presented in Chapters 2–4 are derived from Rumble’s doctoral thesis which can be consulted for further empirical material, but to allow the chapters to flow more easily in this volume we have not referenced them item by item.⁶ These varied academic backgrounds and experiences have all been helpful for interdisciplinary discussions framing this particular project on natural burial. Professor Charles Watkins of Nottingham University’s Department of Geography, an authority on trees, was also kind enough to give some advice of an arboreal nature. From these personal background elements, we now move to this study’s theoretical preoccupations.

Goal, methods and issues

At its simplest, this study’s goal was to ascertain the significance of the Barton Glebe site for its users, with an associated issue being that of understanding the Arbory Trust as an Anglican initiative that established the site. We saw our task as descriptive and interpretative, with anthropological–sociological issues as well as theological considerations being of theoretical interest to us. The social scientific perspective was pursued through questionnaires and interviews held with numerous planners, managers and users of the site, as well as in visits to Barton Glebe and participation in its open-days.⁷ Some focus groups were held at Comberton, the village nearest the site. Though it had not be planned at the outset of this project, as we moved into the last of its 3-year period of study the idea arose of making a film in association with the project. After suitable funding had been secured, we recruited Sarah Thomas, also an anthropologist by background and now an ethnographic film maker. The outcome of her work was the film Earth to Earth: Natural Burial and the Church of England.⁸ This, in itself, then furnished further interview material that is included in this book. Numerous theological issues also emerged from all of these materials and events and we explore those in Chapter 5.

In dealing with these various materials it must be said that we are all too aware of the provisional nature of our analysis and interpretation. Such provisionality is basic in social research not only because of limitation in time and resources for extensive comparative study but also because of the difficult task of engaging with questions of ‘meaning’ in people’s lives, especially when they may only have arrived at some partial rationale within themselves over what is a novel social practice that still lacks the full weight of conventional significance. Here, more than is even necessary in ordinary social research, we have to be careful not to over-systematize ideas that may, in practice, exist only as clusters in people’s thoughts. So too when discussing ritual and symbolism and the way personal experiences and thoughts interplay with those of others, all framed by distinctive cultural conventions. Closely aligned with these thoughts and experiences is the very issue of identity in which the rational–emotional meanings of a life cohere in an embodied sense of self and of the worth of that self in society.

In terms of ritual and symbolism it is wise to bear in mind that one debate in anthropology asks whether ritual is or is not ‘like’ a language? Is it a practice whose code can be cracked to find the meaning or is it better viewed simply as something we do that is an end in and of itself?⁹ In reality the answer is probably somewhere between the two. Some people give extensive accounts of what, how and why they are doing what they do, while others simply do what seems appropriate for themselves with reasons being minimally expressed no matter how deeply rooted they may be in personal or family history. What cannot be ignored is the place of a kind of emotional understanding of the appropriateness of a practice that many of our informants had only encountered fairly recently. The theme of allurement that appears in later chapters gives some expression to that complex sense of the appropriateness and desirability of a practice once it is encountered as a viable cultural option. And that viability is especially important in a society and for a generation in which the very concepts of choice, options and personal worth have become hot political motifs focused both on educational matters of choice of schools and, most relevant for this book, over healthcare. But healthcare is one thing, death is another. One of the most intense debates over choice that has been pursued both in the British Parliament and by the press has focused on choice over death. There is tremendous irony here, however, in that at the time of this research and at the time of writing this book, the much vaunted theme of choice in education and healthcare as well as in commercial advertising for practically anything, stops at the point of doctor-assisted or simply assisted suicide. The state draws the line at the point in helping one of its members to die even if they might wish it in the light of impending disease and the likelihood of a terminal period someone regards as utterly debilitating, beyond their control and therefore undignified. It is fully understandable that palliative care specialists should seek to allay such fears, while the concerns of medical doctors are also very understandable in terms of their daily goal of life preservation. In such a social atmosphere of commercial and political heralding of choice, despite constraint over a key existential fear of the day, the debilitated indignity of dying, some individuals see the issue of choice in funerals as all the more appealing. And not simply the choice between traditional burial and cremation, even with all the choice options over what can be done with cremated remains, but over an option that seems replete with ritual action and symbolic associations that speak to people of their own deeply held life-convictions. Chapter 3 begins to explicitly identify what these life-convictions are that foster pro-choice for natural burial.

Cultural contexts of funerals

This account of choice and natural burial finds its place in a long history of British funeral traditions. For centuries, the British interred their dead in graveyards surrounding their parish churches, with some of high status finding their resting place within such churches and in the Abbeys and Cathedrals of the land. All this was an extension of the earliest Christian practice of relating places of worship with the faithful dead, especially martyrs. The extension of the parish system as a mode of Christianizing Europe brought extensive geographical coverage that enabled the dead to find their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1   Funeral forms, lifestyles and death-styles
• 2   Varied sites and changing rites
• 3   Options and motivations: What people say
• 4   Self-gift, soil and society
• 5   Spirituality, theology, self and sense of place
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index