Safeguarding the House of the Dead: Configurations of Risk and Protection in the Urban Cemetery

Abstract

In Lima's pueblos jóvenes--the vast informal settlements that surround the city--migrants who settled there also founded graveyards. Cemeteries are a natural socio-spatial extension of the settlements and houses that urbanites constructed with their own hands. Lima's peripheral cemeteries are permeable spaces which are often regarded as zones of risk and insecurity. Visitors, vendors and taxi drivers fear theft or assault. Grave looting and trafficking of burial land are common occurrences. Moreover, as a breeding ground for mosquitos, cemeteries are potential hotbeds of lethal diseases. Adding to such 'measurable' risks are the intangible risks and risk aversion connected with spiritual activities. This essay grapples with the conceptualizations of insecurity and risk in areas where the houses of the living and the dead converge, taking Lima's municipal district of Villa María del Triunfo and its Virgen de Lourdes cemetery as a case study. This intervention hence proposes a spatially inclusive conceptualization of security which embraces deathscapes as part of the inhabited urban space. Furthermore, based on the diverse 'threats' and 'risks' encountered in the cemetery space, I propose an intersectional approach sensitive to tangible and intangible insecurities and to the responses to avert these. With this approach I aim to unravel the various dimensions of (im)materiality in the security debate.This Intervention is based on the analysis of academic and grey literature and news items and on fieldwork data

Home Matters: The Material Culture of Urban Security

“…This state in‐between the personal space of intimacy, the world of material objects and the unforeseeable and uncontrollable other out there has led material culture scholars to conceptualize the home as a place from which to understand societal processes more broadly (Miller, 2001). Moving along this path, Christien Klaufus (2021, this issue) suggests conceiving the house as a place of the uncanny, the unhomely, and she situates the ‘house of the dead’, the graveyard, in logics of security and limited certainty that are similar to those of human settlements. As Klaufus makes clear, both spiritual evocations to please dead ancestors and criminal practices such as grave robbery are intimately tied to questions of urban health.…”