The presence of the dead

Abstract

In academic literature, death and the dead are often treated conceptually and with little regard for the aesthetic and tactile experience of the materiality of the corpse. In this way the agency of the dead body is ignored, and the reciprocity between the deceased and the bereaved remains obscured. In effect, the corpse assumes the role of a neutral object, which blurs the particular potency of the dead body's materiality. This article proposes an alternative to this inadequacy, and discusses the changes in cemetery culture in rural Denmark within the past 50 years, addressing identity, emotions and attitudes to the materiality of the dead body. It is argued that an immaterial and subjectified recollection of the dead has, in part, replaced the previous externalized and collective commemoration due to an altered recognition of the corpse's materiality. In this way the adoption of urn burials, unmarked communal graves and lawn cemetery sections may be seen as ways of creating paradoxical yet tangible non-places, where the forging of identities and meanings of dead individuals are relieved of their material presence and proximity.