Cemeteries as cultural landscapes

This review calls attention to two classics which challenged me to grapple anew with fundamental questions: why do we have cemeteries, and what they are about? So many different things go on in cemeteries beside disposal and mourning. Why? And how do these various activities influence how we define and think about cemeteries? In 1930, W. Lloyd Warner brought the anthropological research model developed during his study of the Australian aborigines to his research on Yankee City, a New England community selected as a microcosm of the larger American society. The fifth volume in the Yankee City series interpreted the collective symbolic life of the city and included a section on the cemetery. The book’s initial chapters dealt with the economic and socio – political symbolism ordering the community, while the concluding chapters integrated Freudian symbolism and Christian iconography. This review concentrates on those chapters where Warner presented a theoretical and methodological model, exploring the characteristics and multiple meanings of the cemetery as a cultural landscape. Drawing on Durkheim’s theoretical lead, Warner analysed the cemetery as a ‘collective representation’, a sacred, symbolic replica of the living community that expressed many of the community’s basic beliefs and values. Materially, the cemetery is a specific type of socially bounded space where daily funerals and Memorial Day celebrations ritually order relationships between the spiritual dead and the secular world of the living. The funeral symbolically removes the