Historic Romans and Greeks positioned cash within the mouth of the deceased for passage via the mythological Styx; memorials are devoted to victims of genocide; vultures devour our bodies within the excessive mountains of Tibet; and within the period of technocracy, some family members even try to recreate an individual’s presence with AI.
These are a few of the historical and fashionable customs surrounding loss of life that Roger Luckhurst, a professor on the College of London, Birkbeck, charts in his new ebook Graveyards: A Historical past of Dwelling with the Useless (Princeton College Press and Thames & Hudson, 2025). Within the illustrated ebook, Luckhurst chronicles the historical past of human burials and funerary traditions around the globe, analyzing their impression on the residing. He additionally outlines how the residing make use of the useless for nationalistic, political ends.
The Normal of Ur, a picket Sumerian field from round 2500 BCE inlaid with reliefs, one aspect depicting scenes of warfare, the opposite scenes of peace (picture by Alex-David Baldi by way of Flickr, CC BY 4.0)
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Luckhurst informed Hyperallergic in an interview, the one place he might have a espresso was in a neighborhood park in London, the place he returned incessantly.
“And then I discovered that I’d been sitting in what was in fact a 19th-century graveyard and that the people serving coffee were sitting on top of thousands and thousands of bones,” Luckhurst stated. The revelation sparked his curiosity. He quickly started researching the graveyards and town, and found that many streets in London have been constructed on prime of burial websites.
Ultimately, his analysis developed to incorporate loss of life and burial practices from the world over, which he compiled into an unlimited survey of what he described as “the massive variety” of world burial customs.
An unrecorded Seventeenth-century German artist’s “The Dance of Death,” during which the central dance is surrounded by loss of life’s encounters with residing folks from all walks of life (© Wellcome Assortment, London; picture courtesy Thames & Hudson)
“Observed rituals give us a cultural framework in which to mourn the dead, but they are also there to stop us being pulled down into the earth with our beloved dead at our rawest moment of grief,” Luckhurst writes within the early pages of Graveyards.
In some locations, loss of life rituals have attracted what Luckhurst refers to as “dark tourism” in his ebook. Vacationers, together with these from China, in accordance with the ebook, go to Tibet to view a loss of life ritual referred to as a “sky burial,” related to Buddhist monasteries. Vacationers additionally flock to the cliff cemeteries in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, the place coffin vaults are seen and adorned with effigies.
“ What are we doing when we do that?” Luckhurst stated, reflecting on the commodification of burial rituals in Asia specifically. “If it’s involving tourism to an actual funeral, I think that’s a real issue that we could perhaps explore.”
Egyptian mummy work, left: “Portrait of a young woman in red” (CE 90–120); and proper: “Portrait of a thin-faced man” (CE 140–170) (each pictures public area by way of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork)
In a chapter titled “Recruiting the Dead,” Luckhurst examines how burials are weaponized by the residing to exert political targets. “ What I was most surprised by was the whole sense of bodies being, what I call in the book, ‘recruited’ to political projects,” he defined.
The chapter describes the loss of life of Marxist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, whose physique was displayed in opposition to his widow’s needs as a part of Joseph Stalin’s bid to succeed him as head of the Soviet Union. Thousands and thousands poured into Purple Sq. to see Lenin, in accordance with the ebook, “confirming to Stalin there was a reservoir of mass sentiment to be tapped.”
In Zimbabwe, a nationwide cemetery for revolutionary heroes is formed as an AK-47 rifle, a element that Luckhurst described as his most “jaw-dropping” discovery from his analysis.
Lenin’s mausoleum within the Purple Sq. in Moscow, Russia (picture by flowcomm by way of Flickr, CC BY 4.0)
“That memorialization of the dead is clearly a kind of sense of building a national identity around those who have been sacrificed in the process,” Luckhurst stated. One other instance he cited was the Arlington Nationwide Cemetery in america, the place the useless are recruited to a “nationalist story.”
Luckhurst concludes the chapter by citing a 2023 New York Instances report that the Israeli army destroyed no less than six Palestinian graveyards, because it faces expenses of genocide.
“The already dead remain a persistent target in war,” Luckhurst writes, “never more lively than when recruited to shore up the narratives of people and nations.”
Whereas Graveyards main topic is, fittingly, the titular burial web site, Luckhurst sought to combine the residing and the useless in his ebook, an attachment that he sees as unusual in fashionable tradition. A few of that residing with the useless occurs within the confines of households, current and historical, and different cases occur at a lot grander scales, together with collective reckoning with mass loss of life and atrocity. In every case, Luckhurst provides, there is a chance to assemble a future.
”We very often culturally wish to separate the residing and the useless, however really what we’re doing always resides with our useless,” Luckhurst stated. ”In an previous metropolis like London, I’m actually residing on the useless.”
