Blowing in the wind? Identity, materiality, and the destinations of human ashes

This article asks whether the recent UK‐based practice of removing ashes from crematoria has led to entirely new, innovative rituals of disposal, or whether contemporary practice is an appropriation of late nineteenth‐century Romantic values and beliefs. Drawing on findings from a major empirical study among both professionals and lay people involved in the removal of ashes, it explores the potentiality of ash remains as a mobile material residue of the corpse, and considers whether they enable disposal strategies which no longer reflect concerns with space and place – particularly those associated with traditional burial grounds

Researching Lives Through Time: Time, Generation and Life Stories

The Timescapes project was launched on 31st January 2008, and the event included an afternoon seminar on ‘Researching Lives Through Time’. Keynote speakers at that seminar were Barbara Adam, Jenny Hockey, and Paul Thompson. This first working paper in the Timescapes series presents their talks, respectively focusing on time, generation and life stories. Each of these concepts and approaches is central to the Timescapes endeavour

La crémation et le devenir des cendres

Dans nos sociétés laïques, de plus en plus de personnes choisissent de se charger de toute une série de décisions concernant les cendres de leurs défunts. Actuellement au Royaume-Uni où la législation est très permissive, près de 250 000 urnes sont retirées des crématoriums chaque année. À partir d'une enquête menee auprès de particuliers et de professionnels, les auteurs interrogent l'apparition de ces nouveaux processus rituels dans quatre villes d'Angleterre et d'Ècosse. En réinventant des sites de dispersion des cendres, lors de ce qui pourrait bien être un « rite optionnel », les survivants créent des « espaces vécus » qui transcendent les conceptions officielles sur les lieux réservés aux morts. La perspective matérialiste l'emportant, le désir de ces derniers serait d'établir des liens avec les restes du défunt, afin de créer, par le biais d'une expérience vécue, des espaces de mémoire. A quarter of a million sets of cremated ashes are now removed annually from crematoria in the UK, involving survivors of the deceased in a series of decision-making processes for these remains. This change in practice has escalated over the past decade within a legislative regime that places few, if any, restrictions on the movement and placement of ashes. Issues concerning new ritual practice in a secular society have been the focus of ethnographic research among professionals and bereaved individuals and families, in four regional UK locations. Consideration is given here to what may be « optional rites » marking the emergence of new ritual processes. We argue that in imaginatively re-inventing the sites of ash disposal, survivors have sought to establish « lived spaces » which transcend institutional conceptions of spatial allocations for the dead. The emergence of individual — often private — practices around ashes suggests materially-engaged desires to connect with these remains and to transform institutional conceptions of spaces and places for the dead into « lived » spaces that can engender environments for memorialisation. In unseren Laiengesellschaften wählen immer mehr Leute, sich um das Werden der Asche ihrer Verstorbenen zu kümmern. In dem Vereinigten Königreich, wo die Gesetzgebung sehr permissiv ist, werden jedes Jahr beinahe 250 000 Aschenurnen aus den Krematorien herausgenommen. Auf der Basis einer Umfrage, die bei Privatpersonen und Professionellen gemacht wurde, studieren die Autoren die Erscheinung dieser neuen Rituale in vier Städten Englands und Schottlands. Beim Inventieren neue Orte für die Zertreuung der Asche bei diesen « Wahlritualen » schaffen die Hinterblieb enden « gelebte Räume », welche die institutionellen Auffassungen der für die Toten bestimmten Orte transzendieren. Die Entwicklung solcher individueller Praktiken bezüglich der Asche, weisen auf den Wunsch hin, mit den Totenresten in Verbindung zu treten, um Gedächtnisräume mittels einer gelebten Erfahrung zu schaffen

Cutting the Lawn - Natural Burial and its Contribution to the Delivery of Ecosystem Services in Urban Cemeteries

This article investigates the impact of natural burial on the delivery of ecosystem services (ESs) in urban cemeteries in England that are owned and managed by local authorities. Local authority natural burial sites have received far less attention from researchers than independent sites developed by farmers, charitable trusts, funeral directors and land owners. Here we argue that the local authority hybrid cemeteries that combine natural burial with traditional graves may have a far greater impact in delivering regulatory and cultural ecosystem services than the much larger and frequently more environmentally ambitious natural burial grounds developed by the independent sector. The article presents three case studies of cemeteries, each of which represents a different interpretation of natural burial. Two have retrofitted natural burial into an existing cemetery landscape. The third is a new cemetery where natural burial was included with traditional burial in the original design brief and planning application. The research reveals how natural burial is transforming the traditional cemetery, with its focus on an intensively managed lawn aesthetic, towards a more habitat rich and spatially complex landscape with its own distinctive identity. The research also reveals how natural burial (within the unique constraints of UK burial culture that does not permit the recycling of burial space) is increasing the burial capacity of urban cemeteries by accessing land and grave space that might not be suitable or appropriate for more traditional forms of burial

Seeing the way: visual sociology and the distance runner's perspective

Employing visual and autoethnographic data from a two‐year research project on distance runners, this article seeks to examine the activity of seeing in relation to the activity of distance running. One of its methodological aims is to develop the linkage between visual and autoethnographic data in combining an observation‐based narrative and sociological analysis with photographs. This combination aims to convey to the reader not only some of the specific subcultural knowledge and particular ways of seeing, but also something of the runner's embodied feelings and experience of momentum en route. Via the combination of narrative and photographs we seek a more effective way of communicating just how distance runners see and experience their training terrain. The importance of subjecting mundane everyday practices to detailed sociological analysis has been highlighted by many sociologists, including those of an ethnomethodological perspective. Indeed, without the competence of social actors in accomplishing these mundane, routine understandings and practices, it is argued, there would in fact be no social order

Beyond the Womb and the Tomb: Identity, (Dis)embodiment and the Life Course

Grounded in the authors’ theoretical and ethnographic work on pregnancy and social life after death, this article explores the ways in which the body is involved in processes of identification. With a focus on the embodied nature of social identity, the article nonetheless problematizes a model of the life course that begins at the moments of birth and ends at death. Instead, it offers a more extended temporal perspective and examines other ways in which identity may be claimed, for example, via material objects and practices which evoke the body as imagined or remembered. By documenting pre-birth and post-mortem identity-making of this kind, it demonstrates how the unborn and the dead may come into social existence. In addition, a cultural privileging of both the body and visuality is shown to shore up the capacity of material objects and practices to shape social identities in a highly selective fashion. The article therefore proposes that models of the life course need to accommodate the meanings of pre-birth and post-mortem materialities and so incorporate a conceptualization of social identity as contested, relational and inevitably incomplete