The Deep Time of the Dead

Author(s): Thomas W. Laqueur

Source: Social Research, Vol. 78, No. 3, The Body and the State: How the State Controls and
Protects the Body, Part II (FALL 2011), pp. 799-820
Published by: The New School
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Thomas W. Laqueur
The Deep Time of the Dead

He ordered himself to be thrown anywhere without being

buried. And when his friends replied, "What! to the birds
and beasts?" "By no means," saith he; "place my staff near
me, that I may drive them away" "How can you do that,"
they answer, "for you will not perceive them?" "How am I
then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no
sensation?"

Diogenes the Cynic, 412-c 320 BCE in Cicero, Tusculan

Disputations, I, 43.

Everywhere else death is an end. Death comes, and they

draw the curtains. Not in Spain. In Spam they open them

A dead man in Spam is more alive than any place else

world (Lorca 1998: 55).

THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE DEAD BODY IN

deep time and about its work in particular places at

Diogenes speaks for the first; Lorca for the second. Th

his argument is persuasive enough to have been repeat

two millennia. It also profoundly wrong. The dead bo

matters everywhere and across time; in particular ti

places; in disparate religious and ideological circumst

the absence of any particular belief about a soul or an

It matters because almost always, the living need the

the dead need the living. The dead body has alway

at the same time as it is known to be rubbish: power

social research Vol. 78 : No. 3 : Fall 2011 799

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thing to be reckoned with. "And yet..and "except for..are the long

and infinitely engaged history of our responses to Diogenes' argument.
There is no more protean or more generative enterprise than the

words and acts that challenge Diogenes. Of course, comes the collec
tive voice in thousands of different timbres, the dead are not refuse

like the other debris of life; they can not be left for beasts to scavenge.

They remain part of culture; base as they are, they do not revert back
into nature easily. To the contrary, they bear witness to the histori
cal continuity of humanity. We as a species care for the dead; we live
among them; we make of them ciphers of memory. They are the guar
antors of land and power and authority. They are the temporal founda
tion of human communities. That the dead body needs to be cared for

depends less on what we might loosely call our "views" about death
or on religious beliefs and more on the ethical obligations that we,
the living, owe them, the dead, in general and certain of the dead in
particular.
Or, put differently, the fact that we care for the feelingless dead

body is the result of primal sensibilities. It is to us unbearably abject.

There seems to be something wrong under almost any conceivable

set of beliefs about not caring for it. It is the duty of children to bury

the bodies of their parents, wrote a celebrated seventeenth-century

preacher, because it is "a great deformity to have a man's corpse lie

above ground for no carcasse will bee more loathsome than a man's
if it lie unburied" (Gouge 1634: 270a). While various reasons might be
adduced for why the uncared for corpse is so loathsome, the preacher's
sensibility is born of something foundational. It is echoed in the time
less psychoanalytic anthropology of Julia Kristeva:

The corpse (or cadavre: cadere, to fall), seen without God

and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is

death infecting life.... As in true theater without makeup
or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently
thrust aside in order to live. There, I am at the border of my

condition as a living being (Kristeva 1982: 3-4).

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The care of the dead is also a, if not the, sign of our emergence
from the order of nature into culture. It is, as the philosopher Hans

Georg Gadamer puts it, "the immutable anthropological background

for all the human and social changes, past or present." "The burial of
the dead," he continues,

is perhaps the fundamental phenomena of being human.

Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of the dead, a swift

clearing away of the shocking impression made by one

suddenly struck fast in leaden and lasting sleep. On the
contrary, by a remarkable expenditure of human labor
there is sought an abiding with the dead, indeed a holding
fast of the dead amongst the living. . . . We have to regard
this in its most elementary significance. It is not as religious

matter or a transposition of religion into secular customs,

mores, and so on. Rather it is a matter of the fundamen

tal constitution of human being from which derives the

specific sense of human practice; we are dealing here with
life that has spiraled out of the order of nature (Gadamer
1981: 75).
I think this is roughly right. Gadamer's use of the phrase "elemen

tary significance" puts us in mind of Claude Levi-Strauss' Elementary

Structures of Kinship, which argues that the incest taboo stands at the
border of humans as being in nature and in culture (universal as are the
laws of nature; a norm and thus cultural). Buiying the dead, "holding fast"

to them, and making them the bearers of memory, shares this quality. I
am not really concerned here whether, in fact, care of the dead is or is not
conterminous with culture"the fundamental constitution of human

being from which derives the specific sense of human practice." There
was no such moment or such a border; it is the creation of fictive anthro
pology. All I need for now is that in contemporary debates and, as far back

as people have thought about the subject, care of the dead is regarded as
foundationalof religion, of community, of civilization itself.

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Origin stories like these could, of course, be multiplied. I have

cited those above to hint at the historical depth of the anthropologi
cal truth most clearly articulated in 1907 by Robert Hertz, a brilliant
26-year-old Jewish student of Emile Drkheim and Marcel Mauss. There
are, he says, two kinds of dead: one kind in nature, the other in culture.
On the one hand there were the dead as bodies, the sort of which

Diogenes spoke: smelly putrefying flesh that had lost whatever had
made alive and were like any other organic matter in decay and food
for scavengers. Soon they would be only bones. These dead have little
history. (As Hertz, and many anthropologists since, argue, the concept

of "natural" death vs. a death caused by exogenous evil forces is far

from universal and does have a history. I am speaking here of the dead
body in nature however it came to be in that state.)
On the other hand, there are the dead as social facts, as creatures

who need to be eased out of this world and settled safely into the next.

How this is donethrough funereal rites, initial disposition of the

body and often a repositioning or reburial, mourning and other kinds

of postmortem attentionis deeply, paradigmatically, indeed foun

dationally part of culture. It is not like natural death, something that

happens, more or less, in an instant: becoming really deadeven in

the West, where supposedly death is a precipitous eventtakes time. It
takes time for the rending of the social fabric that death occasions to be

repairedthis was Hertz's main pointand, more important from my

perspective, for the dead to do their work in creating, recreating, and
representing the social order (Hertz 1907: 36-37).

Of course, in complex urban societies, not every death leaves a

hole. Indeed, much of the history of the work of the dead in the last two
centuries is to insist that dead bodies that before had been un-noticed

should be honored. And in the modern world, rituals of death do more

than repair a breach in the social order: they demand new social and
political arrangements. But this is possible because of the structures

through which the dead body matters and because of the seemingly
universal sensibility that Hertz articulates, the sense that the dead are
still among us and must be eased out gently or invited back. We are,

so the historical and anthropological record suggests, a species that

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not only lives with its dead but is acutely aware of their foundational
importance. And we seem to be the only species to do so. The case for
animals, with perhaps a very slight exception for elephants, is very thin

(Douglas-Hamilton et al. 2006: 87-102).

I WANT TO NOW OFFER AN EXEMPLARY CASE OF HOW THESE

anthropological claims are translated into the work of

that have little to do with, or are even contrary to, sp

status of the body, the soul, and afterlife and a grea

the kind of anthropological claims I have been ma

Enlightenment deist philosopher and radical Willia

forgotten 1809 Essay on Sepulchres engages in a self

necromancy that eerily echoes the arguments of St.

Thomas from a radically different eschatological pers

subtitle says, "a proposal for erecting some memoria

dead in all ages on the spot where their remains hav

and was intended to be the first step of a Utopian sch

necro-geography in such a way as to resist the ine

memory by time. The places where noteworthy bodi

should be identified by name, Godwin proposedl

cal signsand should be marked on maps, like th

existed "in which the scenes of famous battles were
a particular mark." This exercise would result in what he called an
"Atlas of those who Have Lived, for the Use of Men Hereafter to be Born"

that would keep in memory those who might otherwise be forgotten.

Godwin knew anecdotally and intuitively what modern research

has confirmed: that after the passing of the generations that had
known the dead directly or indirectlyroughly three generations we
now knowthe interest of the living in the dead wanes; gravestones
are neglected and fall into ruin, cut down as stubble in the field. The

"perishablness of monuments," and the shortness of memory were

all too evident. "Where is Horace's tomb now? Or where the tomb

of Macenas his patron?"Godwin asks rhetorically. His son-in-law

Shelley eight years later in "Ozymandias" would make the same p

when he wrote about the broken statute of the once great king: "R
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the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare / The lone level
sands stretch far away." Godwin offers his proposal as a way to avert
oblivion for the sake of mankind through perpetual care of names. The

"recollection and admiration of the dead" made possible by knowing

where they are buried, will, he argues, make us better people and the
world a more virtuous place (Godwin 1809).

This particular claim is less important in this context than

the arguments he makes for why dead bodies matter in the first
place. Godwin wrote his essay in 1809, 12 years after his wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft, died giving birth to the girl who would marry Shelley
and write Frankenstein. Theirs had been a short but intensely passion
ate courtship and marriage and her death devastated him. Six months
after she died he published his controversially revealing Memoir but

it did not end his mourning. The enormity of death, "the greatest
of earthly calamities, and the most universal"he really means her
deathstill weighted on his heart. "The dead are gone," he reflects,

"beyond all the powers of calculation to reach"; "the effects flow

ing from the mortality of man to human affairs" is incalculable.
Loss is "perhaps greater to him that survives than to him that dies"
not because, as St. Augustine wrote, the dead are comfortably at the
mercy of God or because of the assurance of life eternal, or because,
as the Epicureans would have it, the dead are no more than they were
before the unborn. The living suffer because they cannot be sure that
the dead are anywhere.
Godwin, like Augustine m this respect, tries to bridge the unimag
inably great divide between the two worlds through attention to bodies

of the special dead. The question is why, for a rationalist like Godwin,
the dead body is able to do this. His answer will take us back to the
Church Fathers.

Godwin offers a psychology and theoretical anthropology of the

dead that goes back via Aquinas to the beginnings of the Church. For

those who survive, he says, anything associated to a friendposses

sions, furniture they used, body partshave "the virtue which the
Indian is said to attribute to the spoils of him he kills." This is a remark

able emotional alliance for a man who prided himself on his civilized
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rationalism and he translates its meaning for readers. Everything

"which has been practically associated with my friend, acquires a value
from that consideration; his ring, his watch, his books, his habitations."

(The "he" in this case is a "her"; the friend in question is "the wife of
my bosom.")
But a far more powerful connection to the person of the friend
than objects that she had owned or had held near to her body, was her
body itself. Godwin knows that he ought to accept the views of Bishop
Berkeley that "the body of my friend, the vehicle through which [her]

knowledge and virtue was conveyed to me was nothing." And yet he

admits that he can not let it go at that: "I can never separate my idea
of [her] peculiarities and [her] actions, from my idea of [her] person." "I

can not," he concludes, "love my friend, without loving [her] person."

Only the corpse remains and caring or being in its presence is the near

est that the living can come to the dead: "[Her] dead body is far closer
to that person even than his [her] book or watch." (His insistence on
the male "his" is unrelenting, perhaps because it suggests that what he
says is true in generalthe universal masculine pronounand is not
to be interpreted as an idiosyncratic personal expression of grief. I have
substituted "her.")

Godwin is painfully aware that there exists no more radical

a rupture than that between the living and the dead body; if its rosy
hue could somehow be purchased it "would be my companion still"
which itshepainfully is not. The corpse is the great, paradigmatic
reminder set for us by the "system of the universe" that we are of a

degraded nature and of humble origins, that we are mortal. We cast

bodies into the ground to mould back into earth as a token of this truth.

And yet the corpse remains strangely still the person it was, lacking
only what seems so little yet so enormousthe breath of life, the "rosy

hue." The corpse and the person are not irrevocably sundered.
A man who is as close to an atheist as we will find in the late

eighteenth century thus resists what would seem the self-evident trut

that the dead are really gonethat they are no more in this worldan

he therefore asks the next obvious and universal question: if the dead

are not gone, then where are they? "Where is my friend?" "Close dedu
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tions of reasoning" might allow him, Godwin says, to recover "the

thinking principle which animated [her]." "Suggestions of faith" might
allow him to follow the dead "through the vast regions of space and
see the spirit return to God that gave it." But neither of these options
is satisfying. Memory of the wise things a person said or wrote is cold
comfort and the deist Godwin was famously not given to faith. He is,
he insists, a "creature of sense," a creature of things that are palpable,
present, touchable. This, in turn, offers at the same time a dispiriting
conclusiona moidering body is very far from a passionate friend and
wifeand the beginning of hope. All that we have left is the epitaph
"hicjacet," "here lies dead" over the place where "the body is depos
ited." There is only the sign and dead body beneath it. But then Godwin

appropriates the remarkable power of the imagination and creates a

microcosm of the deep time of the dead. One would have to have to
have an impenetrable heart, he says, not to feel "a certain sacredness
of the grave" a sensibility as old as writing on the subject of death and
as generative.

Based on this intuitionthis feelingGodwin proposes necro

mancy: "the habit of seeing with the intellectual eyes things not visible

to the eye of sense," "rescuing the illustrious dead from the jaws of
the grave," making "them pass in review," querying "their spirits and
recording their answers," having "live intercourse with the illustri
ous Dead of all ages." The proposal to erect a small monument, with a
name affixed, to the final resting places of the worthy deador even
the legendary resting place of near mythical figures like King Arthur or

Homer and fictional ones like Clarissais thus, explicitly, an act call
ing up them back or willing them into being through the voice of the
imagination and the act of building memorials.
But he wants to do more than just call individuals back to life.
Marking with names places "hallowed by the reception of all that was
mortal of these glorious beings" and erecting a "shrine to the memory" is

de facto creating a community of the holy dead without believing in holi

ness. It is a way of communing with each and every one of them without

subscribing to any traditional religious views of how and whether this

might be possible. Godwin offers what he knows is formula for necro
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mancy and for the veneration of relics that he does not believe and that

the national church vigorously disavows. We "indulge all the reality we

can now have of a sort of conference" with the dead "by repairing to the

scene which, as far as they are at all on earth, they still inhabit" (empha

sis in original). The dust that covers a great man's tombalthough by

extension any tomb worth paying attention to"is simply and literally
the great man himself" (again, emphasis in original). We can attain, he says,

"the craft and mysteiy, by which we may spiritually, each in his several
spheres compel the earth and ocean to give up their dead alive" (my emphasis).

These are extraordinary claims coming from an old, virulently

anti-Catholic radical. (The problem of the argument from design seems
to have kept Godwin, as it did many others, from taking the last step to
denying completely that there was a God.) In the final year of his life he

would write a book that attacked all manner of superstition, an expos

of the "credulity of the human mind" as an insult to reasonand necro

mancy was foremost among them. No sooner are we acquainted with

the laws of nature, he wrote in 1835, but that we "start calling up the
deceased from the silence of the grave and compelling them to disclose
the secrets of the world unknown." The dead are, or ought to be, beyond

"our power to disturb" because there is something sacred about their

repose. And yet.... Of course, Godwin is not interested in the "secrets
of the grave," but in a conversation about things of this world. But he
does want to rescue, query, and pass the dead in review. He wants the
presence of his love, Mary Wollstonecraft, and believes that proximity
to her dead body is sadly as close as he can get.
In the 1809 Essay already he was aware that his wish was close to

what generations of English would have branded Catholic superstition

if not to an insult to a man such as himself, who "in, his genuine and
direct sphere, is the disciple of reason." Perhaps he protests too much
by assuring readers that there is "no danger in the present state temper

of the European mind of falling into idolatry." But still, "no-one could
not be affected by the visit of a grave" (Godwin 1835: iv-v, 42).

This is probably trae as far as it goes for early nmeteenth-century

England and for today. (Visitors to the chaste grave of Elvis Presley in
Graceland's "Meditation Garden," or the tomb of Jim Morrison, clouded
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in the mists of marijuana smoke in Pre Lachaise, may wonder whether

the danger of falling into "idolatry" in the present state of the modern

mind is really past.) Godwin has reason to be defensive. Whether he

knew it or not, St. Thomas Aquinas defended "the worship of relics of
the saints" in exactly the same way he uses to explain his attachment to

the body of his beloved and, by extension, to others one wants to keep
near. Quoting St. Augustine as his authority, St. Thomas argues that:

If a father's coat or ring, or anything else of that kind is

so much cherished by his children, as the love for ones
parents is greater, in no way are the bodies themselves to
be despised, which are more intimately and closely united
to us than any garment; for they belong to a man's very
nature" (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part 3, quest. 25, art. 6,
quoting Augustine, City of God, i, 13).

Someone who feels affection for someone who has departed

will have affection for their clothes and "such like," andthis seems

evident to Aquinasfor their bodies or parts of their bodies. If this is

the case for the ordinary bodies of the ordinary dead, it is all the more

true for the special bodies of the special deadsaints"which were

the temples, and organs of the holy ghost dwelling living and operat
ing in them." The skeptic might respond with the syllogism that (a) it
is absurd to venerate that which is insensible; (b) the bodies of saints
(and of everyone else) are insensible; and therefore (c) it is absurd to
venerate them. But the answer is clear. One worships not an insensible
body for its own sake but for the sake of the soul to which it was united.

That is, the dead body carries with it a quality of having been some
thing material that had an intimate relationship with the soul just as a
beloved father's ring or clothes had with his person.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS JUSTIFICATIONS AS WELL AS

the purposes for which they sought to honor the bodies of the dead could

not have been more different for Godwin on the one hand, and the great
est theologians of the Church, on the other. Godwin thinks that the "recol
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lection and admiration of the dead" that comes from knowing where
they are buried will make us better people and the world a more virtuous

place. Augustine and Aquinas believe it connects this world with God and

the saints in heaven to the benefit of the living and the dead. Godwin
denies an afterlife for the dead body; Aquinas believes that the selfsame

person, body and soulwill be resurrected on the Day of Judgment.

But for all the differences in the two accounts, taken together they

show that one can go a long way toward making the dead body conse

quential without particular eschatological or metaphysical commit

ments. It was an enlightenment radical materialist who believed that
the dead "are infected with the perishable quality of their histories";
that they were "imbued with some qualifying substance, or active prin
ciple." It was the deist Godwin who believed that, unremembered, they

are "barren soil" and "perished and left not a trace behind." But, prop
erly buried and remembered those clods of earth"the dust is earth; of

earth we make loam"are "admirably fertile," perhaps not of grain or

flowers but of "sentiments and virtues."

Godwin's proposed landscapes are thus enchanted not by divinity

or by having had immortal souls, but by deep histoiy and, paradigmati
cally, by the history to which the dead body testifies. In other words,
he tells the story of how the "nothing" of the dead body can become
something on account of it having been "something" when it was alive.

The dead thus enchant the body, as they do other objects that remain
behind, whether one denies the possibility of enchantment as Godwin
does in more sober moments or embraces it as did St. Augustine. The
value the body of one's beloved and of things that belonged to her are
"not merely fictitious," Godwin insists; they are constitutive of a person

existing in time. The dead, he says, "have an empire" over the mind.

They are alive in culturally important ways. This is what Lorca

meant. (Whether they are more alive in Spain than elsewhere need not
concern us.) Of course it is the living who do the physical work that
puts the dead in position to do their work. But living bodies do not
have the same powers as dead ones. "The most dangerous person at a
funeral," as historian Richard Cobb observed, "is the body in the coffin"

(Cobb 1970: 8).

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Let me illustrate this claim on a broad canvas through a brief

sketch of the civilization making of the spatial arrangements of

bodies. Christianity is founded on a new necro-geography. This is
what Gibbon meant when he interpreted the failure of Julian the
Apostate in 386 to permanently expel the body of a Christian saint
from the Grove of Apollo near Antioch as a symbolically decisive
moment:

The ruin of the pagan religion is described by the soph

ists as a dreadful and amazing prodigy, which covered the
earth with darkness, and restored the ancient dominion

of chaos and night. They relate, in solemn and pathetic

strains, that the temples were converted to sepulchers and
that holy places, that had been adorned by the statues of

the gods, were basely polluted by the relics of Christian

martyrs (Gibbon 1906).

His source is even more pointed. (Gibbon dresses his anger in

irony; Eunapius does not.) He speaks of the monks who moved into
the ruins of sacred places as "men in appearance [who] led the lives of
swine," who "collected the bones and skulls of criminals ... made gods
of them, haunted their sepulchers and thought that they became better

by defiling themselves at their graves" (Eunapius 1952: 423-25).

Not quite in the fourth century but over the next 200 or 300 years,

the bodies of the ordinary dead moved in and around churches; cities,
towns, and villages came to surround these sacred places. There was the
body or some other part of the special deada saintin each church
protecting all the other bodies with its aura. The pollution taboos of the
ancient Mediterranean world had been reversed and a new civilization

with a new necro-geography at its core was born. This is the story that

the modern cemetery reversed. It undid more than a thousand years of

history and self-consciously enlisted the dead in a new project.
THE DECISIVE YEAR IN THE MODERN HISTORY OF THIS NEW

necro-geography is 1804. In that year Napoleon, Hegel's incarnation

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of the Weltgeist on horseback, was crowned emperor and a genuinely

new kind of space for the deaddefinitively not a churchyardopened

in the heart of Europe. It would soon find imitators and rivals in the
urban centers of the Western world: the Cimetire du Pre-Lachaise.

Of course, there had been burial grounds that were not churchyards
before: Jewish ones, small Protestant and Catholic ones of dubious legal

status in confessional states where the rival religion was the religion

of the state, and, in England, ones of varying sizes occupied by dissent

ers of various sorts. George Fox, founder of the Quakers, John Bunyan,

and scores of other worthies were laid to rest in London's imposing

and extensive Bunhill Fields beginning in the late seventeenth-century.

(Walled off in 1665 as a place to dump plague victims, it was never

consecrated or used for its original purpose and soon had a new use.)

The first freestanding mausoleum since antiquity, designed by Sir

Nicholas Hawksmoor and commissioned for Castle Howard by the Earl

of Carlisle, was built in 1742 for its patron's body. He aggressively did
not want to lie in a church. But whatever its antecedents, Pre-Lachaise

was, and was understood at the time to be, a radical innovation in

necro-geography. It very quickly became the symbol ofalmost a name

fora kind of burial place that triumphed wherever the new bourgeois
civilization of the nineteenth centuiy triumphed or hoped to triumph.

Unlike the churchyard that, whatever its aesthetic merits as

landscape architecture, was simply the space for burial around a

specific church, cemeteries were, like country house parks, designed
landscapespicturesque, natural, fanciful, or dull. They had recogniz

able styles that became trademarks of a sort. The man who in 1808
was responsible for the neoclassical Paris Bourse and who in 1786 had
become the architect for the cole MilitaireAlexander-Thodore

Brongniantalso designed neoclassical Pre-Lachaise. Stephen Geary,

who was responsible for much of the Egyptian revival vernacular archi
tect in north London, also built the Egyptian circle at Highgate.
Unlike the churchyard, historically joined to a church and wholly

dependent on it (where there's no church, there's no churchyard by

definition, even if occasionally they might be a distance apart), the

cemetery was a place unto itself. It was "gesamptkunstwerk," a "complete
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work of art" as Wagner said of his operas and as the German historian,
Norbert Fischer, said of these new places for the dead. They could be
anywhere, although in fact they were almost always urban and func
tioned as more or less compelling "sights" of any city with pretensions
to public notice. Hamburg's Olsdorfer Friedhof presented itself at the

Paris World's Fair of 1900 as a prime example of German gardening

arts and was thought by the city's newspapers as a sight of renown that

would have influence on cemetery design in Berlin, Munich, and else

where (Fischer 1996: 49).

The style of a cemeteryits "look and feel"was transport

able. Highgate, which opened in 1839, was said by the guidebooks and
magazines of the nineteenth centurysomewhat implausibly given its

Egyptian circle and Gothic gatehouseto be the closest that London

had to Paris's Pre-Lachaise. Kensal Green, built six years earlier, had
also aspired to that honor. The emperor of Brazil wanted a Pre-Lachaise

near his capital and the Merchant Adventurer's Company wanted one
in Glasgow (Blair 1858: vii). Alternatively, of course, cemeteries were
designed to be not like Pre-Lachaise, or to differ from it deliberately
in telling ways: Mt. Auburn near Boston celebrated the rural romantic
curves and hollows that allowed for a more democratic distribution of

gravesites than did the grand straight avenues of Paris. Paris was too

gloomy about death, thought Harriet Martineau, the English woman

of letters; Mt. Auburn too cheery. Balzac on the other hand thought
that Pre-Lachaise produced just the right effect: "I seldom go out, but
when I feel myself flagging I go and cheer myself up [there]." He added:

"While seeking out the dead I see nothing but the living" (Culberston

1986). Architecture thus translated into affect; new kinds of places

were thought to, and quite probably did, produce new ways of being

with and among the dead (Sloane 1991: 46-47).

Just as cemeteries could mean almost anything, they could

belong to anyone. The ownership of the new cemeteries varied. Some

belonged to a municipality: Pre-Lachaise was the project of Nicholas

Frochot, delegate to what became the National Constituent Assembly
in 1789, Mirabeau's executor, and Napoleon's prefect of Paris and the

Seine. The shareholders of joint stock owned most of those built in

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Britain before the middle of the nineteenth century, usually in multi

ples of 10 shares. Others were of mixed ownership: local worthies

along with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society had stakes in Mt.
Auburn. Although most cemeteries in Europe contained at least some

consecrated ground, they were not fundamentally religious places

they bore no geographical relationship to churches. However intricate
the laws of land ownership were, they were in no sense owned by the

church; they were conceived of as having a new relationship to the

past. Cemeteries were altogether different from churchyards.

Size alone distinguished them. Pere-Lachaise's 48 hectares made

it almost 70 times as large as the old Cimitire des Innocents, which

managed to compost millions of bodies over the centuries within a

space of 7,200 square meters (.75 hectare). London's Brookwood ceme
tery, founded in 1853 (900 hectares) was a thousand times bigger than
any eighteenth-century churchyard. Size mattered because, in addition
to making the places of the dead into major and architecturally signifi

cant impositions on the landscape, all those square meters provided

room for an enormous increase in the ground available for commemo
ration. The space restrictions that Vanbrugh railed against that left all
but the very greatest of men and women to "little Tawny monuments of

marble stuck up against walls and pillars" became a thing of the past.
There was room now for family mansions.

In the churchyard, no individual could or did own a burial

place; inside, the church's claim to a tomb was almost always by some
customary right. In the cemeteiy, individuals could buy freehold prop

erty. They, like Roman places of burial had been, were essentially
privatefamilialand could be built upon with only minimal zoning
restrictions. Tombs and headstones were oriented not east-west as they
had been for more than a millennium, and as were the churches in

or around which they clustered, but in the direction of the view, the
path, the avenue. (Alignment mattered; Quakers tended to bury with
bodies lying north-south to distinguish their dead from those of the
Anglican majority) (Bashford and Sibun 2007). The placement of tombs
on the landscape followed the same principles as the orientation of an
ordinary house. Of course, most of the dead in cemeteries were not in
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private graves; the majority were in anonymous mass graves or, at best,

in four-to-a-grave tenements that were dug in crosswalks in obscure

corners or wherever was convenient. But what one sees across the beau

tifully landscaped hectares are privately owned monuments on free

hold property; they visually define the place.

The landscape of the cemetery is the landscape of a community

to which one belonged because one could buy one's way in. (The others
were there because they happened to die in a jurisdiction whose author
ities had a contract to bury in pits hidden among the tombs.) Anyone
could get in. While the churchyard had been the place of burial usually

for one and sometimes for several parishesthe common lands of a

local Christian communitythe cemetery was a cosmopolitan space

to which anyoneor no onecould and did belong. Within its bounds
during the early nineteenth century, an entirely new and varied sociol
ogy and economy of the dead came into being. And everyone knew it:
In these refuges of the dead are gathered together all ranks

and ages: the Russian is by the side of the Spaniard; the

Protestant, the Jew, not far from the Catholic; people of
radically different opinions find themselves finally meet
ing in the dust of the grave (Marchand 1821: 225).

This new world did not just happen; those who ran cemeteries
encouraged and actively promoted new assemblies of bodies from differ

ent time periods and of different political and cultural dispositions.

The Pantheon in Parisa mixed genreis the first of the new national
cemeteries that started with the exhumed bones of chosen ancestors
Voltaire and Rousseau in this caseand added new worthies over the

years. By the end of the nineteenth century the carefully crafted assem

bly of a nation's great and good was commonplace and the burial, or
more usually reburial, of new additions were major occasions. (As many
as 250,000 attended the portentous funeral, in April 1939, of the early
nineteenth-century Czech romantic poet Kartei Hynek Mcha, rescued
from his pauper grave and reinterred in Prague's national cemetery,
Vysehrad, five month after Munich [Sayer 1998: 25 if].)
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The process was not so different in ordinary cemeteries. The

Prfet Frochot, in a burst of entrepreneurial modernism, managed to
get for reburial in his new cemetery what he thought were the bones
of two old regime bad boys: the writers Molire and La Fontaine,

whose first burial was thought less than appropriate because of old
regime hostility, and particularly clerical, hostility to their writings.
Militants of the Parisian "section Molire and La Fontaine" exhumed

their bodies in 1792 with the plan to rebury them with well-deserved
honors. In fact, like so much of the French cultural patrimony, they
were rescued by Alexander Lenoir, who since 1791 had been the direc

tor of the Commission on Monuments, charged with the placing

newly dispossessed art in new venues. He put them in the garden of
his Muse des Monuments Franais from which they went to their
strange new home. Even if they were fakes, which they almost surely

were, the point is the same; new relics for a new day (Leon 2005;
Charrier 1933).
In 1817 Frochot pulled off an even more culturally resonant
exhumation and reburial, this time of the bonesprobably genuine
of the star-crossed medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise. Until 1789 the

pair had been resting peacefully, except for occasional checkups and
local transfers, in the Paraclete monastery that Abelard and founded
and where Heloise was the abbess. Their tombs, along with the monas

tery, were destroyed by revolutionaries; the bones then had a peri

patetic existence with several close escapes until 1800. Rescued by

Alexander Lenoir, they, and pieces of their tomb, went to his Muse des

Monuments Franais, where their tomb was rebuilt and the bones rein
terred. With the restoration of Charles X, cultural power shifted again;

the museum of revolutionary booty was closed. As it happened, the

bones were once again available for a new burial place just at a moment
when Frochot needed prestigious tenants to make his new and still not
quite acceptable cemetery more attractive to the fashionable dead. He
was happy to help. An enormous funeral brought the twelfth-century

couple's bones to nineteenth-century Pre-Lachaise and six months

later their mausoleum, disassembled at the museum, was rebuilt in its

new venue. And so the medieval pair from another cultural universe
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was re-imagined as bourgeois lovers in a new memorial park for the

dead on the northeast outskirts of Paris.

IT IS THIS OPENNESS, THIS SELF-CONSCIOUS WORLD-MAKING THAT

distinguishes the nineteenth-century cemeteryboth aesthetic

sociologicallyfrom the churchyard. Many welcomed it and m

not. The Gothic revivalist architect Augustus Welby Pugin, wh

pioned the ecclesiastical style of the Catholic middle ages as an anti
dote to the secular commercialism of the nineteenth century and the
moral evil of the cash nexus, was among its most principled critics. The

"grossest absurdities" were rife he complained. A superabundance of

inverted torches, cinerary urnsbut, of course, no ashesand other
pagan symbols adorned tombs; the entrance gate might be Egyptiana
kind of Orientalist fantasythat created an affiliation between neo

catacombs for sale as Christian burial placesbad enough with

discoveries along the Nile. To make matters worse, there might be
Grecian capitals along a frieze that gives the cemetery's name; Ossiris

bears a gas lamp and various "hawk headed divinities" look on.
Hieroglyphics on a cast iron gate "would puzzle the most learned to
decipher." Advertisements were plastered on its walls. The dead in the
cemetery somehow give credence to all that was vulgar about the first
industrial society (Pugin 1843:12ff)
Not every proprietor was as brazen as the Westgate Hill General
Cemetery Company, which announced its radical social and cultural

agenda explicitly: individualism and cosmopolitanism. Its prospectus

offered acres "open alike to the whole Human race, without difference

or distinction"; a place where the dead could be buried with or with

out religious service "as they think fit." (The promoters were politically

active dissenters long engaged with fighting Anglican privileges.) But

the sociology of these sorts of place was clear. A visitor to San Francisco

in 1855 was amazed that people had started to build all sorts of monu

ments in "the best Parisian style," in imitation of "the sepulchers of

Pre-Lachaise" on 16 acres of what had, three years earlier, been the "sad
and desolate" scrub land of Yerba Buena. But more remarkable than a

French cemetery on the edge of the Pacific, he thought, was that "the
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places of their births were so diverse." "Now they sleep side by side ...
American and European, Asiatic and African . . . now the same filthy

substance." (This is the same trope used in the 1821 Marchand Paris
guidebook from which I quoted.)

That social distinctions are erased among corpses is a very old

trope. But the point here is not to the leveling in death of those seem
ingly fixed, ancient, hierarchies that ordered the old regime, but erasure

of distinctions that Western bourgeois society had created to define

itself in relation to the rest of the world: white pride in not having
the blood of "yellow, red, and black races," the pride of the "man of
progress" over the "slavish native of warm climates," are leveled. The
world of commerce, empire, and slavery are manifest both in the fine
Parisian styles and in contemplating the identical "filthy substance"
that is hidden by chaste monuments. Whatever all this means, it speaks
of a sort of new cosmopolitan of the dead in a space far away from the
living (Brotherton MS; Bruner 1945 [1855]: 22).

If archaeologists 1,500 years from now were to excavate the

burial places of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as we do
those of the sixth, seventh, or eight centuries, they would conclude,
as we do when studying these earlier sites, that they had unearthed
evidence of an epochal shift that allowed the dead to play their parts in
the cultural transformations of the Industrial and French Revolutions.

Those who argued that the churchyard ought to be abandoned; that the
dead should be expelled from their proximity to the living inside cities

where they had been welcomed with the rise of Christianity; and that
new places for them should be fashioned, thought they were engaged
in a monumental project of cultural reform. The dead do the work of
making civilization in our era as they did before.
But there is a difference. For much of history, "And yet. . ." and

"except for..the gap between what Diogenes the Cynic taught and what
humans did and did not dobetween the reality of corpses and what they

mean to uswas bridged by some sort of metaphysical or transcenden

tal claim. Indeed the twoskepticism and metaphysicsare mutually
constitutive. But Enlightenment scienceunderstanding the body as
mere matter and death as a biological eventmade the chasm of Diogenes
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unbridgeable in these terms. On this point, thinkers of the Catholic reli

gious Right and the secular Nietzschian Left agree: the end of metaphysics

seemed to portend a psychological and political disaster. Modernity made

death unbearable and dangerous. The gap could not be bridged.

But it can and was bridged again. We have come to make mean
ing with corpses knowing that if pushed very, very hard, we would have

to admit that the work of the dead was magic. But it is a magic that
we can believe without an ironical shrug, without the self satisfaction

of parody. We comfort ourselves in new ways; we canmelancholy

as it waskeep the dead present tenuously among the living; we can

make and remake communities persisting through time as we have

done before but based now on enchantment of a different sort. What

is modern about the work of the dead in modernity is this: a protean

magic we can believe in despite ourselves.
In many, many ways the evidence for this claim is present in the

everyday politics around us. A more extensive ethnography would bear

it out. While revising this essay, scarcely a week has gone by without

some new case coming to public attention: on July 21, 2011, we learned

that the body of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, buried in the Bavarian town
of Wunsiedel when he died in 1987, had been exhumed, then cremated

and finally scattered to the winds because his grave had become a shrine

for thousands of neo-Nazis. The enchantment of this most profane of

bodies was disbursed only by burning it into tiny particles of its consti
tutive chemistry. On June 9, 2011, a black businessman and former city
councilor in Stockton, California was shocked to discover a sign over the

new graves of 36 anonymous black bodies that had been exhumed and
reburied that read "Moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery."

"When I went up to that gravesite," he reports, "I feel like I could

feel the presence of those people crying to get those things off of them."

A few weeks later, National Public Radio's "All Things Considered"

reported that the children (by his first marriage) of Jim Thorpe, the great

Native American football star and 1912 Olympic gold medal winner,
along with his tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation, are suing the town of Jim

Thorpe, Pennsylvania where he was buried under an impressive pink

marble slab. His second wife had given the body in 1957 to what were
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then two small towns in return for the promise that they would join
and be renamed after her husband. "The community of Jim Thorpe, we
have a signed contract by his widow," a town father responds; "we have
the rights to the possession of Jim Thorpe's body." No, say his surviving

children, "dad's wish was that he buried in Oklahoma." An empty tomb

without the corpse would not draw the tourists that a body and tomb
now attract (New York Times 2011; NPR 2011).
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