The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains

More praise for

THE WORK OF THE DEAD

"The Work of the Dead is packed with information, surprises, unaccustomed lore and learning, and Laqueur shows throughout a sturdy curiosity, as he digs unflinchingly around and into his chosen topic."

—MARINA WARNER, London Review of Books

Monumentally learned. . . . Laqueur’s mastery of this history, and his limpid prose, make this a deeply engaging text.

—DEBORAH LUTZ, Times Higher Education

This massive, mesmerizing work contains much that’s worth pondering.

—Publishers Weekly, (starred review)

"Enormously detailed and absorbing. . . . [A] remarkably supple and fascinating study, providing as it were the sociological and forensic underpinning of every ghost story ever told. . . . The Work of the Dead [is] both provocative and, you should pardon the term, lively (and readers should be sure not to miss the wonderfully argumentative end notes). It’ll change the way you look at being dead and buried."

—STEVE DONOGHUE, Open Letters Monthly

Laqueur’s book is a monumental undertaking, teeming with so many absorbing anecdotes and so much vivid information that it can be read either compulsively or for an hour a day, just to keep in sight of the nub of our fears and the often romantic absurdity of our hopes and superstitions.

—GREGORY DAY, Sydney Morning Herald

Do the dead matter? This is the central question in this meticulously researched, all-encompassing exploration of our mortal remains. . . . In this intimate and often very personal reflection, Laqueur asserts that we need our rituals to serve the dead to smooth over the rent that is caused in the passing of those we love. . . This thought-provoking tome, erudite and finely written, seemingly encapsulates all past uttering on the dead in our fleetingly short lives.

—JULIE PEAKMAN, History Today

One meticulously argumented stroll through time and beliefs, highly attractive in its depth and far-reachingness. . . . Laqueur has succeeded where many others had not: he opened for us a tiny window on the concept of death and dying without violating historiographic objectiveness or trying to impose judgements or values.

—AMIR MUZUR, European Journal of Bioethics

This passionate and compassionate book is nothing short of a magnum opus. In it one of the most original and daring historians of our time guides the reader on an unexpected journey through churchyards, cemeteries, and crematoriums, challenging common wisdom and offering startling new insights into the meaning of our ways of caring for the dead.

—LYNN HUNT, author of Writing History in the Global Era

THOMAS W. LAQUEUR

Thomas W. Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, and Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850. He is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

THE

WORK

OF THE

DEAD

THE

WORK

OF THE

DEAD

A CULTURAL HISTORY

OF MORTAL REMAINS

THOMAS W. LAQUEUR

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2015 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

Cover art: Detail of Paris, vu des hauteurs du Père Lachaise,

by Louise Joséphine Sarazin de Belmont.

Toulouse, Musée des Augustins. Photo © Bernard Delome.

All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2018

Paper ISBN 978-0-691-18093-9

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Laqueur, Thomas Walter.

The work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains / Thomas W. Laqueur.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15778-8 (hardback)

1. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Cross-cultural studies. 2. Death—Social aspects—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title.

GT3150.L37 2015

306.9—dc23

2015003565

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Requiem

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

CONTENTS

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: The Work of the Dead 1

THE DEEP TIME OF THE DEAD 29

1Do the Dead Matter? 35

2The Dead Body and the Persistence of Being 55

3The Cultural Work of the Dead 80

PLACES OF THE DEAD 107

4The Churchyard and the Old Regime 112

The Development of the Churchyard 114

Language 117

Place 121

The Church and Churchyard in the Landscape 121

Necrogeography 123

Necrobotany 133

Necrotopology and Memory 137

The Life and Afterlife of the Churchyard in Literature 141

The Passage of the Dead to the Churchyard 145

Law 148

Exclusion from the Churchyard 148

The Claims of the Dead Body on the Parish Churchyard 151

The Claims of the Parish on the Dead Body 153

The Economics of Churchyard Burial 155

The Right to Burial and the Crisis of the Old Regime 161

Enlightenment Scandals 182

Voltaire 189

David Hume 203

5The Cemetery and the New Regime 211

The Danger of the Dead and the Rise of the Cemetery 215

Genealogies of the New Regime 238

Imagination: Elysium, Arcadia, and the Dead of

the Eighteenth Century 238

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise 260

Distant Lands and the Imperial Imagination 265

The Age of the Cemetery 271

Novelty 272

Necrogeography and Necrobotany 279

Cemeteries and Capitalism 288

Religious Pluralism in the Age of the Cemetery 294

Reform, Revolution, and the Cemetery 305

Class, Family, and the Cemetery 309

Putting the Dead in Their Place: Pauper Funerals

and Proper Funerals, Burials and Reburials 312

Disrupted Bodies 336

NAMES OF THE DEAD 363

6The Names of the Dead in Deep Time 367

Names of the Dead in Times of War 375

Names of the Dead in Times of Peace 382

7The Rise of the Names of the Dead in Modern History 388

8The Age of Necronominalism 413

Names over Bodies 415

Names and the Absent but Present Body 417

Monumental Names 421

Names of the Vanished Dead 431

9The Names of the Great War 447

BURNING THE DEAD 489

10Disenchantment and Cremation 495

11Ashes and History 523

Different Enchantments 524

Ashes in Their Place 542

Afterword: From a History of the Dead to a History of Dying 549

Notes 559

Image Credits 679

Index 681

PREFACE

I am not sure when I began this book. I grew up only a phone call away from an autopsy—a post that is, post-mortem dissection—that took my father, a pathologist, away from the dinner table to the morgue and left me wondering what happened there and to what. What was a dead body really? He never took me with him, although I did spend hours watching him prepare the organs he had removed from it for microscopic examination and listening to him in his study as he dictated his finding. But in my first eighteen years, I knew the dead body only through hearsay or through its detached parts.

In the summer of 1964, I finally saw one—a cadaver to be more precise. It was at the University of Cincinnati, where I was working in a biochemistry lab after my freshman year; my housemate was a first-year medical student who had failed gross anatomy and was asked to try again. He was happy enough for my company. I watched him dissect but did not get my hands on the body. In the summer of 1980, at the beginning of fifteen months on an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship that I used to study medicine, I finally had—or rather shared with three others—my own cadaver. The dead body in these circumstances is a very material thing, with holes through which nerves and vessels and liquids pass, and connective tissues that connect, and tendons that, if pulled, still move muscles.

We—my tablemates and I—learned the names of hundreds of structures as we disassembled our body, our object of study. But it also had a face, at least until we started working on the fiendishly difficult anatomy of the head. I was not so blinded by the need to do well on tests not to think about how strange this thing really was—this body that now seemed to exist only instrumentally for us to learn from. It had been a person, a fact that did not sit well with its current condition. We were told to be respectful toward it and that what remained would be treated once again as human when we were done with it at the end of the summer. Perhaps my subject in this book—the relationship between the overwhelming materiality of the dead on the one hand and Death and Culture on the other—began to come into focus that summer.

But I think that the distant progenitor of an actual book—this book—was born a couple of years later: on 10 October 1983, to be exact. On that Monday, I began writing to some sixty or seventy archives and libraries, secular and ecclesiastical, asking what materials they held that might be relevant for a project I then called, I am embarrassed to admit, The Meaning of Death in Post-Reformation Britain. It would be impossible to answer your letter exhaustively, the Buckinghamshire County Archivist wrote back, and the following are cited as examples. No kidding. Archives are repositories of the traces of the dead, of lost time.

The world in which I wrote my letter is lost. My file folder of kind responses is evidence of an age before on-line catalogues and instant e-mail access to everyone, a time of thin blue aerogrammes densely filled with type that can be felt through the paper punctured by an occasional hole, evidence of a period or a comma forcefully struck. It was a world of great courtesy in which archivists had the time to patiently and informatively respond to a young—but too old to be so clueless—researcher embarked on a manifestly hopeless mission.

In my defense, I did have two sets of questions in mind that I tried to capture in the beclouded phrase the meaning of death: one was about the existential experience of death and dying; the other concerned their embeddedness in the broader social world. The first, and more intimately urgent, had to do with what we might now call the history of the emotions, or perhaps the history of attitudes toward death understood not as a progression of beliefs but of how people in the past stood, in their hearts, before the overwhelming fact of human existence: mortality and our exquisite consciousness of it. This was a search for a history of death that would go beyond the one told by demographers and doctors on the one hand and intellectual historians and scholars of religion on the other. I took meaning to be essentially an inner experience that might have an accessible history.

The question first troubled me as a doctoral student in reading the attack by Edward Thompson, one of the greatest British historians of the twentieth century, on what he took to be vicious, death-mongering eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelicals. By first confronting even little children with the frightening prospect of death and then holding out the false treacle prospect of a good death, Thompson’s evangelicals supposedly terrified the young into submission to a life-denying and politically quietist religion. On one point, Thompson was right: death is everywhere in evangelical literature, and the prospect of meeting it with resignation, if not happily, was held out to the faithful of all ages. Dying well—holy dying, dying in peace and without fear, dying perhaps in the hope of another life, dying with acceptance of fate—was central to evangelical Christianity, as it was, in many different refractions, to all the world’s major religions. ¹

More specifically, books like The History of the Fairchild Family by the most popular children’s writer of the early nineteenth century, Mrs. Sherwood, aka Mary Martha Sherwood, seem to make his point. Listen to the father, Mr. Fairchild, speaking to his curious children about the dead body of old John Roberts, the gardener. What begins as Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild’s benevolent errand to comfort the man’s widow turns into a lesson on the subject of death—embellished by quizzing on parenthetically cited scriptural passages—for their three children’s edification. Incited by his daughter’s curiosity about the dead body, Mr. Fairchild asks,

Have you any desire to see the corpse, my dears? You never saw a corpse before, I think?

No papa, answered Lucy: but we have great curiosity to see one.

I tell you before-hand, my dear children, that death is very terrible. A corpse is an awful sight.

I know that, papa, said Lucy; but we should like to go.

Well my dears, you shall go; and you shall, if you please, see the corpse.

. . . When they came to the door, they perceived a kind of disagreeable smell, such as they had never smelt before: this was the smell of the corpse which, having been dead now nearly two days, had begun to corrupt; and as the children went higher up the stairs, they perceived this smell more disagreeably.

. . . [T]he whole appearance of the body was more ghastly and horrible than the children expected, and making out the words of Job: But man dieth, and wasteth . . . away. (Job xiv. 10–12, 20.)

. . . My dear children, you now see what death is.

Mrs. Sherwood makes it perfectly clear throughout the story that the widow Roberts thinks that her husband had died a happy death, believing in his redeemer, and that she is comforted by this conviction: I know that my poor husband loved his savior and trusted him for salvation. The theological foundation for the story is thoroughly orthodox: death is a terrible thing that is the result of sin; those who believe in Christ’s redemptive sacrifice will find eternal life. While Sherwood is not shy about the gruesome details, her aim was clearly not terror but reassurance. ²

But still, much is puzzling about this passage and about how historians have interpreted ones like it. To begin with, maybe confidence in a life everlasting did make death more bearable for children (and grown-ups) who faced it, as well as for the departed’s survivors. My own dissertation work on the records of the Stockport Sunday School suggested that teenage scholars on their deathbeds, like the Widow Roberts, took comfort from the very evangelical religion purportedly terrorizing them. There is a great deal of reliable evidence that this was true for many others. We can never reckon how many died secure in the hopes of a life everlasting and how many suffered fear of damnation.

And then there is the terror of the corpse and of death more generally. Is it possible at a time when one-half of all children born would die before they reached the age of ten and when everyone, of whatever age, died at home, that the Fairchild children had never seen a corpse? Did it take Mrs. Sherwood to make children, who may otherwise have viewed this carnage as a part of life, fear death for the first time? Had she transformed death from a normal fact of daily life into an awful nightmare? This was a setup for moralizing. But who is being terrorized here? Maybe it is the historian. The idea of exposing children to death, their own or others, is horrible—if all too common still. I found reading modern medical anthropology on the subject so unbearable that I decided that I could not study it in the past. The book of a wise and humane German pediatric oncologist taught me that much of what adults think about death at a young age reflected their own fears and anxiety; children, even in a secular age, had the resources for holy dying. And so did some grown-ups. I realized that I could not write a history of this particular terror. I am not sure it even has a history or a trajectory. My guess is that the proportions of those who die with an equanimity born of feeling part of nature, like a tree falling in the forest (Tolstoy’s fantasy of a coachman’s death); those who die with the comforts of religion; and those who die in great fear have not changed much. But it would be very difficult to make this case with any sort of historical precision. ³

When I tried to write about the history of those who were left to mourn—what parents felt about the deaths of their children through the ages, for example, but more generally of the history of loss—I got no further. On the one hand, it seemed a priori the case that in societies with high death rates (not to speak of those that practice infanticide) parents could not have emotionally survived if they had invested in each new life the passion that we do—the vast majority of us in the prosperous West—from birth or even before. Modern anthropology suggests that constant and relentless death dulls—or seems to dull—the grief of mothers. On the other hand, mountains of evidence shows that parents in the past mourned intensely their children of a certain age. The bodily language of melancholy, as far as we can tell, has remained remarkably stable since classical antiquity. And of course all we could ever hope to access from our sources is an outer expression of feeling at a moment. The soul remains hidden and mercurial. It took me decades to realize (accept?) that I could not write a history of death as it appeared either in the inner emotional lives of those who were dying and or those who remained behind. ⁴

Attitudes toward death seemed a way to get a more rational take on some of this. I discuss these on and off throughout this book and thought for a time that they might be my subject. There are many pronouncements about them: Buddhists think this, and Lutherans think that. Many serious books of history, theology, and anthropology try to show how ways of regarding death articulate with other, more general views, of life and the cosmos. But to tell the truth, I doubt whether such a thing as an attitude toward death exists, at least in a way that can be studied historically or with any emotional nuance.

When I think of a small arena that I know well—the attitudes of my parents toward death—I can report the following: my father went from cold, clinical detachment and annoyance at me for not understanding the pathophysiology of his hypernephroma to a sad and increasingly mute resignation toward his miserable impending end from various metastatic cancers. Those in the lung finally killed him through a massive hemorrhage. My mother faced death with absolute and unshakeable equanimity although she had, as far as I or anyone could tell, no views of an afterlife or indeed any views of the subject of death except that it was a relief from the diminishment of old age. Dying to her seemed like being absorbed into the Brahms Requiem or Beethoven Missa Solemnis or a Heine poem. As for me, I scarcely reacted to my father’s death for six months; it took me years to absorb it. To this day, I have no attitude toward it. He does appear relatively often as a young man in my dreams. I miss him as perhaps the most important audience for my life. And I stand before my mother’s death with awe, admiration, and disbelief. I imagine her spirit hovers over a lake in Virginia where she swam every summer for forty years. Given this muddle—my own inability to articulate the attitudes toward death of people I knew and know intimately—it seemed futile to explore the subject systematically in those whom I would know considerably less well in the distant past. I gave up on a history of death as a historical project of the inner life.

I gave up, slowly and reluctantly, after many years of false starts, trying to write about the existential experience of death and dying, about its inner world. But there remained the second set of questions shadowing my naive letters to archivists and librarians, questions about how death took on social meaning in the past. These questions were not about redeeming mortality so much as about how we lived with death as best we could: a history less of what individual people felt or thought than what they did publically in the face of death, dying, and killing and how these acts comported with other aspects of the social and political order. Over the years I wrote various essays on this subject, some of which, in new guises, found their way into this book. Others, on the history of executions and capital punishment more generally—the very strange cultural power of judicial killing that never had much to do with instrumental rationality—did not. I would have liked to have explored other topics that appear as walk-on parts in what follows more fully: the history of the passing bell and of the funereal feast, for example—that is, of collective hearing and eating in the shadow of death.

But death has remained for me an elusive topic: far too grand, far too entangled with almost everything that gives meaning to our lives to be written into some semblance of clarity. A book on the meanings of death anywhere at any time was beyond me. Like gravity or the air we breathe, it is always there, a part of being human that is so basic that it cannot be dissected out from the rest of life as we know it. One may as well write about the history of the meaning of life. And insofar as that can be written, poets, novelists and philosophers do it better than historians.

Readers will see, I hope, that I have not entirely abandoned death as a topic. I approach it through something more material, through what death leaves behind: through the dead body. This thing—this inanimate thing—that is always more than a thing has been the stuff of our imaginations since the beginning. We need it. It does massive work for the living. This is the subject of my book.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is customary to thank those who have helped bring a book into being, and I have no intention of not doing so. But it will not be easy. On 14 August 2013, when I was still some distance from finishing a first complete draft, I wrote to the Stockport Local Heritage Library in Cheshire asking the current librarian to thank one of her predecessors, Dave Reid, for sending me, back in 1971, photocopies of a memoir book recounting the deaths of local Sunday school scholars. I had just cited it, and that made me think of him. He had died in 2008, she replied; then please, I wrote back, tell his wife Naomi (a historian of Chartism who had been helpful to me when I was working on my thesis) that I was grateful to her late husband; she too was dead. My correspondent said that their son often came by and that she would tell him that I had written to thank his parents.

The first graduate student who helped me with research on what became, after many, many byways, this book was Ann Sullivan. In the late 1970s she and I laboriously went through folklore journals looking for evidence of post-Reformation survivals of what we might think of as pre-Reformation superstition: passing bells, prayers for the dead, funeral feasts. Today that task would take minutes (many of the publications we used are now online), but then it was a much bigger undertaking. She and I tirelessly transcribed text—or pasted photocopied snippets—on 5 × 8 notecards. I have not been in touch with her for forty years and discovered through the Internet that she is a grandmother and living in Ithaca. This sort of rummaging in the depths of memory will only make a mess of a great tumulus of intellectual and personal debts. I will make an effort at a more systematic archeology of gratitude by beginning with the most recent layers—the last to be added—and working downward in time.

My father-in-law, Siegfried Hesse, a brilliant, long-retired appellate lawyer and before that legal editor, read my page proofs with extraordinary attention to both typographical and substantive errors. In 2014—and here I already disturb the orderly excavation I intend—he went through my messy semifinal draft to get it ready for various stages of editing. A man in his late eighties might have been happier reading Proust. I am touched and proud that he gave so generously of his time and intelligence.

Terri O’Prey at Princeton University Press has seen this book through production with a wonderful combination of encouragement and efficiency; Quinn Fusting as assistant editor at the Press has attended to scores of details with care and courtesy. Beth Gianfagna was a dream copyeditor: learned, meticulously attentive to details, and appropriately strict. The wonderful and imaginative Alice Goff, once a graduate student and now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, put together an illustration program and started the process of clearing permissions. Olivia Benowitz helped greatly to resolve the final and gnarly last-minute problems. Brenden Mackie was dogged and creative in tracking down recalcitrant endnotes during the final days of copyediting. Sheer Ganor helped clean up the texts of drafts to make them presentable.

I don’t think I could have shaped a long, shaggy manuscript into a book without the help of my wonderful developmental editor Madeleine Adams, who sometimes knew what I was trying to say better than I did and who led me through final revisions with great delicacy and intelligence. But now the archeological model breaks down. A book is not like a tale, long abandoned; its topmost layers are still inhabited and reach far back in time. My editor at Princeton, Brigitta van Rheinberg, has had faith in this book for well over a decade and gave my semifinal draft a tough and demanding reading that greatly improved its clarity.

And then there are my friends and colleagues, some for more than forty years: Carol Clover was the first to read the whole thing; Carla Hesse, Mark Peterson, Jonathan Sheehan, and Ethan Shagan read, and heard about, more proto-chapters than they might care to remember before they took on all fifteen hundred pages of what had begun to look like a book; Deborah Valenze, Seth Koven, and Claudio Lomnitz read that version too and challenged me to make it better, clearer, and more consequential. James Vernon and Randy Starn read it all seriatim over the years. For each it was an act of kindness and intellectual generosity. To Cathy Gallagher, since 1973 my closest intellectual copine, I owe a special debt both for her preternatural ability to spot and fix a shoddy argument and for a lifetime of engagement in one another’s work.

Other colleagues shared their expertise over the years, and I have tried to thank them in the notes to particular sections of this book, but I owe a special debt to Susanna Elm and to Tom Brady for reading part I and more importantly for their generosity over the decades in answering an amateur’s questions about late antiquity and the Reformation, respectively. My old friend Beth Berry and my newer colleagues Nick Tackett and Carlos Norena have been my guides for matters Japanese, Chinese, and classical in that order. I have been teaching courses on death and dying with my medical colleague Guy Micco, MD, since the late 1980s he has been my expert advisor on questions about the dead body and disease as well as a great friend of this project. Every so often over the decades Martin Jay has given me just the right theoretically inflected text I needed to think with at just the right moment. His interventions on this and other projects have spanned four decades. Sharon Kaufman’s breathtakingly original research on dying in modern America has informed the afterword and many other pages of this book. Patricia Williams at certain critical moments offered advice that sustained me. My walks with my dear friend Istvan Rev in the cemeteries of Budapest, as well as his work and my many conversations with him, have been formative in my thinking about the dead.

There are also moments long ago and more recently that have continued to inform my present: this present, this book. My editor for a time, Alison MacKeen, said something over lunch at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in 2008 that proved to be, in ways I cannot reconstruct, a Eureka moment. The Work of the Dead came into view. In the early 1980s Tom Metcalf took me to Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta, an important moment not only for my account of its history but for my thinking on spaces of the dead more generally. He has been a great friend and helpful reader of my work since 1973. In 1985 David Keightley invited me to a conference in Oracle, Arizona, on death ritual in China that opened up for me a distant world of the work of the dead of which I had known nothing. He has also shared unpublished work with me. In the late 1980s the anthropologist Doris Francis took me on a tour of one of her field sites, a dying and desecrated cemetery in East London called Woodgrange, in which broken Victorian angels shared a landscape with a patchwork of Bangladeshi and other Muslim graves, some flanked on all four corners by burning tapers, and with more or less intact old communal compounds of various sort. An elderly couple was looking for the grave of one of their ancestors so as to arrange an exhumation before the whole site went to ruin. Bodies in a landscape matter.

This book and much of my intellectual life has still deeper roots in the journal Representations that I helped found with friends in 1981 and in the intellectual community that grew around it over the decades. I can think of specific gifts from specific members: Francis Ferguson suggested I read Godwin’s Essay on Sepulchers, which became a central text for me; long ago the much-missed Mike Rogin talked to me about the familial affect that informed nineteenth-century bourgeois tombs; a remark by Tim Clark at one of our evening meetings, where we discussed an early version of what became the chapters on cremation, made me recognize the crazy modernism of some of its more radical proponents; David Henkin, learned in Judaica, sent me texts on the persistence of the dead around their bodies, which made it possible for me to think through the issues raised in chapter 3. There are specific parts of this book—those dealing with ghosts—that owe an intellectual debt to Steve Greenblatt, but far more important is a lifetime of conversations and friendship for which I am grateful. I am blessed with this community of friends, those I have mentioned and others—Lynn Hunt and Svetlana Alpers, Bernard Williams and Paul Alpers (the latter two now dead)—with whom I talked about many things that made this book possible.

Generations of graduate student research assistants and members of the Berkeley undergraduate research apprenticeship program have labored on behalf of The Work of the Dead, and I have tried to acknowledge them by name in the endnotes. I am sure I missed some but am no less grateful to them all. Many graduate students also read or heard parts of the book at seminars and colloquia; their challenges made it better.

And then there are the institutional thank yous. I did not write the book I promised to write when I was fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2000–2001—I wrote another quite different one—but I did research for, and give a talk on, a very early version of chapters 6 through 9. Twice in the new millennia the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton provided a wonderful place to think and write. I wrote some of what became a history of names and a long introduction—a first pass of what became the central idea for the whole book—at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where I was welcomed first as a guest of the rector and then as the spouse of a fellow. Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation in the 1970s and 1990s supported two other books but more importantly enabled the sort of wool-gathering research that coalesced in this one. Finally, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation allowed me to take a year off from teaching in 2013 to finally—actually–write this book out of its many earlier starts and parts.

We are now deep into the excavation of those parts of my life out of which came The Work of the Dead. Joanna Roeber and Martin Rosendahl (she since 1970) have provided a home in London—a room, a haven, affection. I acknowledge John Walsh, my old Oxford tutor, in the endnotes for specific suggestions. But the debt I owe to him as a historian of religion and society is so imbricated in my life that I would not know where to begin thanking him. Jerry Siegel was never formally my teacher but has stood as a model for serious intellectual engagement since I was in my early twenties. Lawrence Stone shaped my life as a scholar and historian. I cherish his memory.

I think it was Alexander Nehamas who told me to read Diogenes the Cynic, whose challenge is the leitmotif of this book; he says it was, but I have no precise memory of the fact. I do have clear and distinct knowledge that he has been my friend since we were eighteen; I speak to him several times every week; he is my friend because, as Montaigne explains his friendship with La Boéti, he is he and I am I. As this book is the product of almost a lifetime’s thinking and fretting, I owe him a great debt.

Finally, I dedicate this book to my colleague, friend, and wife, Carla Hesse. Yes of course she has read, as I have already acknowledged, more drafts of more chapters—and proto-chapters—than either of us can remember. And yes she has made many incisive comments. She sees big arguments and causal inferences where I want to see only the filigree of detail. But I dedicate this book to her because of the life she has made with me.

THE

WORK

OF THE

DEAD

Introduction

THE WORK OF THE DEAD

[Diogenes the Cynic] ordered himself to be thrown anywhere without being buried. And when his friends replied, What! to the birds and beasts? By no means, saith he; place my staff near me, that I may drive them away. How can you do that, they answer, for you will not perceive them? How am I then injured by being torn by those animals, if I have no sensation?

CICERO, Tusculan Disputations ¹

In the beginning was the corpse: lifeless matter from which a human had fled. Almost two and a half millennia ago, the outrageous Diogenes (ca. 412–323 B.C.E.) told his students that when he died he wanted his body to be tossed over the wall where it would be devoured by beasts. He was gone; it no longer mattered to him. This book is about how and why Diogenes was right (his or any body forever stripped of life cannot be injured), but also existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defies all cultural logic. It is about why the dead body matters, everywhere and across time, as well as in particular times and particular places. It matters in disparate religious and ideological circumstances; it matters even in the absence of any particular belief about a soul or about how long it might linger around its former body or about what might become of it after death; it matters across all sorts of beliefs about an afterlife or a God. It matters in the absence of such beliefs. It matters because the living need the dead far more than the dead need the living. It matters because the dead make social worlds. It matters because we cannot bear to live at the borders of our mortality (fig. I.1).

This book is about the body, about the disenchanted corpse, about corpses without consciousness: bereft, vulnerable, abject. It is about that which life breath left . . . behind as Homer says of the bones of the fallen in the Iliad. The fate of this thing has been known for millennia to those who contemplate the dead. A fifth-century C.E. Buddhist text describes with great precision the stages of foulness: the bloated, the livid, the festering, the cut-up, the gnawed, the scattered, the hacked and scattered, the bleeding, the worm-infested, a skeleton. All the rest is commentary that modern forensic science has enriched. Depending on climate, happenstance, and technology, a body might be around as decaying organic matter for only a matter of weeks or months, a few years at best. It begins to devour itself within minutes, as the enzymes that had once turned food into nutriments start disassembling the body that no longer needs them in their old job. This is autolysis. Bacteria freed from the gut soon afterward also start to devour the flesh; in later stages microbes from the soil and the air join in. Putrefaction. Eisenia fetida—the worm in our compost bins—dines on the carnage in some climes; so do flies and other insects. There are many variations on this theme. Anything that keeps bacteria and chemical reactions from working as well as they might preserves bodies: dry, cold, wet, and sterile conditions. The deserts of Egypt and the high Andes, the frozen tundra of Siberia, the acid bogs of Denmark, tanning agents, and anaerobic conditions—all preserve the dead far longer than anyone had reason to expect. So do the desiccating clay caves of Palermo, famous for their ability to make corpses into mummies that could be dressed up to look ready for the opera. The soil of the cemetery in the old colonial city of Guanajuato yielded up mummies of nineteenth-century cholera victims that have become a major tourist attraction and an emblem of Mexico’s engagement with the dead. But under most conditions, an adult corpse is lucky to survive a decade. Bodies encased in lead fare better than those in wood or in the ground; it helps to die on an empty stomach and with evacuated bowels; it helps if someone has removed the viscera; embalming helps. Collagen and hair do better than other soft tissues. ¹

I.1. Diogenes investigates a tomb. Jonas Umbach, 1645–1700. British Museum.

Bones fare better than flesh. How much better again depends on where they lie. In the highly acidic soil of the great seventh-century Anglo-Saxon burial mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, for example, only the stains of bones remain; in the more basic soil of Wharram Percy at the edge of the chalk wolds of north Yorkshire, surviving medieval skeletons are in good shape. Generally, the large bones of the leg fare better than the small bones of the foot. But it matters little. The skeletal remains of friends, of enemies, and of strangers are, as has been endlessly rehearsed over thousands of years, pretty much indistinguishable. Of course, some may bear the marks of the life that once clothed them: violence, disease, and time itself leave marks. Bones do tell tales. But without dress or some other distinguishing mark, it was hard to tell them apart before the advent of forensic DNA technology and other modern techniques. This is why in pictures of the Last Judgment the more prominent dead are shown wearing their crowns or miters to help distinguish them from the great mass of corpses. Out of context, even animal parts can be mistaken for those of humans, except by experts. Chaucer’s pardoner, one might remember, hadde pigges bones in a bottle that the gullible took to be human: the relics of a saint. And after not so long a time, even the bones fall apart: dust to dust. Erosion and oxidation see to that. Death proves even the rich man, as Sir Walter Raleigh observed on the scaffold, a naked beggar which hath interest in nothing, but in the gravel that fills his mouth. Everything is covered over "with these two narrow words, Hic jacet." ²

The corpse: the human body, at the edge of the abyss, soon reverts to the elements from which its physical being came and so reenters the great natural cycle of life and death. Modern ecologists welcome this, and the idea goes back to the origins of Western thinking on the matter. Heraclitus (d. 475 B.C.E.), the pre-Socratic philosopher, suggested that corpses are more worth throwing out than dung. They serve best that serve as fertilizer. It is a view with a long and checkered afterlife. A materialist chemist and philosopher got fired from his post at Heidelberg in the nineteenth century for saying the same thing. And we will hear it again among advocates of modern cremation and from those who think it only adds to greenhouse gases and that we should find a way to treat bodies of humans as nature does the bodies of animals left to the forces of decomposition. But these pragmatic views have had little purchase over the ages. Diogenes the Cynic’s request to his friends that he be flung out unburied has been more challenging. He made this request not for instrumental reasons but because he thought it made no difference what became of him: What harm then can the mangling of wild beasts do me if I am without consciousness? he asked. Or, as Euripides’ Alkestis says to Admetus, right after he tells her that when he dies they will be together again: Time will console you. The dead are nothing. The body has always been disenchanted. ³

The Cynic’s argument has had lots of admirers but has never been persuasive for very long. Just as the dead body has always been disenchanted, it has also always been enchanted: powerful, dangerous, preserved, revered, feared, an object of ritual, a thing to be reckoned with. For the living, for at least some time, it is always more than it is. And yet . . . and except for . . . have been the response to Diogenes’ view, echoing from as far back as we can go. There is no more protean or more generative human endeavor than arguing, in words and action, against it. Of course, comes the collective voice in thousands of different timbres, the dead are not refuse like the other debris of life; they cannot be left for beasts to scavenge. We need to live with them in more or less close proximity. They define generations, demarcate the sacred and the profane and more ordinary spaces as well, are the guarantors of land and power and authority, mirror the living to themselves, and insist on our temporal limits. The dead are witnesses to mortality. They hear us and we speak to them even if we know that they, like all base matter, are deaf and dumb. Bones address us from the gibbet in the words of the late medieval poet François Villon:

You see us cleaving together, five, six:

As for the flesh, which we nourished too much,

It is long since consumed and corrupted,

And we, the bones, have become ashes and powder. ⁴

We address bones. We live with the dead.

Conversely, the willfully brutal disposal of the dead—the treatment of the corpse as carrion—is an act of extreme violence, an attack on the order and meaning we look to the dead to maintain for us. To make the obvious point: to treat a dead body as if it were ordinary organic matter—to leave it lie as if it were the body of a beast—or willfully to desecrate and mutilate it is to erase it from culture and from the human community: to deny the existence of the community from which it came, to deny its humanity. One of the most damning pictures of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was that of the dead, unattended, littering the streets of an American city. If we are to believe medieval bestiaries, hyenas, the most despised and perverted of beasts, purportedly dig up the dead to eat them (plate 1). Eating human flesh for nourishment, for its protein alone, is a revolting sign of the collapse, or entire absence, of civilization. I am thinking here of the Donner Party, or the wreck of the Méduse, or Europeans’ understanding of the practices of some of the peoples of the New World. The practice of cannibalism for the nutritional value of the dead collapses the boundary between nature and culture. It probably does not exist; the exceptions in extremis prove the rule. Montaigne had already understood this back in the sixteenth century. He recognized that most of the cannibalism known in his day was ritualistic: magic. It was not a practice of semihumans radically different from Europeans but rather, as the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins says of cannibalism generally, a practice symbolic even if it was real. And as such, it too, at the margins of care for the dead, constitutes a rejection of Diogenes’ views. ⁵

1. Hyena eats the dead. In Medieval Bestiary. England, thirteenth century. Royal 12 C XIX f. IIV, British Library.

This book answers the question of why we consistently refuse Diogenes’ example—why we generally do not toss the dead over the wall for the beasts to devour—in two time registers: anthropological (part 1) and historical (parts 2–4). The answer in the first of these both disregards time—we care for the dead because humans have always cared for our dead—and considers it on a scale that historians of the French Annales school called the longue durée. They were thinking of the time scale of climate, crops, and agricultural practices and of the patterns of life rooted in a material world that changed very slowly. These adamantine structures, the Annalistes thought, were the foundation for more temporally bound explanations of worldviews—what they called mentalités—and for événements, specific events that historians try to explain. I am thinking of the ways in which the material fact of the insignificance of dead bodies has been and is systematically and spectacularly forgotten, ignored, or reinterpreted through the millennia. Put differently, some irresistible power of the imagination, independent of any particular religious beliefs, blinds us to the cold reality of what a corpse really is. Or rather what it is not. We care about, care for, feel with a dead body, although we know that instantly or very soon after what we call biological death it notices nothing, cares for nothing, feels nothing. Part 1 plays down specific beliefs of specific groups of people at specific moments in history. It emphasizes continuity: of actors (the dead), of the kinds of work they do among the living, and of the foundational reasons we care about them.

I take this long or timeless view for four reasons. First, it lets me explain how and why very old stories are still being told in the everyday politics of today. It lets me compress time. Scarcely a week passed while I was writing this book without some new instance coming to public attention: On 9 June 2011, a black businessman and former city councilor in Stockton, California, was shocked to discover a sign that read, Moved from Nigger Hill Cemetery over the new graves of thirty-six anonymous black bodies that had been exhumed and reburied. When I went up to that gravesite, he reports, I feel like I could feel the presence of those people crying to get those things off of them. The dead do not cry out. We know the dead are not able to speak, writes an eighteenth-century clergyman, for they are all silent in darkness. They cannot see or walk or handle things with their hands, either. Yet they do speak, differently from the living. St. Paul preached to the Hebrews that he being dead yet speaketh, and more generally, Rev. Abel Styles concludes, it is common in the scriptures for inanimate things to be represented as speaking, as well as hearing (fig. I.2). It is still common; there are cultures today in which the living regularly speak to the dead. We endlessly invest the dead body with meaning because, through it, the human past somehow speaks to us. ⁶

I.2. Office of the Dead, the Grandes Heures de Rohan. MS Latin 9471. Bibliotheque Nationale de France, 1425–1430.

Possessing actual dead bodies also still matters to us, as it did in the days of the early Church. National Public Radio recently reported that the children, by his first marriage, of Jim Thorpe, the great Native American football star and 1912 Olympic gold medal winner, were suing the town in Pennsylvania that was named after him and where his remains are buried under an impressive pink marble slab. They were joined in their suit by his tribe, the Sac and Fox Nation. The children wanted Thorpe’s body back. Dad’s wish was that he be buried in Oklahoma, they said. Wrong and irrelevant, said the community of Jim Thorpe. We have a signed contract by his widow (that is, by Thorpe’s second wife), who gave the town the body in 1957 in return for the promise that it would be renamed after her husband, responded a town father. The plaintiffs were perfectly content to let the town keep its name and memorial as long as they got the body. But of course that was unacceptable to the town: an empty tomb would be a sadly diminished tourist attraction. We have the rights to the possession of Jim Thorpe’s body, insists Jim Thorpe, the town. Medieval churches fought each other for centuries over the bodies of saints. ⁷

I.3.The body of a U.S. soldier in Mogadishu, 1993. Jim Watson. Toronto Star.

I.4. Achilles drags the body of Hector. Diosphos painter, vase, ca. 490 B.C.E. Louvre, Paris.

The same sort of historical escalator seems to be working in the opposite sorts of stories—those that are about the degradation of the corpse. They too have a very long pedigree and take on new resonance in new times. When followers of General Mohamed Aidid dragged the body of a dead American soldier through the streets of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in October 1993, it evoked the same raw emotional response that Homer’s story of Achilles’ dragging the body of Hector over the plains of Troy did in the Iliad (figs. I.3, I.4). It was the violation that we recognize from Sophocles’ Antigone, in which Creon is horribly punished by the gods for leaving the body of Polynices unburied on the battlefield, prey to birds and animals; it speaks the language of the Nazi occupiers of Paris, who left the corpses of executed resistance fighters in the streets; it speaks to the terror in the hearts of Jamaican slaves excluded from burial for rebellion or for falling away from Christianity; it evokes the effect that the Spanish conquistadors hoped for when they left the bodies of the Aztec dead for the vanquished living to see. We recognize it in the English poor who rioted in protest against laws that made the bodies of criminals available for public dissection. The radically different eschatologies of Bronze Age or Golden Age Greece, sixteenth-century Mexico, eighteenth-century Jamaica or England, and twentieth-century France or Somalia or the United States seem to melt away.

Variants on the theme of the degraded corpse are stories, echoing one another over centuries, about getting the right dead body in the right place and excluding the wrong body from where it is not wanted. God, through miracles, cast unworthy bodies out of early Christian burial places; Jim Crow laws kept blacks out of segregated cemeteries; public opinion kept the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, out of scores of cemeteries before he finally found a place at a small private burial ground in Virginia. And the state has its say about where a corpse can go. In 2011, the body of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, buried in the Bavarian town of Wunsiedel when he died in 1987, was exhumed and cremated; his ashes were scattered to the winds because his grave had become a shrine for thousands of neo-Nazis who gathered there on pilgrimage every year. The enchantment of this most profane of bodies was shattered only by reducing it into tiny particles of its constitutive chemistry and making it impossible to localize anywhere what remained. ⁸

The second reason I begin with the long anthropological view and return to it throughout the book is because it lets me respond to Diogenes’ challenge with a kind of answer not grounded in time or space but in more or less timeless truths. It lets me connect deep structures with historical contingencies. Three in particular are important for the rest of this book. First, there seems to be a universally shared feeling not only that there is something deeply wrong about not caring for the dead body in some fashion, but also that the uncared-for body, no matter the cultural norms, is unbearable. The corpse demands the attention of the living, however that attention is paid. We have a gut aversion to the bare, bereft dead body. Here is how an eighteenth-century clergyman put it: The dead naturally tend to destroy the life of others, he said, and that is really the reason Men naturally abhor the sight or the touch of the dead. . . . The natural Spirit of Life is afraid of a Dead Body and has an abhorrence of it, which is why we cannot just toss it away, at least not in sight. Dead bodies are, as we will see in chapter 5, less dangerous to health than the living. But this does not detract from his main point. A celebrated seventeenth-century preacher explained why it was the duty of children to bury the bodies of their parents: it is, he said, a great deformity to have a man’s corps lie above ground for no carcasse will bee more loathsome than a man’s if it lie unburied. All sorts of reasons might be adduced for why it is so loathsome, but the preacher’s sensibility is widely shared across time and culture. It is echoed in the timeless psychoanalytic anthropology of Julia Kristeva: "The corpse (or cadavre: cadere, to fall), seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. . . . As in true theater without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being." ⁹

I also believe that there is an even more fundamental reason why our species lives with, and cares for, its dead, materially and imaginatively: such attention is a, if not the, sign of our emergence from the order of nature into culture. It is, as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer puts it, the immutable anthropological background for all the human and social changes, past or present. The burial of the dead

is perhaps the fundamental phenomenon of becoming human. Burial does not refer to a rapid hiding of the dead, a swift clearing away of the shocking impression made by one suddenly stuck fast in a leaden and lasting sleep. On the contrary, by a remarkable expenditure of human labor and sacrifice there is sought an abiding with the dead, indeed a holding fast of the dead among the living. . . . We have to regard this in its most elementary significance. It is not a religious affair or a transposition of religion into secular customs, mores, and so on. Rather it is a matter of the fundamental constitution of human being from which derives the specific sense of human practice; we are dealing here with a conduct of life that has spiraled out of the order of nature. ¹⁰

Gadamer’s use of the phrase elementary significance puts me in mind of Claude Levi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship, one of the most influential anthropology books of the twentieth century, which argues that the incest taboo stands at the border between nature and culture: a liminal state, a threshold. I take abiding with the dead in the same spirit, to be a sign of a conduct of life that has spiraled out of the order of nature. Burial is clearly not its only manifestation—language could be such a marker—nor is it the only way of abiding with bodies: cremating and entombing or scattering their ashes in holy places, for example, are others. It extends as well to the vast range of temporally more limited and less traceable forms of caring for the dead: all the ways in which we prepare them for more permanent disposition—for example, washing them (often the task of women in the Christian West), anointing them, dressing them, eviscerating and embalming them. And it includes the ritual forms of the disposition itself, the funeral in its endless variety. All of these acts and many others qualify and could be the subject of this book, but I concentrate on those that leave the most traces on the ground or in the historical records, those through which we live with the dead through time. ¹¹

There is no chronological border marked culture on the human time scale at which stands a guardhouse marked the care of the dead, no clear frontier that, once crossed, definitively spirals the traveler out of the order of nature. The idea of such a moment is the heuristic creation of fictive anthropology, meant to help us think about the foundations of the human symbolic order, to mark it as wondrous, to resist taking for granted the foundations of our existence. What actually happened in the distant past revolves around two related theoretical and empirical debates. The first is about dates: When did early humans or their ancestors start to care for their dead? The second is about meaning: Did beginning to care for the dead mark a cognitive border between prehistory and history, between one cognitive status and another higher one? I cannot and do not need to take sides in these sophisticated disputes. All I need for now is to observe that as far back as people have discussed the subject, care of the dead has been regarded as foundational—of religion, of the polity, of the clan, of the tribe, of the capacity to mourn, of an understanding of the finitude of life, of civilization itself. And, as far back as we can go, the archeological record seems to support the view that humans and their close hominid ancestors have cared for at least some of their dead. I do not know what this means in terms of human cognitive development or, more specifically, attitudes toward death. I do not think it matters. We must not, writes V. Gordon Childe, one of the pioneers of the study of prehistory, imagine early hominids elaborating an eschatology and then acting on it. The deep emotions aroused by the drama of life and death found expression in no abstract judgments, but in passionate acts. The acts were the ideas, not expressions of them. I think this is still true in our own age. But whether burial represents a great cognitive leap forward or not, for now, and for my purposes, I take Gadamer as being basically right. ¹²

Third, the long anthropological view—deep time—allows me to offer another general argument against Diogenes that I will elaborate with much more historical specificity later. In 1907, Robert Hertz, a brilliant twenty-six-year-old Jewish student of the foundational sociological theorist Emile Durkheim and of the cultural anthropologist Marcel Mauss, wrote an enormously influential paper that showed that the dead have two lives: one in nature, the other in culture. There are the dead as bodies, the dead to which Diogenes limited himself: smelly, putrefying flesh that had lost whatever had made it alive and that,