This paper discusses the emergence of nature burial in the Netherlands by drawing attention to the politics of defining this practice. On the basis of qualitative interviews and the systematic mapping of nature burial sites, it discusses how is nature burial defined, and by whom? What practices are included and excluded by these definitions, and why? By tending to such questions, the paper draws attention to the often-overlooked politics of nature burial. As a ‘green’ or ‘natural’ death practice, […]

Britain has a long history of memorials for battles and martyrdoms, erected for celebration rather than mourning. The first war memorials dedicated to the ordinary soldiers (Waterloo and the Crimean War) were erected in cemeteries, with the themes of celebration and mourning mingled. But in the 1860s, a decade after the Crimean War monuments, memorials began to be erected in cemeteries to commemorate lives lost in maritime disasters, followed by the end of the century by commemorations of purely civilian landbound disasters. […]

Though Ireland possesses a rich death tradition, such traditions appear absent for infants and more specifically, stillborn infants. This absence is understood in Western culture to be a response to Christian theology and its teaching regarding the liminal status of the unbaptised. Stillborn children were unable to receive the rite of baptism and thus remained unbaptised and consequently were not permitted to be buried within their spiritual community, resulting in separate burial. Burials thus occurred in designated Children’s Burial Grounds (Cillíní) which date ‘overwhelmingly’ to the post-medieval period (Murphy, […]

The expanding footprint of urban Asian settlements and increasing living standards have put pressure on cemetery sites. Public health narratives and the sanctity associated with death matters in Asian urban landscapes have fed into the rhetoric of cemeteries as undesirable heritage spaces. Often lacking protection, many cemeteries have been exhumed, cleared, and relocated to allow room for new developments and infrastructure, risking the survival of this quiet element of the urban cultural patrimony. Within an Asian context, […]

This paper examines two extramural cemeteries of Istanbul from its Byzantine and Ottoman past, focusing on how they shaped the spatial and social boundaries of the city. From antiquity to the present day, communal cemeteries have been located outside the city’s borders. In the 4th century, when Constantine built his city on the peripheral necropolis of Severus’ Byzantium, new cemeteries began forming outside the Constantinian wall. In the Ottoman period, the land outside the Theodosian walls was established as the city’s legitimate burial place and continues its function to this day. […]

In 1895 Smithsonian ethnographer and second-generation Irish man James Mooney noted that “The bodies of those lately buried turn over in their coffins when a suicide is deposited among them. So strong is the feeling in regard to self-destruction that in the rare instances where suicide has occrd [sic] the neighbouring cemeteries hav [sic] sometimes been guarded for days by parties determined to prevent the burial of the body near their departed kindred”.
The body of the suicide was rejected by both the living and the dead. […]

This paper seeks to provide a foundational understanding of how the funerary innovation of the alkaline hydrolysis (AH) of human corpses is likely to be adopted in the United Kingdom by covering four key areas of concern:

What does history tell us?
What do current funerary trends tell us?
What influence might the climate crisis have on changing normative funerary practices?
What does AH’s popularity in the USA tell us about its potential in the UK? […]

The 19th-century burial crisis in urban churchyards was ultimately resolved through the creation of cemeteries. Some of these were open to all denominations from the beginning, but others limited those who were accepted. In Liverpool, cemetery access was delayed for Roman Catholics, and there were few churchyards of that denomination, so when St. Patrick’s in Toxteth opened in 1829 it became a very popular choice for burial until compulsory closing of the city churchyards in 1854. […]

Densely populated cities aim to facilitate the multifunctional use of urban public spaces within the context of the intensive and rational use of limited space resources. Cemeteries are an integral part of any city, but their use is deeply influenced by social factors. The recreational use of cemeteries varies, especially across cultural contexts and even within similar contexts. Based on the experiences of other Western countries, this article examines what recreational potential cemeteries and post-cemetery parks have in Poland. […]

Cremation has been a more frequent choice than burial in the United States since 2015, moving toward a decade of transforming funeral traditions. The growing popularity of cremation niches attests to the change in cultural memory as commemoration moves from official declarations to personal, narrative, and multifaceted memories. The inclusion of objects, photographs, and brief documents in a niche creates a sense of a person’s life in a complex, rich way that is not available on a gravestone. […]

Matthew Gandy’s 2012 proposal of cemeteries as spaces where ‘heterotopic alliances’ can flourish, stemming from his reading of Foucault’s 1964 work on heterotopias, questions the ability of cemeteries to be places where strange forms of life, both human and non-human, can meet and form unexpected networks. The point of this communication is to contradict and complete Gandy’s theorization. We discuss Gandy’s idea of the cemetery’s “queerness” through the analysis of 32 French cemeteries’ rules and regulations. […]

This paper investigates the relationship between public cemetery management and public records management in South Africa. The intersection of South African cemetery management and archives and records management has not previously been explored and represents a rich area for further research. In order to build a common ground for reflection and recommendations, this paper centres on the present regulatory framework for cemetery records management and how records management principles are understood and implemented by cemetery managers. […]

The title of the paper refers to the book When the Cemetery Becomes Political which raises the question: How can a cemetery – a place for the dead – evolve into a space that cultivates a political dynamic? This question gains increased significance in times of war when new graves emerge daily, the pain of war is often very physical and place-based: the experience of suffering is tied to matter and to place, both as tragedy unfolds and long after. […]

The burial landscape of the 17th-century in North America is an ever-present feature of historic cities across the northeast seaboard of North America, where many early European settlers landed. These burial spaces, which reflect not only the traditions from the setters’ home country, also show the development of new funeral and burial practices that would evolve and shape how we respond to the same events today. In this paper, based on my PhD research, I will demonstrate how burial grounds developed in the 17th century by British, […]

In Australian cities, historic cemeteries once located at the urban fringe are now central. To accommodate growth, many have been relocated or pared down, making way for parks. This article draws on an ongoing project examining the tension between memorialization, urban ecology, and recreation. It focuses on the attempts of community groups to digitally and physically document burials and maintain headstones in Pioneer Memorial Parks: cemeteries turned into parks where (most) headstones have been removed, but human remains linger belowground. […]

Land burials as opposed to cremation were traditionally supported by the Chinese owing to their strong beliefs of the afterlife, filial piety, and geomancy. However, cremation rates in Singapore for the Chinese and non-Muslims have risen significantly from 10% in the early 1960s to 97% in 2017, becoming the country’s default body disposal method. It is thought that the Chinese were discouraged from burying their ancestors in favour of cremation because of the Singapore government’s persistent and intense acquisition of Chinese cemeteries to regain land for national development. […]

The cemetery movement (ca. 1825-1850) was partly a reaction to the decay of Anglican churchyards and crypts, particularly in cities. Through private capital, promoters built cemeteries independent of parochial authorities, fuelled by a demand from wealthy urban classes and Nonconformists for alternative burial options. However, the Church’s reaction to these projects proved uneven: at a time when State-sponsored church construction was at its zenith, some viewed cemeteries as undermining the church’s spiritual monopoly over the dead, […]

Durkheim ([1912]2001) argues that the notion of sacred and profane exist in every religion of the world. Sacred is ideal and transcends everyday existence. The profane or unholy embraces those practices, ideas, persons, and things that are regarded with an everyday attitude of ordinariness, utility and acquaintance. The profane is also believed to contaminate the sacred. All Indic origin religions (Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Sikhism) consider the body as mortal (Nashvar). In India death (mrtyu) is not opposite, […]