Residues of Death

Disposal Refigured

Tamara Kohn, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, Luke van Ryn, Tamara Kohn, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, Luke van Ryn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429851629
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a critical overview of the changing ways people mourn, commemorate and interact with the remains of the dead, including bodies, materials and digital artefacts. It focuses on how residues of death persist and circulate through different spaces, materials, data and mediated memories, refiguring how the disposal of the dead is understood, enacted and contested across the globe. The volume contains contributions by scholars from a number of disciplines and includes a diverse range of case studies drawn from Asia, Europe and North America. Together they reveal how rapidly changing practices, industries and experiences around death's remains involve the entwining of digital technologies with other material and ritualised forms of commemoration, as well as with shifting boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the institutional and the vernacular, the public and the private.

1Life in death’s residues

Elizabeth Hallam and Tamara Kohn

In April 2016, the annual convention and expo of the International Cemetery Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA), held in New Orleans, exhibited a staggering array of products relating to death, memorialisation and the disposal of bodies through cremation, burial and further recently emerging technologies. Among the displays of hearses, coffins, urns for ashes and memorial jewellery, the “Infinity Burial Suit” was featured. Designed by Jae Rhim Lee, artist and entrepreneur at the company Coeio based in New York, and Daniel Silverstein, this garment is developed from a previous version, the “Mushroom Burial Suit”, and is made commercially available for the dead to wear in the grave. The Suit facilitates decomposition of the deceased so that, as Coeio’s website explains, “bodies are transformed into vital nutrients that enrich the earth and foster new life”.¹

Such a transformation, where the decay of the body entails and enables the growth of other organisms—especially mushrooms in this case—is central to the wider ethos that this Suit for the dead is made to represent. The broader aim of Coeio is to “return bodies to the earth respectfully, affordably, and without damaging the environment”. The Suit, made from organic cotton, is impregnated with a mix of “biological material” and mushroom mycelium. After burial of the deceased, the growing mushrooms “break down” toxins in the body while forming “relationships” with and giving nutrients to plants. This clothing is designed to be used for “natural burials”, in which any chemical-based embalming of the body is avoided, non-biodegradable coffins are rejected in favour of those made from sustainable materials that readily biodegrade, such as willow, cardboard or wool, and the place of burial—in woodland and meadows, for example—is unmarked by headstones (see Clayden et al., 2015). Worn within or without a coffin, the aim is for the Suit to be used as part of an environmentally beneficial disposal of the body.²

This grave garment has received media attention that describes the product as part of the expanding and diversifying activities of contemporary entrepreneurs who are actively “trying to disrupt death”.³ “Disruption” here refers to the development of commercial products that promote alternative means of dealing with the dead that differ from those offered by established funeral industries in Western contexts (see van Ryn, Nansen and Gibbs, this volume). In this respect the Suit’s form and materials as described on its official website are made to speak directly to the growing awareness, and expanding practice, of green funerals. Promotion of this product draws explicit attention to the deceased’s body as physical matter that disintegrates and enters into wider ecological processes.

To clothe the dead in the Infinity Burial Suit, following the deceased’s wishes, is to dress them so as to encourage and speed up their decomposition. According to Coeio’s website, the Suit, comprising a black, or alternatively a ‘natural’/off-white hooded tunic and trousers with coverings for the face, hands and feet, helps “reunite the body with the earth and the ongoing cycle of life”.⁴ This garment and its website narrative celebrate decay as very much a “natural” process (see Rumble, this volume), as well as one that cleanses the body and the soil of harmful toxins, and in doing so they represent death as renewal and regeneration rather than as an ending. The dead become a material source of life, just as the body is frequently a potent focus of ritualised practices that have been recognised in anthropological analyses for some time as often replete with symbols of potentiality, fertility and (re)birth (see Bloch & Parry, 1982).

We open with this description of the Infinity Burial Suit at a large-scale display of death-related products in the United States not just to highlight the expanding and changing terrain of material things that are designed to deal with bodies of the recently deceased in Western contexts. For the Suit is also strongly indicative of increasingly significant cultural practices that treat and represent the dead and their traces as though, in some respects, they continue to reside and interact with the living. So, the bodily remains of the dead come to be perceived not as deceased and departed but as (in some ways) alive and very much present, such that they continue to have force and effect. The Suit materialises just one of the many ways in which “disposal”, conventionally understood as the method by which a person’s body is dealt with after they have died, is currently caught up in significant innovations, including approaches to design that facilitate an ongoing physical afterlife for the dead. Within these developments, the dead do not so much die as pass into further phases of post-mortem life that can be experienced and imagined as active, and indeed responsive or animate, within the environments of those who have not yet “died”.

Natural burial in this clothing, we would argue then, is one manifestation in a wider contemporary refiguring of disposal. It can be seen as indicative of shifts in discourses and practices surrounding death that engage with—and indeed produce—residues associated with death that are expanding and diversifying. Disposing of the dead in contemporary contexts is coming to be refigured through developments in funeral industries and communities of professionals who deal with death, in urban planning and land reuse, in medical education, in new technologies and digital media, and in automation and artificial intelligence.

With these developments, while some residues of death are removed and eradicated, others are generated and preserved in newly emerging and differing ways, as explored throughout this book. The central concern of this volume is, then, with current modes of disposal relating to the dead, together with the residues entailed in these disposal processes. The chapters examine these from multiple perspectives in anthropology, cultural studies, media studies, philosophy, science and technology studies, human–computer interaction and interaction design. In the many contexts analysed, in Europe, Asia and North America, different kinds of residues are perceived to remain after death—whether bodily, material, digital or ghostly—and these residues are variously deemed to require care, labour or other responses, either from laypersons or experts. Some are made to remain among the living in contrast with other residues that might be feared, rejected or perceived as traces that need to be erased, however difficult or, indeed, impossible such erasure is to achieve (see Samson, this volume). Death’s residues also manifest at different scales, ranging from one person’s body to mass deaths, entire cemeteries and massive columbaria, from one email account to an entire lifetime of accumulated digital footprints and mega data sets relating to the documented lives of deceased millions.⁵ For studies of material and digital residues that emerge through death, it is important to keep both ends of this spectrum in focus, from one death and its material/digital repercussions (see Hallam, 2017b) to an almost unimaginable volume of digital remains that are currently sustaining, and indeed being multiplied by, a rapidly enlarging “digital afterlife industry” (Öhman & Floridi, 2017).

In the following sections, we introduce the book’s key concerns with contemporary residues of death and the associated refiguring of disposal that surrounds the deceased. We explore shifting meanings and interpretations of our central terms, namely “residues”, “refiguring” and “disposal”, when used and encountered in relation to “death” within the changing contexts analysed throughout this volume. In so doing we provide a framework for subsequent chapters that ask how the dead may come to be actively present in the environments of the living as residues of many kinds, and how such residues are managed, produced and responded to through current and newly emerging practices for disposing of the deceased. Such inquiry highlights the sensory and bodily dimensions of disposal processes that forge continuing relationships between the living and the dead.

Residues of death

Residue:

The remainder, the rest; that which is left. That which remains after a process of combustion, evaporation, digestion, etc; a deposit or sediment; a waste or residual product.

Death:

The act or fact of dying; the end of life; the permanent cessation of the vital functions of a person, animal, plant or other organism. Cessation of the existence or duration of a thing; end, disappearance, destruction.

(Oxford English Dictionary, 2018)

Decomposition of the human body—such as that referred to in the expo display and online publicity surrounding the Infinity Burial Suit—generates potent material residue that persists in the aftermath of death. This residue is not static but is morphing in material form as well as changing in meaning. Residue in this respect is mobile and shifting; it is a material process, rather than a stable, fixed, entity. It is also highly ambiguous in that it consists of human remains, it is a person’s body, but it is also becoming something else as the body disintegrates, merges with surrounding materials—soil and burial clothing—and is inhabited by other organisms. The Suit’s website description of this process inflects it with positive meaning, emphasising the life-sustaining and life-giving nature of this physical disintegration. Rather than being defined as a “deposit” or “sediment”, then (as in the quotations above), the residue brought forth through this decomposition is described as a process of growth, even as this process also entails material breakdown. Far from “residual” as in something that is left behind, this residue has a generative future trajectory. The body is envisaged as entering into “infinite” or “never-ending” relationships with living organisms in the environment, and it is through these material relations that the deceased is imagined and perceived to live on.⁶ This positive figuring of decomposition as a way of living on after death via bodily relationships with non-human living entities is consistent with narratives of the bereaved whose relatives have undergone natural burial (see Clayden et al., 2015).

Death’s residues are, however, defined, perceived and assigned value in highly contextually dependent ways. Reactions to bodily decomposition occurring before a person is buried in Yokohama, Japan, for instance, indicate that material decay is interpreted as a sign of a person’s isolation and a lack of care for that person during the later stage of life (Kim, 2016). Decomposition as residue in this context, then, is sensed negatively as an indicator of social disconnection. In medical education, too, decay becomes a negatively inflected material residue, a process that interrupts and prevents uses of deceased bodies as resources for gaining knowledge of human anatomy (Hallam, 2010, 2014). In medical schools that offer students a programme of learning with bodies of the dead, a key expectation is that the deceased provide a means to better understand the living human body, and thus decay—perceived as an effect of death—is seen to severely detract from this pursuit (Hallam, 2016, 2017a). Similarly, the residues of death that are highly valued in the Sri Lankan context analysed by Simpson (this volume) are human bodies preserved in formalin—bodies that are also seen to carry residues of those deceased persons’ former lives, even as those very bodies are taken apart in anatomy classes.

Thus, human decomposition after death and the concomitant production of residues may be figured either positively or negatively. Such contrasting situational understandings give rise to strategies and desires that either value, welcome and accelerate decay, on the one hand, or devalue and slow it down, on the other. Also highly contextually dependent is the extent to which such residues are perceived as remains of deceased persons, as complex matter in which traces of persons live on with other organisms, or as material that is devoid of a person’s presence. Attending to such residues of death along with culturally situated perceptions and representations highlights their fluidity of form and mobility of meaning. Such a focus also allows us to extend our analysis so that it encompasses both bodily residues of death and a wide range of digital remains (e.g. texts, images, social media) that persist after death and animate the dead within relationships that unfold between the living and the deceased.

The bodily, material and digital residues explored in this book emerge and are perceived not as stable entities but rather as ongoing processes, whose materialisations fluctuate and vary in density. This is consistent with notions of death too as a process (see Lawton, 2002), rather than a single, clearly definable end or “cessation” of life. With the contemporary production and management of death’s residues there is often a marked extension of the deceased’s presence as though they are still alive, or living on, even if in a changed form. The Infinity Burial Suit, described above, is just one example among a plethora of products and practices that deal in residues of death which extend the post-mortem life of the deceased, ensuring their continued presence via refigured material forms (see Hallam, 2017b). As the dead become potent residues, acquiring capacity to actively remain among the living, cultural understandings of death as “end, disappearance, destruction” are powerfully countered by perceptions of the deceased as traces that retain or come to possess degrees of vitality in their ongoing social and material existence.

Residues of death, then, as we outline here, are the central focus of chapters to follow. We use this term, as do the contributing authors, to help develop a field of analysis that encompasses the dead and their remains which often extend beyond the body, and from the physical to the digital. Bodies of the deceased—indeed the social, cultural, material and political constitution of those bodies and their distinctive physicalities—have been situated as a central analytical focus of death studies for some time (see Hallam, Hockey, & Howarth, 1999; Verdery, 2000). Further anthropological studies have attended to the processes through which the dead are memorialised, not only through the treatment of their bodies but also through sustained interactions with their possessions and material objects with which they interacted during their live...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Life in death’s residues
• Part I Animating deathspaces
• Part II Data afterlife
• Part III Material afterlife
• Part IV Mediating mourning
• Index