What Will the Neighbours Say? Reactions to Field and Garden Burial

Walter, Tony; Gittings, Clare

doi:10.1057/9780230283060_11

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…Clayden and Dixon 2007) 1 and on burial of ashes in the garden and other private places (e.g. Prendergast et al 2006), we know of no academic literature specifically on complete body burials on private land, apart from Walter and Gittings (2010) where we report how neighbours react; we explore there the concepts of visible and invisible, pubic and private, and boundaries between the two. There are two publications providing practical and legal advice for do-it-yourself enthusiasts (Bradfield 1993;Speyer and Wienrich 2003), publications which are also read by funeral directors who may have to advise both families on practicalites and local authorities on legalities.…”

Section: Rest In Peace? Burial On Private Land Clare Gittings and Ton...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rest in Peace? Burial on Private Land

Gittings¹,

Walter²

2016

Deathscapes

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Section: Rest In Peace? Burial On Private Land Clare Gittings and Ton...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Rest in Peace? Burial on Private Land

Gittings¹,

Walter²

2016

Deathscapes

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“…Although English and Scots law restricts the disturbance of buried remains, the UK has remarkably few laws governing the dead's initial disposal (White, 2000); so, for example, families may bury whole bodies or cremation ashes anywhere that poses no public health hazard. While burial on private land, though legal, is rare (Walter and Gittings, 2010), burying and scattering ashes in all manner of locations is both legal and increasingly common (Prendergast, Hockey and Kellaher, 2006). In contrast, German law requires that the deadincluding ashes -be buried only in authorised burial grounds by authorised personnel.…”

Section: Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Disposal or dispersal? Environmentalism and final treatment of the British dead

et al. 2014

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In current environmental discourse, disposal does not remove and destroy waste but rather transforms it into something useful or harmful and/or re-locates it. This article shows how this operates when the 'waste' comprises human remains, specifically how innovative 'dispersal' practices are now challenging the 'disposal' discourse of nineteenth-century burial and twentieth-century cremation which contained the dead within special death spaces separated from everyday environments for living. Since the 1990s, disposal practices have been supplemented by practices with an entirely different rationale. Instead of containing the dead in safe, out of the way places, new practices disperse human remains back into environments that sustain the living, whether this be via natural burial, new cremation practices or new technologies currently being developed, namely alkaline hydrolysis and freeze-drying. Promoters of all these innovations appeal to ecological usefulness, blurring the boundary between the living and the dead, thereby positioning the dead body as a gift to the living and/or to the planet. Thus, a new ecological mentality is increasingly framing the management of all the dead -not just those interred in natural burial grounds. In the light of this, we reconsider land use policy, and question death studies' use of the term 'disposal'.

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“…In fact, the matter and the location of ashes is important to people (Kellaher et al, 2010: 137, in MD ). Another example are burials in people’s own private gardens, which trigger varied reactions, some people welcoming them, others seeing them as inappropriate, tasteless, or disgusting (Walter and Gittings, 2010, in MD ). What is at stake here is that the often unmarked and unbounded grave threatens the boundaries between the living and the dead, between death space and domestic space.…”

Section: Places Of Absencementioning

confidence: 99%

Placing and tracing absence: A material culture of the immaterial

Meyer

2012

Journal of Material Culture

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International audienceThis essay engages with recent work on an unusual, yet fascinating theme: absence. Two edited collections have recently been published that deal with the topic: An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss (Bille et al., 2010) and The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality (Hockey et al., 2010). These books explore an almost counterintuitive aspect of absence: its material culture. Indeed, absence has a materiality and exists in - and has effects on - the spaces people inhabit and their daily practices and experiences. Drawing on the discussions in these two books and on other recent developments in the study of absence, this essay considers the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter. Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to trace absence. This entails following and describing the processes through which absence becomes matter and absence comes to matter. It means to map out, locate and follow the traces of absence and understand absences as traces, that is, as residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous, yet material entities

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What Will the Neighbours Say? Reactions to Field and Garden Burial

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

Rest in Peace? Burial on Private Land

Rest in Peace? Burial on Private Land

Disposal or dispersal? Environmentalism and final treatment of the British dead

Placing and tracing absence: A material culture of the immaterial

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