Around Halloween, cemeteries often appear as symbols of mystery, fear, and the supernatural. But to Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology Amanda Fontaine, Ph.D., they tell a different story.
“Humans have been practicing ritual burial for tens of thousands of years,” says Fontaine. “We’ve seen cemeteries go from a more private space that is religiously connected to more secular spaces where people of any religious faith or no religious faith can be buried alongside one another.”
Teaching Bryant’s “Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust: Body Disposal in Modern America” course, Fontaine examines how burial grounds reflect major shifts in American life, from changing funeral practices and social inequality to environmental concerns and emerging forms of memorialization.
Birth of America's cemeteries
In Colonial America, cemeteries were small, often located on a family property or tied to a house of worship, such as a churchyard. It was common to have plots with generations of people from the same family because loved ones were usually responsible for managing funeral preparations and burials. The Civil War, however, sunset this tradition as families became overloaded with casualties and, many times, people died far from home.
“That's how the funeral industry coalesced,” Fontaine says. “That was also the time embalming became mainstream as a way to preserve fallen soldiers so they could be returned to loved ones, so they could see them and say goodbye.”
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Starting in the late 1800s and moving into the 1900s, death became even more professionalized, and the cemeteries we’re most familiar with today (think: Rhode Island’s Swan Point Cemetery or California’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park) grew out of this shift. New cemeteries were planned to be more park-like, aligning with the landscape and the grounds’ natural contours.
“Once lawnmowers and landscaping equipment came about, we started to see cemeteries become more standardized in their structure, and that was largely to accommodate maintenance because people wanted a place to memorialize their dead, and they wanted it well tended to,” Fontaine says.
The afterlife’s glaring inequalities
Fontaine shares that cemeteries are excellent visual indicators of different kinds of systemic inequalities.
Pre-emancipation and into the Jim Crow era, historical cemeteries were racially segregated. African American sections were on the edges of the property, not well maintained, and the grave markers may have been displaced or broken. The cemeteries’ traditionally white areas were more landscaped and better maintained.
Cemeteries also reveal social and socioeconomic status.
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“The size of the monument can tell us a lot about the sort of socioeconomic standing of an individual or of a family,” Fontaine says.
She adds that looking at someone’s birth and death date can give individuals a sense of their standing in society.
“If somebody lived to be 90 in a period of American history where that was rare, then we can infer that that was somebody of importance, somebody who had economic resources and had access to clean drinking water, abundant food, and healthcare,” Fontaine says.
How we think, talk about death
A cultural distancing from mortality occurred once families stopped confronting death directly in the home and started outsourcing the body preparations to professionals.
“It became something we didn't see as much, so then we didn't need to talk about it as much, and then it became taboo to talk about it when it arose,” Fontaine says.
Looking to people to actively have conversations about mortality and think about their end-of-life options, the “Death Positive Movement” gained popularity in 2011 and has been making strides since. The movement calls for a reintegration of cemeteries into public life in a way that is respectful to both the dead and grieving loved ones and can also be used as a green space. For instance, Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery holds public activities such as movie screenings, artisan fairs, and farmers’ markets.
The Death Positive Movement, notes Fontaine, coincided with environmental awareness efforts that drew attention to burial practices and their impacts on the earth. Traditional burial requires a significant amount of land use; the chemicals used in embalming can leech into the ecosystem; and some caskets contain varnishes, adhesives, or preservatives that introduce pollutants into the soil as they deteriorate.
“Within the past few years, the number of people who opted to be cremated after death surpassed the number of people who wanted to be traditionally buried,” she says, adding that cremation is an eco-friendlier alternative.
And, while not mainstream yet, she notes that there are conversations happening around the idea of human composting, which is a controlled decomposition of humans for purposes of returning them to the soil; this is currently legal in 14 states. There are also green burials where an un-embalmed body is placed in a designated green cemetery where it naturally breaks down over time.
Death’s future
Fontaine sees society continuing to move in the direction of the death positive movement and becoming more open for discussion around the topic.
“I think we'll see more innovative ways for body disposal and memorialization cropping up. Some of the ways that seem a bit fringe right now will probably gain some traction,” Fontaine says.
For instance, individuals are now embedding QR codes into headstones, which take visitors to a stable URL that holds things like a biography of the person, personal recipes, and pictures or videos of them.
“Memorialization will become this digital realm because it's not limited in the way the physical world is,” Fontaine says.
With the rise of cremation, she adds that people are using ashes in creative ways. Cremated human remains have been incorporated into jewelry, paint (which has then been used to create a portrait of the deceased person), and tattoo ink.
“That signifies a real human desire to remain attached to people who were meaningful to us in as close to a tangible way as we can,” Fontaine says.