How The Dead Live On

Hannah Black talks to historian Thomas Laqueur about his book The Work of the Dead, which describes how the development of the cemetery changed cultural attitudes toward death:

Before the Enlightenment, the only place you could get buried without ignominy was the churchyard. With the development of the cemetery, the dead make new kinds of communities. In churchyards, the graves were all oriented east-west. In the English churchyard, there’s a particular botany: The yew tree is the tree of the churchyard. There’s only one kind of person in the churchyard: a Christian. There’s no private property in the churchyard, everything belongs to the community. Every monument has to have the approval of the parish priest, so you can’t build what you want there. The churchyard is a communal space, and it’s a space that belongs to the parish. Others can come in, but only by paying extra.

The cemetery is a place where (in theory) anyone can buy property, and you can lie next to anyone, and you can be buried in any direction you want to be buried.

You can write anything you want on the tombstone. You can be any religion. If you’re Jewish, some rabbis might not be willing to bury you, but some rabbis would. It’s an open space, and people built according to the sensibilities of the day. Just like you can choose clothes that are slightly retro, the large cemeteries provided big tombs and they provided graves that looked like Egyptian tombs and Roman-style plinths, and you could present yourself in whatever way you wanted. The colonial cemetery in Calcutta looks like an imperial cemetery, it doesn’t look like a churchyard.

In Europe, every nation starts by producing national cemeteries. The first thing the Czechs do is produce a national cemetery. So the dead can produce all kinds of communities.

(Photo of Czech national cemetery at Terezin by Scott Lowe)