Death, Memory and Material Culture

Elizabeth Hallam,Jenny Hockey

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181012
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Anthropologie

- How do the living maintain ongoing relationships with the dead in Western societies? - How have the residual belongings of the dead been used to evoke memories? - Why has the body and its material environment remained so important in memory-making? Objects, images, practices, and places remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. At the time of death, embodied persons disappear from view, their relationships with others come under threat and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially, politically, much is at stake at the time of death. In this context, memories and memory-making can be highly charged, and often provide the dead with a social presence amongst the living. Memories of the dead are a bulwark against the terror of forgetting, as well as an inescapable outcome of a life's ending. Objects in attics, gardens, museums, streets and cemeteries can tell us much about the processes of remembering. This unusual and absorbing book develops perspectives in anthropology and cultural history to reveal the importance of material objects in experiences of grief, mourning and memorializing. Far from being 'invisible', the authors show how past generations, dead friends and lovers remain manifest - through well-worn garments, letters, photographs, flowers, residual drops of perfume, funerary sculpture. Tracing the rituals, gestures and materials that have been used to shape and preserve memories of personal loss, Hallam and Hockey show how material culture provides the deceased with a powerful presence within the here and now.

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Introduction: Remembering as Cultural Process

This book is about relationships between death, memory and material culture. Death is a life crisis, a conjuncture of changes and transformations of the physical body, social relations and cultural configurations. Death is a phase of transition involving loss and adjustment and throughout this study we examine the ways in which memory comes into play as an important aspect of the process of dying, mourning and grief. Facing death, either of the self or of others, has come to entail ritualized social practices that mobilize domains of material objects, visual images and written texts. Focusing upon Western experiences, we attend to a diverse range of materials, associated with death in historical and contemporary contexts. In doing so we examine issues of metaphor, temporality, and social space, all of which impinge upon and shape memory as a cultural process and a social experience. By process we mean sets of interconnected practices that unfold over time, involving material and embodied dimensions. Developing anthropological and historical perspectives we find memories at work in visual images of death, in textual forms and in rituals which we trace as interconnected fields, related in their focus on the body – its structures, capacities and limits. We explore memory through the material objects that acquire meanings and resonances through embodied practice – such as the wearing of mourning attire, or the ritualized writing of wills, together with the material objects that come to represent or form extensions of the body – from funeral effigies to photographs. This takes us into personalized interior spaces and domestic settings as emotional realms of dying, mourning and remembrance. Thus we analyse the ‘everyday’ contexts of memory making that have received comparatively less attention when we note the sociological and historical work devoted to large scale, public forms of memorial and commemoration (Morley 1971; J. Davies 1993; Winter 1995; A. King 1998; Rowlands 1999). The relationships between material objects and subjectivity, materiality and imaginative processes are explored throughout this study, which seeks to account for the cultural ramifications of death as a salient figure in the making of memories.

Material culture mediates our relationship with death and the dead; objects, images and practices, as well as places and spaces, call to mind or are made to remind us of the deaths of others and of our own mortality. Whether in the form of personal memento or public memorial, material objects and embodied social practices associated with the dead have been viewed from a variety of perspectives, which might be personal, social or political. We highlight a diversity of social values and cultural meanings that are attributed to mementoes and memorials, and examine the ways in which these are perceived to recall or represent death and the dead. These processes often entail value judgements, for instance in the cultural politics that render certain persons or social groups memorable or publicly visible in dedicated monuments. While the deaths of royalty or political leaders are marked, others might be marginalized or forgotten. Here we analyse ‘ordinary’, ‘mundane’ deaths as well as material objects associated death and memory that have been overlooked. In examining these themes we explore the ways in which material objects evoke the dead and this leads us to consider methodological and analytical issues faced by anthropologists and cultural historians. Emphasizing the centrality of material cultures and embodied social practices in producing and sustaining memories, we draw upon original research, focusing on England. Throughout our study historical and cross-cultural comparisons serve to highlight and expose the institutions and social practices that constitute Western perceptions of memory and their relation to death.

Memory Making

Central to this project is the shifting and often elusive field of memory and the way in which memory practices provide perspectives on the past as well as inflecting views of the future, situating us in time as well as social space. Important starting points are ‘everyday’ or naturalized conceptions of memory that have become axiomatic or regarded as ‘common-sense’ orientations towards the social world. As we bring this set of precedents into critical focus, we explore culturally constituted conceptions of ‘internal’ states, where memory intersects with emotional or imaginative experience. To understand the ways in which internal processes and external material objects are linked in the production of subjectivity and identity requires an analysis of material culture as well as the discourses and practices that define and situate objects in relation to the self. Our work identifies memory through its distinctive vocabularies, metaphors and images that structure and shape remembering, whilst feeding into the formation of social identities and relationships.

‘Memory’ is commonly envisaged as both the facility to remember and as the mental representation or trace of that which is remembered, both of which are crucially mediated by a variety of cultural forms. In contemporary Western societies, ‘memories’ are often conceived as possessions: we ‘keep’ and ‘preserve’ our memories almost as though they are objects in a personal museum. We choose when to disclose or display our memories to others, either in the form of personal narratives or photographs. They are, therefore, associated with individual agency in the sense that we imagine ourselves to be responsible for, or ‘in control’ of, our memories. While they are attributed something approximating an object status, memories are also routinely regarded as ‘static’, as imprints retained and fixed such that the dimensions of creativity or imaginative reconstruction that remembering entails often remains as a latent, only dimly perceived and sometimes troubling awareness.

Alongside this orientation toward fixity is the notion that a memory and the experience it arises out of are identical – this may be explained in terms of the influence of scientific disciplines on the conception of memories as ‘real’ or ‘true’ (Lambek and Antze 1996: xiv). Yet these concepts require further analysis in relation to death and its attendant trauma, loss, and emotional difficulty. They also require contextual and comparative analysis, which reveals their historical and cultural specificity as well as the ways in which memory and death are caught up in processes of personal transformation and social change. Memory practices and experiences shift over time as perceptions of the past are reworked in the context of the present and in anticipation of the future. Here we trace connections between the crises of death and the formation of memory, the relationships between loss and recovery, how memories operate to render present that which is absent and here we find concepts of death and memory intimately bound together. Indeed, we witness death acting as a deep incentive to remember and the process of dying can give licence to intense phases of memory making with all of its attendant material complexity – from the disposal of the corpse to the repeated act of returning to the graveside with flowers.

The material presented in this book reveals the social and cultural dimensions of memory and memory making in a diversity of locations that might be interior or exterior to the body, stimulated and anchored in private or public domains. It is in relation to death, as event, idea and experience, that we situate this exploration of memory. It is at the time of death that embodied persons disappear from view; that their relationships with others come under threat; that the unfolding of their affairs and their influence may cease. Emotionally, socially and politically, therefore, much is at stake at the time of death; memories and memory making in this context can be highly charged and heavily loaded. Indeed, in contemporary contexts, the threat of death is very much bound up with the possibility of oblivion. Not only may individuals or groups believe that there is no independent existence after death; they also face the possibility of social erasure and the annihilation of identities that they have lived out. Memories of the dead, as we will show, are as much a bulwark against the terror of the forgettable self as an inescapable aftermath of lives which have come to an end.

Materialities and Social Practices

Mementoes, memorials, words and artefacts can be understood as external cultural forms functioning to sustain thoughts and images that are conceived of as part of the internal states of living persons. These relations between internal and external domains are subject to change over time as well as to cross-cultural variation. Perceptions of memorializing practices and their emotional resonance are often acutely sensitive and receptive to changes in broader social orientations and attitudes. For example, a Western tendency to wear jewellery made from enduring parts of the corpse such as hair was not uncommon in the nineteenth century yet came to be seen as unsavoury during the twentieth. The carrying of a deceased husband’s skull in a basket was expected of New Caledonian widows, yet to do so in contemporary Western society might invite a clinical diagnosis (Taylor 1983). Western practices that have developed around the prenatal deaths of infants, such as photographing and measuring the body, giving it a name, a death certificate and a grave, are recent cultural innovations. Prior to the 1970s foetal remains were disposed of with no religious or institutional attempt to provide them with a social body and therefore a memorable identity. Similarly the practice of memorial photography has taken place within quite specific cultural boundaries. Ruby (1995) shows how carefully composed photographic portraits of relatives, taken after death, were common in nineteenth-century American homes, appearing in frames on parlour walls. However during the twentieth century, especially since World War Two, post-mortem photographs in both Europe and America have been subject to restricted viewing as they are kept in guarded family photograph collections or in the institutionalized filing systems of professionals (such as the police) who deal with death.

Whilst highlighting patterns of change in the material dimensions of memory our study also explores the striking tenacity of certain memory-making practices in which many generations have invested. In their appeal to continuity, memory acts such as the demarcation of spaces dedicated to the dead and the use of visual images to invoke persons deceased, carry the historical weight of hundreds of years. As we shall see, the resilience of flowers as expressive materials of memory may be explained, paradoxically, in terms of their fragility. Camporesi observes that ‘[t]ime … dominates floral symbolism because of the ephemeral nature of flowers, their rapid discoloration and premature putrefaction, which relate them to human life’ (1994: 34). The interplay of longevity and transience inhabits many of the material and cultural dynamics that we trace in our study. We are reminded not to disregard the most fragile, paper-thin fragments of material cultures in our search for the most tenacious of memories associated with death.

Our analysis of material objects requires a nuanced focus on the embodied experience of socially structured space, as it unfolds over time. The cultural meanings ascribed to spaces of the dead and dying are invoked through social practices and it is this nexus of social space and practice that reproduces potent death-related memories. We therefore analyse a diversity of spaces – sacred, public and domestic – which serve as sites of memory making: museums, memorials and cemeteries, attics, nurseries and gardens. Spaces of death, and their significance in memory making, have been transformed across historical time in both their material form and their metaphorical potential. Our discussion moves from medieval conceptions of memory, in which valued images were recalled through their location in real and imaginary places, to the way in which death-related objects and practices have emerged and have been transformed in contemporary society. We question the predominant argument that the dead are sequestered and instead chart the ways in which lost generations and dead friends and lovers remain manifest – through well-worn garments, memorial prizes, photographs, street names, residual drops of perfume, war memorials. The deceased can always be provided with a powerful presence within the here and now, something which is increasingly evident in the appropriation of public space for private grief at times of collective disaster or traumatic loss. Drawing on these materials, we examine a concept of ‘memory’ as a labyrinth of mutually interacting materialized cultural forms and images which emerge over time and in relation to the spatial location of the dead and dying.

Practices associated with death, together with the experiences of memory and emotion that they invoke, can be observed across a spectrum that ranges from an individual visit to a grave to the collective participation in state funerals. While these practices vary in scale, duration and intensity, they may share a common ground in prevailing cultural codes and values. There are, however, divergent perceptions of death rituals that emerge along, for instance, lines of gender, ethnicity, age and social group. Contested views of highly visible public funerals, for instance, mark different levels of social involvement and personal identification that affect emotional experiences and memory. We might cite the example of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, which gave rise to media debates regarding the significance of collective mourning and grief. How could a multiplicity of individuals, each of whom stood in a different relationship to this member of the Royal Family, nonetheless find commonality in their grief? Large-scale mourning was clearly a newsworthy phenomenon that had erupted in response to a quite extraordinary death. In practice, however, the representation of collectivity and shared emotionality was rapidly called into question. Criticized for whipping up ‘false’ emotion, the media were said to have fostered the events and indeed the emotions in which many participated (Merrin 1999). Clearly the reporting of a collective emotional response angered many people and on the first anniversary of her death newspapers were filled with letters and articles that challenged an assumed universality of grief. These letter writers refused to have their particular individual emotions subsumed within corporate statements and insisted upon a diversity of personal responses – including an absence of any interest whatsoever in her death.

Taking account of their effects upon self perception and identity, this book explores processes of grief, mourning and remembrance, as culturally constituted and socially shared. At the same time the meanings of these practices are diverse, often socially negotiated and politically contested. Rather than focusing on psychological explanations, we provide cultural and historical accounts of how the dead and the living find proximity via material objects and places.

Memory Materials in Cultural and Historical Perspectives

In the absence suggested by death we find potent cultural materials and strategies, including objects, visual images and texts that constitute systems of recall for persons and social groups that have been threatened or traumatized by loss. Throughout the book we analyse the materiality of things at the edge of social life – the ways in which social disappearance has been perceived and counteracted. In many instances, death is provided with a visibility through material cultures and we analyse the cultural politics and social repercussions of this visibility. Cultural preservation, of persons or objects, requires investments and these might be economic, political and emotional so that the cultural practices involved in memory making exist at macro as well as micro levels of societies. Memory, in relation to death, can be seen at work in public spaces, sacred sites, Church institutions, state bureaucracies, national museums as well as in locations devoted to personal collections, including domestic interiors. Thus we explore the spaces of death and memory, observing their internal organization and symbolism together with their external connections and references to wider social and cultural formations – these are spaces of immense as well as intimate proportions. Responses to death and the evocation of memories during processes of dying, grief and mourning have been rendered in the form of the large-scale monument and the miniature memento – here we attend to the implications of scale and substance. In tracing the formation and practice of memory we explore its temporal dimensions. How is the material culture of death instrumental in the maintenance of particular memory configurations? Why do certain memories persist as others are seen to fade into a distant past? Why are certain aspects of society and culture afforded a permanence that others are denied? How do social, cultural and political factors impinge on the resonances and associations that material objects amass and shed as they circulate, come to rest or are actively resurrected?

These are key questions that we address through a study of materials that have a place in contemporary and historical contexts associated with dying and death. Whilst material objects retain a certain historical specificity, rooted in their production within a particular historical moment, we witness their varied uses at later stages in their social lives. Moving (being transported, translated) from one cultural or temporal zone to another, objects are re-contextualized and made to mean in different ways – for example, having once operated as a focus of personal remembrance and emotional connection, objects such as mourning jewellery may be displayed in museums as evidence of past mourning rituals. Thus materials once inhabiting a domain of subjectivity, and used predominantly for the fashioning of personal memory, may be later assigned object status, for viewing in public domains as an aspect of national cultural heritage. Conversely, objects seen to possess a social relevance or value at one time may be redefined as worthless or even dangerous or disturbing at others. Objects once central to public forms of remembrance – village war memorials or public statues – may become virtually ‘invisible’ as a result of habitual viewing, and therefore marginal in longer term processes of memory maintenance. Objects themselves m...