Landscaping Death

Abstract

This article explores the cultural construction of death and revival in Cornwall. In examining the ways in which these issues intertwine with the affirmation of local landscape identities, it surmises that an obscure and diffuse sense of `deathliness' exists that generates collective and contested topographical memories and perceptions. By offering ethnographic interpretations of how people relate to contemporary burial places as well as a material culture analysis of prehistoric and derelict industrial environments, the article reveals three ways in which Cornishness rests in iconographical settings and material elegies. (1) from a prehistoric pedigree, where death and ancestry connect to expressions of folklore and custom; (2) through the ties that mortality has with the past's dangerous local industries; and (3) from the symbolic death brought about by the extensive emigrant diaspora or the dissipation of identity from tourism and immigration. These factors illustrate that enduring tangible aspects of identification are perpetuated by a partial relating back to dying-out ways of life. I thus propose that the prominence of death itself becomes a significant yet ambivalent material metaphor - a motif for shaping personhood and advocating solidarity.