Possession,performance,and the rhetoric of belonging: Urban cemeteries as spaces of cultural citizenship

Abstract

This study utilizes performance and cultural citizenship as rhetorical frameworks for examining the power of spaces of death in shaping civic identity in urban spaces. Utilizing invisible rituals as a point of entry, I examine the urban cemetery as a space for reinforcing, challenging, and reshaping the identity of citizenship through performance, ritual, and possession. Through a combination of on-site observational research and digital ethnographic interviews, this study explores urban cemeteries as community spaces that reify hegemonies of cultural citizenship in life and death. Utilizing literature from the study of space, performance, possession, cultural citizenship, and ritual practice, I argue that performances of ritual in cemeteries are more than just acts of mourning or remembrance. Rather, resting on the dynamics of visibility, performances of ritual are also claims of possession of the space that assert belonging and shape the frame of reference for acts of meaningmaking in cemeteries.

Introduction

‘I’ve found some strange things around the cemetery,’ David tells me as we begin to wrap up our interview over Zoom. ¹ ‘Like what?’ I probe, fingers poised over the keyboard preparing to note David's observations. ‘Bags of chickens,’ David says. My fingers hover a moment longer before they begin flying to keep up with the list of other occurrences that David and I spend the next half hour discussing: eggplants at the cemetery gates, blood on headstones, dead and live animals, jars of ambiguous liquid, and various kinds of offerings David associates with practices like ‘voodoo’. David is not the only one of my interviewees who found evidence of what they referred to as ritual practices in or near the cemetery. Skylar, a groundskeeper at The Woodlands, spoke to me of finding eggplants outside the cemetery gates several times a year and coming across what she called ‘little collections of weird stuff,’ shrines, or evidence of rituals that are not located near specific headstones. As I would come to learn, most of these rituals are consistent with practices of Candomblé, Ocho (also known as Santería), and Vodou, Afro-Caribbean diasporic religions uniquely expressed in local contexts around the world (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, 1997; Palmié, 2006; Ramsey, 2013; Viarnés, 2007). These ‘invisible rituals’ are performances of ritual in cemeteries that are more than just acts of mourning or remembrance, they are also claims of possession of cemetery space that assert cultural citizenship and belonging both in and beyond the cemetery. ²

Cultural citizenship, as articulated by Miller, is a description of one form of citizenship that has emerged as transnational flows of bodies, labor, and knowledge have proliferated across the globe (Miller, 2001a, 2001b). As terms like ‘migration’ and ‘borders’ have become increasingly popular buzzwords, cultural citizenship provides a helpful framework for thinking about identity, belonging, and the power and purpose of nation-states in an ever-intertwined society. Cultural citizenship is concerned with ‘the maintenance and development of cultural lineage through education, custom, language, and religion and the positive acknowledgment of difference in and by the mainstream’ (Miller, 2001b: 2). While political citizenship permits governmental representation and protections of private property, and economic citizenship addresses the legality of employment and the distribution of economic benefits, cultural citizenship centers belonging (Miller, 2001a). Therefore, cultural citizenship is at stake in any space or performance where individuals or collectives vie for recognition from the mainstream to achieve validation of their differences as a part of collective culture. As this study will demonstrate, urban cemeteries are exemplary locations where bids for cultural citizenship take place. Urban cemeteries serve as participants in performances of the possession of space as a means of forcing mainstream culture to recognize demands for cultural citizenship by, at least, acknowledging implicit biases and, at most, positively validating cultural difference.

This study is not interested in the content of invisible rituals as meaning—although that endeavor has its value—but the (f)act of invisible rituals as such in relationship to the construction of cultural citizenship. For example, with a little research one can find out that the what—the meaning—of leaving eggplants at a cemetery gate is most likely an offering for the orisha Oya, a spirit venerated in Candomblé, Ocho, and Vodou who guides spirits to the threshold of the cemetery (Santerian Church of Orishas, n.d.). It is the (f)act of invisible rituals themselves, the performance of making an offering or leaving behind some trinkets, tokens, or tonics, that must be analyzed if we are to understand what the process of such a ritual does for people and culture. In drawing our attention to the performances naturalized in a cemetery by being subversive, invisible rituals force us to come up against ourselves as a collective and reckon with elements of our death culture that we still do not like to talk about, the elements that we continue to push to the edges even as the edges creep up on us and demand to be incorporated into the space of meaning making. These rituals not only exist in a liminal space but also force us into a liminal space—as scholars of rituals like Bell and Turner argue—and thereby afford us the opportunity for the collective transformation of our vocabulary of death and dying and parameters for cultural citizenship along with them (Bell, 2009; Turner, 1975).

In what follows, I discuss the dynamics of (in)visibility present in the space of the urban cemetery that make it an exemplary space for exploring the work of ritual practices as acts of possession and declarations of cultural citizenship. This necessary throughline of (in)visibility underscores the purpose, method, and application of this research as needed to broaden our understanding of the rhetorical function of urban cemeteries, especially among marginalized communities. I take up an architectonic definition of rhetoric that encourages pluralism of theory and method to support the interdisciplinary literature required to pursue this study (McKeon, 2005). Utilizing a combination of on-site observational research and digital ethnographic interviews, this study explores several urban cemeteries in Philadelphia, PA, as spaces that reify and transform the identity of cultural citizenship through ritual, performance, and possession. Following a description of my method, I situate this project in relationship to literature that traverses the study of space, performance, possession, cultural citizenship, and ritual practice, resting upon the dynamics of visibility as they illuminate the powerful potential of invisible rituals to expose our frame of reference and challenge our ritual sense. The bulk of this study puts the words of my interviewees and my observational research directly into conversation with its informing literature. Through a critical cultural lens, I hope to advance scholarship on the possession of cultural citizenship by exploring the power of death and spaces of death in shaping civic identity. This study concludes with several theoretical implications and practical recommendations for urban cemetery managers, staff, and volunteers.

Architectonic rhetoric and plural methods

Rhetoric as an architectonic art—that is, an art of doing—is predisposed to rubbing elbows with other disciplines and bodies of literature (Benson, 1989; Eberly, 2001). As McKeon explains, the purpose of rhetoric is the discovery of the unknown in any discipline (2005). This form of rhetoric is fundamentally interested in answering the question, ‘What does rhetoric do?’ by examining both the ways traditional rhetorical artifacts are productive and by producing new understandings of what constitutes a rhetorical artifact. In the context of this study, I mobilize an architectonic understanding of rhetoric to ask what meaning invisible rituals make by primarily examining what invisible rituals do through the lenses of performance, ritual, and possession. This architectonic analytic informs my methodological approach as one that is both fundamentally plural and performative. It is not enough to simply ‘read’ the landscape of performance in a cemetery, it must be experienced, observed, and discussed to be remotely understood. Even then, from an architectonic perspective, the work is never really done because the rhetoric of doing is always being done, constantly reorienting our understanding of existence and experience. ³ I approach invisible rituals and performance in the cemetery not to decode or understand what these performances mean in a discursive sense but to understand what they do in an affective, cultural, and civic sense. For these reasons, my chosen method is a combination of immersive on-site observation (henceforth referred to as fieldwork) and digital ethnographic interviewing. ⁴

My fieldwork attempted to adhere as closely to a critically immersive method of participant observation fieldwork as possible while operating under the constraints of research during the COVID-19 pandemic that restricted in-person gathering. This fieldwork was culturally focused and site-specific research interested in studying people and the signs, symbols, practices, and rituals they engage in to understand how localized communities make meaning and shape the use of space (Clifford and Marcus, 2010; Conquergood, 1991; Geertz and Darnton, 2017; Ghodsee, 2016; Turner, 1975). Because of its strong emphasis on observation and participation, fieldwork is particularly suited for the study of performance, ritual, and possession as architectonic acts of meaning making and identity construction.

Fieldwork took place in three rural cemeteries local to the Greater Philadelphia Area: The Woodlands Cemetery, Laurel Hill Cemetery, and West Laurel Hill Cemetery. These sites were selected based on three criteria: design, setting, and activity level. First, all three of the sites are rural cemeteries by design that have become urban cemeteries due to growth of the city of Philadelphia (Skår et al., 2018). Second, this growth means that while the cemeteries were originally designed as distant green spaces for socialization and leisure in the late nineteenth century, they are now surrounded by living neighborhoods with varying reasons for visiting cemeteries (Greene, 2008; Smith, 2017). Third, these cemeteries are active sites of community engagement and activity that invite people to visit by being open and welcoming to the local community and by conducting programming and events aimed at attracting different audiences to the cemetery.

During active fieldwork I spent at least three hours a week at one or more of these cemeteries, logging approximately 80 h of on-site data collection. Each visit lasted several hours during which I walked the grounds, sketched maps of the cemetery's layout, and observed the space and its visitors. I immersed myself in the cemetery as a visitor, walking the trails and pathways, visiting famous graves, and picnicking and reading under the trees. As an avid cemetery visitor I was already familiar with these locations and endeavored to experience the cemeteries as a participant and an observer, with a critical awareness of my positionality as a researcher. ⁵

After my initial site visits, I spent two months conducting remote ethnographic interviews with staff and volunteers from all three cemeteries. ⁶ I engaged in ethnographic interviewing as a means of exploring the experiences of people who observe and interact with individuals and communities that inhabit and move between cultural fringes within a cemetery. ⁷ Consistent with this style of interviewing, I conducted semi-structured interviews to build rapport and invite interviewees to shape the direction of my research (Heyl, 2001). Using a guide of 17 open-ended questions focused on cemetery use, affordances, and performativity, I built rapport with my interviewees over our shared enjoyment of cemeteries and encouraged them to share their experiences of the space in their own words. At the end of each interview, I left space for my interviewees to share additional insights beyond the perceived boundaries of my research agenda. I identified my sample using purposive and snowball sampling until I had conducted 15 interviews with 10 staff and five volunteers. Following the initial interviews, I added ‘thick description’ to my research notes through relistening to the recordings (Geertz, 1973). In total, this produced 61 single-spaced pages of interview notes. The following puts these conversations and notes in conversation with literature on (in)visibility, spatial and affective tensions, the performance of ritual and possession, and the potential for cultural citizenship in urban cemeteries.

A definitional note on ritual and our ritual sense

Ritual theory tends to focus on the content of cultural and religious rituals to decipher what rituals communicate. Especially at end-of-life, rituals provide a sense of belonging, confer affective and economic value to the deceased, and solidify posthumous identity (Barley, 1997; Metcalf, 1981; Metcalf and Huntington, 1979). Building on the mention of a ‘ritual context’, or what Bell (2009) calls a ‘ritual sense’, I focus on ritual first and foremost as a cultural performance that functions to either reinforce naturalized cultural hegemony or ‘make do’. By attempting to create space for forms of cultural citizenship and civic action that have been pushed outside of the central arena of social drama, invisible rituals can transform our shared understanding of death and dying. Therefore, I use Bell's definition of rituals as ‘the means by which collective beliefs and ideals are simultaneously generated, experienced, and affirmed as real by the community’ (2009: 20). Rituals say things in that they do things, they are a type of performance that acts upon the body, space, and time to place the subject in a position of liminality with the potential for transformation (Bell, 2009; Rappaport, 1979; Turner, 1969; Turner, 1975). This transformation has implications for the constitution of the structures of power regarding civic belonging that are naturalized in cemeteries.

Invisible rituals and a bid for belonging in urban cemeteries

I define ‘invisible rituals’ as those performances and performative remains that, though visible in cemeteries are not legitimized as acceptable and valuable forms of engagement with cemeteries. These rituals come up against the ‘proper’ relationships between performances of grieving, mourning, and remembering in the space of the urban cemetery, making visible the frame of reference for acceptable performances that is usually implicit. The prevalence of invisible rituals is consistent with the demographics of Philadelphia. Black Americans, including African Americans and Caribbean-Americans, make up over 40 percent of the population (United States Census Bureau, n.d.). The other 60 percent of the population includes Caucasians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Mexican Hispanics, Asian Americans, and a very visible ethno-religious Jewish community (United States Census Bureau, n.d.).

Dynamics of (in)visibility

The prevalence of racial and cultural diversity in the city of Philadelphia is altogether different from the visibility of racial and cultural difference. Visibility and invisibility exist not as a dualistic binary, but as a processual cycle of identification and recognition (Cruz, 2017). Visibility is more complicated than merely seeing or being seen, it is about recognition and inclusion as well (Cruz, 2017). The paradoxical experience of being seen and yet invisible is beautifully narrated in Fanon's foundational work Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon experiences being seen as a Black man when a child identifies him, saying, ‘Look, a Negro! Maman, a Negro!’ (Fanon, 2008: 93, emphasis in original). At once, Fanon is seen and identified as a Black man, and yet in being seen he is not recognized as a part of society. Being identified by the child as a ‘negro’, Fanon is encountered as an othered object while his total complexity as a human being is made invisible. While he is seen and identified, he is not recognized or known. This is architectonic rhetoric at work, communication that not only says something, but does something to the subject, the space, and the time (Eberly, 2001; McKeon, 2005).

These same dynamics of visibility and invisibility occur in the performances that take place at cemeteries. Flowers, money, and alcohol are all evidence of performances that routinely occur in cemeteries and are recognized as being in our frame of recognition that dictates what is and is not afforded visibility regarding performances for a cemetery. My interviewees tapped into this boundary between visible and invisible performances as they articulated connections and separations regarding ‘little collections of weird stuff’, ‘strange things’, and rituals. ‘Weird stuff’ and ‘strange things’ included burnt offerings and animal remains and were associated with ritual practices by my interviewees. Both of these categories were considered distinct from routine and visible performances in cemeteries and fall under my definition of invisible rituals. Like Fanon, they are seen and identified but they are not recognized or known. Despite Black Americans, African Americans, and Caribbean-Americans comprising the majority of Philadelphia's population, the performances of remembering, mourning, and offering associated with spiritual practices like Candomblé, Ocho, and Vodou exist as invisible rituals that, while seen, remain dispossessed.

The consequences of this dispossession reside most obviously in the alienation of Black Americans from most cemeteries in Philadelphia even though they make up the majority of the population. Visibility and recognition of performative remains as belonging within cemeteries naturalizes who is seen as a member of the cemetery community. Visibility and recognition as heuristics of possession function as reminders of the phenomenon of deep time in relationship to performances in cemetery spaces. Deep time tells us that our present is not experienced the same by all subjects (Lane, 2010). For some, ‘“five hundred years ago” may be beyond the pale of memory, for another it is a raw reality in whose snare we still live’ (Lane, 2010: 116). Zerban, a staff member at Laurel Hill Cemetery, explained that rural cemeteries were historically places of lynchings during slavery and Jim Crow. This situates Black Americans in a temporal relationship with cemeteries informed by a violent past that makes it even more crucial that rituals and performances associated with Afro-Caribbean diasporic communities are recognized not only as visible but as contemporary. To other the invisible rituals produced by Ocho and Vodou as ‘strange’ is to ostracize the performances from space and time, deepening the time that distances Black Americans from possessing a sense of belong in urban cemeteries.

It is because of the position of identity in relationship to time, space, and performance that not all cemetery visitors will feel welcomed in the same way that a cisgender white person will. Laurel Hill and The Woodlands were both founded several decades before slavery was abolished, and West Laurel Hill was founded just a few years after the emancipation proclamation. All three cemeteries are products of their time, a time when non-White Americans were not seen as citizens. David told me that up until 1974 Laurel Hill was a segregated cemetery. Zerban told me that Laurel Hill struggles to reach Black Americans because of additional affective barriers such as evidence of former racism and a lack of knowledge about the Black residents interred in the cemetery prior to its desegregation. Evidence of racial prejudice and outright racism continues to echo in American cemeteries, where who you are in terms of identity matters just as much as how you come to realize your identity in the context of a space inextricably linked with inequity. This history does not mean that cemeteries need to restrict themselves to being spaces of exclusion in the present. De Certeau (2013) writes that every performance is in relationship to systems of identity, but this does not mean that every performance is always in adherence to systems of identity. The very possibility for disrupting frames of recognition is embedded in the performance of identity itself (Butler, 1988).

As Butler writes, ‘by virtue of the unrecognizable other…norms that govern recognition come into crisis’ (Butler, 2005: 20). A collective understanding of what is ‘in’, ‘out’, and ‘on the outside of’ visible performances for a cemetery is implied in a frame of recognition that the invisible rituals of Afro-Caribbean diasporic religions are considered distinctly ‘on the outside of’. Leaving food at a specific gravesite is ‘in’ our vocabulary, but leaving eggplants outside of a cemetery is not. Instead, such invisible rituals are ‘on the outside of’ our frame of recognition in a fringe space wherein the performance is associated as ‘othered’ ritual as opposed to a norm (Turner, 1969). But a fringe space does not exist on its own and must be considered in relationship to a central body, a relationship that is often hegemonic. By existing on the fringes, invisible rituals create a crisis of recognition by exposing the frame of recognition of performances for a cemetery that is usually taken for granted. This crisis brings attention to the hierarchy of visibility afforded to performances in a cemetery with implications for our collective understanding of death, dying, and the construction of civic identity.

As a space where cultural citizenship is negotiated, failing to make visible the possession of cemetery space by members of the local urban communities has the potential to further ostracize marginalized communities from being included in definitions of citizenship based on civic engagement at the cemetery. Traditionally, we associate the term ‘possession’ with what is known as spirit possession, when the body of a person becomes ‘possessed’ with an outside force (Johnson, 2011). For the sake of this project, I take up a more nuanced understanding of possession as ‘the terms of property, the place one can sit’ (Johnson, 2011: 423). These notions of ownership, the human body, and property ‘preceded and guided notions of spirits’ capacity to “sit” in flesh’ and inform my usage of possession as a performance that attempts to assert belonging and being (Johnson, 2011: 23). Intentional outreach to marginalized communities who feel dispossessed by cemeteries is crucial to encouraging people like Black Americans that they too can possess ritual and performative space in cemeteries.

Affective tensions impacting inclusion in urban cemeteries

Urban cemeteries are already complex spaces of place making since they are located at the intersection of time, space, and culture as spaces of both memorialization and community engagement (Nielsen and Groes, 2014). As spaces of life and death, urban cemeteries like Laurel Hill and The Woodlands that are one of a minority of greenspaces in a dense urban jungle must balance the, at times, affectively conflicting interests of mourners and recreationists. These cemeteries face the same challenges of other urban planning projects when it comes to creating spaces to engage the community in that a top-down approach is ineffective (Nielsen and Groes, 2014). A cemetery may claim to be ‘open to the public’ or to ‘welcome visitors’, but the visitors may be unsure what they are welcomed to do in cemeteries due to poorly communicated messaging about spatial use (Grabalov, 2018; Nielsen and Groes, 2014; Skår et al., 2018). In response, cemetery visitors describe an affective barrier to engagement where despite the physical affordances of the space, they are not sure if activities like jogging or bike riding are considered ‘appropriate’ (Grabalov, 2018; Nielsen and Groes, 2014; Skår et al., 2018).

In conversation, many of the staff and volunteers noted that the historical differences of Laurel Hill and West Laurel Hill led to two different sets of spatial affordances, expectations, and audiences. Laurel Hill Cemetery was founded in 1836, five years after Mount Auburn in Massachusetts, making it the second oldest rural cemetery in the United States. West Laurel Hill was established 30 years later in 1869 following the expansion of Fairmount Park, Laurel Hill's neighboring greenspace. The two cemeteries have only recently come under joint management despite their proximity, just a 6-min drive apart on opposite banks of the Schuylkill. Having developed as separate cemeteries, civic engagement staff like Florence now work to find ways to form a single cemetery audience. ‘People can feel like they get a bit lost in the space which can parallel one's feeling of loss, but you cannot get lost in the cemetery—you will always find your way back, just like in life,’ said Florence, speaking of cemeteries as enriching community spaces that are additive to society and capable of connecting with a broad audience.

While the cemetery staff at all three cemeteries do their best to remove affective barriers—such as the cultural impression that cemeteries are meant to be ‘quiet’ and ‘sad’ places—they fail to recognize at times that removing certain affective barriers might actually be constructing others that make visibility and possession for marginalized communities more difficult. For example, what happens to the perceived acceptability of invisible rituals when cemeteries focus their messaging on increasing access to paths and greenspace for leisure and recreation? Giving people greater access to structures is not enough to encourage use; visitors must also have positive experiences to possess the space and receive explicitly inviting messaging that ‘sees’ them (Nielsen and Groes, 2014). This is particularly important to consider since urban cemeteries can be places for cultural encounters that can increase understanding and acceptance of cultural differences both in general and in the specific context of varying rituals surrounding dying, mourning, and memorializing (Swensen and Skår, 2019).

Picking up on the potential for cemeteries to mediate cultural interactions, Lucille Butler, staff at West Laurel Hill, said that the space ‘encourages people to express the unique elements of their culture.’ For example, on my many visits to West Laurel Hill I always walked through two sections dedicated to Jewish residents. Each section features a prominent stone washing station, where visitors are provided with a basket of palm stones and a faucet for rinsing them before leaving them on graves. As a representation of the Jewish tradition of contributing to the burial of the dead by place dirt and stones upon graves, the visibility afforded to the practice at West Laurel Hill influences the prevalence of leaving behind other tokens of remembrance—money, glassware, and other trinkets—elsewhere in the cemetery. The impact of normalizing different cultural practices of remembering and engaging with the dead cannot be understated. Recognizing Jewish practices of mourning, grieving, and remembering that involve leaving performative remains behind undoubtably influences the normalization of leaving behind other tokens of remembrance.

Making visible cultural differences by recognizing diverse rituals as a part of the cemetery community fosters intercultural interaction. Jane, program manager at The Woodlands, said that the cemetery tries to put on programming that engages all the varied interests of the community, including holiday programming. Based on a review of event promotional material it is notable that holiday programs, like Halloween events, are usually general, areligious, and not spiritual to appeal to the largest audience. None of the cemeteries put on programs for Día de Muertos or recognize other holiday events for dispossessed communities. As a civic institution, cemeteries have the power to recognize and make visible performances like invisible rituals as a part of the cultural language of performance and possession for a space of death and dying.

The power of the performance of possession to disrupt visible practices

Performances constitute one of the most basic units of analysis for understanding culture: they serve as ‘a universal human resource for deepening and clarifying the meaningfulness of life’ (Conquergood, 1985: 1). I understand performance as embodied, temporally and spatially contextualized, audience-oriented behaviors that are reflexive and ethically situated (Conquergood, 1985; Spry, 2011). Performance is both how we ‘problematize how we categorize who is “us” and who is “them”, and how we see ourselves with “other” and different eyes’ and how we create ‘border crossings, contact zones, and boundary disputes’ (Langellier, 1999: 138; Madison, 1998: 282). Drawing upon Butler's assertions about gender, it follows that subversive performances of possession create a crisis of recognition by coming up against dominant ways of doing possession (Madison, 1998). Therefore, I assert that invisible rituals provoke a crisis of recognition by coming up against our frame of recognition for performances of mourning, grieving, and remembering.

Since it is possible to discern ‘ways of operating’, or styles of action that function as standards of performance, it is also possible to find ways of ‘making do’ within these constraints (de Certeau, 2013: 30). De Certeau's process of ‘making do’ supports taking up the very tools provided by a system of constraints to work around, re-work, and make do by re-mixing the ‘rules’ such that performers introduce a ‘degree of plurality’ that lets them alter the system that constrains them by using the constraints to construct a new way of doing (de Certeau, 2013: 30, emphasis in original). The practice of making do in the context of doing identity brings attention to the fact that who I am matters because who I am is the place from which I exist in networks of power and knowledge production. Making do is what de Certeau (2013) calls a tactic, a fringe practice inextricable from the use and abuse of power that ‘is the space of the other’ and ‘an art of the weak’ (de Certeau, 2013: 37). This characterization of a tactic needs to be clarified by a Foucauldian understanding of power as a network in which all subjects and entities are interconnected. Since de Certeau says that a tactic is determined by an ‘absence of power’ it would be more accurate to say that the tactic of making do is an art of the oppressed (de Certeau, 2013: 38, emphasis added). Tactics of making do utilize relationships between time and action to create space for visibility.

The practice of Afro-Caribbean diasporic spiritual beliefs in the US, like Ocho and Vodou, encompass a set of marginalized performances that are not allocated space for practice in most predominantly white Americanized spaces—which include most US urban cemeteries. The invisible rituals that accompany them exemplify the tactic of making do as they speak to performances that seek to make a space of visibility for themselves in cemeteries. The visibility of performative remnants of mourning and grieving allows visitors the opportunity to either recognize these performances or identify them as ‘other’, as in the case of invisible rituals. The othering of invisible rituals does not just mean identifying certain behaviors as being ‘on the outside’ of our frame of recognition of appropriate performances in the space of death and dying, it also means othering Black and marginalized communities instead of recognizing them as cultural citizens of the cemetery and community.

There is room for a diversity of performances of grieving, mourning, and remembering in cemeteries, indicated by the recognition of various racial and ethnic groups such as the two dedicated areas for the Jewish residents in West Laurel Hill and the significant population of Asian residents at the cemetery. Along with diverse cultural spaces, cemetery staff speak of unique individual performances of remembrance that are recognized as part of the cemetery community. I was informed by multiple staff at West Laurel Hill that every year a family comes to the cemetery with a TV and a grill to have a game day barbeque for the first Eagle's game of the season with their deceased father. Picnicking at a family member's graves is a regular occurrence at all the cemeteries according to staff, as is leaving mementos on special days. Skylar, groundskeeper at The Woodlands, noted that leaving wreaths around Christmas and flowers on birthdays and anniversaries is prevalent, and there is also a family that leaves a carved pumpkin at their loved one's grave every Halloween. When seen and recognized by staff and other visitors as normal for the space of a cemetery, the performances are made visible, but so are the identities of the performers and the deceased as cultural citizens whose contribute to the civic value of cemeteries.

Despite the diversity present in the cemetery landscape, social inequity is still entombed there and felt by many. Cemeteries must navigate mediating performances of identity that are at times conflicting with contemporary social values. Zerban stated that it is often through the eyes of visitors that cemeteries come to take on new meaning and the performance of identity is exposed as a central part of experience. During a tour at Laurel Hill, a young Black woman noted a nondescript stone, asking ‘Who is he hiding from?’ Her assessment was ironically accurate considering that she was referencing the stone of one of the largest slave owners in the United States in the nineteenth century, whose stone only bears his initials. Urban cemeteries conduct lots of tours, many of which are themed around different ‘residents’. When interfacing with a community that feels unwelcomed because of the history of racial violence that has taken place in the past or other affective barriers, it is not enough for cemeteries to advertise themselves as spaces for ‘everyone’. Cemeteries need to recognize what it means to be Black and be in a cemetery space and positively validate the repeated occurrence of invisible rituals that speak to attempts to possess visibility made by marginalized groups as a way of reinforcing, challenging, and rejecting the identity of citizenship through ritual cultural performances.

Possessing space for cultural citizenship in urban cemeteries

The doing of the identity of citizenship serves as an intersection where performance, power, and space come into relationship, and cemeteries represent such a space of collective identity where campaigns of cultural citizenship play out rhetorically. C.E., a staff member at Laurel Hill, said that the cemetery offers a space for solidarity and communal identity. It provides people the chance to explore where they come from and functions as a space that speaks to their shared history as Philadelphians and Americans. This begs the question: what is recognized as part of the shared history that comes to exemplify the identity of the cemetery as a civic institution, with the authority to inform what being a Philadelphian or American looks like? This sense of community is shaped by the people who use the cemetery, and it is reinforced by which groups possess visibility in the space.

Cemeteries use general messaging that welcomes all visitors into the space, and staff communicate that visitors from all backgrounds have the right to express themselves so long as they are not putting themselves or others at risk. Having the right to express grief and engage in performances of remembering is altogether different from whether those performances are visible and recognized as part of the cemetery community. C.E. spoke candidly about the complexity of catering to all the groups who visit the cemetery, identifying multiple ‘audiences’ that are visible in the cemetery: history buffs, leisure-goers, artists, goths, and cemetery enthusiasts being just a few. Cemetery staff recognize these groups by putting on programming aimed at inviting them into the space, like the annual RIP 5k at Laurel Hill. Staff also encourage and welcome performances that these groups already engage in, such as leaving flowers, palm stones, or other trinkets. In affirming the visibility of certain groups, cemeteries create barriers to the visibility of others. For instance, while cemeteries recognize that leaving things behind in the space is one of the ways the community engages the space, invisible rituals are not seen as possessing the status of cultural citizenship and are not ‘naturalized’ in the cemetery space. Instead, David remarked that the individuals who left animal remains in the cemetery usually did so overnight to avoid being told to leave by the staff who had discouraged at least one individual from doing so previously.

As civic institutions, cemeteries rhetorically inform what we consider the norms regarding grieving, mourning, and remembering, particularly American ways of engaging spaces of death and dying. The placing of flags at veterans’ graves, for example, is not only an individual act of mourning and engaging with the reality of mortality, it is a cultural precedent regarding both how we recognize American citizens who have died and how we, as American citizens, recognize the dead. On these grounds, we must add a fourth concept to Miller's triad of politics, economy, and culture that shapes the discourse surrounding the construction of citizenship: death (Castronovo, 2001).

Writing of democracy in the nineteenth-century United States, Castronovo (2001) explains that both physical and social death outlined a public sphere where citizenship was universalized so as to disembody and disenfranchise certain subjects from the rights and community of being a citizen. Castronovo (2001) defines necro citizenship as a kind of citizenship for the select few where whiteness masquerades as a universal standard for rights, personhood, and belonging that obfuscates the reality of the suffering and enslavement of others that is necessary to maintain the illusion of equality. ‘Haunted by social death,’ Castronovo writes, ‘citizenship as the precept for equal membership also serves as an architect of inequality’ (Castronovo, 2001: 204). Subjects who are culturally or socially different from the ‘universal’ identity of citizens are socially dead and outside of the system of citizenship. Outside of the system, subjects are denied the rights and community inclusion of ‘naturalized’ citizens and ironically liberated from ‘social meanings of race, gender, culture, and religion’ (Castronovo, 2001). From this position, Castronovo states that the socially dead have the ability to ‘think against freedom,’ or to challenge the actual value of the depoliticized center of ‘naturalized national rights’ that citizenship is built upon—they can make do within the constraints of citizenship (Castronovo, 2001: 61).

When speaking about invisible rituals, David noted that ‘these people are using the cemetery for their own means,’ but that ‘they’ were always extremely respectful of the space. Similar comments regarding visitors using the space for ‘their own means’ were not made by other interviewees talking about the prevalence of people leaving flowers, stones, mementos, and even small bottles of alcohol or food at specific gravestone. Unlike invisible rituals, these performances of remembrance are not seen as coopting the space for personal use. Instead, the visible remains are naturalized as belonging in the cemetery and recognized as performances conducted by members of the cemetery community. The way that cemetery staff speak about the people who perform invisible rituals versus those who leave behind visible remnants of remembrance illuminates how cemeteries naturalize the meaning of citizenship.

Invisible rituals are socially dead, they are not recognized as having civic value that contributes to cemeteries as spaces of cultural citizenship. David believes that many of the people performing invisible rituals are immigrants and celebrates invisible rituals as examples of the diverse and tolerant nature of cemeteries. Not all cemetery staff and visitors are as welcoming. David told me that a male staffer at Laurel Hill approached and scolded a visitor who was seen driving through the cemetery and leaving behind glass vials filled with liquid, candles, and other ritual ephemera. This act of discipline is unusual considering that cemetery staff at all three cemeteries told me that while there are written rules regarding what is ‘allowed’ in the cemetery, they rarely reprimand people for leaving mementos. Invisible rituals, while seen in the cemetery, are excluded from the naturalized cemetery community and the cultural citizenship it affords, evidenced by the fact that a staff member judged invisible ritual remains as inappropriate. These rituals continue to remain on the fringes of both the space and the conversation regarding the collective identity of the Philadelphia community and American citizens represented by these cemeteries.

In addition to attempting not to reprimand people for leaving mementos, several staff members at Laurel Hill and West Laurel Hill, David and C.E. especially, stressed that the cemetery staff do not believe in ‘stealing from the dead’. This means that the cemetery staff do not take things that are left at gravesites, even if they technically violate the cemetery's rules. However, cemetery staff do discard animal remains and other ‘hazardous’ items that are found in the cemetery in general. Some of the other invisible ritual remains that David and Skylar discussed discarding included: glass bottle filled with various fluids, a glass jar with a preserved snake inside, a raw pork chop, and eggplants. Despite having a policy against stealing from the dead, the cemetery staff pick up invisible ritual remains on sight because they do not want visitors to be responsible for finding and maintaining invisible rituals. In part, the staff justify this response by stating that these people (the people performing invisible rituals) use the cemetery for their own means and leave behind the remains of rituals that they are ‘done’ with, so the staff are just cleaning up after them and helping them finish their work. On the one hand, it is possible to make the argument that the remains of invisible rituals are unsafe and unsanitary: glass can break, a child could mistakenly drink an unidentified liquid, animal remains left out in the open do not create a very savory aroma. On the other hand, it seems irresponsible and unethical to justify the removal of invisible rituals using the argument for safety while allowing other performative remains—like small liquor bottles, glass vases, and food packaged in plastic—that are unsafe for the cemetery environment to remain. By attempting to deal with the remains of invisible rituals before visitors encounter them, the cemetery is only reinforcing that invisible rituals do not belong by reducing the opportunities for visitors to see them as visible performances.

Invisible rituals exemplify the practice of making do in regard to the formation of cultural citizenship in cemeteries. While cemeteries neglect to put on programing or encourage engagement that caters to the subjects that engage in invisible rituals, the rituals continue to pop up in cemeteries and to be seen. Invisible rituals have possessed space for themselves, a space where they are identified and can therefore campaign for visibility as remains with civic value that contribute to the history and community of cemeteries. Several days after the male staff member at Laurel Hill ‘told off’ the visitor performing a ritual, David said that the cemetery staff found a well-known relief of a man's face covered in blood. David inferred that this was a statement to the cemetery staff that invisible rituals would not be dispossessed when they are already compelled to make do.

Discussion of the past, present, and potential futurities of invisible rituals in urban cemeteries

The connection between invisible rituals and the construction of cultural citizenship represents an avenue for theoretically rethinking the role and power of citizenship from the perspective of the socially dead. Cultural citizenship already complicates how we understand civic identity and responsibility by demonstrating that citizenship is not an identity that is conferred through the reception of political and economic rights and privileges but through the possession of community belonging (Beaman, 2016; Miller, 2001a). As a dimension of citizenship focused on the inclusion and visibility of subjects in the societal community of civic belonging, cultural citizenship can be nuanced by the addition of Castronovo’s (2001) description of social death as the state that subjects find themselves in when they are excluded from the rights and inclusion to community. Taking the relationship and perspective of the socially dead into consideration grants an opportunity for rethinking citizenship from outside to question the implicit value of citizenship itself. Increasing cultural hybridity has given way to a dramatic increase in transnational flows of knowledge, capital, and bodies that presents a necessary challenge for rethinking the role of citizenship in a post-global neoliberal world (Appadurai, 2000; Bhabha, 1994; Shome, 2011).

Additionally, as performances that explicitly involve opposing forces and the transformation of subjects in the context of hegemonic structures and vocabularies of shared meaning making, rituals are always already hailing subjects, in the context of Althusser’s (2001) framework, to reproduce and reinforce the collective ethos, or ways of operating (Bell, 2009; Butler, 2005; Rappaport, 1979). Ritual performances make distinctions between opposing forces not always for the sake of separation but for the continuance of conformity to the dominant ideology much in the same way that interpellation commands the subject to be produced in line with dominant ideology so that ideology may reproduce its own means (Althusser, 2001; Bell, 2009; Butler, 2005; Rappaport, 1979). To validate and make visible only the rituals that conform to the cultural mainstream reinforces a hegemonic hierarchy of ritual practice that devalues and dispossesses ritual practices performed by marginalized and subversive communities that do not align with the norms of performance for urban cemeteries. It is necessary for us to recognize ritual practice as an arena for cultural expression where shared beliefs, values, and attitudes are shaped and reshaped such that practices that at one point are transformative may become visible to the point that they become conformative and vice versa.

The large urban cemeteries of Philadelphia recognize that they have a problem when it comes to connecting with their most immediate audience, the predominantly Black urban neighbors. In response to this problem, staff and management endeavor to organize and promote programming that invites local residents to participate with the cemetery as a greenspace, a park, and a place for community engagement to live up to the cemetery's original nineteenth-century socio-cultural aspirations. As invisible rituals highlight, urban cemeteries can do better to become more inclusive spaces of community engagement, intercultural encounters, and conversations about death and dying. Based on my conversations with cemetery staff and my fieldwork, there are three recommendations I forward to cemetery staff to ensure that they act as ethical and equitable stewards of cemeteries: 1) site-specific identity construction, 2) participatory community outreach, and 3) informed spatial design (Nielsen and Groes, 2014).

First, staff and volunteers should develop individual profiles of the cemeteries they work at that make it clear to visitors why they should engage with the space. All three of the cemeteries that I studied have very clear individual profiles from ‘edgy’ to ‘active’ to ‘peaceful’ that allow them to fully articulate the identity of the cemetery. For example, The Woodlands is known to be both a peaceful and active cemetery. As a green space in a bustling metropolis, it offers a space of reprieve from the overstimulation of the city while also affording walkers, runners, and bikers a safe space to exercise. In addition to these adjectives, staff and volunteers should consider how they can articulate the cemetery space as a place for cultural exchange and death education. Explicitly welcoming a diverse array of visitors to these cemeteries is essential to ensuring that invisible rituals are seen as performances that possess valid space in the cemetery.

Second, cemeteries should build partnerships with the local neighborhoods with particular attention to Black and marginalized neighborhoods to address and avoid the whitewashing of cemeteries. To effectively engage marginalized communities and become a space for intercultural interaction, urban cemeteries can specifically welcome marginalized communities by partnering with local organizations and institutions to sponsor events that reflect marginalized interests. All three cemeteries attempt to do this with their diverse array of programming and by partnering with other local institutions to expand their audience reach. However, to build successful partnerships with local neighborhoods, cemeteries need to acknowledge the communities that they are failing to reach. It is not enough for urban cemeteries to train their staff and volunteers about how to talk about issues of identity, race, and citizenship should they come up. As civic spaces where claims of cultural citizenship are made through performances of grieving, mourning, and remembering, cemeteries need to directly lead conversations about race and citizenship, especially in regard to how injustice in life is perpetuated in death.

Third, cemeteries could endeavor to create ‘zones of inclusion’ by extending spatial affordances to ensure that all visitors feel welcomed and different kinds of performances and rituals can coexist. Similar to how Nielsen and Groes in their ethnography of rural and urban cemeteries recommend that cemeteries create ‘behavioral zones’ to designate space for specific performances, zones of inclusion would allow cemeteries to be accessible to a diverse array performance (Nielsen and Groes, 2014). Unlike behavioral zones, zones of inclusion are not continuous spaces with hard boundaries, but distributed spatial affordances that affirmatively acknowledge the existence of performances without constraining them to restricted spaces. Major urban cemeteries already engage in establishing zones of inclusion when they invest in plastic flag holders, pave pathways, or install dog waste stations. These zones of inclusion would not only create spaces that are accessible for a variety of performances and rituals they would also grant visibility by recognizing different performances and bodies as a part of the cemetery community.

Conclusion

Cemeteries are active civic spaces where the act of citizenship is possessed, normalized, troubled, and rethought through varying performances. Invisible rituals draw our attention to a hierarchy of performance with implications for the possession of cultural citizenship and community inclusion. As a cultural performance of making do, invisible rituals expose how cemeteries function as civic institutions for reinforcing, challenging, and reshaping the identity of citizenship. By ostracizing and erasing invisible rituals from being recognized as a part of the cemetery community, urban cemeteries contribute to the already uphill battle they have when it comes to reaching the local Black community. In doing so, urban cemeteries privilege dominant comfort over the recognition of the marginalized. As a civic institution, excluding invisible rituals and the communities that perform them from cemetery communities sends the message that invisible rituals do not align with what it means to be an American citizen. Urban cemeteries can validate invisible rituals and confer civic value upon them and those who practice them. They can do so by starting conversations and engaging in programming and education that recognize invisible rituals as part of a cemetery community. Providing recognition for invisible rituals would not only impact our ritual sense but also provide an explicit counter to the erasure of the Black community in urban cemeteries. To see urban cemeteries live up to the socio-cultural ambitions of their origins as spaces for community engagement, the discomfort caused by invisible rituals must not be ignored. Rather, can we allow ourselves, and our cemeteries, to be possessed by the discomfort brought on by invisible rituals to shift our understanding of cultural citizenship and transform our relationship with death and dying?