From monuments to megapixels: Death,memory,and symbolic immortality in the contemporary United States

Abstract

This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to the present. It asks: What do recent shifts in mortuary practice and memorialization reveal about larger changes in American culture and society? And what is at stake in charting and understanding these changes for anthropologists interested in technology and culture change more generally? We argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from ‘monuments’ to ‘megapixels’, the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media. We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating the transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combatting death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today’s virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss.