Death, Materiality and Mediation: An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland 9781785332838

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Contextualizing Death
1 Field Boundaries
2 Talking about the Dead
3 Sensing Memories and the Dead
4 Objects of the Dead
5 Collective Remembrance
6 Materiality in the Graveyard
Conclusion
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Death, Materiality and Mediation

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by Birgit Meyer, Department of Religious Studies and Theology, Utrecht University, and Maruška Svašek, School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding ‘mediation’ as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial and emotional processes. Volume 1 Moving Subjects, Moving Objects Transnationalism, Cultural Production and Emotions Edited by Maruška Svašek Volume 2 Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea Ludovic Coupaye Volume 3 Objects and Imagination Perspectives on Materialization and Mediation Edited by Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space, and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking Volume 5 Having and Belonging Homes and Museums in Israel Judy Jaffe-Schagen Volume 6 Creativity in Transition Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe Edited by Maruška Svašek and Birgit Meyer Volume 7 Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland Barbara Graham

Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland

Barbara Graham

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2017 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2017 Barbara Graham All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Graham, Barbara, 1954- author. Title: Death, materiality and mediation : an ethnography of remembrance in Ireland / Barbara Graham. Description: New York : Berghahn Books, 2016. | Series: Material mediations : people and things in a world of movement ; volume 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016024743| ISBN 9781785332821 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781785332838 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Funeral rites and ceremonies—Ireland. | Funeral rites and ceremonies—Northern Ireland. | Death—Social aspects—Ireland. | Death—Social aspects—Northern Ireland. | Memory—Social aspects—Ireland. | Memory—Social aspects—Northern Ireland. | Material culture—Ireland. | Material culture—Northern Ireland. Classification: LCC GT3247.5.A2 G73 2016 | DDC 393/.9309417—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016024743 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-282-1 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-283-8 ebook

For my father, Andrew Boyd (1921–2011)

 Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Contextualizing Death

viii ix xviii 1

1. Field Boundaries

20

2. Talking about the Dead

37

3. Sensing Memories and the Dead

55

4. Objects of the Dead

76

5. Collective Remembrance

95

6. Materiality in the Graveyard

118

Conclusion

138

Appendix

145

Index

149



Illustrations

4.1. Aunt Jinny’s jug

78

4.2. Pink and white roses that now grow in a new home

83

5.1. Catching up at a Cemetery Sunday

99

5.2. Newry churchyard

100

5.3. A sea of umbrellas on a stormy day

103

6.1. Back-to-back headstones all in rows

123

6.2. The large statue that dominates the grave of a six-month-old baby

126

6.3. Presbyterian (left) and Church of Ireland (right) graveyards, South Armagh

128

 Preface

This book explores contemporary Irish attitudes and beliefs about the dead through examining how diverse forms of material culture can mediate people’s relationships with the deceased, the divine and the living. Through an ethnography of communities along both sides of the eastern border area of Ireland, it examines how materiality is central to processes of remembering and the crucial element in the transformations, negotiations and reintegrations that inform ongoing relationships between the living and the dead. With attention to culturally acceptable and unacceptable forms and uses of materiality in the private and public domains, it addresses themes of containment and displacement, separation and reconnection, sentiment and value. The concept of materiality used here includes not just concrete matter and substances but also stories, narratives, ephemera and embodied experience. These various forms of materiality are used as metaphors for the interactions between the living and the dead and as a lens through which the physical, cognitive, emotional and spiritual places of the dead are revealed. The different aspects of this inquiry involve attention also to concepts of inalienability, physicality after death, boundaries, identity and sense of place. The discussion is situated within a historical context of the place of the dead in Ireland. The research was carried out initially over a period of fifteen months in 2006 and 2007 (and subsequently during five months between 2012 and 2013) in counties Down and Armagh in Northern Ireland and Louth in the Republic of Ireland. The area is bordered on its north, south and western sides by the Mourne, Cooley and Sliabh Gullion mountain ranges. It is cut through at its eastern side by Carlingford Lough, which also serves as the political border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at this point. The land border extends across the southern parts of Down and Armagh. It is a mix of urban and rural settlement and has a predominately

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Catholic population. The region forms a natural geographical and social hinterland where movement of peoples and contacts can be documented back to prehistory. This area, however, especially around the South Armagh border region, witnessed high levels of unrest and violence during the thirty-year period (1968–98) of ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. During that period, across Northern Ireland, 3,600 people died and 50,000 were injured or maimed (BBC History Archive). The heart of the conflict is generally viewed as the differing aspirations in relation to the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. In essence it was a territorial conflict involving different national identities and political affiliations of Protestants (Unionists) and Catholics (Nationalists, Republicans). Unionists sought to remain part of the UK while Nationalists and Republicans aimed for a United Ireland. During the Troubles violence often spilled over into the Republic of Ireland and Britain, and border areas, particularly the South Armagh hinterland, saw high levels of violent deaths. In order to combat the movement of paramilitaries, the British government closed most border roads, and this had an effect on the social and economic lives of people residing in the area.1 Travel to work, to school, to church and to visit friends and relatives was severely curtailed by the necessity to take long detours, at times through areas that they felt unsafe.2 There was a feeling of isolation by many families living in this situation and a considerable amount of fear on behalf of border Protestants, who were, and still are, a minority in this area. Despite the violence, however, and the levels of fear and resultant mistrust, not every aspect of life was defined by the political situation, and as in any conflict, not everyone ascribed to polarized political or identity categories. Since the signing of the peace agreement (the 1998 Good Friday Agreement) Northern Ireland has made considerable advances in addressing previous inequalities in relation to housing, political representation and employment, and there are continuing significant efforts to build cross-community co-operation. The region remains, in many respects, a divided society; there are still isolated acts of violence; a high percentage of public housing is segregated on religious grounds (an estimated 90 per cent in Belfast),3 and the majority of schools are still divided along religious lines although the integrated schools sector is expanding. In the border area where the research for this study was conducted, a large number of residents have close family connections on both sides of the border. Today many people work, attend schools and churches, shop, make use of health services or regularly socialize across the jurisdictions. Part of the rationale to undertake a cross-border focus was to attest to the common cultural values and practices in relation to the dead that display no significant cultural differences that can be attributed to residence in either state. Whilst acknowledging the large and

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important body of work that has been undertaken by scholars in relation to the Irish border,4 this book moves away from a focus on sectarian divisions to show that, in dealing with the dead, people of different religions (or even those who reject the doctrines of churches) display common attitudes and practices. Within the ethnographies that have been written there are insights on kinship and inheritance that I apply in relation to how items are passed on through generations. My findings on how property is distributed just before or after someone’s death can be compared with what Leyton (1970) discovered. The basic principles that governed post-mortem distribution of goods and money – ‘genealogical distance, kinship category, birth order, sex, “desserts”, need and esteem’ (Leyton 1970: 1386) – are discernible in a variety of ways and situations in this study. This hierarchy of categories pertains today to kin and close acquaintances. The anthropology of death has received surprisingly little attention in relation to Ireland and, arguably, what has been done in Northern Ireland has been coloured by the violent conditions in the north. Much of the work on death, burial and rituals has been undertaken by historians (Corish 1985; Leigh Fry 1999; Tait 2002) and archaeologists; those involved in the historical archaeology of the period from 1600 to the present-day period have concentrated on headstone analysis in terms of artwork styles and spatial distribution, (e.g. Longfield 1947; McCormick 1983; Mythum 2000). In the history of material culture in Ireland over the past five hundred years, most records or studies have concentrated on high-status objects from large houses, estates and churches (Barnard 2005). The sources on artefacts are also concerned mostly with church and ecclesiastical treasures (Barnard 2005: 53–62). This study builds on a body of recent work on the dead, memory and material culture, most notably by Hallam and Hockey (2001) and Hockey et al. (2010), in what is a growing field of inquiry for anthropologists. This necessarily also includes issues of forgetting and remembering, of which there is an extensive and growing literature in anthropology (Berliner 2005: 197–211). In a critique of how the concept of memory is used, Berliner (2005: 203) argues that the notion of memory has become expanded to the point where it is in danger of becoming conflated with the concept of culture. He (2005: 198) points to the growing uneasiness among anthropologists and historians over its precise meaning (Winter 2000: 13) and its possible conflation with identity or culture (Fabian 1999: 51). Attention to collective, and social, memory (such as in Connerton 1989) has produced an analytical framework for theorizing ‘issues of cultural conservation and social continuity’ (Berliner 2005: 204). The analysis of collective events in this ethnography emphasizes individual readings of particular remembrance activities that take place in public

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settings. A more appropriate term to describe these events is ‘communal’, a term that can encompass aspects of mutuality and neighbourhood that are important factors for those who attend, and the usage of which thus circumvents the theoretical connotations and difficulties of representation that adhere to the term ‘collective’. In conjunction with this, of course, memory is juxtaposed with forgetting, as memory, of necessity, involves processes of selection. The selection of some memories, at the expense of others, in relation to the keeping (or not) of objects and the dynamics of remembrance is therefore of significance in inquiring into the reasons and rationales of specific practices relating to the materiality of the dead. This study also introduces new research in relation to Ireland by providing an analysis of the material culture of the dead at the micro level. The foregrounding of materiality as a metaphor for explaining and understanding cultural ideas and practices in this area of inquiry provides a new approach to the subject matter. It adds to theoretical concepts of inalienability (espoused initially by Mauss 1966 [1950] and Weiner 1985) by extending the parameters of inalienability and postulating it as a more fluid concept, acquired through distinct stages, and dependent on cultural rules and norms. It also examines how objects are kept, how they evoke memories, how they are transformed and how they are active in the transformation of relationships and ontological states. The demarcation of boundaries with material objects, a process that is complex and ambiguous, is addressed as illustrative of the boundaries between the living and the dead. This is partly an affirmation of Bloch’s (1977: 278–92) argument that ritual discourse and behaviour are the windows into social structure but develops it further to show how the different cognitive systems he posits interact in adjusting and maintaining cultural practices. Issues in relation to containment and boundaries are analysed by examining how the dead are placed in Irish cultural life. The placing of the dead is itself a metaphor for people’s sense of place in this area that is scattered with the memorials and reminiscences of the dead that underpin ideas of legitimacy, belonging and identity. In exploring the intricate connections between humans and materiality, the book builds on the work of Schiffer (1999) and Lakoff and Johnson (1980), who recognized that objects are fundamental in defining humans who have an instinctive need to make concrete the immaterial. Miller (2005: 2) recognized that definitions of humanity have often been ‘synonymous with the position taken on the question of materiality’. And King (2010: xv) in a study of material objects and religion in Ireland, reminds us that in the case of images we ‘learn to interact with them materially – even shadow images appear on walls, while dreams and ideas are in our heads’. A detailed analysis of the narratives and stories connected to the dead and their materiality also complements Hoskins’s (1998) theories on how the stories

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of objects are embedded within the stories of people’s lives and are crucial in the transmission of history, belief and cultural values. The emphasis on materiality and the importance of human engagement with its diverse manifestations owes much to the recognition of the centrality of the role that materiality plays in social relations (Edwards et al. 2006; Miller 2005). In these collections there is also an acknowledgement of the ways in which materiality is fundamental to processes of self-reflection and how it evokes sensory memories and embodiment (issues that are discussed in chapters 3 and 4). Materiality – what it is and how useful it is as an analytical concept for anthropologists – has also engendered much recent debate (Ingold 2007: 1–16). An expanded notion of materiality to include ephemera, narratives and embodied experience is similar to Miller’s (2005: 4) concept of also including the imaginary and the theoretical. Ingold argues that materiality as a concept diverts our attention from materials, something that we should be equally concerned with (2007: 1–2). Yet, as Tilley (2007: 17) and Miller (2007: 23–27) point out, the concept of materiality is needed in order to examine the significance that things have in relation to people and their social relationships. Anthropologists have never neglected materials in analyses but have engaged with the form and substances of what things are made of in order to determine their significance for people (Miller 2007: 24–7) and how they are engaged through the senses. Miller also argues that people ‘see the world in terms of immateriality and degrees of materiality’ (2007: 25). In arguing for a wider concept of materiality I am not advocating a materialist perspective wherein everything is reduced to matter and bounded concepts of time. Rather, what is being proposed is that, whilst recognizing that there are phenomena beyond matter and time, outside of the physical world in which we live and engage, we engage with this immateriality through making it material. This can be seen in the graphs and calculations of physicists to explain the workings of the universe or in the embodied experiences of people due to sensory engagements. So, we may not be able to catch a sound and hold it as a tangible object, but as it travels through the air, it changes and bends that medium and has a material effect on our ears as it vibrates. This is perhaps not very far removed from Gibson’s (1979: 16; Ingold 2007: 4–5) ideas of how surfaces separate one type of material from another and are the places where interactions occur. The introduction outlines the themes and direction of the research within the ethnographic and theoretical literature on death, material culture, senses and commemoration. It discusses areas of similarity and difference in theory and ethnography and considers the more local studies in relation to the anthropology of Ireland. Chapter 1 details the methodology and reflects on the experience of researching sensitive issues in familiar surroundings.

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Chapter 2 considers how narratives, stories and particular forms of talking in specific death-related contexts illuminate processes of mediation. The role of the senses in triggering emotional and sentimental memories of the dead is discussed in chapter 3 through attention to materiality in both the private and public spheres. The chapter argues that the senses are a primary factor in instigating memory and analyses ambiguous processes and encounters with the materiality of the dead. The concepts of value and inalienability are reassessed in chapter 4 in relation to objects of the dead. It takes a new and critical look at how boundaries and thresholds are negotiated through material objects and examines the strategies and processes used by people to keep and control former possessions of the dead with particular attention to circulation. The complex shift from private to public remembrance and the often contested public arena and shifting boundaries that are mediated through various forms of materiality are the subject of chapter 5. It discusses the dissimilarities that arise between the public and private in relation to forms of ritual, place and the materiality used. It also shows how private considerations are present in public commemorations and discusses the negotiations that arise between official texts and individual understandings. Chapter 6 discusses the changes in graveyard memorializing by critically examining the contested nature of some public forms of material remembrance and continues the themes of boundaries and emotions through an examination of ‘out of place’ forms of material remembrance. Through exploring attitudes and practices surrounding graveside decorations it argues that changes are accommodated within traditional forms and that processes of graveside memorializing can inform about wider changes in society. The data collected included extensive interviews with individuals, families, groups, clergy, representatives of organizations and those involved in the funerary trade. The fieldwork also involved attendance at collective and individual remembrance events, church services, wakes and funerals. Material is also drawn from numerous hours of conversations with groups and individuals, participation in social events ranging from church social events to dances and yard sales and months spent immersing myself in the lives and daily happenings of people in the area (the appendix details interviews and events). Notes 1. A comprehensive resource that provides facts and figures about the conflict in Northern Ireland along with a history and a database of writing is Conflict Archive on the Internet (http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/), which is based at the University

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of Ulster. The site contains source material on the Troubles, politics and society from 1968 to the present. 2. The Irish Borderlands Project website ‘provides a set of resources for exploring the histories, geographies, meanings and experiences of the border’ (http://www .irishborderlands.com/index.html). It contains a number of resources in its ‘Living with the Border’ section in relation to people living along the border during and after the conflict and contains testimonies on how road closures and the Troubles affected people’s lives and attitudes. The website arose out of a threeyear research project into ‘Irish border/lands: cultural geographies of division, interconnection and diversity’. A book based on the research was published in 2013: C. Nash, B. Reid and B.J. Graham, Partitioned Lives: The Irish Borderlands (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Another useful resource is Harvey, B.; A. Kelly, S. McGearty and S. Murray, The Emerald Curtain: The Social Impact of the Irish Border Monaghan, Ireland: Triskele Community Training & Development, a report on research carried out to assess the social, cultural and economic impact for communities living along the southern border area. The authors began from the premise that the legacy of the violent conflict had had a ‘negative impact on the infrastructure and sustainability of these communities’. The action research assesses the impact of the border on the geographical communities adjacent to or straddling the border and the participation of members of the target group in these communities. The border and the legacy of the conflict are believed to have had a negative impact on the infrastructure and sustainability of these communities. The project aims to identify this impact and work with the communities to develop strategies in both practical and policy terms to address this impact. (2005: 7). A considerable body of work specifically examines the lives of people living along the border in relation to the conflict and its aftermath. For recent anthropological studies that analyse contemporary attitudes of Protestant communities in this area, see Donnan (2010) and Donnan and Simpson (2007). 3. Some useful resources on social housing and attitudes to integration include: http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/housing/housing.htm; H. Stockinger, 2015. ‘Young people’s experiences of integration and segregation in Northern Ireland.’ Research Update. 99. full text from ARK (Access, Research, Knowledge) Northern Ireland. (Details from the 2015 Young Life and Times (YLT) survey. Retrieved from http://www.ark.ac.uk/publications/updates/update99.pdf 16 May 2016; S. Fenton, 2015. ‘Northern Ireland is trying to socially engineer council estates to make Catholics and Protestants live together.’ The New Statesman. Retrieved 14 May 2015 from: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/northern-ire land-trying-socially-engineer-council-estates-make-catholics-and; Religious Segregation and Allocations in Northern Ireland’s Social Housing. 2015. Retrieved from: The Chartered Institute of Housing, http://www.cih.org/news-article/dis play/vpathDCR/templatedata/cih/news-article/data/NI/Religious_segregation_ and_allocations_in_Northern_Irelands_social_housing 16 May 2016. 4. Research in Ireland, historically, tended to emphasize the cohesiveness of communities in the south and divisions in Northern Ireland. Anthropologists work-

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ing in Northern Ireland were drawn, understandably, towards an examination of urban sectarian violence on the one hand or what were deemed as more peaceful rural settings on the other (Curtin et al. 1993; Donnan and McFarlane 1986, 1989). In terms of urban ethnography there were different areas of concern for the researchers. Much of the work in Northern Ireland was concerned with the segregated geographies of urban sectarianism. In the south, attention focused on the decline of individual towns and cities and on the connections and exchanges in the social, economic and political spheres between the large urban centres and the rural hinterlands (Wilson and Donnan 2006).

Bibliography BBC History Archive. ‘The Troubles: Thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland 1968-1998. retrieved 20 November 2015’, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ troubles. Barnard, T.C. 2005. A Guide to Sources for the History of Material Culture in Ireland, 1500–2000. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Berliner, D. 2005. ‘The Abuse of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Anthropology’, Anthropological Quarterly (78)1: 197–211. Bloch, M. 1977. ‘The Past and the Present in the Present’, Man (NS) 12(2): 278–92. Connerton, P. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corish, P.J. 1985. The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Curtin, C., H. Donnan and T. Wilson (eds). 1993. Irish Urban Cultures. QUB Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies. Donnan, H. 2010. ‘Cold War along the Emerald Curtain: Rural Boundaries in a Contested Border Zone,’ Social Anthropology 18(3): 253–66. Donnan, H., and G. McFarlane. 1986. ‘Social Anthropology and the Sectarian Divide in Northern Ireland’, in The Sectarian Divide in Northern Ireland Today, Occasional Paper 41. London: Royal Anthropological Institute. ———. 1989. Social Anthropology and Public Policy in Northern Ireland. Aldershot, England: Avebury. Donnan, H., and K. Simpson. 2007. ‘Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants’, Ethnos 72(1): 5–28. Edwards, E., C. Gosden and R. Philips (eds). 2006. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Fabian, J. 1999. ‘Remembering Other: Knowledge and Recognition in the Exploration of Central Africa’, Critical Enquiry 26: 49–69. Gibson, J.J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Hallam, E., and J. Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Hallam, E., J. Hockey and G. Howarth. 1999. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge.

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Hockey, J., C. Komaromy and K. Woodthorpe (eds). 2010. The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoskins, J. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. 2007. ‘Materials against Materiality’, Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 1–16. King, E.F. 2010. Material Religion and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Lakoff G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Leigh Fry, S. 1999. Burial in Mediaeval Ireland 900–1500. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Leyton, E. 1970. ‘Spheres of Inheritance in Aughnaboy’, American Anthropologist 72: 1378–88. Longfield, A. 1947. ‘Some Late 18th and Early 19th Century Irish Tombstones’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 77: 1–4. McCormick, F. 1983. ‘The Symbols of Death and the Tomb of John Forster in Tydavnet, Co. Monaghan’, Clogher Record 11: 273–86. McFarlane, G. 1986. ‘It’s Not as Simple as That: The Expression of the Catholic and Protestant Boundary in Northern Irish Rural Communities’, in A.P. Cohen (ed.), Symbolising Boundaries: Identity and Diversity in British Cultures. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mauss, M. 1966 [1950]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West Ltd. Miller, D. (ed.). 2005. Materiality. Durham: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. ‘Stone Age or Plastic Age?’, Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 23–27. Mythum, H. 2000. Recording and Analysing Graveyards. York: Council for British Archaeology. Patterson, H. 2013. Ireland’s Violent Frontier: The Border and Anglo-Irish Relations during the Troubles. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan. Schiffer, M. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behaviour and Communication. London: Routledge. Tait, C. 2002. Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland: 1550–1650. Hampshire, England: Palgrave. Tilley, C. 2007. ‘Materiality in Materials’, Archaeological Dialogues 14(1): 16–20. Weiner, A. 1985. ‘Inalienable Wealth’, American Ethnologist 12(2): 210–27. Wilson, T.M., and H. Donnan. 2006. The Anthropology of Ireland. Oxford: Berg. Winter, J. 2000. ‘The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the Memory Boom in Contemporary Historical Studies’, German Historical Institute 27.



Acknowledgements

A number of people have helped in the production of this book through participating in the research, offering advice and guidance and providing helpful and insightful comments on drafts and revisions. Firstly I would like to thank all the people with whom I worked during the research. To the many welcoming and interesting individuals who agreed to take part in the research, gave of their time, allowed me into their homes and provided me with information about the topics in this book, I am very grateful. Thanks also to the church and civic organizations, social groups, congregations and the staff at local museums for all their advice and help on gathering information. I am grateful to colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast for their generous input and interest. Thanks to Professor Hastings Donnan for his advice and guidance during the research, his many valuable and constructive comments and his ability to keep me focused. A particular note of thanks to Hastings for giving me the chance to work with Professor Michael Jackson, Harvard University, at a writing week during which he and colleagues from QUB and Maynooth University gave helpful comments on a very early draft of a chapter. Thanks to Dr. Maruška Svašek, who also encouraged me to write this book and afforded me the opportunity to work with a variety of international colleagues on the CIM (Creativity and Innovation in a World of Movement) project and to co-ordinate the ROIE (Researching Objects, Images and Emotions) Postgraduate Forum at Queen’s. This experience allowed me to explore theoretical concepts in relation to objects from a wide variety of perspectives. And I am grateful also to Dr. Lynne McKerr at the School of Education for all the helpful comments; and advice and for reading drafts of some of the chapters. It was a privilege to work with all of them and to have the opportunity to learn from their varied experience and fields of knowledge and generous collegiate spirit.

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Thanks also to Marion Berghahn, Melissa Gannon, Jessica Murphy, Dhara Patel and Duncan Ranslem from Berghahn Books, who have all provided much appreciated help and guidance through all the stages of review and production; to Birgit Meyer (Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University) and Maruška Svašek (School of History and Anthropology, Queens University, Belfast) for editing the series; and to the copyeditor Debra Corman for a thorough and expert job in rectifying mistakes. All remaining errors are mine alone. Finally, thanks to William for help with photographs, Luke for his IT support and as a willing companion on many trips to graveyards and monuments and Ruth for her encouragement and belief in the project.



Introduction CONTEXTUALIZING DEATH

The nature of how individuals and societies conceptualize and categorize death and the dead is entwined with diverse forms of materiality, in public, private, ritual and secular settings. How such material culture is used in post-mortem contexts is a framework within which it is possible to discover the particular attitudes and beliefs of people in one area of Ireland and identify the routes through which material forms mediate relationships. The literature on death and the dead in Ireland ranges through folklore, archaeology, history and anthropology, and this is drawn on along with a vast body of work from anthropologists on death and the dead.

Attending to Material Culture There have been increasing calls from anthropologists to investigate more varied forms of material culture in relation to death. Humphrey (1980: 556–57) argued for greater attention to be paid to forms of memorialization other than tombs. In a review of Metcalf and Huntington’s (1991 [1979]) study of mortuary rituals, she advocated that more attention should be focused, in Western societies, on material forms such as photographs, tapes and individual anniversary practices. Nearly twenty-five years later Robben (2004: 13) recognized the paucity of death studies in Western societies that centred on material culture. He reminds us that the ‘objectification of material culture’ was a major focus for anthropologists one hundred years ago. Yet he acknowledges a renewed interest in materiality and death evident in works by, for example, Hallam and Hockey (2001). This follows an enthusiasm for attention to material culture (which has long been the focus of

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Death, Materiality and Mediation

archaeologists) that has resulted in theoretical works on humans and materiality (Schiffer 1999); the biographies and social life of objects (Appadurai 1986; Attfield 2000; Hoskins 1998); materiality in everyday life (Miller 1998, 2001); and interpretations of museum collections (Pearce 1994). The concept of agency has been a crucial element in theorizing objects, and in an examination of art objects Gell (1998: 22) contends that agency is ‘relational and context dependent’. The boundaries between people and objects and how material items portray personhood are addressed by Knappett (2005: 31) in his notion also of a relational agency that is ‘distributed across hybridised human–non-human networks’. More recently Knappett and Malafouris (2008) consider the concept of materiality and non-human agency. Knappett (2008: 139–56) expands the application of Actor Network Theory (ANT) in an archaeological context and argues for a concept of agency ‘that is a process distributed across collectives of humans and non-humans’. He suggests that a distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things’ can be advantageous in considering what he calls ‘the variable character of material actors’ (2008: 143–44). Latour (2005: 72) asks that we allow for all participants in actions or networks and suggests that objects can ‘authorise, allow, encourage, permit’. Knappett (2008: 143) is anxious not to define objects solely in terms of a subject/object relationship and advocates for a greater focus on the materials of things as part of the investigation of agency. This fusing, or perhaps resultant hybrid, is, however, contingent on the agency of humans who initiate the action for specific reasons. There is also the realization of course that the dead exert a degree of agency, or have the potential to do so, over the living. The dead are still conceptualized as human, although admittedly in an altered state. None of this negates Miller’s (2010: 93–94) arguments that ‘things do things to us, and not just the things we want them to do’ and this can apply to the toy on which we stub our toe or something ‘that falls from the mantelpiece and breaks’ (2010: 94). Yet, while acknowledging that a person did not direct the action, can we say that the things are acting on agency? As will be discussed below, however, in terms of inalienability, objects can be seen to have agency in relation to the past. In conjunction with that, I suggest that in considering the human/ object engagement in relation to the conflation of boundaries, this is precipitated by the experiential, the sensory engagement and cognitive nature of humans who are realizing connections and embodied interplay with objects. One aspect of those interactions is how objects may depict personhood (chapters 3, 4 and 6) and the way in which this is tied to different aspects of social relations; this is particularly addressed when examining how and why certain items are selected as keepsakes. In doing so I draw on ethnographic studies of objects, meanings and memory that have been undertaken by,

Introduction

3

among others, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981), Curasi et al. (2004; and Price et al. (2000). Investigations of material culture in homes reveal changes over the generations in how many treasured items may be kept and displayed. Arensberg and Kimball (1968 [1940]: 129) described the practice of keeping treasured items in a special room (the ‘west room’) in a County Clare household.1 Here were kept special objects, including heirlooms that were ‘associated with past members of the household’. The west room evoked a power through the furniture and objects that were used to decorate the space (Taylor 1999: 231–35). These items were inalienable, as the family would part with them only ‘when it must’ (Arensberg and Kimball 1968 [1940]: 129). In contrast to the centrality of the west room that played ‘a crucial role in the drama of domestic life’ (Taylor 1999: 223) because it housed particular objects of sentimental value, my work shows that objects can be more dispersed throughout the household. The rules and norms governing display and access have changed; some items are now more public than in previous generations, while others remain privately tucked away and rarely shared. The motivations to memorialize is evidenced in this study through the attachment that people place on keepsakes and mementos. These items are often of no monetary value yet may act as representations of the deceased or of their personality. The picture in the hallway, the book on the shelf and the headstone in the graveyard are analogous with the examples of memorial artefacts elucidated by Goody (1974: 452): ‘the ancestral tablets of traditional China … the stools of the Ashanti, the clay pots of the Tallensi … the simple anthropomorphic shrines of the LoDagga’. The analysis of material culture in this ethnography is therefore undertaken within the context of previous ethnographic studies but also with cognizance of a growing body of more recent theoretical work in anthropology on materiality. An underlying concern in much of this work is with reclaiming the importance of material objects as potent agents of communication in the everyday cultural lives of peoples around the world. Placing materiality more centrally in the analysis of social and cultural behaviour is not to fetishize material worlds, but rather to acknowledge that social worlds are ‘as much constituted by materiality as the other way around’ (Miller 1998: 3). The contention that a focus on objects does not negate or marginalize the anthropological goal of the study of people is borne out by Hoskins’s (1998: 2) observations that the history of objects inevitably entails the history of persons. Hoskins found she could not separate these elements in her study of how ordinary household possessions might be given an extraordinary significance ‘by becoming entangled in the events of a person’s life and used as a vehicle for a sense of selfhood’ (Hoskins 1998: 2). Objects have social

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meanings, which can be unravelled, and are as integral a part of our lives as our bodies, ‘indeed, these two facets of our lives have the fundamental characteristic of physicality not possessed by most other facets of our existence’ (Pearce 1994: 1–3).

The Value of Things One of the major concerns of this book is to consider how and why objects acquire particular types of value. The material culture of the dead includes an array of objects ranging from headstones, keepsakes and mementos to more transient or ephemeral forms that are manifested in text or displays of commemoration at gravesides or monuments. They are used to immortalize the dead and symbolize the personhood of the deceased. Material items may become instilled, by use and association, with emotional capacities and move towards ‘the ontological state of “self” (subject) from that of “other” (object)’ (Lupton 1998: 144; Hallam and Hockey 2001: 43). Objects used in imagining the dead have biographies (Kopytoff 1986: 64–91) that connect them to the social and cultural processes of the communities in which they circulate or are positioned. The social life of material objects (Appadurai 1986: 34) is dependent on the stories (or narratives), associations and interactions between objects and people (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 44). It is through these media that material forms process towards achieving inalienability (Carrier 1993; Herrmann 1997; Mauss 1954; Weiner 1985). Their value (like Geary’s relics 1986: 188)2 depends on specific beliefs and circumstances and the ‘social and cultural transition’ of the objects. Their uses, progressions, and changing forms are elemental in the role they play in the symbolic constitution of ideas of immortality. The status of material objects and attempts to situate them in relation to commercial trade has led anthropologists continually to define and revisit concepts of value. It is, however, not just anthropologists who are concerned with the criterion of value. People make decisions constantly on value in deciding which items to keep or discard. Objects are allocated sentimental, monetary or historical family value or a combination of these. Rarely have they only one form of value. In considering how the former possessions of the dead become cherished keepsakes and mementos, I have drawn on a large body of anthropological literature concerned with the concept of ‘inalienability’,3 a term fraught with debate. Noyes (1936: 435–36) was not convinced that it defined effectively the distinctions of value and exclusivity. In evaluating the concept of inalienability, I consider how it is dependent on circulation and distribution and how the former belongings of the dead can exhibit a power to define

Introduction

5

who the deceased was and possess a role in preserving part of the identity of the dead (Weiner 1985: 210–27). It will be shown that in order to retain an inalienable quality, these objects never lose the identity of and the attachment to the person to whom they once belonged. Mauss (1923–24, cited by Weiner 1985: 210–27) recognized that in giving away something, a part of one’s nature and substance was also given, ‘while to receive something is to receive a part of someone’s spiritual essence … the thing given is not inert, it is alive and often personified’. Thus, in the context of practices carried out by the people with whom I worked, objects can be agents in relation to the past and the present and are enmeshed in social and cultural associations. The agency of the material objects is manifested in their ability to maintain connections with the dead through the keeping of items that evoke the embodied person: ‘connections between bodies, spaces and objects articulated the inner dimensions of the individual and symbolized their social relations’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 41). Without the social and cultural connections, material items cannot be ‘alive’, but when they are tied to associations with people, places and stories, they are, like the Maori cloaks (one of two ‘traditional wealth objects’ noted by Weiner 1985: 214), unique in their personal histories and so rendered irreplaceable. More recent work on inalienable items has, for example, concentrated on the processes through which already cherished possessions of older consumers become inalienable (Curasi et al. 2004). People employ various strategies to precipitate an item’s inalienable status and this is done as a way of perpetuating a lineage or history, thus encapsulating memory on the more macro level of the extended family (Price et al. 2000). Goody’s exposition of what he called ‘intergenerational transmission’ (1962: 273) considered the mechanism for the redistribution of rights and material items of the deceased – a process that he recognized as necessary for cultural transmission. The distribution of items across generations is addressed in how belongings are shared hierarchically and horizontally (chapter 4) not just among kin but also among friends and acquaintances. I examine the efficacy of the transmission of objects in relation to shared notions about the dead and their relationships with the living. Any transfer of inheritance can potentially be adversarial and certain people within a group of family or friends may feel overlooked in the distribution of wealth and goods. Goody (1962: 276–83) recognized this, and the mechanisms used to pre-empt conflict, as a common factor in all types of societies. These mitigating procedures may include the making of wills or, in Ireland, the handing over of title to land when children marry (Arensberg 1937: 78; Goody 1962: 278). There is an acknowledgement of a relationship in life and it is this connection that is a determining factor in the transfer of material items. The myriad situations that surround the concept of reciprocity are seen in the context of this ethnography as

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post-mortem acknowledgements of relationships that are bound up with post-mortem obligations to the dead, methods of both material and cultural transmission. In a re-evaluation of Kopytoff (1986) and Weiner (1985, 1992), Graeber (2001: 33–35) argues that Weiner reverses Simmel’s (1971: 54) position that value is a product of exchange; Weiner argues that things become valuable in direct proportion to the level of fear of losing them. Graeber disagrees with Kopytoff that objects are valuable simply because they are ‘unique’. This is, of course, dependent on some agreed definition of ‘unique’, which is as problematic as ‘inalienable’. Graeber (2001: 34) acknowledges, however, that an item’s ability to ‘accumulate a history’ formulates and enhances its value. Both Kopytoff (1986) and Weiner (1985, 1992) make useful points in relation to objects, albeit from different perspectives. There is an overconcentration in their work, however, on items of relative high status, which contrasts with the emphasis in this study on everyday items and how they attain or are ascribed value. I argue that value is more fluid and relative; indeed Simmel (1971: 50) argued strongly for relativity in value, although he anchored it to exchange. His theory is useful, however, when applied to how the relativity of relationships to people and associations are determinants of an object’s value. I argue that this is not merely a chronology of the trajectory of an object but also its associated stories connected to specific people that underlie aspects of value.

The Self in Things Weiner (1985: 212) discusses the issue of immortality in reference to Simmel’s (1971) observations that objects may embody ‘pathos’ because ‘they encompass the limits and constraints in social relations’. In linking persons with things, the materiality of the things is superseded; items may become routes through which mortality is transcended. What this raises are questions about where the ‘self’ may reside and what that can tell us about people’s perceptions of the dead. The materiality of experience and being in the world is a fundamental human condition that has to be, nevertheless, viewed in conjunction with the acknowledgement of the nonmaterial realm that exists beyond death. Humans conceive the world, and outside of the world, in terms of quantification and experience that are physical and material. The sense of a continuing presence of the dead, documented in the ethnographic literature, has led to new concepts of the body. Hallam et al. (1999) have sought to theorize the body by exploring the site of the ‘self’ when it is not coterminous with the physical body. The idea of a ‘self’ beyond the body is essential to the people in the area I worked. They believe that what con-

Introduction

7

stitutes the ‘essence’ of a person is not confined to the physical. Yet, this ‘essence’ or fundamental encapsulating of ‘self’ has to be made material. Here we are faced with the paradox, or perhaps more accurately, the dialectic, of corporeality and non-corporeality, wherein, in seeking to acknowledge and capture the ‘self’ outside of the body this is done by a reversal through projecting memories onto material items. The notion of a disembodied ‘self’ is materialized and objects may be used to symbolize the deceased.4 Material forms are also indicators of beliefs about the dead and how they should be treated. Malinowski (1948) recognized the contradictory state between love and fear and argued that fear was not only centred on the corpse; the ambivalence was between ‘love of the dead and fear of the corpse’ (Goody 1962: 21–22). In Ireland, the fear of the corpse is not overtly manifested, if it is there at all. The corpse is cleansed, laid out and displayed, kept company and entertained at wakes; it is incorporated into rituals (Taylor 1989a). If these rites can be properly viewed as ways to temper fear, then it is not fear of the physical corpse, but fear of the dead. Contradictions do arise between love and fear of the dead – or love of the self that was in the body, but fear of that other self that is not embodied. The stories that people tell and the reasons for specific remembrance practices reveal beliefs and attitudes towards that altered state of ‘self’ of the dead that cannot be contained by the living, only placated (Christiansen 1946). There is an unequal power relationship that thus ensues and this generates, if not outright fear, then a degree of apprehension and uncertainty of the unknown world of the dead, an apprehension that is negotiated and mitigated differentially according to culture. The rituals and rites, private and public performances that follow can be traced to this fear. The transformation of the deceased into an altered state or being may in various societies render a person an ancestor, at times a ghost, or an everpresent spirit. The belief that the dead are accessible in this new form is necessary for continued memorializing and relationships. In China, contact with the dead, whether they are ancestors or ghosts, is potentially ‘dangerous and disturbing’ (Stafford 2000: 79–80). There is a duality to the spirits of the dead in China and a combination of the ‘benign’ and the ‘demonic’ in the cosmos (Stafford 2000: 31). The dead in China and in many societies, including Ireland, are believed to have the potential and the power to intervene in the lives of the living. Beliefs in the dead who may come back to remonstrate with the living (Ochoa 2007: 475) or the ghosts who can be both benevolent and malevolent5 (Gough 1958: 447–8) have parallels in Ireland. O’Hogain (1999) and O’Suilleabhain (1967) recognized the desire to reassure the dead of their continued popularity through funeral games and rituals. Collected folklore and contemporary storytelling in Ireland abound with tales of ghosts and visitations of the dead.6

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Sentiment and the Senses The role of sentiment and the creation of sentimental value are also key components in the centrality of how material culture may help to cement ongoing relationships with the dead. Parkin (1999: 304) acknowledges that there are articles of sentimental value ‘which both inscribe and are inscribed by … memories of self and personhood’. His study of people who were displaced from their homes in violent situations revealed that, with little or no time to gather many belongings, people chose objects that instilled a memory of a past self, the self before displacement. Such personal mementos may be inscribed with narrative and sentiment (Parkin 1999: 313). The journals and diaries of Mormons during nineteenth-century migrations in America were used by Belk (1992: 339–61) to show how possessions often acquired ‘emotion-laden meanings’ (Belk 1992: 339). Heirlooms carried by the migrants, whether clothing or furniture, conjured up memories of those left behind and served as symbols of those people. In situations where the relative who has bequeathed the heirloom is no longer living, such items may become the focus of ‘a western form of ancestor worship … gifts, clothing, photographs, and even a copper tub were among the items acting as transitional objects for these Mormon immigrants’ (Belk 1992: 353). In considering the relationships between people and things, people often see objects from the point of view of relationships with others and past experiences evoked by an item can be used ‘to define the selves of these people’ (Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981: 112–13). This notion of how memory of past experiences is embedded in the evocative nature of particular objects plays on concepts of how memory is constituted. Hallam and Hockey (2001: 13) examine ‘the relationships between embodied action and material objects’ to explore how material objects constitute systems of recall for persons and social groups. They argue that whatever form the materials of memory take, they acquire significance ‘through conceptual linkages between personhood and the material world’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 36). There is the suggestion that a person’s sense of identity or social role is ‘bound up’ with objects that trigger memories and conjure up mental pictures (Tonkin 1992: 94–96) and words or narratives are important in shaping memory and identity (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 44; Parkin 1999: 303–20). The impetus to perpetuate a personhood is evidenced in this study through the various strategies and rituals that people employ in conjunction with materiality and is addressed especially in chapter 4. Objects and monuments can be tracked through their physical and social lives. Appadurai (1986) recommends that we ‘follow the things’, for they are without meaning apart from those that human actions endow them with, and their meanings are ‘inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories’

Introduction

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(Appadurai 1986: 3–63). In this he opens up the theoretical possibility of inquiring into how the former possessions of the dead become sentimental objects and how these items are used by the people who now have custody of them or responsibility for their continuance. A belief that personhood can be inscribed within ‘private mementos of mind and matter’ is put forward by Parkin (1999: 308). Something that was once a commodity (for example, a piece of clothing, or items that have had ‘little or no utilitarian value’ [Parkin 1999: 313] such as photographs or letters) becomes a sentimental and treasured item and symbolic of a person or a relationship (Carrier 1993). Sentiment is here examined as a particular kind of emotion triggered by the sensory experience of a valued object.7 There has been considerable debate in the literature on the privileging of sight historically, and, for examples, both Stewart (1999: 19–22) and Zelizer (1998: 6) contend that the visual has dominated analysis of the interactions between people and things. In dealing with the connections between senses and emotions, I examine all the senses and the fusion that occurs between them. Stewart’s (1999: 19) contention that a sensory hierarchy regulates the body’s ‘somatic memory of its encounters with what is outside of it’ is tested through accounts related by people during the study. While the visual can be a primary marker of events because images, as Zelizer (1998: 6) argues, ‘help to stabilize and anchor collective memory’s transient and fluctuating nature’, it will be shown that this is not always the case. Sutton’s (2001) and Stoller’s (1989) rich explorations of taste have redressed the imbalance in the ranking of the senses. Taussig’s (1991) keen examination of the tactility of sight has contributed to a growing awareness and debate on how senses can merge to produce a hybridity that is stitched together by emotional seams. In addition, Classen’s (2005) comprehensive volume on touch brings together an eclectic array of essays on how touch is used, perceived, negotiated and culturally formed, and Turkle’s (2007) collection of reminiscences about ‘evocative objects’ draws on all the senses to portray the overwhelming emotion that can result from the contemplation of items of memory. It has been argued that emotion, imagery and memory are interconnected through scientific mapping of the brain (Damasio 2000). Yet Tonkin (2005: 62) is of the opinion that we should take account of contexts, and while there are interactions between emotionality and imagination, it is context ‘that often structures interactions’. Sentiment and senses of objects must therefore be seen in context and are triggered not only by material objects but also by stories and connected to the landscape. In theorizing how places, both public and private, impact on the uses and forms of materiality, the importance of space emerges as significant in both narratives and acts of remembrance. Stories about the dead, where they are recounted or located in relation to landscape, are important cultural referents in Ireland.8

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In respect of collective remembrance there are a number of studies devoted to the cognitive processes of memory (e.g. Halbwachs 1992 [1952]; Middleton and Edwards 1997 [1990]; Winter and Sivan 1999). These works concentrate on how collectivism is enacted in memory processes, but I focus on aspects of communal remembrance, in which individuals will negotiate and frame experiences that may be opposed to official texts. Communal remembrance is the public gathering of people to enact rites for a discrete group of deceased persons (for example those who died in wars or the dead of a parish). The collectivism that may be enacted in these ceremonies is that of the ‘social construction of bereavement and commemoration’ (Weiss 1997: 91–92) that seeks to produce a bounded and agreed set of memories, themes that play out in particular ways in Ireland (chapter 5).

Death and Liminality Rituals performed at death are centred on facilitating the separation of the dead from the living while also re-establishing the dead in an altered state of being. They are rites undertaken not just for the dead but also for the living; the living need to be assured of the separation of the dead, but they also need to make cognitive adjustments to the altered status of the dead. Themes of separation and reintegration are addressed (chapter 2) in an analysis of how people talk about the dead and how their stories illuminate the importance of places and objects in facilitating the re-assimilation of the dead. They are also important considerations in examining how acts of remembrance, attention to the belongings of the dead and the role of the senses are contingent upon a process of reintegration. Van Gennep (1960 [1909]) originally postulated the existence of states of segregation and subsequent re-amalgamation in his exposition of the three stages of rites de passage (separation, transition and reincorporation). The intermediary or liminal phase was expanded on by Turner (1967, 1969), for whom it represented a ‘betwixt and between’ stage during which a person undergoing a change (an initiation rite, a marriage or death) is suspended between a former and a future state (or status). This state of anti-structure became the starting point for his concept of communitas, an attribute of rites of change that evolves during the liminal period and manifests as a loose agglomeration of equals (Turner 1969: 94, 130). He believed examples of this, outside of rites of passage, could be found in communities of hippies, monks or even pilgrims. Turner’s (1969) stance on liminality and communitas as anti-structure is, however, open to criticism. If the liminal is essential to the processual nature of the ritual, it is, arguably, part of the

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structure and raises the issue of whether anti-structure can be said to exist. This is similar to what Gluckman and Gluckman argued about the rigidity of the ‘distinction between structure and anti-structure’ (Deflem 1991: 19) when they suggested that evidence of structure, albeit inverted, was present in communitas (Gluckman and Gluckman 1977: 242). Turner, however, recognized that within anti-structure there lay the seeds and the eventual formation of structure (1969: 132). What he was referring to, however, is more accurately conceived of as the conformist nature of groups, the members of which, on agreeing on a common lifestyle or philosophy, identify themselves as different to external society by striving to be similar internally to the group. In contrast to Turner (1969) and Van Gennep (1960 [1909]), I argue that the bounded characteristics they attribute to death as a rite of passage are not always neatly circumscribed. In many cases the liminal is not fully resolved in any processual sense but is present in the continuing attention to the dead. The disconnectedness expounded in liminality continues after death and must be negotiated through material items. I examine this in relation to how kin connections and spatial and temporal considerations may modify the expectation or appearance of resolution. For the close kin and friends of the deceased, liminality may remain as a permanent ‘structure’, embedded in acts of remembrance. The evidence in this study shows that both private and collective (public) remembrance rituals and ceremonies are instances of attempts to renew the separation and integration stages. This, however, does not apply to all people or situations equally. Factors that will temper the degree to which liminality will still be present include a lack of close family or social connections or if kin live far away. The nature of death and how it has been viewed in different societies have ultimately been concerned with the opposing states of loss and renewal – the loss of the individual, the loss to the society and the renewal that takes place when the deceased are re-socialized in an altered state as ancestors, souls in heaven or ghosts.9 There are numerous stories in the oral and written tradition about ghosts and visitations of the dead, tales of mythical creatures connected to death warnings and writings on the deaths of the heroes of the Ulster Cycle epic tales.10 In the collected folklore of Ireland there is a vast body of literature relating to the dead. Carleton (1862), Glassie (1987), Hyde (1910), Murphy (1975) and Wilde (1971 [1888]) are just a few examples of published tales and customs that include variations of stories about the dead that are still current. I draw on these when analysing how people talk about the dead (chapter 2) to show the depth of beliefs about the continuing connection with the dead. I also examine the narratives to add new perspectives on context that includes place, gender and structure.

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Contestation The historical and ethnographic evidence of the contestation between church and people11 has parallels today. Taylor (1995) examines contestation between the various interested groups (most notably church authorities and individuals) through one case study in Donegal. By examining a range of possible readings (by individuals) of a given situation, Taylor (1995) asks questions about the relationships between official and popular religion and between power and meaning. These are themes and issues that are also addressed in the book (chapter 5) when examining how private and public remembrance can conflict with officially scripted texts. Other forms of discord also take place in relation to restrictions on the types of headstones permitted and attitudes towards material display in graveyards (chapter 6). Taylor contends that death is one of the principal ways in which the Catholic Church has controlled and imposed ritual, texts and ‘devotional objects’ (Taylor 1989b: 176). The decision of the clergy not to allow the playing of fiddle music at a graveside (Taylor 1989b: 178) is an example of the labyrinth of acceptable and unacceptable forms of materiality at death. The conduct of wakes and the experience of Irish Catholics afforded Taylor (1989b, 1995) an opportunity to probe the power dynamics of the institution of the church and how that is internalized or subverted in various religious contexts. While I address the differences between institutional scripts and how the individual reads particular events (as in public remembrance events discussed in chapter 5), I consider these points within the context of materiality and an emphasis on kin connections and attachment to place. The focus on items within the domestic setting represents a move away from historical concerns about the power of objects that took shape within a religious context, where the initial attention was on items such as relics and the structures of monasteries and cathedrals (Taylor 1999: 225). The relics I consider are not powerful objects within the institutional religious context but those within the domestic and kin domain. They are personal, diverse and idiosyncratic, special only to people who have social or kin connections with the deceased. The associations of objects with deceased family members provide fruitful opportunities for exploration by the anthropologist of the social and cultural constructions of the connections between ‘individual mental processes and the surrounding material world’ (Taylor 1999: 226). Such connections are equally applicable to the world of objects and to places in the landscape (Taylor 1999). The materiality of death, and the dead, also extends to an awareness of how the landscape shapes and encroaches on feelings about the dead and the sense of belonging for the living that is enshrined in the places of the dead. Some writers have been concerned with the historical landscape in

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Ireland or how the land transfer is regulated through kinship connections (Arensberg 1937; Arensberg and Kimball (1968 [1940]). The importance of legitimizing residency and ties to land through kin (living or dead) is in the forefront when people relate their connections to past members of their geographical area. Glassie (1982: 664) noted that ‘the land becomes history, as history becomes thought as people cross space in awareness.’ What these writers illustrate is the attachment to landscape that is interwoven with stories and sensory experience. I explore how attachments are forged through the association of places with the dead and their stories. More recent work by Donnan (2005), along the South Armagh border, reveals that recalling features in the landscape in a relational sense is a way to anchor ethnicity with place, particularly that of those who died violent deaths in the Troubles (see also Thomas 2001). The fixing of the dead (and the living) in the landscape is a major theme that stresses the connectedness to place that is enmeshed in narratives of the dead. How the landscape is used, sensed and thought about is discussed in chapters exploring how people talk about the dead, how the landscape conjures senses and emotions and how people conceptualize various forms of materiality in the landscape. The way that people remember, in the landscape and in the home, focuses attention on culturally acceptable forms of remembering. These are bound to the unfinished nature of separation and reunion, as discussed above, and reflect the need by the people with whom I worked for continuous negotiation of a liminal phase. Both private and public forms of remembering through materiality are objects of social attention and are also powerful ways in which people perform separation and integration. Notes 1. A close equivalent of this practice of assembling certain objects in a particular space was found in the Basque country in Northern Spain by Douglass (1969: 140), who noted that villagers kept a room for special festive occasions. This formal space was furnished with the household’s most prized items and adorned with a gallery of photographs of family members, past and present. 2. Geary’s examination of ‘the cultural parameters of commodity flow in medieval civilization’ (1986: 169) investigates the circulation of mediaeval relics (wherein they may oscillate from sacred items to commodities) to interrogate issues of exchange and value and points out that the relics of saints ‘had no obvious value apart from a very specific set of shared beliefs’ (1986: 174). 3. The notion of inalienability in anthropology can be traced to Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift (1966 [1950]). In an examination of gift giving among Samoans, Maoris and Trobriand Islanders, he classified certain possessions as ‘indestructible’ or ‘immeuble’ (1966 [1950]: 7) in order to differentiate them from items suitable for general trade transactions. The ‘indestructible’ items, such

14

4.

5.

6.

7.

Death, Materiality and Mediation

as Samoan marriage mats, Maori cloaks and the kula necklaces and armshells had particular properties that invested them with a type of value that precluded their selling. Goody (1962: 286) found that among the LoDagga, land was never exchanged for money. To sell land could conflict with beliefs about ‘the inalienability of land rights’ (1962: 286). So here the concept of inalienability is developed as an abstract. It is a quality that may be invested and linked to materiality but moves beyond the object. Goody considered how inalienability could be applied to the LoDagga redistribution of rights and goods following a death. Land was above monetary value and was only transferred or exchanged in tightly controlled networks of kin through inheritance, gift or loan. For Goody, ‘the definition of property revolves essentially round the problem of exclusion’ (1962: 287). Examples from different parts of the world include Worsley’s (1954: 165–7) study of how the Australian Aboriginal group the Wanindiljaygwa used dolls and bone boxes to symbolize people. Small bone boxes were made when anyone under the age of thirty died, into which were placed a lock of hair and one or more bones from the right hand wrapped in cloth. If a newborn baby died, no bones were placed in the box, but a little doll was fashioned to symbolize the person. After the burial service the boxes were given to the grandmothers, who passed them onto the mothers. Following the initial intense mourning period, however, the items were returned to the custody of the grandmothers. They carried them on their person until someone had a child – thus dolls symbolized the unborn, and the boxes symbolized the dead. There is also the more familiar iconography from the Mexican Day of the Dead with the artistic representation of the dead in skulls, skeletons and anthropomorphic sugary sweets, which Brandes (1998a: 181–218) has shown is humorous in mocking death and ephemeral in that it is designed to last only for one day. Gough (1958: 447–48) recorded three types of cults of the dead among the Nayars in India: the ‘lineage ghosts,’ which were the focus of a collective cult; matrilineal forebears who had distinguished themselves in life; and ‘alien ghosts,’ who were generally victims of bad deaths such as murder or suicide. All three sets of ghosts have potentially dual qualities of benevolence and malevolence. Lineage ghosts can ‘inflict misfortunes’ on the living if they live their lives wastefully but will reward correct deference to them in the form of offerings. And ‘alien’ ghosts have to be exorcised from the places that they haunt (Gough 1958: 463–64). During the last 140 years writers have collected and published a range of stories and customs relating to the dead (e.g. Carleton 1862; Glassie 1987; Hyde 1910; Wilde 1971 [1888]). Anthropologists have recently revived their interest in emotions, and much of this literature (e.g. Geertz 1980; Goddard 1996; Hochschild 1979; Leach 1981; Lutz and White 1986; Middleton 1989) has concentrated on the meaning or feeling debate (the biological or cultural root of emotion) (see Leavitt 1996). Tonkin (2005: 57) believes the word ‘emotion’ has ‘culturally specific and changing connotations’.

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8. The types of tales that are continuously recycled are, in many ways, comparable to the moral stories of the Apache that are tied to landscape and ancestors (Basso 1996: 37–70). 9. Variations of the fundamental presentation of breakage and reforming, the meaning and nuances of funeral rituals, repeated mortuary ceremonies and more long-term treatment of the dead have been studied in societies across the world (e.g. Alexiou 1974; Bloch 1971; Bloch and Parry 1982; Danforth 1982; Dubish 1989; Fabian 1973; Herzfeld 1996; Panourgia 1995; Seremetakis 1991). Stafford (2000: 4) problematizes the separation stage in rites of passage and argues for a more central position for this ‘common human constraint’ within anthropological analysis. In a study of attitudes in modern China he argues that the process of separation (not just at death) precipitates reunion and is linked to questions of human relatedness (Stafford 2000: 174–76). Rituals enacted at times of separation and reunion ‘express and explore’ issues of relatedness and may produce (as Durkheim argued) ‘the very collectivities within which separation has social and emotional significance’ (Stafford 2000: 175–76). 10. The Ulster Cycle is one of four groups of mythological tales and sagas from Ireland. It contains stories of people known as the Ulaid (who gave their name to present-day Ulster), who are believed to have lived some two thousand years ago. One of the most famous tales is the Cattle Raid of Cooley (Táin Bó Cúalnge), which took place around part of the border area where this study was carried out. See Kinsella (1974) and O’Rahilly (1976). 11. In a historical study of Irish Catholicism, Corish (1985) mentions the desire of the church in the seventeenth century to modify behaviour at wakes, especially the lamenting, as such practices were viewed as pagan, with too much emphasis placed on the reinforcement of kin connections.

Bibliography Alexiou, M. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, A. (ed.). 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arensberg, C.M. 1937. The Irish Countryman. Cambridge, MA: Macmillan. Arensberg, C.M., and S.T. Kimball. 1968 [1940]. Family and Community in Ireland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Attfield, J. 2000. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Belk, R. 1992. ‘Moving Possessions: An Analysis Based on Personal Documents from the 1847–1869 Mormon Migration’, Journal of Consumer Research 19(3): 339–61. Bloch, M. 1971. Placing the Dead. London: Seminar Press. Bloch, M., and J. Parry. 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Brandes, S. 1998a. ‘Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning’, Ethnohistory 45(2): 181–218. ———. 1998b. ‘The Day of the Dead, Halloween and the Quest for Mexican National Identity’, Journal of American Folklore 111(442): 359–80. Carleton, W. 1862. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. New York: Wilson and Hawkins. Carrier, J.G. 1993. ‘The Rituals of Christmas Giving,’ in D. Miller (ed.), Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon. Christiansen, R.T. 1946. The Dead and the Living. Studia Norvegica 2. Oslo: Aschehoug. Corish, P.J. 1985. The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Classen, C. (ed.). 2005. The Book of Touch. Oxford and New York: Berg. Csikszentmihalyi, M., and E. Rochberg-Halton. 1981. The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curasi, C.F., L. Price and E.J. Arnould. 2004. ‘How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth’, Journal of Consumer Research 31(3): 609–22. Damasio, A. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinmann. Danforth, L. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Deflem, M. 1991. ‘Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s Processual Symbolic Analysis’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30(1): 1–25. Donnan, H. 2005. ‘Material Identities: Fixing Ethnicity in the Irish Borderlands’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 12(1): 69–105. Douglass, W.A. 1969. Death in Murelaga: Funerary Ritual in a Spanish Basque Village. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Dubish, J. 1989. ‘Death and Social Change in Greece’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 189–200. Fabian, J. 1973. ‘How Others Die: Reflections on the Anthropology of Death’, in A. Mack (ed.), Death in American Experience. New York: Schocken, 177–201. Geary, P. 1986. ‘Sacred Commodities: the Circulation of Medieval Relics’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 169–91. Geertz, C. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon. Glassie, H. 1982. Passing the Time in Ballymenone: Culture and History of an Ulster Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ——— (ed.). 1987. Irish Folk Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 2000. Vernacular Architecture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gluckman M., and M. Gluckman. 1977. ‘On Drama and Games and Athletic Contests’, in S.F. Moore and B. Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual. Assen: Van Gorcum.

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Goddard, C. 1996. ‘The “Social Emotions” of Malay (Bahasa Melayu)’, Ethos 24(3): 426–64. Goody, J. 1962. Death, Property and the Ancestors. London: Tavistock. ———. 1974. ‘Death and the Interpretation of Culture: A Bibliographic Overview’, American Quarterly 26(5): 448–55. Gough, E.K. 1958. ‘Cults of the dead among the Nayars’, Journal of American Folklore 71(281): 446–78. Graeber, D. 2001. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. London and New York: Palgrave. Halbwachs, M. 1992 [1952]. On Collective Memory, trans. by L.A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hallam, E., J. Hockey and G. Howarth. 1999. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge. Hallam, E., and J. Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Herrmann, G.M. 1997. ‘Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the U.S. Garage Sale?’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 910–30. Herzfeld, M. 1996. ‘In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hochschild, A. 1979. ‘Emotion Work: Feeling Rules and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–75. Hoskins, J. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge. Humphreys, S.C. 1980. ‘Review of Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, by R. Huntington and P. Metcalf’, Man 15(3): 556–57. Hyde, D. 1910. Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: David Nutt. Kinsella, T. (trans.). 1974. The Tain. London: Oxford University Press. Knappett, C. 2005. Thinking through Material Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2008. ‘The Neglected Networks of Material Agency: Artefacts, Pictures and Texts’, in C. Knappett and L. Malafouris (eds), Material Agency: Towards a Non-anthropocentric Approach. New York: Springer. Knappett, C., and Malafouris, L. (eds). 2008. Material Agency: Towards a Nonanthropocentric Approach. New York, NY: Springer. Kopytoff, I. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appaduria (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leach, E. 1981. ‘A Poetics of Power’, New Republic 184: 14. Leavitt, J. 1996. ‘Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions’, American Ethnologist 23(3): 513–39. Lupton, D. 1998. The Emotional Self. London: Sage.

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Lutz, C., and G. White. 1986. ‘The Anthropology of Emotion’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology 15: 405–36. Malinowski, B. 1948. Magic Science and Religion. London: Faber & West. Mauss, M. 1923–24. ‘Essai Sur le Don: Forme et Raison de L’Exchange dans les Societes Archaiques’, Annee Sociologique, Novelle Serie 1. Cited by A. Weiner (1985), ‘Inalienable Wealth’, American Ethnologist 12 (2): 210–27. ———. 1954. The Gift, trans. I. Cunninson. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. ———. 1966 [1950]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West Ltd. Metcalf, P., and R. Huntington. 1991 [1979]. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Middleton, D., and D. Edwards (eds). 1997 [1990]. Collective remembering. London: Sage. Middleton, D.R. 1989. ‘Emotional Style: The Cultural Ordering of Emotions’, Ethos 17(2): 187–201. Miller, D. 1998. Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. London: UCL Press. ———. (ed.) 2001. Home Possessions: Material Culture behind closed doors. Oxford and New York: Berg. ———. 2010. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Murphy, M.J. 1975. Now You’re Talking. Belfast: Blackstaff. Noyes, C.R. 1936. The Institution of Property. New York: Longmans, Green. Ochoa, T.R. 2007. ‘Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography’, Cultural Anthropology 22(4): 473–500. O’Hogain, D. 1999. The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in pre-Christian Ireland. Dublin: Collins Press. O’Rahilly, C. 1976. Táin Bó Cúalnge Recension 1. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. O’Suilleabhain, S. 1967. Irish Wake Amusements. Cork: Mercier Press. Panourgia, N. 1995. Fragments of Death: Fables of Identity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Parkin, D. 1999. ‘Mementoes as Transitional Objects’, Journal of Material Culture 4(3): 303–20. Pearce, S. (ed.). 1994. Interpreting Objects and Collections. London: Routledge. Price, L., E.J. Arnould and C.F. Curasi. 2000. ‘Older Consumers’ Disposition of Special Possessions’, Journal of Consumer Research 27(2): 179–201. Robben, A. (ed.). 2004. Death, Mourning and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Schiffer, M. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behaviour and Communication. London: Routledge. Seremetakis, C.N. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, G. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stafford, C. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Stewart, S. 1999. ‘Prologue: From the Museum of Touch’, in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Ansley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg. Stoller, P. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sutton, D. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts. Oxford: Berg. Taussig, M. 1991. ‘Tactility and Distraction’, Cultural Anthropology 6(2): 147–53. Taylor, L. 1989a. ‘The Uses of Death’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 149–202. ———. 1989b. ‘Ba InEirinn: Cultural Constructions of Death in Ireland’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 175–87. ———. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholicism. Dublin: Lilliput Press. ———. 1999. ‘Re-Entering the West Room: On the Power of Domestic Spaces’, in D. Birdwell-Pheasant and D. Lawrence-Zuniga (eds), House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe. Oxford: Berg. Thomas, J. 2001. ‘Comments on Part 1: Intersecting Landscapes’, in B. Bender and M. Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg. Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. Tonkin, E. 2005. ‘Being there: emotion and imagination in anthropologists’ encounters.’ in K. Milton and M. Svasek (eds). Mixed emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg. Turkle, S. (ed.). 2007. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. New York: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, trans. M. Vicedom and S. Kimball. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weiner, A. 1985. ‘Inalienable Wealth’, American Ethnologist 12(2): 210–27. ———. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Oxford: University of California Press. Weiss, M. 1997. ‘Bereavement, Commemoration and Collective Identity in Contemporary Israeli Society’, Anthropological Quarterly 70(2): 99–101. Wilde, Lady. 1971 [1888]. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland. Galway: O’Gorman. Winter, J., and E. Sivan (eds). 1999. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worsley, P. 1954. ‘Material Symbols of Human Beings among the Wanindiljaugwa’, Man 54: 165–67. Zelizer, B. 1998. Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

1



Field Boundaries

The fieldwork for this study was carried out among people with whom I shared residence, language and ethnic origin, although I grew up in an urban area some fifty miles distant from the research area. During fieldwork I was variously referred to as a ‘local’ or ‘one of us’, terms that I would not necessarily use to describe myself, but in categorizing me in these ways participants conferred on me a degree of ‘insiderness’. The various contexts in which I came to be seen as ‘local’ (or not) and the experience of shifting identities and boundaries (structural, emotional and gendered) had methodological consequences, which I discuss below. In pursuing this research I was aware that being female, middle-class and of urban origin and my perceived religious background were potential sites of negotiation that impacted ‘on interactions with informants in the field’ (Lerum 2001: 468–69). Despite a familiarity of place and custom, conducting research in my ‘home’ area presented particular advantages and disadvantages. I quickly learned to modify any expected ease of ‘interpretation of cultural cues’ (Labaree 2002: 105) and discovered that some people were wary or suspicious of my motives (Shahrani 1994: 35). In order for people to allow me to examine their lives, I spent many weeks building and developing levels of trust and acceptability. There was a constant process of negotiation of the ‘insider/outsider status’ due to being in the position of sharing a degree of membership ‘with the social group studied’ (De Andrade 2000: 270–71). But the conflicting and debatable interpretations of ‘insider/ outsider’ or Cheater’s (1987: 164) ‘self’ and ‘other’ initiate endless and confusing attempts at explanation – what Strathern called ‘impossible measurements of degrees of familiarity’ (1987: 16). Each researcher’s situation

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and relationship to the field are different and unique. A more useful set of parameters that moves away from these dichotomies is Narayan’s recognition of ‘shifting identifications amid a field of interpenetrating communities and power relations’ (1993: 671). Those ‘identifications’ include the multiple identities and structural positions common to everyone (Lerum 2001: 473–74; Narayan 1993: 676; Rosaldo 1989: 194). The notion of the ‘native’ researcher is not entirely unproblematic and has been extensively theorized by anthropologists.1 In light of the problematic of defining ‘anthropology at home’ I consider that I was a ‘partial insider’ and subject to ‘shifting boundaries’ (Sherif 2001: 436). Like all fieldworkers, I was involved in continuing negotiations regarding trust, access and relationships. The months spent collecting data were peppered with interactions that were mediated along shifting boundaries; oscillations of positions that are encountered in everyday life (Rosaldo 1989: 29–30) and that were present in a variety of ways: during interviews and participation in social and memorial events; in justifying my research; in the realization of the emotional involvement demanded by the work; and in the degree of self-exposure necessary for meaningful relationships to develop.

Into the Field The methodology included conducting a number of both structured and semi-structured interviews, using a responsive technique, attending formal remembrance ceremonies, wakes and funerals, and becoming involved with individuals and families as they attended to the dead and their possessions through grave visiting, house clearances and the processes of choosing headstones. I also conducted interviews with clergy of different denominations, stonemasons and undertakers, museum curators and local archivists, members of local history societies and community and church groups (see appendix, tables 1–8). In addition, I undertook documentary and historical research at local museums and consulted material in local and national archives (appendix, table 9) in order to determine patterns and changes in the treatment of the dead and their associated material culture. The documentary research also included consulting death notices and obituaries in newspaper archives to discover how the dead are remembered textually. Bereaved participants were, however, the focus of the study and are therefore concentrated on in the ethnography and analysis. The process of engaging with the bereaved in this research and exploring sensitive and potentially upsetting issues required relationships built on trust. Part of this trust emanated from being defined and situated as a ‘local’ by the people I was interviewing, from their desire to tell their stories,

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and from the assurance that some things that I heard would never be used. The information I gathered is comprised of a range of data, related to me during interviews and conversations, on walks and at events I observed. There is also that information that is situated in the interstitial spaces between speech and expression; it is seen in body language and listened for in the silences (Moore and Roberts 1990: 321). The tones of voices, types of words and inflexions used, the gestures made, by whom and for whom, are all rich sources for interpretation. The physicality of places and how I and participants experienced ceremonies, grave visits and funerals revealed emotions, feelings and senses of place that could be articulated in word, song, movement or atmosphere. More formal interviews with clergy, undertakers, stonemasons and museum curators were not only opportunities to elicit facts but were also occasions to delve into institutional and personal codes and beliefs in relation to the dead. Engagement with people in the field, therefore, meant deeper and longer relationships, a delving into the ‘why’ of practices, attitudes and behaviours, and a greater exposure of who I was, along with considerable self-reflexivity. This translated into an experience of seeing myself from ‘the viewpoint of those with whom I wished to engage’ (Cheater 1987: 167). I discovered that in order for people to tell me about their thoughts and feelings I had to be prepared to justify myself in terms of the research and as a person. This was evident in various situations and the following example illustrates how an adjustment of those multiple ‘identifications’ (Narayan 1993: 676; Rosaldo 1989: 194) was necessary in order to gain access and to begin developing trust.

Shifting Boundaries and Gaining Access In the months leading up to fieldwork I had contacted various churches, social clubs, local history organizations and bereavement support groups as a way to gain access to institutions and individuals. Overall I met with eleven different groups across the three counties in the field area to discuss a range of issues (appendix, tables 4–5). I excluded my home village from the fieldwork, as there was the possibility that over-familiarity with people and situations might result in an unseen bias in interpretation. There was also a danger that people would assume that I already had considerable knowledge about the issues I was examining or would be reluctant to let me gain too much personal knowledge about them. One of the groups that I had been hoping to visit met each month in a centre in the village of Culnamore (a pseudonym), which straddles the South Armagh / North Louth border. On a summer evening in September 2006 I set out to meet members of this local history group. Culnamore is in a part

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of the county with which I was unfamiliar and I set off early in order to allow for ‘getting lost’ time. Once I had left the main road out of Newry, I found myself in a labyrinth of back roads and laneways, few and scattered signposts, and driving deeper into rolling hill country. A wrong turn into someone’s farmyard left me baffled and I knocked on the door for directions. The farmer told me to ‘just take the next left and you will come into the village after a mile or so’. It was a few more miles, however, before I spotted the centre where the meeting was being held. The evenings were closing into dusk earlier at this time of year and I was glad to have arrived before dark. Culnamore consists of one main street that narrows at the end of the village and streaks its way up into the hills. A second road runs at right angles to it just midway into the village. There is one small primary school, a tiny general store, a church and the community centre. I had spoken to a couple of the committee members in advance and explained that I was keen to talk to people about items of remembrance. I had anticipated that I would observe their monthly meeting and then introduce myself more informally, move around and talk to people. When I entered, however, I was surprised to find that I was scheduled to give a formal presentation on my research, after which I was to be questioned closely about my personal and academic credentials. It was during this questioning that I became aware of managing identities and a distinct blurring of boundaries (Sherif 2001: 483). A few people wanted more details on how I was hoping to gather information, and one or two of them suggested places to visit or archives to consult. This group had produced local history pamphlets and were knowledgeable about graveyards and death rituals. For these reasons I was careful to listen to them and ask about what they had researched. When I placed myself in a position of a learner, the group members gained some control over the discussion. By doing so they were signalling a partnership in the research as identities of researcher and that of audience moved back and forward between us. This slippage, however, was also about boundary maintenance as the members of the audience moved to incorporate me into their world of knowledge. It was an exercise in inclusivity on my part as I drew them into my inquiry and stimulated their interest by asking more questions. Instinctively, I watched faces and noted the tone of voice for clues on when to listen and when to speak. I listened for particular examples of stories or objects that they were enthusiastic about eavesdropped on asides as the main discussion progressed in order to pick up on a story or topic that I could develop. These ‘constantly shifting and ambiguous’ boundaries (Sherif 2001: 436– 47) of speech and identity were providing access to this group and their interests. The members of the group were anxious to situate me in their terms and to probe behind the persona of the professional researcher. At one stage

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in the discussion a woman asked about my personal background and what I knew of their village. I mentioned someone from the village with whom I had worked a few years previously. There were nods of recognition as a few people said they knew the person and his family, but they were also keen to know my family name and how I had become interested in researching my project. Deliberately allowing the boundary to move between my identities was, paradoxically, a way to ‘gain control of [the] project by first allowing [my] self to lose it’ (Kleinmann and Copp 1993: 3). The result of revealing personal information and a connection to the village was that the members of the group re-positioned me as also a ‘local’, and they began to talk more freely about their beliefs and stories. One or two people then volunteered information about their own mementos or treasured items and this soon developed into a cascade of stories – funny, sad and sometimes scary. I was surprised to witness how easily they related stories about the dead and their belongings and how they lapsed seamlessly into personal reminiscences. The conversations and exchanges on that night led to further meetings and interviews with three families from that group. I visited their homes, went grave visiting with them, attended communal remembrance services as part of their respective family groups and helped one of the women to organize a house clearance after the death of a relative. Two people from this group became important participants and gatekeepers during the research, which led to further contacts with groups and individuals.

Gender and the Insider Negotiating myself into groups and into the confidences of people was, however, often a slower process. I was often perceived as an ‘outsider’ due to my education, my previous job and my urban origins. I had to put myself mentally in the field and develop a high level of visibility in order to become accepted. This meant taking part in the lives of the people with whom I was working, and participating in a variety of formal and informal gatherings. This was a way of building up my visibility and their trust in me. My situation was not unlike that of anthropologists who undertake fieldwork in countries and societies different from those in which they were brought up. There is a continuous overlapping of where a researcher is ‘located’ and ‘moving back and forth between the positional boundaries of insiderness and outsiderness’ (Griffith 1998: 363). I also had to adhere to expected gender norms in particular situations in order to foster acceptability and avoid causing offence. I met one family through a contact in a social club in South Down. They arranged to meet me at a charity dance on a Saturday night in the autumn

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of 2006. I arrived into a noisy and packed hall. The band was tuning up on stage and people were toing and froing to the bar. Jim and Anita were waiting for me and had a table along the side of the dance floor. They introduced me to Anita’s two sisters, their husbands and their teenage children. Several of their friends were sitting at tables next to us, and over the course of the first half hour, we chatted casually about what I was researching. This was a night of set dancing – a particular form of Irish traditional country dancing that is popular throughout this area. Taking part in the dances and talking to people as we danced afforded an ideal opportunity to get involved with a range of different people in an informal setting. Yet no one was willing to divulge information; they were only interested in finding out about me. It was after I had gone to a number of dances and attended a couple of local wakes that the relationships changed. The interactions and conversations at the dances were primarily carried out initially with women. Husbands and boyfriends were introduced and made polite but short enquiries about the research but soon wandered off to the bar or to sit with other men. I realized that the route to gaining their confidence and co-operation was, firstly, to get to know the women and secure their participation in the project. With the ‘chameleon-like virtuosity’ that Mascarenhas-Keyes (1987: 182) described, I was able to act out the gender role that was expected. If I wanted to talk to someone’s husband, I had to make sure to approach his wife, draw her into the conversation and invite her to be present at the interview. Within this gendered cultural role that participants had ascribed to me (Kondo 1986) were also a number of other competing and overlapping roles: I was a student, a mother and an older woman – all of which would be foregrounded at different junctures to ease the course of fieldwork and negotiate my legitimacy (Jacobs-Huey 2002: 793). The women informants and older men did not think it was ‘proper behaviour’ for me to interview married men on their own or to arrange fieldwork outings with them. This had to be undertaken in the company or close proximity of their wives or female relatives. As a mother it was acceptable to talk to younger men, and this posed no difficulties, as younger men and women were more likely to socialize together and stay in a group when on an outing. Elderly men positioned me as a ‘daughter’; they viewed me as slightly naïve in terms of knowledge and were keen to portray themselves as custodians of stories and customs. Like Mand (2004: 37), I was able to portray an identity that arose from ‘shared cultural referents’ but one that conflicted with self-ascribed personal and professional roles. Yet this deference to expected behaviour resulted in an entrée into their more personal and intimate worlds. I was soon able to approach people with requests for interviews, and many sought me out to tell me stories or ask if I wanted to accompany them to grave visits. One woman, Jean, on introduc-

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ing me to her cousin during a grave visit, explained my presence by saying: ‘She’s one of us.’ When I asked her what she meant, she said I was part of the crowd: ‘Well, you know what we are like, you get it, and you know our stuff and get up there and dance with us. You don’t make yourself different.’ I realized that I had become a ‘local’ in Jean’s terms by getting involved as an active participant in her life and that of her friends and neighbours. I considered myself, however, only a ‘partial insider’, as I was constantly taking notes and mentally analysing speech, body language and reactions in all situations in the field. Shortly after this conversation I was invited by Jean and her husband, Charlie, to attend the weekly dance class, held at the social club. ‘We can have a great chat afterwards,’ she said. It was not long before I was ‘part of the furniture’ (as one woman remarked) and often stayed until midnight and later with the group as they related all kinds of stories and tales about the dead and the objects they treasured. As I participated in their lives a degree of reciprocity developed; more people became willing to allow me access to their world of emotions and feelings and also became more engaged with my life and research. They would ask about my family, what other things I had found out, what was my schedule and to whom else I was talking. I worked extensively with three couples from this group and, through them, made more connections that led to interviews and outings. Accepting their codes of behaviour in relation to gender was not the only identity that I had to be aware of or adjust to during fieldwork.

Identities and the Insider In Northern Ireland there is always some degree of inquisitiveness about a person’s religion. Whenever I was asked about my religion, either directly or obliquely, I found myself unprepared for the questions. Part of this was because I felt that as a researcher this was not part of my identity. There was also the worry that to be labelled as a particular denomination might alienate some individuals or groups and place me outside of my ‘partial insider’ status. The attempts by a few informants to elicit this information were unsettling, as I had to expose some of those ‘multiple identifications’ and shift my own boundaries in order to move towards greater intimacy and rapport with people. I was initially confronted with a request for this information when I contacted the congregation of a Presbyterian church in Co. Louth. The first time I visited their church was a warm Sunday morning in the summer of 2006, and on entering, I was greeted by two men who were busy setting out bibles for the service. As we introduced ourselves I explained why I had come, and

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they were keen to find out more about the research and what I was doing. They questioned me about where I was from, asked whether I had been to their church before, handed me a bible and a hymnbook and asked if I was staying for tea afterwards. The church dates from the 1860s and its large interior with a semi-circular balcony was chilly with a faint smell of damp. The congregation, mostly older people, with one or two young families, numbered about twenty-five. The warmth of the welcome I received as they greeted me and insisted I sit with some of their members more than mitigated the discomfort of the cold. As the service ended and people busied themselves in setting out tea and coffee, I was approached by one of the church elders who asked: ‘And are you Presbyterian?’ I automatically answered: ‘No, I’m not’ but did not qualify this statement by volunteering which church I had been brought up in or what religious views I may now hold. I disguised my annoyance at the question; I was not willing to be categorized by religion and inwardly realized that I resented the intrusion. The conversation quickly moved on to a discussion of upcoming church events. Despite my defensiveness in shielding part of my personal background, it was assumed I was a Protestant because of my surname. This was not an entirely erroneous identification, as I had parents of different religions. My antagonism to this particular question indicated a reversal in the exercise of gaining trust. I was wary of revealing too much personal information and unwilling to compromise ‘in order to gain a constituency’ (Lance 1990: 338). I continued in my circumspection for some weeks while attending church services, afternoon social tea parties and the bi-annual get-together between the congregations from towns on both sides of the border. People were hospitable and polite but equally hesitant about revealing themselves. The answer was to be patient and to persevere with just ‘being there’ in the midst of their social and religious settings (Wolcott 1995: 95–96). This meant being actively involved and eventually divulging my religious background as a way of indicating that I was willing to collaborate rather than compete (Moore and Roberts [1990: 321] have argued that negotiations between fieldworkers and informants are ‘as much a competition as a collaboration’). Weeks passed and I had gathered much information on items that people kept or gave away, how they preferred to remember their dead and the importance they placed on communal remembrance services. While I could draw some general inferences from what I was told and observed, it was not until towards the end of October in 2006 that people began to volunteer to share their more intimate thoughts and feelings. I realized that this congregation had been observing me as much as I had been observing them. The relationships changed slowly but the shift was, paradoxically, abrupt. It happened during a conversation with a family I had spoken to on several

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occasions, when the father, a middle-aged man, began to explain why he felt that looking after graves was crucial to his sense of identity. This led to an invitation to accompany him and his teenage daughter on a grave visit, an outing that produced a wealth of insight into the relationships between the living and the dead, the sense of legitimacy that a grave affords and the general attitudes to acceptable ways of remembering. His openness in divulging personal information and his enthusiasm for the research filtered into other relationships I had with this congregation and my status with them changed from ‘outside researcher’ to an acceptance as a trusted acquaintance. The weeks of patience and my decision to shift my own boundaries had facilitated a compromise that produced rich and meaningful data. In working with all the different groups, I was also able to talk to, observe, and interact with men and women of different ages and from different religions, class and occupational backgrounds. The individual interviews that I conducted also spanned similar demographic variables. This variety in people’s ages and backgrounds allowed me to compare a large number of responses in interviews in order to determine patterns in people’s attitudes and behaviour. The scale of involvement with the many groups and individuals also resulted in a deeper emotional connection to people, something that is considered in a different context below.

The Emotional Insider Another aspect of being an ‘insider’ centred on emotional engagement, where insiderness meant sharing emotions by sharing an experience. Rosaldo’s notion of the ‘emotional force of death’ (1989: 2) is a useful starting point to examine how my personal experience of bereavement during fieldwork affected relations with informants and produced different ways of understanding motivations and emotions. My mother died, after a long illness, six months into the fieldwork. I was now dealing, on a personal level, with the situations that I was researching, and this resulted in significant changes in my attitude towards the research and in the attitudes of those with whom I worked. Rosaldo (1989: 3–4) admits that it was only when he had to confront the accidental death of his wife while they were on fieldwork that he began to understand the anger induced by a death of the Ilongot head-hunters. He had attempted to rationalize the Ilongot desire for taking heads and wondered at possible hidden meanings, but his personal experience of bereavement led him to realize that when the Ilongot spoke of the force of the anger they meant ‘precisely what they say when they describe the anger in bereavement as the source of their desire to cut off human heads’ (Rosaldo 1989: 3). Like Rosaldo, I found

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that the ‘force of emotion’ created by my mother’s death led to greater empathetic understanding with informants – what Beatty calls ‘a feeling-with’ that is ‘based on common or analogous experience’ (2005: 20). I experienced a profound change in the interactions with informants, many of whom came to the wake and funeral or sent cards. Subsequent conversations and interviews were often tempered with remarks such as ‘Well, you know how it feels’ or ‘What have you kept that belonged to your mother?’ Responding openly and honestly to these remarks and questions allowed for a heightened ‘emotionally engaged ethnography’ that shifted ‘the power dynamic between researcher(s) and the researched’ (Lerum 2001: 481). Sensing the dropping of the ‘academic armour’ (Lerum 2001: 473), a number of people became willing to relate more intimate feelings. At public commemorations or when I accompanied individuals to visit graves, there was also a greater display of inclusion into the realms of feeling and emotions when, on occasion, people touched my arm or shed tears in my presence. I had become ‘local’ in an altered sense. This also had ramifications for my methodological approach. There was less need to spend time on explanations or casual exchanges in order to relax an interviewee or when accompanying people to ceremonies. I was more intensely aware of asides in conversations, facial expressions or body language. A nod of the head or a gesture of hands was mutually understood, and it was possible to ask more probing questions because informants accepted me as someone who shared their vulnerability. Similar to Nelson’s (1996) argument that ‘native anthropologists are seldom considered insiders by default,’ I experienced one of the various ‘gradations of endogeny’ that happen during fieldwork (Nelson 1996, cited by Jacobs-Huey 2002: 791). The seepage of becoming endogenous is not, however, confined to a ‘local’, and it would be facile to argue that it is necessary to experience personal pain in order to understand how it affects people (Beatty 2005: 21–22). In her examination of famine, Hastrup (1993) contends that no one expects anthropologists actually to experience starvation, but to imagine it (1993: 722–23). While Hastrup (1993) argues that we can feel empathetic, there is clearly a difference in how we relate the field if we are drawing on personal experience. In order to understand and represent emotionally demanding experiences, we have to allow ourselves to enter into other people’s actuality, within which we must confront the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity. Hedican (2006: 1) argues that it is crucial to examine the emotional involvement and reactions of the fieldworker in order to fully analyse subjectivity in the field. He was deeply affected by the death of a young man in the village where he was conducting fieldwork and felt ‘intense sadness and remorse’ (2006: 3) but could not find a way through his academic

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training to deal with his feelings or adequately describe his emotions. He struggled between identities of fieldworker wanting information and the ‘ordinary person’ (Hedican 2006: 4) who needed to grieve. His ambivalence was resolved when another resident told him that he would be expected to attend this ‘homecoming’, as he knew the deceased, and that he would also gain valuable information for his research. The awareness of identities and boundaries and the need to divide and also merge these personae are crucial to an anthropology that is experiential while also objective.

Testing Boundaries My emotional engagement with participants shaped the context in which I gathered data during the various interviews and events. In conducting interviews, I had to be prepared to switch quickly between structured interviews and open conversation and allow people to divert from the main purpose of the interview and to reveal things to me in their own time. Within these diversions much could be revealed as they provided insights into the ways in which people connected incidents and parts of their lives and how they felt about the dead and remembrance. As Hoffman recognized, open-ended interviews demand emotional labour, as they ‘often develop into areas that the researcher did not anticipate’ (2007: 323). They also involve encountering and negotiating power and allowing it to travel backwards and forwards between researcher and interviewee (Hoffman 2007: 318). The techniques of securing information were born of the recognition of the ‘asymmetries in power embedded within the interview encounter’ (Moore and Roberts 1990: 319–25). During interviews there were occasions when a person refused to answer a question or times when people were uninterested or unwilling to facilitate potentially useful connections. Such difficulties are not unusual in any research of fieldwork and require developing strategies in order to gain information by other routes. One example of this was when I encountered resistance from a bereavement group facilitator who was unwilling to allow me access to his group to explain the research unless he had considerable control over the interviews. As the ‘seeker of knowledge’ (Hoffman 2007: 322), I was dependent on him to relay information about the project, but neither of us was prepared to shift our professional boundaries – an example of what Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2002: 208) called ‘testing’, which happens ‘when the interviewee exposes the researcher’s inferiority or lack of knowledge in areas in which the informant has expertise’. I realized I needed to use different routes and other contacts to broaden my network and secure the information and access that I required, what Gillies (2004: 15) called ‘snowballing techniques’.

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Other aspects of emotional labour were evident in negotiating the practicalities of data gathering. I had intended to use a tape recorder for most of my interviews but I soon discovered that not everyone was happy with being recorded, and those who expressed concern (six interviewees in total) felt vulnerable at the prospect of being recorded (Hoffman 2007: 322). Any mechanism for collecting data has positive aspects as well as drawbacks. In these instances I resorted to taking notes by hand. This presented me with a different set of difficulties, and it is awkward to be continuously thinking of taking an accurate note while also trying to keep a natural flow in an interview or conversation. I had to use a variety of little strategies: talk while I was writing and constantly verbally affirm what people said or ask questions that allowed people to give lengthy answers. Juggling a number of tasks at the one time, along with constantly being aware of someone’s potential unease and nervousness, was logistically difficult and emotionally taxing (Arendell 1997: 344; Hoffman 2007: 322).

Inside and Out Observing behaviour at public collective acts of remembrance and recording the procedures of services entailed another shift in how I situated myself in fieldwork. A church service for All Souls’ Day or Remembrance Sunday placed me in the position of both participating and observing. The details of dress, demeanour and body language and ritual order were important aspects in understanding people’s beliefs and motivations. I opted to sit close to the back of the churches during these services in order to get the best possible viewing position. This also made it easier to take notes discreetly and scribble observations into a small notebook that I carried in my pocket. There was a further opportunity to observe and talk to people when everyone adjourned to the parish hall after the services for refreshments. I had previously arranged to meet up with people I had been working with and, as part of their ‘group’, was introduced to other members of the congregation. Being seen as an ‘insider’ and someone who was already trusted seemed to make people more relaxed and open and willing to talk. As always, they were keen to know the details about the research and then settled into discussing their reasons for coming to the service and what it meant to them. This informal setting provided an opportunity to observe different individuals and groups as they relaxed and chatted. Yet it was not a situation where I could pull out a pen and paper and start jotting down notes. To do so would have been insensitive, intrusive and counter-productive; people would have simply stopped talking or become very guarded in what they revealed; it would have spoilt the ease and spontaneity of the interactions. I had to

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hastily recall the observations and conversations at the end of the night and spend some time sitting in my car writing down all that I remembered. The interplay of roles at these events contrasted with how I was able to fully engage my researcher identity when I conducted more formal interviews with museum curators, archivists and church officials. In these situations a different qualification was added to being ‘local’. Here we were equals, engaged in similar academic pursuits, with an expectation that an exchange of information would be mutually beneficial. I visited the museums, National Archives and records offices on a number of occasions throughout the fieldwork and was given full access at the local museums to current and archived collections. The data collected at museums and archives were mainly used as part of my background learning of the subject matter and, while not detailed in the study, enabled me to build a broader picture of the history and practices surrounding death and the materiality associated with the dead. At the National Archives in Dublin and Public Records Office in Belfast and at the more local museums and heritage centres within the fieldwork area, I was able to consult a wide range of both print and recorded archives. An examination of a range of wills, spanning 150 years, was used to gain a general idea of the types of items that were passed on. The content of museum displays, archival catalogues, oral history archives and the museum libraries were assessed in terms of type (historical, current, archaeological or political) and how the material represented areas of social interest in relation to the study. The oral histories were selected for those with stories and reminiscences in relation to the dead and were used to inform analysis of past practices, attitudes, beliefs and gender divisions in relation to death and the dead. Catalogues of items held by the museum were assessed to determine what objects had been donated and why, and what personal histories were attached to them. In conjunction with interviews with curators on how items are acquired for their collections, these data were used to build up background information on inheritance practices and the types of items that do not make their way into public museums. All of the curators interviewed also provided valuable information on local people to contact in relation to the research or sites that could be visited in order to gather data on historic and prehistoric burial sites.

Ethics and Sensitive Research Death and bereavement are sensitive issues and researching this topic involved discussing and analysing potentially upsetting emotions and feelings. It was important therefore, as mentioned earlier, to build trust and empathy

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and to avoid intruding on people’s grief. Conducting sensitive research can raise ethical dilemmas, and in the context of my fieldwork, during individual and group interviews and participating at private and public remembrance events, it was necessary to be aware of sensitivities and issues of privacy. One of the most basic considerations centres on anonymity. All the names of participants have been changed, and aside from the main towns, pseudonyms have also been used for small villages and rural parishes. While much information may have been gained from people who were only recently bereaved, it was necessary to weigh the benefits of this against the potentially harmful intrusion of privacy into someone’s grief. I decided, therefore, not to approach people who had been recently bereaved (within the previous twelve months). Ethical problems can also arise when ‘crossing boundaries in fieldwork’ (De Laine 2000: 2), and researching sensitive topics can present the researcher with difficulties of boundary maintenance (some of which has been addressed earlier in this chapter). The particular gender issues that I have discussed had the potential to become problematic if men had been willing only to tell me things that their wives or partners would approve. But this did not happen, as, once introductions were completed and the research explained, men would talk easily and openly. The physical boundaries between private and public space, or between roles of researcher and friend have implications, not just in the field, but also in how people are represented in texts (De Laine 2000: 2). During my fieldwork I became friendly with a number of the people with whom I worked. Friendships, as De Laine (2000: 2) has pointed out, allow access to ‘confidences . . . that are private and secret and can make problematic disclosure and publication of personal information’. It is important therefore to consider how the friends I made – or indeed, any of the participants – would react to how they are represented in this text. Hornstein (1996: 51–68) argues that we should not say in print what we would not say to someone’s face. With this in mind I would be happy to show this work to any of the people with whom I worked in the expectation that they would feel that they were fairly and accurately represented.

Conclusion The experience of fieldwork from the point of view of being a ‘local’ was complex and revealing. My home was a few miles outside of the geographical boundary of the research area but still within its social and cultural boundaries. This positioned me in a curious quasi-residency where I could be simultaneously in and out of the field. There was always the chance that on

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days off from work I would meet participants as I went shopping or hunting for books in a local library. There was a ‘constant shifting of belonging … mental, emotional and physical’ (Mand 2004: 37). My position as a ‘local’ was, however, comparable to anthropological research no matter where it is carried out or by whom; it required emotional engagement and negotiations of identity boundaries. As shown above, I had to confront my own sense of who I was and be prepared to open myself, intellectually and emotionally, in order to develop meaningful relationships that allowed the flow of information. This was a continuous negotiation but was ultimately a crucial exercise in exploring the intimate and sensitive details about the uses of material culture in the relationships between the living and the dead. Those relationships are evident in a number of ways, one of them being the materiality of talk, the stories and narratives of the dead. The next chapter discusses how people talk about the dead across a range of different social contexts. Note 1. Various criticisms and reflections have arisen from the terms ‘anthropology at home’ (Jackson 1987) and ‘native anthropologist’. Messerschmidt (1982: 197–98) suggests that there seems to be no consensus on what ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ anthropology means and they are terms fraught with misconceptions. Much of the early concerns over these terms focused on the desire to de-colonize anthropology (Garcia 2000: 98) and on the work of Western-trained anthropologists from former colonial states (Jacobs-Huey 2002: 799). When Haniff (1985: 107–13) described her work among Caribbean women, she accepted the term ‘native’ and ‘insider’ without question and strongly advocated that ‘insiderness’ was crucial to research, something that Labaree found ‘over simplistic’ (2002: 103). While dismissing any attempt to define the terms, Haniff’s (1985) statement raises questions of how to approach fieldwork from the position of being in culturally and geographically familiar places.

Bibliography Arendell, T. 1997. ‘Reflections on the Researcher-Researched Relationship: A Woman Interviewing Men’, Qualitative Sociology 20(3): 341–68. Beatty, A. 2005. ‘Emotions in the Field: What Are We Talking About?’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 17–37. Cheater, A.P. 1987. ‘The Anthropologist as Citizen: The Diffracted Self?’, in A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London and New York: Tavistock. De Andrade, L.L. 2000. ‘Negotiating from the Inside: Constructing Racial and Ethnic Identity in Qualitative Research’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 29(3): 268–90. De Laine, M. 2000. Fieldwork, Participation and Practice: Ethics and Dilemmas in Qualitative Research. London: Sage.

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Garcia, M.E. 2000. ‘Ethnographic Responsibility and the Anthropological Endeavour: Beyond Identity Discourse’, Anthropological Quarterly 73(2): 89–101. Gillies, V. 2004. ‘Researching through Working Class Personal Networks: Issues and Dilemmas in Bridging Different Worlds’, in R. Edwards (ed.), Social Capital in the Field: Researchers’ Tales, Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group Working Paper no. 10. London: London South Bank University. Griffith, A. 1998. ‘Insider/Outsider: Epistemological Privilege and Mothering Work’, Human Studies 21: 361–76. Haniff, N.Z. 1985. ‘Towards a Native Anthropology: Methodological notes on a Study of Successful Caribbean Women by and Insider’, Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 10(4): 107–33. Hastrup, K. 1993. ‘Hunger and the Hardness of Facts’, Man (28)4: 727–39. Hedican, E. J. (2006). ‘Understanding Emotional Experience in Fieldwork: Responding to Grief in a Northern Aboriginal Village’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods 5(1): 1–8. Hoffman, E. 2007. ‘Open-Ended Interviews: Power, and Emotional Labour’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36(3): 318–46. Hornstein, G.A. 1996. ‘The Ethics of Ambiguity: Feminists Writing Women’s Lives’, in C.E. Franz and A.J. Stewart (eds), Women Creating Lives: Identities, Resilience and Resistance. Boulder, CO: Westview. Jackson, A. (ed.) 1987. Anthropology at Home. London and New York: Tavistock. Jacobs-Huey, L. 2002. ‘The Natives Are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among “Native” Anthropologists’, American Anthropologist 104(3): 791–804. Kleinmann, S., and M. Copp. 1993. Emotions and Fieldwork. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. King, E.F. 2010. Material Religion and Popular Culture. New York and London: Routledge. Kondo, D.K. 1986. ‘Dissolution and Reconstitution of Self: Implications for Anthropological Epistemology’, Cultural Anthropology 1: 74–88. Labaree, R. V. 2002. ‘The Risk of ‘Going Observationalist’: Negotiating the Hidden Dilemmas of Being an Insider Participant Observer’, Qualitative Research 2(1): 97–112. Lance, J. 1990. ‘What the Stranger Brings: The Social Dynamics of Fieldwork’, History in Africa 17: 335–39. Lerum. K. 2001. ‘Subjects of Desire: Academic Armour, Intimate Ethnography, and the Production of Critical Knowledge’, Qualitative Inquiry 7(4): 466–83. Mand, K. 2004. ‘“Insider” and “Outsider Ambiguities: Social Capital, Gender and Power in the Field’, in R. Edwards (ed.), Social Capital in the Field: Researchers’ Tales, Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group Working Paper no. 10. London: London South Bank University. Mascarenhas-Keyes, S. 1987. ‘The Native Anthropologist: Constraints and Strategies in Research’, in A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London and New York: Tavistock. Messerschmidt, D. 1981. ‘On Indigenous Anthropology: Some observations’, Current Anthropology 22(2): 197–8.

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Moore, D., and R. Roberts. 1990. ‘Listening for Silences’, History in Africa 17: 319–25. Narayan, K. 1993. ‘How Native Is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?’, American Anthropologist 95(3): 671–86. Nelson, L. W. 1996. ‘Hands in the Chit’lins: Notes on Native Anthropological Research among African American Women’, in G. Etter-Lewis and M. Foster (eds), Unrelated Kin: Race and Gender in Women’s Personal Narratives. London: Routledge. Rosaldo, R. 1989. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. Schwalbe, M.L., and M. Wolkomir. 2002. ‘Interviewing Men’, in J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (eds), Handbook of Interview Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Shahrani, M.N. 1994. ‘Honoured Guest and Marginal Man: Long-Term Field Research and Predicaments of a Native Anthropologist’, in D.D. Fowler and D.L. Hardesty (eds), Others Knowing Others: Perspectives on Ethnographic Careers. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Sherif, B. 2001. ‘The Ambiguity of Boundaries in the Fieldwork Experience: Establishing Rapport and Negotiating Insider/Outsider Status’, Qualitative Inquiry 7(4): 436–47. Strathern, M. 1987. ‘The Limits of Auto-anthropology’, in A. Jackson (ed.), Anthropology at Home. London and New York: Tavistock. Wolcott, H. F. 1995. The Art of Fieldwork. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.

2



TALKING ABOUT THE DEAD

Talking about the dead in Ireland can be funny, frightening, instructive and cathartic. Three specific contexts (a wake, a funeral and a house clearance) are used here to examine the forms the narratives take and how they illustrate processes of mediation and relationships. They are analysed along with material from general conversations and traditions of telling ghost stories (appendix, table 6). How people talk about the dead in different contexts can be formulaic, ritualized, conversational or performed. The different types of narrative can reveal seemingly paradoxical beliefs about the dead as positive or negative forces in the lives of the living and are also illustrative of attempts to obscure the separation that is death. Later chapters will discuss how material culture is used to evoke memories, commemorate the dead and facilitate ongoing connections between the living and the dead. Yet none of this is possible without narratives, for they are fundamental to the centrality of how material items are used in remembrance and encapsulate many of the themes and attitudes that are addressed here. They also arise out of a long tradition in Ireland of being concerned with the dead and of narrating about the dead through conversation, stories and song.1 The attention to narrative builds on what Tonkin (1992) recognized as the connections between stories, memory and history (Allman 1997: 142–44). While her focus is on how the past and future is shaped by different types of oral histories and the intricate construction of those narratives, I concentrate on how the narratives of the dead are active and lived experiences that influence the present and yet also act as a continuation of past feelings and attitudes. These following extracts raise analytical themes that are dealt with in depth at the end of the chapter and are taken

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as representative of data collected during five wakes, six funerals and a wide range of interviews with groups and individuals spanning a number of age and gender categories (appendix, tables 1–8).

The Wake It was an unexpectedly mild day in early December 2006 when I arrived at Jim’s wake. I had become acquainted with his brother and sister-in-law (Gary and Kate) a few months earlier and had met Jim on a few occasions. He was thirty-nine years old and was married, with two young children, aged twelve and fourteen. The door of the large terrace house on Main Street was opened wide, inviting the world into a warm lighted hallway and rooms beyond, filled with people and quiet chatter. Throughout the afternoon and early evening people of all ages and backgrounds arrived at the wake: friends, neighbours, relatives, former work colleagues, schoolchildren who knew the deceased’s children, casual acquaintances and friends of friends. But the curtains and blinds of the old house were firmly closed and drawn against that world that it sought to invite inside. The paradox of the open door and the darkened windows was as if the house itself symbolized the passage of death, a closing of existence on earth while simultaneously opening the way to a new afterlife. Outside the front door, which opened directly onto the street, stood a group of young men, dressed in dark suits and coats, who greeted each new arrival. There was a constant forming and re-forming of this group in shifting permutations as young men took turns to ‘do the door’ while others entered the house to direct and talk to people inside. They greeted each new arrival with a handshake and a ‘Thank you for coming’ and inquired as to their relationship with the deceased. The mourners expressed condolences by quietly uttering the phrases ‘I’m sorry about Jim’ or ‘Sorry for your trouble.’ As new people arrived they passed those who were leaving, a constant busyness that blended with the solemnity of the occasion. One or two family members stood along the hallway to continue the ritual of welcoming people inside. On entering the house I was approached by an uncle of the deceased. He directed me to where Kate was and I made my way to the upstairs room. It was expected that each new visitor would wish to view the body, or, as it was put to me: ‘Go up to see Jim.’ I went to the back of the hall and started to climb a curved staircase. Halfway up I found myself at the back of a queue of people waiting to enter the bedroom where the body was laid out. Everyone was talking quietly, asking each other how

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they had come to know of the death and how it had happened. One man began telling us about the deceased’s final day: He’d been in hospital for a week or so and was sort of up and down. When it wasn’t looking like he was going to come back from this setback, Marie and the children said they wanted him at home. They got it all arranged and brought him home on Monday. He was very weak and in a lot of pain, but the nurses and doctors got his medication sorted out and he seemed fairly contented. Bobby and Alex [Marie’s brothers] fixed up the bed so he could look out the window. He just slowly went downhill. All the family were able to see him and spend time with him and he got a chance to talk to them individually. Then, on Thursday, Marie said she knew he didn’t have much time and she called everyone to the house. They spent the last few hours with him, and praying with him, and it was very peaceful. It’s a blessing really, he went about six o’clock last night … of course, the kids are distraught but Marie’s not too bad today, but she didn’t get much sleep last night.

In his former bedroom Jim was laid out in his coffin, dressed in a dark suit and encased by white satin lining, a set of rosary beads entwined in his clasped fingers. A number of straight, high-back chairs were placed around the room. These were reserved for elderly relatives and friends, who sat in quiet contemplation and prayer or conversed in subdued tones. In a corner of the room was a small square table covered in a white cloth, on top of which had been placed two candlesticks. Kate was standing near the coffin and praying when I entered. On seeing me she moved away slightly from the coffin and began recounting the details of the days leading up to the death, how Jim’s condition had slowly worsened and who had been with him at the end. This narrative was told repeatedly to each new arrival at the wake. Kate’s talk was mixed with regret, sadness and resignation. Turning to the coffin she said: ‘It’s better for him now. All the pain has gone and he is at peace. Doesn’t he look well? No more tension in his face.’ Gary explained that he was organizing the funeral service: ‘Jim didn’t want a lot of fuss. It has to be simple yet show who he was. I have picked some nice readings and music that I know he would have liked.’ As I stood with Kate more people moved into the room and talked to each other in short phrases. The most common remarks I heard were ‘He looks well’, or ‘He’s happy now’, or ‘He’d be pleased to see you’ve come.’ The younger men and women, girls and boys, who came to view the body placed sympathy cards on the little table but made no comments. They stood silently for a minute and then left the room, as if unsure of what to say. They sought out Jim’s children or other younger people who were there and stood silently in small groups. One of Jim’s relatives suggested they could help to serve tea. A couple of the older teenage boys were gently persuaded

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to ‘help’ the young men at the door. As we moved back downstairs more people were waiting to go into the bedroom; like a slow-moving carousel the visitors wound their way from street to upstairs and down again, their passage arrested at junctures for greetings, explanations and prayers. All the while the quiet tones that descended on entering the house were perpetuated throughout this round of physical movement and talk. I followed Kate down the back hallway towards the kitchen. Here the sounds of more animated conversation and the clatter of crockery as it was set on the table or washed in the sink drifted out into the adjoining living room. A large kitchen table was set with the best china as four women provided a constant flow of tea, sandwiches and cakes to an ever-changing group of visitors. Old friends, acquaintances and relatives greeted each other and were introduced to each new arrival. The women at the sink joked and laughed about the volume of food and tea and constantly coaxed young and old to sit down and rest. Kate’s aunt Masie announced: ‘What are we going to do with all this stuff? Everyone has been so good, bringing things. Mick, do you want more tea? Pat even made a big pot of soup and brought it over; we can use that later for dinner.’ Around the table the talk was still about Jim, but the conversations now were light-hearted. Tales of what he liked in life, how he was with people, and comical anecdotes of teenage exploits and, as one old uncle said, ‘the way he could charm himself out of anything, and charm everyone around him’. As we settled to drink tea Kate began to reminisce about the things she and Jim had done as children and teenagers – the holidays, the dances, the boyfriends and girlfriends – and the heartbreak she had felt when he fell ill. Other cousins and relatives came to sit with us and add their particular memories to the conversation. Everything about Jim was positive. He had been kind and astute and loved his family. That he was also ‘well thought of’ was evidenced by the great number of people who had come to the wake. But there was also sadness. Kate said: ‘I will miss him now; we were very close. But we have to keep positive for Marie and the kids.’ Whenever any of the younger children or teenagers came in they were nurtured out of their sadness. An elderly uncle told one young boy: ‘Now, he wouldn’t want to see you like that. Jim liked a good party and we have to give him a good send-off.’ One of the women at the sink told a friend of Jim’s daughter: ‘I know it’s sad and you are sad for Anne, but her daddy has gone to a better place and he’s not suffering any more, so you have to be glad for that. He wouldn’t want to see you all so doleful.’ As the afternoon shifted to evening the procession of people coming to the wake ebbed and flowed as families attended to mealtimes and people drifted in on their way home from work. I was helping in the kitchen and

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occasionally stepped outside to the front door with Kate to get a break. Later in the evening more people lingered to talk as they left the house. Exchanges on how Jim looked or the number of people at the wake would, after a few minutes, turn to sport or work. Inside, close to eleven o’clock, it was mostly family and very close friends who remained. The drinks cupboard was opened and ‘tea’ was transformed to shots of whiskey or gin, bottles of beer or stout. The memories of Jim as a child, a young man and a husband and father, were recycled and circulated in the kitchen and living room. The conversations drifted and gradually encompassed everyday concerns of money, jobs and politics. I left just after midnight, the kitchen humming with subdued voices.

The Funeral It was a Saturday morning in March 2007 and the main street in Kilmurry was strangely quiet. In the village, which straddles the Armagh/Louth border, the shops were closed and the blinds pulled down. It had been raining earlier but the sun had come out to dry up the wet pavements, and little pockets of steam rose up occasionally from the ground, catching specks of sunlight before disappearing. A few cars were parked in a side street, and as I waited just beside a large oak tree in the main square, people began to drift in ones and twos to stand at the side of the pavement on the main roadway. There were old men dressed in dark suits or coats, middle-aged women in their Sunday attire and younger people wearing jackets or tops over their jeans. ‘Are you waiting on May’s funeral?’ one old man asked me. ‘They should be coming’, he added, glancing along the street. ‘That’s always the hardest thing’, said his companion, ‘leaving the house. No one likes that. It’s the worst part. Because that’s it. You know then that it’s over. You have to let them go.’ May was ninety-three when she died. She had five children and numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews. She had outlived her husband, her siblings and all of her friends from childhood and young adulthood. As her coffin left the house on its way to the church, the streets were lined with neighbours and friends. Her three sons and two daughters walked behind the hearse. Behind them, six of May’s grandchildren carried wreaths of neatly arranged carnations and lilies. As the cortège passed by, dozens more people joined in behind to walk the short distance from May’s former home to the church. More people stood outside the church; elderly mourners had taken seats inside about half an hour before the funeral service was due to start. The priest greeted the cortège at the entrance to the church, where he sprinkled the coffin with holy water before leading the mourners down the aisle as the organist played an opening hymn.

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I waited outside a while before making my way into the back of the church to stand with other mourners. The congregation overflowed out onto the steps of the church, and there was quiet talk as people greeted each other and commented on the weather. One middle-aged man remarked to a friend beside him: ‘Well, she’s got a nice day. Thank God. Unusual, it always seems to rain at funerals.’ His friend looked at the sky and replied: ‘Yeah. That’s for sure. She was a good sort May. Look at all the people who turned up. Isn’t that great for the family.’ Inside the small church the priest, dressed in the purple vestments of mourning, began the liturgy of the funeral Mass. The emphasis during a funeral service is on hope and renewal in Christ, and the prayers are carefully chosen to reflect hopefulness in the face of death. One of May’s grandsons read from Ecclesiastes (3:1–11), a popular Old Testament reading at a funeral that begins, ‘There is a time for everything. …’ After this the psalm ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ was sung by a niece, and the second reading, this time from Romans (8:1–11), was read by a young cousin of May’s. This reading emphasizes the hope of living in Christ after death. During his homily, the priest stressed how May had led a good life and encouraged her family not to be sad: While we are sad that she has gone from us in this life, we are happy that she has returned to Christ. The trials of this life are put aside and she will enjoy peace and happiness in the glory of God. May lived a long time and saw many changes, but she was blessed with a large family and people who cared about her. She had a strong faith and was contented to leave the world behind, knowing that her real home was not here.

At the Offertory Procession one of May’s nephews played the Irish lament ‘Caoineadh Na dTri Mhuire’ on the fiddle. This ancient tune is commonly heard at Catholic funerals and tells of the heartbreak of Mary as she watches Jesus dying. At Communion a granddaughter sang Faure’s ‘Pie Jesu’, after which the church choir sang ‘Sweet Heart of Jesus’, a hymn that was popular a generation ago in the Catholic Church. As the Mass ended the priest introduced the final part of the church service: ‘Before we say our final goodbye to May, we bless her remains with water and honour her body with incense.’ The smell of incense was sickly and overpowering. As the container was swung backwards and forwards in an arc, the priest walked in a circle around the coffin, blessing each corner. He then took a vial of holy water and again walked around as he sprinkled the water on the coffin. Outside, as the coffin was placed back into the hearse, dozens of people moved around talking to May’s family and friends. They offered sympathy cards to the family members and remarked on how well they had ‘held up’ during the service. I made my way over to Anne, May’s younger daughter,

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and asked how she was. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘I’m not too bad. It went well. I think my mother would have liked the tunes.’ A number of people remarked on the music and the order of service. ‘That was lovely Anne,’ said one man. ‘Nice and simple. No fuss. Your mother would be well pleased.’ After about twenty minutes the funeral procession moved off towards the graveyard, just a few hundred metres from the church. May was buried in the same grave as her husband, and it had been opened the day before by the local gravediggers. As the mourners clustered around the grave, the priest recited the prayers of committal as the final act in the funeral. People shook hands with May’s family and many of them said they would come back to the house for something to eat. Back at May’s former home there was an air of relief that the funeral was over, and away from the formalities of the church, people lapsed into more light-hearted talk and stories about May. In many ways this change in talk was similar to how people talk in kitchens at wakes.

The House Clearance It was a chilly January morning in 2007 when I set off to meet Vicki. She had invited me to help her to clear out her parents’ belongings from the family home. We had arranged to meet in a car park just outside Newry, and after a quick hello we set off. I followed her along some back roads until we came to a little cluster of houses close to the border. Vicki, who is twenty-six years old, had earlier told me that she had found it difficult to clear her parents’ home on her own. Her mother had died some years before her father, and when he died in 2005 she and her brother took on the task of sorting through all the belongings. Her father spent the last few months of his life in hospital, and things that he would have used while in hospital were cleared away immediately. Vicki had spent months clearing the house, and when I met her, it was still unfinished. We parked our cars in the driveway and walked round to the front of the large semi-detached house. I pulled my anorak around me as we entered the house; it was chilly and dusty. Vicki apologized for the cold: ‘Sorry it’s a bit cold. I haven’t been here in a few weeks. I’ll put on a couple of the electric heaters and we’ll soon warm up. When my father was alive it was like a hothouse in here.’ I was surprised at how much stuff was still in the house. All the furniture, books, some paintings and her father’s clothes were still to be sorted and decisions made on what to keep or give away. We tend to do bits and pieces of clearing now and again. We are taking our time because there isn’t really any pressure to get it done. But my brother and I decided

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to do it systematically and thoroughly. My Dad had so much stuff. We got rid of his shoes to a local charity and have only now made a start on his clothes.

Vicki decided that it would be best to let the house warm up a bit and make a start on the garage. ‘I know that sounds like it’s even colder, but it’s not. The neighbours are in and out there all the time borrowing stuff and they always put a wee heater on so it’s usually OK’, she said. The brick garage is attached to the house through a door leading off the kitchen. Inside were workbenches, shelves and a collection of tools and car mechanic equipment. Vicki’s brother had already taken some things, and we pulled out anything that was rusted or past its usefulness to be taken to the local dump. As we sorted through the debris Vicki would occasionally stop and laugh and admonish her father for being such a hoarder. As she lifted up bits and pieces she talked of the friends and neighbours and who would like certain items: ‘I’ll just judge it by how close he was to people and we can ask his workmates and best friends first to choose. There are also a couple of neighbours who were good to him and I’ll leave aside the lawnmower and power hose for them.’ After a couple of hours in the garage we went into the house for a break to make tea. Vicki talked animatedly about her father, and as we wandered around the house with our mugs of tea, she pointed out his belongings and what she felt she might keep. At one stage she picked up a box of postcards and started to laugh: ‘These are all the places we went to on holidays as children. I can’t believe he kept them. Here’s one from France the year we went camping. I didn’t know he kept these. I never would have thought of him as sentimental.’ Vicki decided to keep the postcards because they reconnected her to those family holidays. ‘It’s nice to have these and it tells me something about my father that I didn’t know’, she said. We spent the rest of the day hunting through cupboards and drawers as Vicki talked constantly about her father and recounted stories of things he had done or said. Armed with boxes and large plastic bags we divided up books, letters and odds and ends of all manner of ornaments. In deciding what to keep or not keep she always thought about what her father would have liked. At one stage, in the kitchen, she picked up a little egg cup that he had used each morning. ‘Dad would like me to keep that, I know’, she remarked. When I found a bunch of old National Geographic magazines stuffed away in the back of a cupboard, I asked her if she wanted to keep them. ‘Well, I think I’ll give them to somebody, maybe the library or some doctor’s surgery. People like reading that sort of stuff’, she said. By four o’clock in the afternoon we were both tired and hungry. There had been many moments of laughter and sadness during the day. Sometimes Vicki would stop to reflect on some artefact or photograph and remember

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things about her father. At other times she was amused at the sorts of things that were tucked away in cupboards or lying around on tables – old bank statements or receipts no longer of use. By the end of the day we had whittled down her father’s wardrobe to a couple of suits and a coat and had managed to get rid of a considerable amount of old papers. I was glad to leave the house behind and Vikki said she probably would not return again for a few weeks. ‘A little at a time is OK’, she said. ‘Too much of it just makes me too sad.’

Patterns of Talk The ritualistic or formulaic talk that is evident at funerals or wakes contrasts with the conversational during the house clearance or ‘performed’ storytelling. There are, however, underlying patterns in the talk, regardless of the form it takes, and these patterns reveal a consistency in attitudes that are tied to ways in which people negotiate a balance between the positive and negative aspects of the role of the dead and accommodate the tension between separation and reunion. There are also patterns discernible in relation to age and gender. People constantly refer to the feelings of the dead and how this is related to an overall equilibrium that is sought not just between the conflicting aspects of the dead, but also between the living and the dead. One of the initial aspects that seem to dominate talking about the dead is the deference to their feelings. Vicki was careful to consider which of her father’s belongings he would have wanted her to keep. Although his physical body was gone, she was renewing her connection with him through objects that encapsulated his personality (the egg cup or particular books or clothes), retained his spirit and ensured his remembrance. At Jim’s wake his brother was anxious that the funeral be simple with no fuss, the way ‘he would have liked’. Comments at May’s funeral about how she would have enjoyed the music and the form of the service give the deceased a prominent place in the hierarchy of emotions. How the dead are perceived to feel about something or how they might act is used as the initial reference point when the living are making decisions about the dead and how to treat them. This elevated status underlies many of the attitudes and practices associated with the dead. In general conversation people often warn that care is needed in talking about or attending to the dead, as they have the potential to exert malevolence. Stories about ghosts or chance encounters with the dead are still told widely and act as warnings to attend to duties in relation to the deceased. This can include looking after belongings that they cherished, attending to graves and taking part in private and public remembrance activities. By ex-

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hibiting concern for the feelings of the dead and caution in relation to them, the living are negotiating the new relationship that now exists. This is not an equal relationship, as the dead are outside the dominion (power) of the living, yet the behaviour of the living can influence how the dead act. The balance of mastery rests with those who have died. When the living consider the feelings of the dead and voice awareness of the ability of the dead to feel and react to situations, they are re-incorporating them into the world of the living and forging continuing contact. Many younger people related how they consult dead relatives in times of difficulty. They do this by visiting graves and asking for help or making private invocations to a dead grandparent and in so doing are bringing the dead back into their lives to seek advice and learn from them. In this way the wisdom of the dead is renewed as a positive force for the living. But there is also the recognition that the dead can, paradoxically, be disturbing and malignant presences, and this induces an underlying fear of the dead that is revealed in talk and actions. Christiansen (1946) believed that there was an almost universal fear of the dead in prehistoric and pre-Christian times. In Ireland the anthropological literature and folklore collections contain accounts of how people were able to prevent the dead from carrying out malevolent acts (e.g. Wilde 1971 [1888]). The dead may appear in their former dwellings (Glassie 1987: 127–37), and there is an ‘ancient and common theme of the returning dead’ (L. Taylor 1995: 74). Tales of the dead reappearing, to either help or hinder the living, are a modern version of the ‘many strange superstitions concerning the dead’ that Wilde (1971 [1888]: 117) recorded among the Irish. These included stories about the dead trying to abduct the living or of fairies stealing people. Halloween is still a time when people believe the dead return to earth, and Wilde documented stories about the revelries of fairies on that night and how ‘mortals should stay at home and never dare to look at them’ (1971 [1888]: 80). This fear of the dead has also been thought, by some writers, to explain behaviour at wakes and funerals when people would do all in their power to placate the dead by providing a good wake and having a large attendance at a funeral (O’Suilleabhain 1967). There is an acknowledgement in this that the separation at death is not complete, and this oscillation between the different states of the living and the dead can be discerned in many of the ways in which people talk about death and the dead. The constant negotiation between these states is also illustrated through people’s emotional and practical interactions with the former possessions of the dead (as discussed in chapters 3 and 4) and in their involvement with and reactions to various public forms of remembrance (chapters 5 and 6).

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Separation and Reunion At Jim’s wake, as at other wakes, members of the bereaved family talked about the dead by relating the time, place and circumstances of the death. The details were repeated, in an almost soothing hypnotic fashion, for each new person who entered the wake house. Kevin (1944: 106) noted that in Galway these details of the death, and what the deceased said before dying, were repeated ‘in every single home’ when people return from a wake. The story, and the responses of the listeners, become like a formulaic mantra. At the wake, the telling is spurred by urgency, motivated by a desire to keep the deceased present by talking about him or her, but paradoxically to soothe the bereaved into a realization that death has occurred. What this illustrates is how the functional aspect of relating the death is only one part of the process of separation that is being manifested. The re-telling of the circumstances of the death marks the separation but also begins the journey towards reunion in a new relationship. The acceptance of the death is evidenced in formulaic expressions heard at Jim’s wake: ‘It was peaceful’ and ‘It was a relief’ or ‘It’s a blessing.’ The dead are being verbally distanced while at the same time moving towards reintegration in another form. Visitors to the wake house talk about the deceased in positive statements and phrases. They also interlace the sympathy expressed with humorous talk of the person who has died. The initial solemnity of offering condolences is superseded, as people move through the wake house, with happy and funny reminiscences of the deceased. The humour reveals a comfortable accommodation of the dead as part of the living community. The tragedy and the loss experienced through the death of a loved one is tempered by the realization that this life is only part of the journey and that the dead are now in a place where they enjoy happiness or are, like the dead in Pine’s (2007: 119) Polish village, ‘away somewhere else, doing ordinary things’. Similar to the merry wakes described by O’Crualaoich (1998) and O’Suilleabhain (1967), there is a reaffirmation of relations among the living along with the new relationship with the dead. Those who have died gradually become ancestors (Stafford 2000: 81), and by using humour the living display the desire to incorporate all aspects of human relatedness into the connections with the dead. While an emphasis is placed on the finality of the physical separation, there is also awareness of the spiritual relationship that endures. In his examination of Norwegian mortuary customs, Christiansen (1946: 14) believed that rites surrounding the dead at time of death and burial were partly an attempt ‘to hide the fact of a final separation’. It can be argued that much of the talk of the dead is also an attempt to obscure that separation. Many of the themes and attitudes present in the folk literature that eluci-

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date continued connections with the dead are discernible in the narratives that unfold when people consider the dead. The stories that result remind us that the nature of death is disconnection, a departure from and a rupture in everyday sociality. It produces a rent in relationships that is healed and reconnected through a variety of methods. For Stafford (2000: 19), the forcefulness of reunion rests on the nature of the separation, and he explores how that process forges psychological and material reconnection. He contends that separation functions as a dynamic constraint (2000: 4) that is ultimately manifested at times of death (Stafford 2000: 14; Bowlby 1978). Crozier (1989: 85) believes that the three elements of mortuary rites that she recorded, ‘the wake, the burial and the funeral tea’, correspond to Van Gennep’s (1960 [1909]) states in his rites de passage. But the difficulty with viewing the funeral tea as a reincorporation (Crozier 1989: 85) is that it does not allow for the unresolved liminality that underlies many of the practices, attitudes and feelings associated with the dead. L. Taylor (1989b: 178) argues against a neat progression of the rites of passage stages from a different perspective, that of the ‘element of tension’ between how the Catholic Church and the people interpret the events. In his ethnography of a Donegal wake and funeral, he admits that the wake might well suggest a ‘classic liminal phase’ (L. Taylor 1989b: 178) but argues that the wake and the funeral deal with ‘different aspects of the deceased’ and are akin to completely separate rites. What happens at a wake and the way that people talk about the dead are different from the codified texts at funerals. But, as will be seen below, the texts and conversations are not solely restricted by the event but are more dictated by spatial considerations.

Funeral Texts Death precipitates a spiritual connection that is inscribed in religious teachings and texts and is emphasized during the funeral. Christians do not believe that death is the end of life, and this is stressed in the symbolism of water (as a renewal of baptism and life) and in the texts used at May’s funeral Mass. The order of the Mass is carefully controlled by the church, and non-liturgical music and eulogies are discouraged or even forbidden. Historically, the Catholic Church discouraged long wakes (three-day wakes were common) and condemned the practice of lamenting (keening) by issuing edicts against what they felt was pagan practice (Corish 1985). Lysaght (1997: 70), however, found evidence of keening in Donegal as recently as 1994. Evidence for the antiquity of keening is deduced from the metrical form used, and a clue is found in the Rosc metre that dates to before the eighth to ninth centuries (O’Tuama 1961: 22). A lament for the dead is

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also at the centre of an Old Irish2 poem from the eighth century, and it is undoubtedly a tradition that stretches back much further in time (Lysaght 1997: 66). This ancient lamenting tradition in Ireland was a form of improvised poetic song that was performed by women over the body of the deceased at wakes and often at the graveside. It was a passionate expression of grief – a musical performance based on the use of the voice and more akin to wailing than singing. Lamenting is a tradition that is mirrored in many different societies around the world, most notably Greece (Danforth 1982; Seremetakis 1991). Professional keeners, who were paid for their services, were often sought out to perform laments. Keening was not just an expression of sorrow at the loss of a person or form of eulogy; it was open to textual manipulation in order to express bitterness and anger or frustration at the social position of women (Bourke 1993). Similar textual devices, in improvising words and tenses, were also used by women in Inner Mani in the Peloponnese in southern Greece and in Crete to decry their status or even improve their ‘fate’ as determined by conventional social norms (Herzfeld 1996; Seremetakis 1991). This particular form of ‘talking about the dead’ was also used by the living to remonstrate with the dead for leaving, to call on their perceived power in the afterlife to help the living, and to serve as a warning to those left behind to take care of the bereaved. In contemporary Irish communities modern lamenting takes the form of tunes played at wakes and funerals, and spoken eulogies will often be delivered after the funeral Mass or at a graveside. Wakes and funerals are public and social affairs (Crozier 1989: 82–83; Kevin 1944: 107; L. Taylor 1989a: 177). The conversations that ensue within this sociability stress the positive aspects of the deceased and often include songs and tunes drawn from the lamenting tradition (L. Taylor 1989a). May’s funeral contained Irish lament tunes, along with classical pieces and popular hymns. The music and verbal texts were a celebration of the deceased; they were chosen as pieces that May particularly enjoyed in life. In this way the official liturgical ceremony combined with the efforts of May’s family to personalize the service. This mixing of narratives involved ritualistic and formulaic elements but also brought in conversational modes. As the official role of the church finished at the burial, the talk of the dead blended easily into what can be heard in the kitchen at wakes, during a house clearance or in general conversation and anecdotes about the dead. This is something that Kevin (1944: 109) noted in the way that gravediggers in Galway talked after a grave was filled in. They reverted to animated stories of past burials, ‘talking with zest’ as if ‘restoring in themselves the movement of their minds’. And L. Taylor (1989a: 177) noticed the ‘communal and conversational’ quality of the talk about a deceased man in a public house after his wake. The talk among the people at May’s funeral also

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touched on how the dead or those close to death will find a way to warn the living. After May’s funeral one of her grandchildren, a thirty-year-old woman, said she had been sure when May was going to die. ‘I felt her in the house that night. As if she just breezed through. Then I got the phone call.’

Age and Gender in the Narratives of the Dead This warning of death is an indication of how people believe the dead can communicate with the living. May’s granddaughter had a benign experience but other people related encounters with a banshee3 that contained elements of dread and apprehension. The banshee is a female spirit associated with death warnings and is believed to ‘follow’ certain families (Lysaght 1986: 53). The cry of the banshee has been likened to a primeval scream or the crying of a fox (Lysaght 1986: 74). Attempts to explain why the banshee is female have included suggestions that her origin stems partly from the ‘human keening women’ in Ireland (Lysaght 1998: 152). Yet this female death messenger is more likely to be linked to goddess figures in early Irish mythology, supernatural figures who had dual aspects of good or evil (Lysaght 1998: 159). The banshee is firmly established in Gaelic Ireland through references in the folklore archives, and her name means ‘woman of the Otherworld’ (Lysaght 1998: 153). She is associated with noble Gaelic families and is sometimes seen as an ancestral figure to certain nobility (Lysaght 1998: 154). Yet another possible explanation of the banshee’s gender that has not been considered is the connection to women’s roles in mortuary customs. It was women who were traditionally concerned with the washing of a corpse and looking after the laying out of a dead body. Today they still dominate in organizing tasks inside the household connected to wakes and funerals (Crozier 1989; Graham 2005). Thus they can be seen to have responsibilities at both the beginning and the end of life, and it would be fitting that the pre-mortem warning of separation comes from a female figure. It is also interesting that the recipient of these warnings is also more likely to be female. Stafford (2000: 110–14) has noticed ‘fundamentally different’ roles for men and women in Chinese rituals of separation and reunion but believes women to be ‘at the heart’ of these processes, as they are the people who produce ‘the emotional attachments which compel reunions of various kinds’ (2000: 110). Older people are those who tell anecdotal stories, reminisce and relate ghost stories from folklore or re-tell stories they heard as children. Teenagers will not talk of the dead in this manner. They may mention a friend or relative they have lost or tell the odd ghost story, but they display less con-

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versational engagement in relation to the dead. Part of this can be explained by a lack of continued experience of confronting death, but it has to be remembered that young people are not excluded from the reality of death or mortuary rituals in Ireland. Although they may not be active participants in the conversations of their elders, they are recipients of the stories and tales that are related. Those stories incorporate ‘set’ or formulaic tales, told with regional or personal variations, such as encounters with the dead on lonely roadways or haunted houses or barns. They are made local by references to nearby places in the landscape or personalized by connecting them to the speaker or someone he knew, and these are the stories most likely to be told by men. In this way a large part of how men talk of the dead is structured in accepted story form. They relate them in more formalized settings – sitting around with friends or relatives late in an evening after a party or other social gathering. At other times, men talk about the dead if someone else solicits the conversation. They tell tales about kin in graveyards during formal ceremonies (see chapter 5) or talk of specific dead at wakes and funerals. On this level, men’s engagement in talk of the dead can be seen to reflect the formal roles they are expected to carry out at times of death (Graham 2005). They are responsible for liaising with mortuary practitioners and take charge of making the funeral arrangements. The businesslike and ‘matter of fact’ duties engaged in at these times is mirrored in their talk when they present themselves as custodians of a store of knowledge concerning the dead. Yet these are not the only occasions when men tell tales of the dead. Although there is a perception among the people with whom I worked that women’s engagement is more personal and emotional, there are instances of overlap and disconnection in the culturally expected rigidity of gender differences. Women aged over thirty are more given to talking spontaneously about the dead without prompting. Sitting at home or chatting at a dance, the talk may easily slip into stories about the dead. It is also women who are more likely to invoke the dead and ask them for help in dealing with difficult family situations. Many men, however, volunteered accounts of how they request help from deceased kin or related personal experience of visitations. There were women who were disinclined to be involved in conversations about the dead and younger men and women, in their twenties and early thirties, who readily chatted informally about dead friends and relatives. There is no sense of detachment in these narratives but rather a sense of living and lived experiences. This is a characteristic that is carried over into wake gatherings, where talking about the dead reinforces the element of separation while, at the same time, initiating a state of reconnection. And that reconnection is also seen in Vicki’s talk about her father and his belongings in clearing her house.

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Conclusion Talking about the dead, therefore, takes a number of overlapping forms. Within those forms are recurrent themes of disconnection and reintegration, of benign and malignant forces, and of the paradoxical beliefs and attitudes that surround them. The dead are physically gone but remain in places, in objects, in stories and in mind. The easy relationships that can exist in the funny stories and fond material memories are interwoven with cautious tales of ghosts and spirits, a paradoxical situation of oppositions that is indicative of the balance that has to be achieved in relationships with the dead. When people warn that the dead have to be respected, they are mindful that the dead are now in an altered state but remain essential to the living as forces of intercession with God and dispensers of advice. In similar fashion to the attitudes of the Amazonian Jivaro (A.C. Taylor 1993), the dead are ontologically different from the living but are transformed into social partners. The possibility that the dead can manifest as malignant forces is pre-empted by remembrance duties, which include talk, performed by the living. Similarly, the Chinese also negotiate relationships between the dead and potential ghosts in order to precipitate a balance between good and evil spirits (Stafford 2000: 82). The influences of the dead, the negotiated forms of talk about them and the realization of duties towards them are all contained in narratives that can be keys to discovering common social processes (Case 1995: 20). The next chapter continues this examination through an analysis of the emotional and sensory experiences that are connected to objects of remembrance. Notes 1. For example, Carleton 1862; Craig 1998; Gilbert 2003; Hyde 1910. Variations of stories about the dead that are still current today can be found in Glassie (1987), Murphy (1975) and Wilde (1971 [1888]). 2. Old Irish here refers to a developmental stage of the Irish language dating from the sixth to the tenth century ad. 3. ‘Banshee’ is the Anglicized form of the Irish Gaelic bean sídhe, which translates as woman (bean) of the fairies or fairy mound (sídhe).

Bibliography Allman, J. 1997. Reviewed Work: Tonkin, E. 1992. ‘Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of History’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 30(1): 142–44. Bourke, A. 1993. ‘More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry’,

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in J.N. Radner (ed.), Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bowlby, J. 1978. Attachment and Loss, vol. 2, Separation, Anxiety and Anger. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carleton, W. 1862. Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. New York: Wilson and Hawkins. Case, S. 1995. ‘Taking Narrative Seriously: Consequences for Method and Theory in Interview Studies’, in R. Josselson and A. Lieblich (eds), Interpreting Experience: The Narrative Study of Lives. Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage. Christiansen, R.T. 1946. The Dead and the Living. Studia Norvegica 2. Oslo: Aschehoug. Corish, P.J. 1985. The Irish Catholic Experience: A Historical Survey. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan. Craig, P. 1998. 12 Irish Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crozier, M. 1989. ‘Powerful Wakes: Perfect Hospitality’, in C. Curtin and T. Wilson (eds), Ireland from Below. Galway: University College Galway Press. Danforth, L. 1982. The Death Rituals of Rural Greece. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gilbert, R.A. (ed.). 2003. Irish Folklore in the Nineteenth Century. Bristol: Thoemmes. Glassie, H. (ed.). 1987. Irish Folk Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Graham, B. 2005. Gender Divisions in Irish Mortuary Ritual. Unpublished MA thesis, School of History and Anthropology, Queen’s University Belfast. Herzfeld, M. 1996. ‘In Defiance of Destiny: The Management of Time and Gender at a Cretan Funeral’, in M. Jackson (ed.), Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hyde, D. 1910. Beside the Fire: A Collection of Irish Gaelic Folk Stories. London: David Nutt. Kevin, N. 1944. I Remember Karrigeen. London and Dublin: Burns Oates and Washbourne. Lysaght, P. 1986. The Banshee: The Irish Supernatural Death Messenger. Dublin: Glendale Press. ———. 1997. ‘Caoineadh os Cionn Coirp: The Lament for the Dead in Ireland’, Folklore 108: 65–82. ———. 1998. ‘Aspects of the Earth-Goddess in the Traditions of the Banshee in Ireland’, in S. Billington and M. Green (eds), Concept of the Goddess. London: Routledge. Murphy, M.J. 1975. Now You’re Talking. Belfast: Blackstaff. O’Crualaoich, G. 1990. ‘Contest in the Cosmology and the Ritual of the Irish “Merry Wake”’, Cosmos 6: 145–60. ———. 1998. ‘The Merry Wake’, in J. Donnelly and K. Miller (eds), Irish Popular Culture 1650–1850. Dublin: Irish Academic Press. O’Suilleabhain, S. 1967. Irish Wake Amusements. Cork: Mercier Press. O’Tuama, S. 1961. Caoineadh Airt Ui Laoghaire. Dublin: An Clochomhar.

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Pine, F. 2007. ‘Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Ghosts of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Seremetakis, C.N. 1991. The Last Word: Women, Death and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stafford, C. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, A.C. 1993. ‘Remembering to Forget: Mourning and Memory Among the Jivaro’, Man 28(4): 653–78. Taylor, L. 1989a. ‘The Uses of Death’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 149–202. ———. 1989b. ‘Ba InEirinn: Cultural Constructions of Death in Ireland’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 175–87. ———. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholicism. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, trans. M. Vicedom and S. Kimball. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wilde, Lady. 1971 [1888]. Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland. Galway: O’Gorman.

3



Sensing Memories and the Dead

A pivotal factor in processes of remembering through material objects is the role of the senses in triggering emotional and sentimental memories. Distinct from the narratives that objects conjure through association, the senses become primary instigators of what are often complicated and ambiguous processes and encounters with the materiality of the dead, and central factors in negotiating and mediating those engagements. While acknowledging that objects are not essential to remembering, it is argued that material items play a fundamental role in defining persons in remembrance and this is achieved through the senses and the emotions. In exploring remembrance, senses and emotions are considered not just cerebral, cognitive processes, but also visceral and embodied (Csordas 1993: 147; Damasio 2000). In this way, the instances of recall that are set in motion by the senses are not only bodily experiences for the people who are remembering; the stimulant perceived by the senses also serves as a material experience of the person who is being remembered. The senses will conjure up both a memory and mental image of the person and a sensory experience of them. Further, the data collected show that such embodiment is crucial to and indivisible from the sensory experiences of remembrance. The cognitive dimension of memory is, I argue, bound to material items, and the senses, or a memory of the senses, are crucial players in our ability to recall and tell stories. This is illustrated in examples below and also relates generally to the narratives of the dead (previously discussed) that are a paramount feature of remembrance. The analysis draws on data from a wide range of interviews, conversations and group encounters with people of different age groups, both male

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and female and from diverse economic backgrounds (appendix, tables 4–8). Specific examples are used to represent the overall patterns that emerged during these discussions. While differences in age and gender were discernible in relation to particular circumstances (detailed below), there were no differences in attitude and reaction that were reasonably attributable to class, an indication of the depth and extent of the beliefs and practices in relation to the dead in Ireland that will also be demonstrated in further chapters. As indicated earlier, materiality is here broadened to incorporate not just visible, solid objects that take up a defined space in the world, but tangible aspects of our body – senses of taste, smell, sight and touch and the making of memories in tangible form. In this way the concept and experience of objects becomes an experience of matter – as touching, smelling, hearing, tasting and seeing require matter to stimulate and activate those senses.

Materializing Emotions and the Senses Much of the literature on emotions (e.g. Geertz 1980; Goddard 1996; Hochschild 1979; Leach 1981; Lutz and White 1986; Middleton 1989) has concentrated on their biological or cultural roots. Aristotle’s privileging of thought as a precursor to feeling emotion led to debates that still have resonance and that have been addressed in the field of neuropsychology (Damasio 2000; Tonkin 1992). Leavitt (1996) analyses the attempts at theorizing emotions in anthropology along the opposing hypotheses that emotions are either biologically determined or primarily sociocultural in nature. Yet he also points out that emotion terms are used to indicate and explain ‘experiences that involve meaning and feeling, mind and body’ (Leavitt 1996: 514). Although a detailed consideration of the arguments over the theorizing of emotions will not be rehearsed here, Milton and Svašek (2005) make compelling arguments that traditional contradictory views on emotions as either universalist, biological phenomena or culturally constructed should be combined in order to realize a richer and more authentic representation and analysis of emotions and emotion work. If emotions are viewed as universal while also being expressed differentially across cultures, it must be acknowledged that there are also differences in individual expression and that feelings, emotions and sentiment encompass a variety of biological, psychological and cultural factors (Myers 1979). Ethnographic examples contained in collections edited by Wulff (2007) and Milton and Svašek (2005) are used in cross-cultural comparisons. In relation to materiality, I argue that, in all its forms, it is materiality that brings forward the emotion of memories, and it is the senses that are

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paramount in that process. An attention to the senses and how other peoples and cultures experience the world through the senses has become an increasing area of inquiry for anthropologists. Stoller (1989: 4) pleaded for anthropologists to engage actively in the senses in ethnographic inquiry. In his account of work among the Songhay of Niger in Africa, he related the powerful insights into the people’s lives that he gained by immersing himself in the sounds, tastes and smells of their everyday interactions (Stoller 1989: 4–5). Merleau-Ponty (2007 [1962]: 264) also recognized the link between the visceral and cognitive elements of sensory experience in relation to objects when he talked of the vibrations of colour and sound transmitted into the body through the senses. In cognizance of ‘the life that resides in objects’ (Stoller 1989: 37), Merleau-Ponty (1964: 164) was also aware of the echoes that stimuli may create in our bodies, similar to the ‘reverberations’ that Bachelard (1964 [1957]) said were present when a poem impacted on a reader. The tendency of anthropologists to acquiesce with ‘Western’ models that separate the five senses has been criticized by Geurts (2003), who also calls for an awareness of the intermingling and embodiment of the senses (Fernandez 1986; Sutton 2001). Geurts’s elucidation of the sensory world of the Anlo-Ewe of West Africa incorporates their concept of seslelame – ‘feeling in the body’ (2003: 188) – as a way in which many of these people ‘read their bodies while simultaneously orienting themselves to objects’ (Geurts 2003: 183). Examples below show that the concept of seslelame can be glimpsed in a variety of sensory memories among people in the border area of Ireland. Similarly, Sutton’s (2002) exploration of how food is both a sensory and a social memory for Greeks at home and abroad elucidates more universal applications of themes of embodiment and the role of particular senses in triggering memories. Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 25–32) argue that we need to catalogue things, even when they are not spatially bounded, and they extrapolate that this need is projected onto our experiences with physical objects such as our bodies. This provides ‘the basis for an extraordinary wide variety of ontological metaphors, that is, ways of viewing events, activities, emotions, ideas, etc. as entities and substances’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 25). Their recognition of how humans ‘materialize’ phenomena, the inherent need in us to personify, have tangible objects, whether in physical form or language form, can be related to the desire among the bereaved to retain a physicality of the dead. This need to materialize allows us ‘to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms – terms that we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions and characteristics’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 25). The impetus to retain a form of physicality is considered here in relation to the senses – tangible in that they are felt and experienced bodily, sensing and encountering in turn tangible items.

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I consider the senses of sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing and further break down each sense into different categories to show that, for example, sight (viewing) may be considered on its own or married with other senses dependent on the nature of how an item is displayed. The issue of display becomes a crucial factor in how the senses are engaged with objects (Svašek 2007: 123–53), and it will be shown that modes of display facilitate particular forms of interaction that serve to mediate different relationships. Senses have been considered as a hierarchy, with sight and hearing rated above that of smell, touch and taste (Stewart 1999: 19–22). In relation to museum architecture and furnishings, however, Stewart (1999: 28) maintains that museums still have ‘a vestigial relation to touch as the primary sense for the apprehension of powerful matter or material.’ Stoller has cautioned ‘Western’ anthropologists against relying too much on sight, which is ‘the privileged sense of the West’ (1989: 5). Lund (2005) explores the touching eye as an aspect of the sensory experience of the Scottish landscape, and Magowan (2007: 13–14) expands the challenge to Western categories of the senses even further in addressing the ‘critical’ relationships between touch and sight. She also analyses the interplay between hearing, seeing and movement in the music of the Yolngu in northern Australia. What these ethnographies and analyses build on is that the experiences of things outside the body can be remembered corporeally, and this does not necessarily adhere to a strict hierarchy of sensual experience (Stewart 1999: 19). Indeed, Proust’s (1981 [1913]: 58) description of an explosion of memory involving his whole being, set in motion by a little cake, privileges taste and smell as the persistent remnants when the past has gone and ‘after the people are dead’.

Memory in the Touch of Sight I consider, firstly, how sight can be considered as a primary agent of memory and, secondly, use examples to show how it can defer to touch as a more evocative trigger for recalling people and past times. One of the most commonplace items of remembrance is the photograph, an artefact that evokes memories of an event, a time and place, and may act to anchor a family socially and geographically. Photographs are displayed in a variety of ways – framed and hung on walls or placed on mantelpieces, kept loose in drawers or stuck into albums, or fashioned into lockets worn next to the body. The nature of their treatment determines the manner in which the photograph ‘interacts with memory’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 144). It also determines which senses, other than sight, are woven into that interaction (Edwards 1999: 228). Pictures of deceased friends and relatives, framed and hung on a wall, engage the sense of sight as the primary means of recall. The conscious

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decision to display a photograph on a wall invites only looking. There is no invitation to touch or linger long. Yet the prominence of such display reveals a desire to fix the deceased within the structure of the household, and this is a permanent fixing. These pictures are observed but they also observe; the past members of the family are watching over the activities and the people of a household. And behaviour may be tempered in deference to what a forebearer would consider appropriate. One young man in his twenties remarked that he was wary of his old aunt whose picture hung in the living room. ‘She’s always looking at you. I mean it’s like she knows what you’re doing. You’d need to behave around her.’ Photographs in frames that are placed on mantelpieces or atop dressers, pianos or sideboards engage sight and touch. They will be dusted more often, moved slightly, or set in new locations. They will be picked up, touched and talked about. Visitors are invited to engage in a tactile way with them, ask questions and make comments. The contrasting displays therefore afford different interactions in communicating distinct relationships. The relative looking down from the living room wall affects only kin in a particular way of imagined moral judgement and directions for behaviour, while the participatory nature of the engagement with those pictures that are handled mediate relationships with friends and visitors that allows the exchange of stories and participation in the daily life of the household. The differences in interaction were obvious in households I visited throughout the fieldwork area. Tony is a member of the Creganuir Local History Society. A former headmaster, he lives in Greenveigh, South Armagh. His house is full of photographs of his parents and his wife’s parents. Old black-and-white studio portraits, wedding photographs, and snapshots adorn the walls of his hallway. Interspersed with them are framed artefacts of Carrickmacross lace made by his mother. In the drawing room of his old farmhouse is a portrait of his father that was painted by Tony’s daughter, a working artist. The painting hangs on the wall above an old piano and faces a window. It is a large oil painting, an impression of a man with pipes and hats and faces fusing and twisting into each other. Tony explained what it meant to him: My father always wore a hat and always had a pipe, and this is how my daughter remembered him. It’s her impression of him and I really like it. I always stop and have a little thought of him when I come into this room. The pictures in the hallway are part of the house. I pass them a hundred times a day, they greet me when I come in the door, and the sight of them gives me a nice warm feeling, like all those people are still about here in the house. I guess most of the time I don’t consciously think about them, they’re just there.

The sense of touch becomes much more central when people engage with photographs that are dotted around houses on shelves and furniture. Jane is

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a 51-year-old woman in South Down. The day I visited her was a hot sunny morning in June 2006. She invited me into the kitchen, which opens out onto a small conservatory filled with plants. A large pine table dominates this bright and homely kitchen, with its tiled floor, old dresser and handcrafted kitchen units. The walls are hung with numerous photographs but the most precious pictures are kept in the adjoining living room. Here, a large collection of old sepia photographs of her parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles is displayed, each individually in ornate silver frames on the mantelpiece and around the fireplace on tables. The hearth, as the heart of the home, is framed with the presence of her family, past and present. Her first reaction when showing me the photographs was to lift them up and invite me also to hold them. And she talked about how she felt when touching the photographs: Sometimes it is just the act of touching something that brings back the memories. Sometimes with a photo it is just touching it, stroking it. The whole tactile thing is important. I like to have my family around me in these photos and touching them makes them still part of the family – not isolated individuals stuck in a frame. I can tell the stories that go with the pictures and this keeps their memory alive.

Touch has traditionally been associated with affection (Hornik 1992: 449) and generally has positive connotations of attention, interest and love. Touching artefacts, by sight or by hand, is an expression of positive feeling now and in the past. When Tony talks of having a nice ‘warm feeling’ when looking at the photographs or Jane explains the necessity to be tactile, there are flickers of Geurts’s (2003) seselelame – the body is feeling through the senses of memory and the memory of sensation. While these particular examples reveal how the metaphor of touch is used and bodily felt by both Tony and Jane, there is an obvious gender division in how that sensation is brought forth and internalized. In talking to people about their sensory experiences it emerged that men, regardless of age, would verbalize the sensing of touch but emphasize the part played by sight by primarily talking about looking at an object or picture. Older women (those aged from about thirty-five) were quicker to engage in physically touching an object and would instinctively reach out to experience the tactility of a picture or little artefact. Younger women in their late teens and early twenties were acutely aware of the effects of sight when viewing a photograph or object. They readily engaged in discussing objects, the emotions they prompted and the bodily sensations they sparked, but were disinclined to touch things other than items of apparel. This did not translate into a revulsion (an aspect of sensory experience discussed below) but demonstrated that the tactility of sight (Taussig 1991: 152; 1992: 18) was a powerful sense-emotion that did not require a conscious touching with the body that the older women found more significant.

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Taussig (1992: 18–19) explains tactile sight as a visual sensory experience that produces, as we view an object, a sense of touching through sight. The differences noted in how people touched or did not touch objects suggest that as people move through life their sensory experience of mourning differs. This could stem from the fact that women often have a more direct physical and tactile engagement with death. As already noted, in Ireland, it was women who traditionally washed and laid out a dead body. It would be misleading, however, to give a polarized notion of experience and enactment, as men do, of course, touch photographs and other items. It is the general pattern of the degree of tactility and the use of different sensory metaphors that become evident in relation to age and gender. The example in the following section shows how one man merges his use of sight and touch and also introduces hearing through the suggested sound of past conversations.

Echoes of Memory The images that are tucked into drawers and old albums can bring forth a well of emotion and sentiment in people. Richard, who lives along the Armagh/Louth border keeps a picture of his father that was taken at his brother’s wedding. During one of my visits to him, he went into his study and brought out the photograph from a drawer in his desk. He’s wearing the suit that I kept for a while after he died. There I am on his right and that’s my brother on his left. He’s standing there talking to me. It’s an eternal spake.1 He’s standing talking to me and I’m doing the listening. That was really the only photo I wanted of him because of that. It’s an eternal physical capturing of something that is gone. I had this picture before he died, and for some reason I don’t want to make it feel something more than it is so I don’t put it in a frame. But it’s the most watched and touched photo that I have. I take it out and look at it a lot.

While talking about this picture Richard constantly ran his hand over the image, as if physically touching his father. The paradox in his desire not to make it ‘something more than it is’ while admitting how much the image is examined and touched is akin to the ‘letting go’ but ‘holding on’ conflict in dealing with a death, a conflict that is assuaged by recourse to material items such as the photograph. The images kept ‘loose’ in drawers and packets do not have the layer of glass or cellophane that divides the pictures in frames or albums. Not only are they more available to tactile interaction, but also they can be stroked and the imprint of fingers left on them. The living and the dead are connected through the physical interaction of touch.

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This example also illustrates how materializing is a two-way process; senses, memory and emotion are fused and exchanged between subject and object. Mindful of the expanded concept of materiality that is used here, we can see how parts of Richard’s body, through his fingerprints, are mingled with the photograph. Thus imprints and photograph touch and embody each other and evoke Geurts’s (2003) seslelame. But Richard’s emphasis on the memory of his father’s speech reminds us that auditory episodes can be reconfigured in the senses, transforming the one-dimensional picture further through the synaesthesia of not only different senses, but also the emotions and past events that render them memorable. In these processes are the ‘echo in our body’ that Merleau-Ponty (1964: 164) believed was awakened when people are confronted with the materiality of ‘quality, light, colour and depth’ of a Cézanne painting. Those echoes extend, however, beyond paintings, into myriad materialities and exist in the ‘toing and froing’ between receiver and received that ‘vibrate and linger’ (Feld 1996: 93). A more direct and different type of touch, more recognizably embodied, involves a greater encompassing physical contact with something connected to the dead. Clothes touch not only the physical body of the living person who wears them but act in an evocative and emotionally charged way to bring living and dead body together by also engaging smell and movement (Humphrey 2002: 68). One woman in her forties, Anna, spoke of keeping her father’s coat hanging in the hallway of her home. He had died a year previously, and his overcoat was the only item of his clothing that she kept. Her father had worked as a stonemason and part-time farmer and had never had too many good clothes. But his good overcoat he would have used for visiting. And when he came here he would always hang it on the same peg on the hallstand. I wanted to keep that coat because it was how I remembered him coming into my house. And I keep it hanging on that hallstand on the same peg. Most times I just don’t think about it. Other coats and jackets get piled on top and you can’t see it a lot. But sometimes I’ll walk past and touch it and have a little thought about him and it’s nice. It makes him present with me in some way. It still has his shape in it. And sometimes I put it on and can feel how he would have been in it, and smell his pipe off it, and see him coming in the door and taking it off to hang up. It sort of keeps him close and keeps who he was as a person alive to me. The kids know it’s there and just accept that’s a little bit of their granddad.

The materiality of the coat exists in the obvious form of fabric and fibres that are used to fashion it into a wearable item of clothing. But the act of wearing the coat also embodies the experience of the person to whom it once belonged. This is made possible through its materiality and the sensory experience and memories it arouses as Anna wraps the coat around her and hugs it to her. Yet the garment also encompasses the body of the living

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person and adds new materiality each time it is worn. Just as Richard’s fingerprints release and transfer parts of his physicality to the photograph, similarly Anna imparts fragments of her body to the coat. The physical materiality in these transfers is complemented by the associations of senses and memories that are being built into the items for enhanced and future encounters. Yet what happens when sensory engagement other than sight is denied to the living person or when we interact with objects from relatives we never knew? What is the effect on senses and emotions when people are confronted with items that are removed from them spatially, temporally and generationally?

Senses and Emotions in Time and Space The overpowering sense of attachment that the tactile nature of an artefact can impart was described by Yee (2007: 32–35) after she consulted the archives of the famous architect Le Courvoisier in Paris. ‘I could trace the precision and force of the incision into the newsprint. I felt his frustration, his spirit.’ This touching and viewing of the original drawings was brought abruptly to an end when the archives were digitally reconfigured for the World Wide Web. While appreciating that people around the world could now access them, Yee lamented that ‘the scans for the website gave me nothing to touch’ (Yee 2007: 32–35). The value of touch and physicality was lost and the digital archive did things for her, but not to her. She had lost her connection to the artist and had ‘no sense of the architect who drew it.’ Yee needed not just to see the drawings (they were viewable on the website) but to become immersed in the ‘tactile seeing’ (Taussig 1991, 1992) and the touching with hands that enabled the senses to spark emotions and conjure the working architect as he struggled with his designs. The distance in space that resulted from the virtual images produced a negation of embodiment. On one level Yee’s realization that the computerized archive was able to perform a function for her but incapable of affecting her reminds us of the double materiality that is explored in previous examples. That double materiality (that fusing of the materialities of the living and the dead; what happens when new materiality of the living is imparted to and fused with the materiality of an object that was worked with, worn or used by someone now deceased) is lost to Yee, just as it is lost in museum displays, despite Stewart’s assertion (above) that there remains a ‘vestigial relation to touch’ (1999: 28). Here was an aspect of negativity in relation to a materiality rendered more poignant by virtual reality. The material distance Yee experienced can be extrapolated to temporal and generational distances evident in the reac-

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tions of younger people during my fieldwork and the variations in sensory impact that mirror the differentials in touch discussed above. Younger people had a more detached relationship to artefacts that had belonged to people they had never known. Items such as books, jewellery or furniture were appreciated as having significance for family members and could be utilized as resources. They were talked about only on the level of functionality or as ‘some thing that belonged to an old uncle of my dad’s.’ The materiality of the objects remained as ‘one-dimensional’ and there were no emotional or sensory transferences, reverberations or echoes, because no memories were possible. The imparting of memories, however, through story and anecdote, do, over time, weave into someone’s consciousness and create connections between subject and object. The ‘significance and connotations’ of items that appear ‘fixed’ can and will ‘change over time’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 131). There is a mediation of relationships through time, across generations, in personal and in public spaces and with a variety of materiality – mediation and changes that are manifested, in many instances, in sensory experience. For Rena, a 34-year-old woman in South Down, the sense of smell is overpoweringly evocative in relation to an old prayer book that once belonged to a great-aunt. She had never met this aunt but had heard her stories. Talking about the prayer book she commented: It was given to me some years ago. I never knew her but sometimes I will go and open it up and hold it up to my face and sniff – and it’s almost as if I can smell her. I know all the stories about her. And apparently she was quite a formidable character. She liked to have her own way and liked things to be done a certain way. And she could be quite cross. She used to terrify my mother! And apparently I have some of her characteristics. My mum says ‘she’s not dead at all – I only have to look at you sometimes and I can see her all over again!’

The stories implanted into Rena’s memory from her mother have woven a character into her imagination. And the person of the great-aunt is made material through the sense of smell from the prayer book. The propensity to materialize the immaterial (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 25) is effected here through the senses and the intermediary of a tangible object. Yet the comfortable relationship that Rena enjoys with her aunt’s artefact does not pertain to every situation. There are instances when the sounds, images or smells may provoke adverse feelings or even repulsion. In an examination of the subject-object divide of human corpses, Svašek (2007: 229– 48) found that adherence to cultural rules in relation to the treatment of bodies was a primary factor in determining emotional reactions. The degree of accessibility to certain items or their desirability in relation to display revealed similar culturally constructed boundaries.

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In Victorian England locks of hair of the deceased were fashioned into little amulets to be worn about the body, thus bringing together seeing and touching (Taussig’s ‘tactile sight’ [1991, 1992]). It is more common now to place locks of hair, if they are kept, out of everyday sight and touch. One elderly lady in North Louth recounted the story of a plait of hair that she has from her mother’s sister, who died in 1928. She explained how she acquired the hair and what it means: She was only a young teenager when she died and she had a long plait of hair. My granny had the plait cut off and she kept it, and then gave it to my mother, who gave it to me. It seems strange that I still have this plait for all these years after her death. But it is there, and I will keep it. I don’t really look at it or touch it very much, just maybe a few times a year. And touching the hair seems I can sort of imagine what kind of a person she was and how she would have grown up.

Other people told of having locks of their own hair that had been cut off when they were toddlers. They are kept as sentimental reminders of childhood, but as one man, Michael, said: ‘I don’t know if any of my children will want it. I keep it but I don’t look at it or touch it very much. Maybe it’s different when it belongs to someone else.’ So there are clear differences in the emotive value of the locks of hair, dependent upon the relational distance between the persons involved. Like the prayer book that Rena keeps, the plait of hair from the old lady’s aunt helps to retain a certain intimacy with a deceased relative they never knew. Michael has no need for sensory engagement with his own lock of hair and admits to little emotional attachment to it. The deciding difference would seem to be that the role of these personal items is to make and perpetuate memories of other people, a role that is impossible without associated narratives. Yet the instances of display are more guardedly adhered to when considering parts of the body. The locks of hair of the deceased are no longer worn about the body of the living. While a memento of this nature can be accepted as a ‘clean’ artefact, any attempt to keep the body or bones would be viewed with suspicion and abhorrence. Douglas (1966) examined the tension between pollution, danger and acceptability of display, and Svašek (2007: 229–48) has explored these parameters in relation to the body. In recognizing objects as triggers for emotions, Svašek (2007) argues that the dead are experienced by the living as subjects and that, alive and dead, humans have both subject and object existence. Svašek also deals with the tension that arises when the subject and object interpretations are categorized as ‘out of place’. The mask of the student protester Jan Palach2 is accepted as a national and political symbol in the Czech Republic, but there were strong objections when a German widow drove around her hometown with

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her husband’s death mask on the passenger seat. Displays of actual parts of the human body were derided when exhibited as art, but scientific anatomical specimens were more generally accepted. The debates around displays of bodies that had been plasticized and could be opened and closed centred on the subject-object divide. The objections to such displays were framed in terms of strong emotions, anger, outrage and disgust. During interviews carried out along the Irish border, the majority of cases related to me were of acceptable forms of sensory experience. There were occasions, however (amounting to about 10 per cent of those interviewed), when people expressed repugnance when confronted with certain former possessions of the dead. One couple spoke of how they had thrown out the bed sheets used by a dead relative: ‘You wouldn’t use them again … I mean that’s a bit weird. You could just smell them off those sheets.’ Another man said he wouldn’t keep his brother’s shoes: ‘That’s just a bit too much, as if I’m him.’ Thus, while coats and shawls that may be worn occasionally for brief moments are acceptable, the more intimate contact of sheets or shoes, for these people, evokes shudders and expressions of distaste. So objects associated with the dead display elements of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. A sensory and emotional engagement with sights, sounds, taste, smells and tactility is controlled through culturally acknowledged parameters. An over-reliance or over-emotionality resulting from excessive sensory closeness (as with the bed sheets or shoes or actual body parts) is in danger of descending into morbid fascination that goes beyond permissible boundaries. There is, however, an ambiguity in determining the use of intimate objects. David, from Dundalk, desired his grandmother’s spectacles because of their intimacy. These everyday items were in daily intimate contact with the deceased but were coveted by David, not reviled. He explained what they meant to him: This was how she saw the world, through these glasses. Every morning she put her sight on and every night she took her sight off her. This is a thing that was with her, it was so close, and it was the most precious thing, she couldn’t exist without it. I just had them for a keepsake. Whenever there were photographs those were on her face and I wanted those, and every time I looked at them I thought, those are the glasses that she wore for thirty years of her life. When you couldn’t afford new glasses you kept the one wee thing, the particular bendy hooky thing that you put on. I remember when she would take them off her; they would fold in a funny way, and she would put them on her with a real ceremony.

For David, the glasses were ‘living’, something ‘real’, almost ‘as if there was a part of her sitting around’. The spectacles symbolized much more about his grandmother, who was a local folk singer and musician. This particular object brought back memories of his grandmother and what she contrib-

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uted in life, who she really was. ‘It was a symbol of something deeper, her singing and her songs’, he said. Yet, despite all that this woman had handed down to her sons and grandchildren through music and songs, it was the one artefact that she would have touched and used every day that was most precious to them. These spectacles, and other objects, are seen as providing access to deeper sensations and recollections and are gateways to feelings and meanings; ‘they speak volumes that cannot be said in words’ is how David describes it. The processes that determine the acceptability of the glasses but the repulsion of sheets and shoes involve both cognitive and bodily factors. The bed sheets and shoes are organic items that mold and shape into a body. Yet so also is the coat kept by Anna. It is the expectation that sheets and shoes be renewed or replaced that seems to govern part of the unfavourable attitudes to their retention. One woman hinted that reusing these particular items of the dead suggested that ‘you can’t afford the money for new ones’. More pressing reasons for the dichotomy between the reactions to the sheets and the spectacles are connected to the stories to which the objects are attached. The sheets and shoes had no narratives or anecdotes associated with them that allowed them to hold or impart positive memories. The negative reactions to the shoes and sheets also raise questions of how items are valued, or defined as alienable and inalienable. The concept of inalienability is discussed more fully in the following chapter, but it would seem, when considering sensory experience, that there are smells and touches that have become so inextricably linked to a dead person that they have acquired a negative inalienability. In accumulating a particular type of history (Graeber 2001: 34) the shoes and sheets have moved beyond acceptable keepsakes because of the inalienability of smells and bodily fluids with which they are associated. The reading glasses exist as the antithesis of this. David’s animated description of them evoked, in teller and listener, the mental image of an old lady fixing and adjusting her glasses, as if she was back in the room with us. The power of objects to elicit memories of someone’s past social life (Hallam et al. 1999) provided David with happy memories of his grandmother. The positive/negative reactions to the different items were channeled through the senses, resulting in strong, but opposing, sensory and emotional reactions. This can also be experienced when people consider the ‘real’ images and sounds of the deceased.

Sounds and Senses of the Dead The voices and faces of the dead exert differing emotional effects on people. The degree of emotional distress depends again on distance – distance in

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time and in social connection. A wife who found it impossible to watch the video footage of her dead husband (as one interviewee admitted) for a year or two after his death may eventually view that video with nostalgia and fondness. Her grandchildren, who only vaguely remember their grandfather, are possessed of a greater degree of emotional detachment and can relish watching him as someone both far and near. To hear the voices and conversations of those who have died, to look at a ‘living’ yet ‘not living’ face and body can be unnerving and ghostlike. Twenty per cent of young people interviewed (those aged between eighteen and thirty) said they never watched old videos of parents or siblings who had died. One man in his twenties felt it ‘a bit creepy, not my thing. It’s like they’re dead but not really. Maybe when I’m a lot older I can watch the holiday videos.’ Steve, a 33-year-old man, who had recently buried his grandmother, talked of how he had put together a tape of her favourite music for her funeral. ‘But it will be a while before I listen to any of those tunes again. They bring up too many memories just now.’ Alan (aged fifty), whose parents were both musicians, has negotiated a compromise with himself over recordings of his parents and enjoys the sound of their voices. He has tapes of interviews they took part in for a radio programme a few years before they died. I suppose they said things in those interviews there that they hadn’t said to us. But I got a copy of that tape and by the time I got it both my parents were dead. I listened to some of it but I kept a bit not to listen to. It’s almost like having a bit of them still there, and I feel if I listen to that last bit then they will be gone. I like having the tape and from time to time I listen to bits of it and hear them saying things that I’d never heard before.

The tapes bring new information to Alan with each listening and surprise him with memories of his parents’ voices and with aspects of their lives new to him. Hearing particular sounds or seeing something can also unexpectedly trigger memories people may have forgotten, setting emotions on a path of jumbled but connected memories. A favourite piece of music or song that is associated with someone now deceased can be played or sung in conscious memory of them. Yet the same sound, when heard unexpectedly on a street or in a supermarket, will catch a person unawares and send them into a cascade of emotions and remembering. This hijacking of the senses can happen in all sorts of unexpected contexts. Several informants spoke of how they had glimpsed someone in the street who had reminded them of a dead friend or relative. Neil (aged thirty-three) said: One time, I saw someone from the back in this duffel coat. It just looked like my mate Paddy who died a couple of years ago. That coat and the way the guy walked. I nearly called out to him. It was a bit uncanny and I’m not sure if I liked

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it. I just sort of stood, confused. I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to be doing. It was like I’d seen a ghost.

The mix of diverse and ambiguous sensory and emotional reactions to the tangible and elusive reminders and belongings of the dead are perhaps most sharply focused on the body of the deceased – and no more so than when parts of the body or the senses of the dead are encountered. For it is not just the senses of the living but also the senses of the deceased that become material in engagements of memory and artefacts. The senses of the deceased are brought into the memory processes when considering items that they made during their lives or crafts in which they were involved. How someone worked or sweated over a task is, in turn, evoked by the living through the senses of touch, smell and sight. Jack, from Louth, believes the sentimental value of objects rests on the usage made by an item in life. He is dismissive of modern items such as computers because he believes they are common and unconnected to the person. Yet he keeps his grandfather’s shaving cutlass, which would have been a common item in its day. What makes it so different from modern technological items that are used daily? Well, a thing like the cutlass was something very personal to that person; it was something he touched and used every day. It touched his skin in a very personal way. People perhaps would have used typewriters exclusively in a similar way. A lot of people can use a home PC; it’s rarely just one person in the household. I also keep his last for making shoes. I think of all the shoes that were repaired on it, and all the sweat that dripped over it. All the curses that were said over it while someone was working.

In this instance the artefacts physically embody the person, in that they retain bits of blood and sweat from the grandfather as he shaved and repaired shoes. It is how the shaving cutlass and the shoe last were used, and the mixing of materialities of objects and body, that makes them different for Jack from the computer. The cutlass and last have not lost that authentic quality of ‘engaged human contact’ or association with ‘human endeavour’ that Benjamin (1968 [1935]: 233) maintained was the difficulty in reconciling any type of ‘aura’ to mechanically reproduced art. Engaging the whole body with an artefact can also be a powerful way of engaging senses and memory. The act of using something that once belonged to a loved one, the experience of replicating their bodily movements and the emotions that arouses, is almost tangible for an onlooker. Stephen, a man in his fifties, talked animatedly as he showed me a blackthorn stick that had belonged to his wife’s grandfather. The walking stick is unusual. It is weighty and solid and has a carved head on the top. The head is an impressionistic

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representation of a human head, like a copy of early Irish stone heads seen on the statues on Boa Island in Fermanagh and the Corleck Head from Co. Cavan. The stick dates back to the late 1800s. ‘We don’t know who made it but it belonged to my wife’s grandfather. I always admired that stick every time I saw it, so when my father-in-law died it came to me.’ Stephen values the uniqueness and authenticity linked to the history and the handmade quality of an object (Benjamin 1968 [1935]: 223). Although the previous history of the walking stick is lost and the maker unknown, it has retained an idea of history in Stephen’s imagining because, by its nature of manufacture, it is tied to individual and bodily endeavour and craftsmanship. As he talked Stephen constantly moved his hand in a circular motion over and around the head to the stick, just as a walker would do. He rubbed the head and commented on the use-wear evident in years of hands rubbing and leaning on the stick: Many hands must have fashioned this stick. Whoever made it and those who used it, and I’m the latest in the line, so it’s nice to know that I’m part of what went before and I am also contributing to its fashioning and shape now as I use it. It gives you a strong feeling of connection. You can imagine the people who used it, what they might have been doing when they took it out, and how they must have felt about it to make sure that it survived all this time.

The physical objects are connected fundamentally to the physical body. They touched the body, and parts of the body (like sweat, and the curses emanating from a frustrated craftsman) were mingled with the object in a lasting connection. The fusing of materialities transformed these objects into something beyond functional commodities and converted them into items that had a life of their own through that association and physicality with the person who is now dead. When Pollak (2007: 226–27) uses her grandmother’s rolling pin, feeling ‘its texture and weight’ against her hands, it anchors her ‘in the past, yet continues to create memories for the future. The object becomes timeless.’ The intermingling of people and object through sensory memories creates a fragment of memory that can be grasped anew with each repeated interaction with a treasured object. The mingling of the senses to produce a remembered ‘whole’ was central to Sutton’s (2001) exploration of sensory memory of Greek islanders – the synaesthesia that occurs when people talk of tasting or hearing a smell.3 One fifty-year-old man, who had been living in Australia for many years, was visibly excited by the smells around him on a wet day when I accompanied him on a grave-visiting outing. Standing on a slight incline in a country churchyard on the shores of Carlingford Lough, George smiled as the salt spray from the sea brushed his face and hands: ‘There is nothing quite like that smell. And the wet grass. Now I feel as if I am really home. Just looking

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at my father’s grave here and smelling the earth and the sea. I can just see him here.’ George pulled his coat around him as he talked, as if to capture the smells and the touch of the spray. He opened his mouth and took a measured long and audible breath, tasting the smells as they touched him, then turned and laughed and gave a half deliberate, half involuntary shudder. The salt air and grass smells were not just mixed with the memories of his father; they were the evocative instigators of memory. The mixing of senses here produced a ‘wholeness’ (Sutton 2001: 75) of memory that synthesized those memories both cognitively and bodily. Here also were present MerleauPonty’s echoes (1964: 164) and Bachelard’s (1964 [1957]) reverberations that were carried in the ‘conversation’ of sensation and emotion between George and the living elements of sea spray and grass. The sense of taste is a powerful trigger and metaphor for memories and people. Kohn’s recipe for her mother’s pecan rolls is ‘a piece of material culture’ (2002: 20–21) that holds tastes and smells but, by being reconfigured through the physical migrations of the women in the family, also holds that family’s rich and varied history. Her own part in the baking of those rolls, in adapting the recipe while on fieldwork, is related as ‘a vibrant reminder of my roots’ and as something that centred Kohn ‘both at home and in the field’. When George tasted and smelt the sea spray, he was centering himself and his father and re-working and computing his histories. He was also hearing the sea and the memories that that evoked. What George was also sensing was place. The geographical setting of the graveyard was an important factor in placing his senses and his memories. As Feld (1996: 91) noted: ‘As places are sensed, senses are placed; as places makes sense, senses make place.’ George’s memories were anchored in the senses but also in the memory of those senses as these blurred and coalesced into one another (Seremetakis 1994: 28).

Sense, Emotion and Memory Senses and related emotions in relation to remembrance are dependent on a materiality that presents itself in many forms and combinations. This is not always an easy relationship and is determined by notions of culturally acceptable sounds, smells, sights, tastes, associations and display. The relationship of the living to the materiality of the dead is therefore complex and ambivalent. There is a mixture of attraction and repugnance and clear cultural rules and varying emotional and sensory responses to what things are appropriate to keep, touch and display. The bed sheets that have been used by a now deceased person or someone’s shoes are considered too intimate to be used by those who knew the dead person. To do so is to breach

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a boundary that offends the senses and affords a degree of embodiment that cannot be comfortably accommodated within the ‘norm’. In considering the subject-object divide, it is argued that these particular items have become too subjective and produce reactions of aversion similar to what Svašek (2007) discovered when bodies and body parts were too objectified in public display. The death mask and anatomical specimens were ‘out of place’ and beyond the accepted boundaries. But other objects, like the grandmother’s spectacles or a shoe last, play on that boundary and oscillate between ontological states. This is similar to Knappett’s (2005: 33–4) ideas of hybrid forms that are made possible by the human tendency to ‘co-opt inanimate objects into their physical and psychological operation’. In applying this to the way in which materiality acts on and with the senses, it is possible to see that agency ‘emerges reciprocally as humans and non-humans merge’ (Knappett 2005: 28). Yet intentionality and context are important determining factors. A continuum exists, therefore, that requires a balance between subject and object, and the parameters of that balance are culturally dependent and variable. Thus, we have seen that the senses play a major part in how people relate to artefacts and how touching, smelling, viewing, hearing and tasting can initiate emotional reactions and a wealth of memories. In explaining Cézanne’s notion of ‘nature on the inside’, Merleau-Ponty (1964: 163–64) realized the interconnections and the indivisibility between the body’s sensations and its sensing of phenomena. He also recognized that by paying attention to the ‘reverberations’ (Bachelard 1964 [1957]) that are instigated by materiality, we can listen to the ‘echo in our body’ that is ‘awakened’ and ‘welcomed’ by things that, in turn, make other things material (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 164). The stories connected to the dead are set in motion by the sensory engagements with the material objects. The greater the senses are foregrounded in these circumstances, then the greater seems to be the sentimental feeling evoked. The senses, however, can also be ambushed and taken unawares in unexpected places and situations, making remembrance also more visceral and tactile. These stories of the sudden jolting of memories disclose a world that is full of ghosts – not the quasi-material forms that are familiar from film and literature, but the ghosts of memory (Carsten 2007). They are ghosts that are ‘materialized’ through the perception of the senses that, in turn, instigate emotional reactions and a tumble of remembered interactions and people. They can be bittersweet, nostalgic or even disturbing. But they are always tangible by being embodied and are as much a part of the everyday lives of the people with whom I worked as are their interchanges with other living humans. As Damasio (2000) argued, there are ‘clear links among bodily feelings, emotions, consciousness, and cognition’ (cited by Geurts 2003: 198). The process of embodiment fuses the sensory worlds

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of the living with the dead and mingles artefacts and materiality with those senses and bodily activities. Csordas (1993: 138–39) talked of ‘attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others’. Ultimately it is sensation and its related emotions that set us on a path to particular memories. As Merleau-Ponty (2007 [1962]: 243) argued, the ‘perceptual’ and ‘motor’ sides of sensations are in communication with each other. In other words, sensations are the sensing of something. What that sensation articulates or how it is articulated (felt) is often reactive and involuntary but always rooted in memory and experience. The interconnections between the living and the dead that have been dealt with here through the prism of the senses will be examined in the next chapter in relation to how objects become inalienable items. Notes 1. ‘Spake’ is a colloquial for the word ‘speech.’ 2. Jan Palach was a Czech student who publicly committed suicide by self-immolation in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1969, in protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia the previous August by Warsaw Pact troops. Charles University in Prague, where Palach studied, maintains a digital archive about him as part of a multimedia project, http://www.janpalach.cz/en. 3. Sutton developed his concept of ‘wholeness’ from the work of Fernandez (1986), who envisaged a need for the revitalization of connectedness and relatedness in sensory experience amidst fragmentation in contemporary society.

Bibliography Bachelard, G. 1964 [1957]. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press: Boston. Benjamin, W. 1968 [1935]. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York: Schocken Books. Carsten, C. 2007. Ghosts of Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Csordas, T.J. 1993. ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. Damasio, A. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinmann. Douglas, M. 1966. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Edwards, E. 1999. ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Ansley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg. Feld, S. 1996. ‘Waterfalls of Song’, in S. Feld and K.H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Fernandez, J. 1986. Persuasions and Performances: The Play of Tropes in Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Geertz, C. 1980. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Geurts, K.L. 2003. ‘On Rocks, Walks and Talks in West Africa: Cultural Categories and Anthropology of the Senses’, Ethos 30(3): 178–98. Goddard, C. 1996. ‘The “Social Emotions” of Malay (Bahasa Melayu)’, Ethos 24(3): 426–64. Graeber, D. 2001. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. London and New York: Palgrave. Hallam, E. J. Hockey and G. Howarth. 1999. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge. Hallam, E., and J. Hockey. 2001. Death, Memory and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg. Hochschild, A. 1979. ‘Emotion Work: Feeling Rules and Social Structure’, American Journal of Sociology 85: 551–75. Hornik, J. 1992. ‘Tactile Stimulation and Consumer Response’, Journal of Consumer Research 19(3): 449–58. Humphrey, C. 2002. ‘Rituals of Death as a Context for Understanding Personal Property in Socialist Mongolia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8(1): 65–87. Knappett, C. 2005. Thinking through Material Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kohn, T. 2002. ‘Mom’s Pecan Rolls’, Anthropology Today 19(2): 20–21. Lakoff G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Leach, E. 1981. ‘A Poetics of Power’, New Republic 184: 14. Leavitt, J. 1996. ‘Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions’, American Ethnologist 23(3): 513–39. Lund, K. 2005. ‘Seeing in Motion and the Touching Eye: Walking Over Scotland’s Mountains’, Ethnofoor 18(1): 27–42. Lutz, C., and G. White. 1986. ‘The Anthropology of Emotion’, Annual Reviews in Anthropology 15: 405–36. Magowan, F. 2007. Melodies of Mourning: Music and Emotion in Northern Australia. Oxford: James Currey. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. The Primacy of Perception. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2007 [1962]. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. Middleton, D.R. 1989. ‘Emotional Style: The Cultural Ordering of Emotions’, Ethos 17(2): 187–201. Milton, K., and M. Svašek (eds). 2005. Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg. Myers, F.R. 1979. ‘Emotions and the Self: A Theory of Personhood and Political Order among Pintupi Aborigines’, Ethos 7(4): 343–70. Pollak, S. 2007. ‘The Rolling Pin’, in S. Turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Proust, M. 1981 (1913). Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Montcrieff and T. Kilmartin. New York: Vintage. Seremetakis, C.N. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stewart, S. 1999. ‘Prologue: From the Museum of Touch’, in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Ansley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation. Oxford: Berg. Stoller, P. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sutton, D. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts. Oxford: Berg. Svašek, M. 2007. ‘Moving Corpses: Emotions and Subject-Object Ambiguity’, in H. Wulff (ed.), The Emotions: A Cultural Reader. Oxford: Berg. Taussig, M. 1991. ‘Tactility and Distraction’, Cultural Anthropology 6(2): 147–53. ———. 1992. ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, Visual Anthropology Review 8(1): 15–28. Tonkin, E. 1992. Narrating Our Pasts: The Social Construction of Oral History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wulff, H. (ed.). 2007. The Emotions: A Cultural Reader. Oxford: Berg. Yee S. 2007. ‘The Archive’, in S. Turkle (ed.), Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

4



Objects of the Dead

Objects that once belonged to the deceased may be kept or distributed among family or friends after a death. This circulation of material items is closely related to the type of value ascribed to them and involves strategies and processes adopted by people to keep and control these former possessions that become mediators in negotiating relationships, boundaries and ontological states. It is argued that different types of value (monetary, sentimental or social) are dependent on circulation and that particular forms of inalienability can be ascribed in the varying connections between worth and distribution. It is envisaged that inalienability requires, de facto, characteristics of both value and circulation. Further, the boundaries of circulation, both physically and socially, are primary determinants of where an item may be placed along a continuum from alienable to inalienable. I examine what inalienability is and what makes an object inalienable, how things acquire value and what part circulation plays in rendering special status onto objects.

The Nature of Inalienability The concept of inalienability is grounded in Mauss’s essay on gift exchange in Melanesian communities. He referred to certain possessions as ‘indestructible’ (Mauss 1966 [1950]: 7) to differentiate those objects (such as Samoan marriage mats, Maori cloaks and the necklaces and armshells of the kula) as having particular properties that separate them from commercial trade transactions. These items possessed a particular type of value that precluded

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them from being sold. In exploring the Maussian concept, Weiner (1985: 210) argued that certain objects became inalienable as, according to Mauss, they ‘remained attached to their original owners even when they circulated among other people’. At the centre of Mauss’s construction of inalienability is that attachment and how an emotional and relational value is created through the history of objects in particular circumstances. In the cases cited by Mauss (1966 [1950]) items have particular cultural, sentimental or ritual value and are objects that cannot be sold, but are either kept or passed (as in the case with kula valuables) to certain people along geographically demarcated routes (Kockelman 2007: 364). For Mauss, a thing given ‘is not inert. It is alive and often personified’; it is ‘not inactive’ (Mauss 1966 [1950]: 10–12). While these are particular observations on the Maori concept of the hau, it will be shown in examples below that objects in contemporary communities can take on affective qualities that, as Weiner (1985: 212) has said, transcend their materiality. Unlike the more rigid dichotomy between gift and commodity elaborated by Mauss (1966 [1950]) or the more essentially ‘closed’ systems that Weiner (1985) analyses in Melanesian communities, the data here presented will show a more fluid concept of value and circulation, which permeates to the ordinary and particular but within certain cultural rules and norms. The concept of the Maori hau envisages a spirit that resides in persons and things (Mauss 1966 [1950]; Weiner 1985). The examples below show that objects do not have this inherent ‘spirit’. Rather, a special quality of connectedness to someone is created after a death when meaning is projected onto an item that then comes to symbolize aspects of the personality of the deceased.

Value and Inalienability For an item to have the attribute of inalienability it must retain some essence of the giver (Mauss 1966 [1950]), while alienable can be defined in terms of objects that retain no embodiment of the giver/seller – thus a commodity (Carrier 1995a: 86–88; Gregory 1982). A strict demarcation of either gift or commodity has, of course, been critiqued by, among others, Herrmann (1997) and Gregory (1997). More recently Bird-David and Darr (2009) have argued that gift and commodity are often hybridized in sales promotions in supermarkets (a ‘two for one’ offer) yet, following Latour (1993), postulate that these categories ‘are re-affirmed as separate modes of exchange within the very context in which their hybrids proliferate and diversify’ (2009: 305). It is the notion of hybridity and the part played by ‘agentive social actors … to establish a relation space’ (Bird-David and Darr 2009: 304) that are of interest in considering how attachments to former objects of

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the dead can be used to mediate relationships and result in a conflation of boundaries. It must first be decided, however, when that ‘essence’ is manifest. For the people with whom I worked, an object had the ‘essence’ of someone if it encapsulated the defining aspects or characteristics of a deceased person. This ‘essence’ is not a precluding attribute of an object but is manufactured through meaning and is one of the most powerful reasons why material items are held in special regard. Thus, an old decorated jug (illustration 4.1) kept by a nephew has no inherent ‘auntness’ in its basic material form – the jug is just a jug – but it comes to symbolize this aunt and how she lived through the associations and stories that the nephew connects with the object. Within the realm of domestic and personal belongings there are no things that can be categorized as inalienable from their production. All sorts of objects, whether or not they have commercial value, therefore, move in and out of different statuses along a spectrum from commodity to special possession (Appadurai 1986: 13; Carrier 1993, 1995a, 1995b; Curasi et al. 2004: 611; Herrmann 1997: 910–30). The process of an object being converted from commodity to possession is ‘the means whereby an enduring and intimate relation between an object and an individual is initiated and perpetuated’ (Carrier 1995b: 106–24). Inalienability is bound up with context, and material items can move along a hierarchy of the concept to a state of absolute inalienability where things are removed from circulation for both the living and the dead (Thomas 1991: 5; Weiss 1997: 171). There are a number of different ways in which objects can become inalienable.

Illustration 4.1 Aunt Jinny’s jug

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If one of the determining factors is value, then what type of value is being ascribed and how? Value lies in meaning, and items become cherished possessions by means of varying routes that ultimately depend on the meanings attached to things (Curasi et al. 2004; Price et al. 2000). In the context of the data it will be shown, as Weiss (1997: 171) argues, that inalienable possessions are not particular types of objects but things that are made inalienable in specific contexts. In the context of death the meaning of things can be transformed and thus facilitate a change in their status. The examples below are drawn from more than 150 interviews with a wide range of individuals and groups (appendix, tables 4–8). People related their connections to the loss of friends or relatives in different kinds of situations: the deaths of elderly relatives or neighbours, infants or young people, or their own contemporaries. The types of deaths ranged from natural causes and premature illnesses to accidents, and while the particular circumstances of death or age of the deceased did not affect processes of inalienability, the types of objects kept necessarily differed. It was the significance of objects that displayed particular connections to the dead and the living that were afforded special status. Various objects may be kept after someone has died because they have particular resonance for the surviving family members. Remembering through these former possessions can be diverse and idiosyncratic. While almost anything can serve as a keepsake or object of memory, treasured items attain a special quality that rests on the ‘private or personal meanings’ that are ‘central to their worth’ (Belk 1992: 339; Curasi et al. 2004: 609). Objects will become inalienable because of their ability to affect emotions and memories. In the context of meaning for the living, an item moves into a category removed from commercial considerations due to associations that are relational to the person who keeps the object (Weiner 1985). So objects become inalienable through symbolic associations with the dead and are tangible records of relationships and events. Having meanings for the living manifests in how people talk about the objects they keep. A common theme with these items is their ability (for the living) to define the person and encapsulate the ‘essence’ of who they were in life. This differs from the Maussian concept that envisages an a priori relationship between thing and person that is recognized throughout a particular society. The ethnographic examples described here illustrate how the working of meanings into an object creates value and imparts a sense of the person through the retelling of the stories attached to someone’s life. The stories and objects are bound inextricably and are specific to a particular family or group. A striking example of this is a piece of coal that is kept by one family as a material symbol of a deceased relative. Jane, a 48-year-old health

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worker, keeps a lump of coal that belonged to her father-in-law. She and her husband Joe regularly move the coal around the house, as Jane explained: Sometimes it’s on top of the dresser in the kitchen; sometimes it’s on the piano. It’s been here for a few years now and it’s part of the house. Joe’s father was a coal merchant and that was the piece of coal he brought into the house the last New Year’s Day he was alive, so it’s special.1 Sometimes it even sits on the oil tank. I would die if anything happened to it, but it’s just a lump of coal. Yet it means so much more because it tells you who Joe’s dad was.

What makes this lump of coal so special to the family seems to depend on a number of intertwined associations that allow the artefact to serve as a symbolic representation of a deceased relative and to reinforce notions and traditions in relation to the dead. The piece of coal in Jane and Joe’s house not only conjures up memories of the father as a working merchant but is also tied into the magical symbolism of pagan rituals connected to the start of the New Year. The combination of the practical and the magical entwined with the dual symbolism of ending and renewal has transformed the coal into a special object, imbued with sentimental value. Both Jane and Joe know ‘it is just a lump of coal’ but it means so much more to them because of its associations with the deceased. The artefact is also a metaphor for durability and change, an expression of continuity in the face of change wrought by death. The sentiment and emotion attached to it depend on the associated stories of its social life and that of the dead. No other piece of coal would hold the same set of meanings for this couple. The lump of coal serves not only as a memory trigger for specific events in this family’s history but is also a symbol of relationships among an extended family and community. Its value lies in myriad meanings and encapsulates a rich sense of Joe’s father as a person. Its movement around the house can perhaps tell us something about how the family think and feel about Joe’s father. Both Jane and Joe recount different reasons for this – practically to ensure that it is not mistakenly used in the fire and more meaningfully to keep Joe’s father involved in the daily comings and goings of the household. Its display in either the kitchen or the living room makes it visible to family and visitors. In this way the coal not only serves as a memory trigger for specific events in the family’s history but is also a symbol of relationships among an extended family and community. Death has transformed its meaning, value and status. Death also plays on the boundaries between object and subject in this example as the coal oscillates between ontological states in this fusing of boundaries. Death will thus reconfigure that status of an object as a possession. As Weiss (1997: 165–70) points out, ‘A person’s death has the capacity to transform the nature of their possessions’ and this is true ‘for even the most mun-

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dane of goods’. Death as transformative is evidenced in the case of an elderly woman in South Armagh who keeps a butchering knife that belonged to her grandfather. He was known locally as a pig butcher and would have travelled around rural areas to slaughter and butcher pigs. Olive recalls that her father also used the knife in butchering, and she keeps it in the kitchen drawer close to hand: This knife. The blade is fairly worn now on one side. It’s never used now. In fact I was going to throw it out but then I stopped myself. It belonged to my grandfather. There was a wooden handle on it and it got worn away over the years, so my husband replaced the wood. He made that handle for it. So, no, I wouldn’t like to throw it away. It has bits of all the men in my life so it’s important. I can see bits of all of them in that one knife.

The old butchering knife also fixes memories to places in the South Armagh landscape when Olive remembers how her grandfather travelled the area to work: ‘He would have been all over this area and that knife would have been in many a different yard! It’s funny to think of all the people and all the places it would have seen. I still talk to people who remember him coming at certain times to do the slaughtering.’ As a material symbol of Olive’s grandfather the knife also encompasses his way of life and his movements through the landscape. It fixes him in place, in the geography of a particular location and in the mind of Olive. As a connection to Olive’s father and husband the butchering knife, set in its place in the kitchen drawer, also fixes these men within her house and the memories that it holds. This is similar to Kahn’s realization of being fixed in the memory of the Wamira of Papua New Guinea when she returned after a few years to her field site. She found that her house and all her possessions had been kept and displayed just as she had left them and realized that she had ‘fixed Wamira in my mind [just as] Wamirans had fixed me in their place’ (Kahn 1996: 189). Through the associations and stories both the piece of coal and the butchering knife are items that have moved along the continuum from alienable to inalienable, and this is dependent on the meanings attached to them by the living. The objects will set in motion memories and associations of who the person was and their role in life but, whilst cherished, there is a recognition that they are still objects. Similar to the inalienable possessions of the Lio of Eastern Indonesia, they are ‘incorporated into people’s identity … so people are not reduced to things, but things are incorporated in people’ (Howell 1989: 435). This is illustrated when a special object can render a whole life and set of memories as inalienable. A value is placed on a memory that is tied to particular conditions and use of an object. A young musician (Richard) who died in a road accident is remembered by his older brother Dave primarily through a mandolin that once belonged

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to him. Although Dave is also a musician he does not play the instrument; it lies encased in its box on top of a set of bookshelves in Dave’s study: ‘I wouldn’t play it. I keep it there. Somehow I wouldn’t feel that it needs to be played. I suppose it’s remembering him in a certain way, playing that mandolin, and I wouldn’t want to disturb that.’ Not playing the mandolin enables him to capture Richard in his imagination, and the memory of time, space, person and object are entwined. To play the mandolin would break the image and render it irrecoverable. The non-use of the instrument is a fundamental factor in its status of inalienability. Associations that are temporally fixed as to when it was last played enhance its value; the remembrance of its sound is made more poignant now by its silence. This instrument is, however, an object that arguably never was alienable. It was made for Richard and played by him for many years, but its status has encroached towards total inalienability since his death. It will never be played again in Dave’s lifetime, but had Richard lived, it may have been replaced for a better instrument or have already been passed on to a younger family member. What the above examples illustrate is how a death has refigured the meanings of objects. Death acted to halt their destruction and produced an imperative to retain them as special possessions. Objects that held some special meaning for the dead, things that were cherished by them in life, also have an enhanced inalienable status when someone dies. The belongings of the dead take on a particular significance that is brought sharply into focus as the living now confront the tangible material existence of a deceased loved one. Thus the realization of the loss of the physical person is coupled with the acknowledgement that someone’s ‘special things’ have acquired a deeper sentimental value as the living feel a sense of duty to retain certain items. This is illuminated when people talk of holding onto things because they feel the dead would want that to happen. ‘I wouldn’t like to think that it would be lost or forgotten about’, one man said of his father’s microscope. ‘It was important to him; he kept it since he was a child.’ And an elderly woman has her husband’s Bible on the table in the living room. ‘It’s just there where he always kept it. That was his most precious possession and it means that much more to me now, to know I have it around and what it meant to him is not forgotten.’ A sixty-year-old woman in South Armagh, Brigi, related how her sister keeps her dead husband’s coats because he was ‘especially fond of them’. She has tried three times to get rid of them but can’t bring herself to do so. ‘Alan liked those coats so much; she just can’t seem to part with them because of that.’ To keep the inalienable status of the treasured possessions of the dead requires more than physical retention of items. The worth of objects and other things does not reside in their monetary value but in how they are perceived emotionally and culturally by the people who take on the curatorial

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roles. The relativeness of inalienability lies in the association the objects have with the person who has died. To keep things that the dead were fond of is also a way of keeping them ‘near’ and honouring how they felt about the objects in their lives. One man talked about the rose bushes growing in his garden (illustration 4.2) that he took from the house he grew up in after his mother died: They were growing around the front of the house. They remind me of all sorts of things. The smell of them, the fragrance would bring you back to people. My mother planted them. There is a very special smell of them. And they were used in Illustration 4.2. Pink and white buttonholes for weddings and funerals, roses that now grow in a new home and put in a jam jar to bring a bit of fragrance into the kitchen. So having them here is very important – that link with the old house, not only with the past but also with the people who would have been affected by them. I think she would like the idea that they are here now with me. Her roses, still growing. It’s like keeping faith with her.

The emotional engagement with items that may have little or no monetary value has been recognized by Finch and Mason (2000: 148), who found that their British interviewees were more attached to individual keepsakes than to monetary resources. There was ‘a clear stake in the symbolic significance of these items’. Elaine, whose mother had died a year before our interview, is particularly anxious to keep a small handmade booklet of photographs. Bound in thick card with hand-drawn flowers on the cover, it was made by her mother over a number of years to chronicle her life. The pages are peppered with dried sprigs of edelweiss from skiing trips and old blackand-white photographs of Elaine’s parents and grandparents, on walking trips, at home and with their children. Towards the back of the album is a picture of Elaine, her husband and their four children. Elaine told me how her mother had decorated the pages in the album: ‘She dried those flowers and stuck them into the album around the photos. I find that really special. And the photos are of a certain quality that you don’t get anymore. This was something special to her. I have to hold onto it. It is something for my children as well.’ This photograph album is irreplaceable. It is physical evidence of time, place and people and is ‘a corporally indexical association … a testament

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to important life events’ (Curasi et al. 2004: 610). Elaine’s album tells part of her family story, and it is the value placed on belonging that she wishes to impart to her children. Edwards and Hart (2004: 1) have argued that all photographs are ‘three-dimensional things’ and possess a materiality that encompasses moments in time and space that are fused with ‘subjective, embodied and sensuous interactions’. Each photograph in Elaine’s album, with its particular story and memories, is also inextricably linked in meaning to the materiality of the album. As Edwards and Hart (2004: 2) argue, the images alone are not the sole site of meaning, but attention must also be focused on how the photographs are presented or (as above) are materially dressed in the hand-made and decorated album. The attention given to presentation and how photographs are used are primary factors in signalling their social significance and are bound up with the images to ‘create the associative values placed on them’ (Edwards and Hart 2004: 2). Elaine deliberately restricts public display of the album but has decided that she will show it to her children whenever she feels ‘they are ready to appreciate the history’ the photographs encapsulate.

Circulation and Inalienability The circulation of objects after a death can take a number of forms. To include display as part of circulation widens the definition of sharing and involves considering the conscious decisions made by people on how and why some things are displayed and others not. Display involves allowing access to items for people who visit a home, an access that is not restricted to kin, so such items are subjected to a wider social circulation, but do not necessarily involve their physical (re)distribution. The decisions to put objects on view in more public rooms in a home involves also a wider circulation of the stories and associations of those items and initiates a diffusion of special memories. The corollary of restricting physical access to items necessarily draws more defined boundaries around intimate connections and relationships. The evidence from the range of interviews, conversations and observations in people’s homes shows that what is displayed or not depends on how much people want to express their feelings and stories to others. Artefacts on display invite comments and questions, serving as entrées into general conversations with people new to someone’s home and as a way of reminiscing with others more familiar with a family’s history and circumstances. They are also used to relate connections to family and place, as this is the reason so many of these items are kept. Large items of furniture are almost universally displayed, unless there is no room for a piece in a house.

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A grandfather clock belonging to a young family in South Armagh sits comfortably in the corner of their farmhouse kitchen. Jamie explains that it had to be bought from an uncle in England: He made such a fuss about what it would cost to transport it, and eventually I offered to buy it from him. We got someone up the road, a local watchmaker, to repair it for us. It had originally belonged to my father. It’s eighteenth century, and it does work. A lot of people say it just looks like we had made the corner for it.

The clock is part of this family’s history in a particular geographical area, something that Jamie is anxious to pass on to his children. He had particular reasons for wanting it, not only because it had belonged to his father. ‘I moved back here after some years abroad and to get the clock back to its original home sort of made me feel more connected. It’s good for the children also to know the story about it.’ While Jamie’s clock is on view in the family kitchen and holds sentimental value for him in terms of memory and history it is also an item that is of considerable monetary worth. ‘I suppose it’s an expensive thing but I wouldn’t sell it or like to see it going out of the family. It’s not the money that’s important.’ To keep items out of circulation encompasses various strategies. It can entail restricted access, such as examples where special pieces are kept in a dressing table drawer and hidden from wider public view. Jamie’s’ wife, Christine, keeps three gold pens that belonged to her father. They are housed in a special leather case and tucked into a drawer in her bedroom. Christine explains that she likes to keep the pens out of public view because then she knows where they are at all times. ‘And they wouldn’t really mean anything to anyone else and I wouldn’t like other people opening the case and looking at them. They are too special for that.’ She admitted to being annoyed on one occasion when Jamie used the pens and says she is keeping them for her boys when they are older. The pens hold very special memories of Christine’s father and are rendered more inalienable than the clock because of their restricted use and display. The pens fall into definitions of inalienable wealth postulated by Curasi et al (2004: 609) as things that pass down through generations and are kept within a kin group. The pens are objects that have acquired inalienability and may at some point lose that status. But more intimate items, like a lock of hair, are inalienable by their very nature (Kockelman 2007: 343), particular to a person, and are never kept on public view. A Newry woman, Anne, keeps locks of hair from several generations of her family. She believes the locks of hair have particular power to connect her to those who have died, and these keepsakes are of particular importance to her. Locks from her grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother are enclosed in a

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gold locket that was passed down to her. Anne keeps pieces of hair from her own parents neatly folded in an envelope in her bedside cabinet, and she explained their importance for her: There is a power in these things and certainly I know that if there was a fire in this house today that would be one of the first things that I would go and get. It wouldn’t be my jewellery; it would be the two envelopes with my parents’ hair in them. And I will divide the locks up and give a piece each to my two boys and my daughter for when I’m gone.

The hair acquires properties of sentimental value by the act of cutting and keeping. Its exclusiveness is enhanced by its physical separation from public view and its future inalienability cemented by Anne’s decision to divide the hair between her three children at her own death. To curtail circulation extends also to withholding items from being sold or sent to a charity or junk shop. The control of the circulation of items may also mean allowing something to be moved around within clearly defined parameters. This can manifest itself in situations where objects or items of clothing are restricted in use and distribution and operates along a spectrum of availability. Price et al. (2000: 179–210) have analysed how older consumers select objects to bequeath to their heirs and form certain strategies to do this in order to transfer ‘both the objects and their meanings to their targeted heirs’. The curatorial role requires a sense of responsibility towards possessions instilled with ‘strong mnemonic value’ (Price et al. 2000: 179– 210). They argue that heirlooms are made through conscious acts. There is evidence that these strategies are used by people to ensure that objects will go to selected people. But circulation can also be tightly restricted to a single family unit, and it is the restriction that ensures ongoing and accumulative inalienability. Conor, a 48-year-old man from South Down, has made definite decisions on how to keep and display various treasured items of which he is custodian. He is currently involved in transferring family cine film onto video and DVD. His family has been involved in amateur dramatics in the area for the past one hundred years, and his father and grandfather took photographs and cine film of productions. Among his collection is early film footage of his father as a young boy taking part in a musical production. Conor was adamant that these archives would not be widely circulated: A great many of the photographs I have came from two brothers who took pictures at productions. I was lucky to get these and I am the only person who has access to them. And I have put most of them onto CD. The local museum has asked me to do an exhibition of the archives I have, but there are lots of photographs I won’t be showing. And a lot of stuff I won’t be putting into the museum archive. These pictures are special and were given to me because of my family connection. I don’t want someone else to make use of them. I’m reluctant

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to put a lot of my old cine film permanently into the museum or to let them have permanent copies, as I don’t want them to be copied or redistributed.

Conor justifies his decisions regarding the archives on the basis of family exclusivity: ‘These are very much my family things, and I don’t want everyone to have them. I will put on the exhibition, I have already done a small one, but I don’t want the things to be permanently out of my control.’ In his insistence and strategies to restrict circulation, Conor’s material comes close to Weiner’s first class of inalienability – those things that are never circulated (1985: 212). The loss of the items would diminish the family identity, and some of them will never be shown outside the family or even given to anyone apart from his son or daughters, who were also involved in amateur dramatics. In this way they are totally inalienable. He cannot lose control of them, even temporarily – for people to copy the material would also diminish it, render it less valuable in terms of its rarity and associations. These are things that were given to him because of his family connection and can only be circulated within a narrow kin group. It can be seen as a more intensely controlled form of how kula valuables are moved only to certain people or circulate along particular routes (Singh Uberoi 1971). The imperative to circumscribe circulation for Conor arises from his belief that the objects he keeps encapsulate his ancestry (Liep 1986: 158–59). Adrian and Greta, a couple in their sixties from Greenveigh, have given several items away to family members. The walls of their home are lined with photographs of friends and family. During the past couple of years they have begun to give away large items of furniture to their children. A number of these pieces came from Adrian’s mother, and he talked about one piece in particular that he was fond of: I had always wanted her dresser and she used to joke that she would leave it to me, and she did. I hung onto it for ten years but the house is getting too cluttered now. One of our girls loves it and I knew she would have wanted it. So I decided to let her have it now, to enjoy while she is young. But she is not allowed to sell it or throw it out. It’s a part of my mother. I would hate to think it was somewhere or with someone I didn’t know. It keeps her presence, perpetuates her. She’s not far away and it’s the same with all the things. We gave some chairs and tables to the boys, and they’re under orders to keep them in the family too.

Keeping the furniture or other objects or giving them within the close family circle is seen as a way of keeping the dead close. As Greta explained: ‘You keep the people who have passed on near to you. The things help because you can tell the stories of what they used and how they used them.’ Two of the women interviewed felt it was important to keep objects that will be given to their children as a way of establishing roots with the maternal side of their family. These women, who both live hundreds of miles away

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from where they grew up, talked of the importance of instilling a sense of history of their side of the family in their children. Lucy (aged twenty-eight) said: ‘I don’t want the maternal side of the family to get subsumed so I think it is important that things from that side go to the girls so that they are aware of their history and their ancestors.’ Angela, who is thirty-eight, spoke of why she felt it necessary that her family was remembered: I have already given my children things that came from their grandparents – crockery, linens and some jewellery. And I did it because they don’t generally know much about my family. They never knew my father or my grandparents. The older I get the more strongly I feel that I would like them to have part of that. Not just to know their father’s side, but mine also. It’s important to do that because if I go maybe all of us (my family) will disappear if I don’t instil a sense of it into my children. They have individual presents that they would have got from my mother when she was alive. My oldest boy has a stone pine marten and he has taken it away to London with him now since she died – and he hadn’t played with it since he was a child.

Angela also felt an imperative to place her family in history: ‘It’s about acknowledging your ancestors and letting your children know that they have roots and history. With other things that I have they do bring up certain memories and stories, and I feel a responsibility to hand down those stories, to record them in some way, so that the things keep their sentimental value.’ She added that it was comforting to have things from older people who had died, as it ‘gives me and the children a sense of belonging and acceptance’. Things that hold less value in terms of family history, sentiment or money will be distributed outside of the kin circle. This social circulation has also degrees of meaning and is used as a way of including friends within a familial circle, as an expression of gratitude for a relationship or help given during a time of bereavement, and also as a way of reintegrating the deceased and perpetuating their presence among the living community. So items may pass to close friends or further onwards to charity or junk shops. At each of these stages value takes on different levels of meaning. Items are rendered less inalienable from the family the further along the chain of circulation that they move. Paradoxically they have much deeper qualities of inalienability for the receiver. A young woman of twenty-five, Bernie, related how she holds onto a jacket that belonged to a friend who died tragically of cancer at a young age: Some months after her death her youngest sister came to visit. She said she wanted me to have something of Rachel’s and thought I would like this particular item. I remember being very touched that she would think of me and that she had put this aside for me when clearing out Rachel’s clothes. I used to wear it a lot the first couple of years after Rachel’s death. But then I stopped wearing it. I hung it

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up in a cupboard in the hallway, and I see it when I open that cupboard every day. I have things in my house she bought me and they hang in the kitchen, a stained glass ornament and a dish. The coat reminds me of her in a very physical way. I can see her hunched up against the cold, with her hair flying behind her, always in a rush, with that big smile that was so typical of her. To know that she wore this jacket, that it was next to her skin, makes it special, like I’m still touching her physically even though she is gone.

Other relatives had to be sure that items of clothing went to people whom they knew and who knew their loved one. Two sisters from Omeath, Co. Louth, Mary and Ann (aged fifty-eight and fifty-seven), were reluctant to allow their mother’s collection of headscarves to become ‘anonymous’ clutter in a local jumble sale. As Mary pointed out: We had a lot of headscarves of my mother’s, good ones, the kind of scarves that you could put around your shoulders. When she died we didn’t want them to just go to anybody, and we didn’t want to throw them out either or into a charity shop. We decided one day to take them down to the local community centre when the pensioners were having their day club. We gave them out to some of the older people we knew, so we felt better that they were going to people we knew.

They felt this was important: Because for us it was something we thought our mother would have liked. It also would have been too anonymous to just give them to a shop or a sale and not know where they were going. It would have been as if we didn’t care where her stuff went. I don’t know, maybe for some people that is okay, but we needed to feel we could still have some connection with the things and whom they went to.

The above examples and discussion have concentrated on what I would term aspects of ‘positive’ inalienability. As seen in the previous chapter, the shoes and bed sheets that were associated with the dead evoked revulsion from family members who expressed an unwillingness to keep them. They are thrown out or torn into strips to be given to charity ‘rag’ bins. I argue that this is an example of ‘negative’ inalienability, where value is perceived as polluting and unacceptable because of the nearness of association with the body. This aspect of inalienability has not been considered in the literature. It differs from the value of objects that can be relegated to a commodity or items that no longer have a narrative or personal history. The shoes and bed sheets have an immediate and vivid history, a history that is too close in intimacy and time to allow them any positive connotations. The temporal aspect of value along with the associated narratives of objects is an important deciding factor in remembrance and inalienability that permeates all types of remembrance, and different types of circulation and value are intrinsic aspects of inalienability.

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Conclusion This chapter has examined how value and circulation are interrelated within the concept of inalienability. While accepting the arguments that objects can oscillate between statuses (Appadurai 1986; Carrier 1993; Curasi et al. 2004; Gregory 1982; Herrmann 1997), I contend that inalienability can be manufactured through a process that can be separated into stages. The act of selection is taken as a first stage and progresses to keeping or giving, then receiving and finally to displaying, wearing or putting away. This initial stage also raises issues of how the objects of the dead are separated or discarded. It has been seen that various items are kept or are distributed to friends and relatives depending on the meanings they have for the living or had for the dead. Objects are also selected that, for the living, encapsulate the personality of the deceased. Other items may be given to neighbours or work colleagues (as in house clearances, as examined in chapter 2) or given to charity shops or pensions clubs, as shown in examples here. All of these items are kept within a realm of family or neighbourhood relationships. There are also the things that are discarded, like the bed sheets or bits and pieces that no longer hold particular associations or memories. These may be forgotten bank statements tucked into a drawer or worn-out shoes or household paraphernalia that are viewed as solely functional that have outlived their stories or never had any special attachment. Miller and Parrott (2009: 511), in their study of loss and material culture in a South London street, argue that objects can be used to mediate loss and separation. They consider how there is an ‘economy of relationships’ (Miller and Parrott 2009: 513) that is attended to through the processes of keeping or discarding objects, and they tie this to the necessity of economizing memory, as not everything can be kept or remembered. What happens, they argue, is that a process of forgetting is put in place through divestment of certain objects in favour of others to result in an idealized memory that is weighted towards the happier and positive attributes of a person or situations for the bereaved (Miller and Parrott 2009: 507). These selections, based on positive associations, confirm the data presented here in how and why people make some of their choices in keeping or discarding items. Aside from the initial stage of selection, the rest of the stages of inalienability fall within circulation. In all these stages there is a cumulative effect, with meaning poured onto the object at each juncture. For inalienability to operate there must be certain criteria: meaning (which is along the spectrum of value and is created by various types of circulation), context and relationship between people. While these criteria fit in a broad sense with previous literature (e.g. Feil et al. 1982; Herrmann 1997; Liep 1986; Price et al. 2000), the data presented here explore the concept at a more micro level,

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with an emphasis on the specificity of transformations of meaning in particular geographical and cultural settings. The initiator of the process is death, and the dynamics of meaning and circulation of objects that that precipitates rests on cultural notions of a desire to retain a physicality that has been lost. This is accomplished by choosing material items to be distributed and by projecting meaning onto them. The result is that they function as tangible reminders and symbols of the deceased. The control of circulation enhances the value of items in terms of sentiment, family tradition and exclusiveness, and in this is not dissimilar to the strict geographical and social control of kula valuables (Malinowski 1922; Singh Uberoi 1971; Weiner 1985). There is, however, in the ethnographic literature on Melanesia a concentration on a central concept of the gift (Gregory 1982; Mauss 1966 [1950]). The objects and other items considered in the Irish context are not regarded as gifts in the Western understanding of a gift as a present. What is given or kept among people in contemporary Irish communities are mementos or keepsakes. A gift can be viewed within a spectrum of reciprocity, and Weiner (1985: 212) has contended that inalienability is tied to reciprocity. In the data presented above, the notion of reciprocity is not envisaged by people after they have passed on an item. Rather, the giving of a memento can be seen as the end act of reciprocity for a relationship that endured during life. The things given to family members are markers of kin boundaries, those to friends and neighbours are in recognition of time given through friendship, and those to charities as ways of ensuring that certain items are kept in circulation as useful, functional items. The giving in these particular circumstances is not, contra Weiner (1985) and as Thomas (1991: 30–31) has recognized, a principle of exchange. In a general sense Weiner’s contention that inalienable possessions must have the capacity to ‘endure beyond the lives of humans’ (1992: 37) is applicable if related to how inalienability is lost when sentimental value does not endure beyond a particular person. One illustrative example of this process is of a concert ticket that is kept by a young man in Newry. It was given to him by a cousin who was killed in a road accident before they could attend the concert. ‘I keep it because he bought it for me and we were very close. No one else sees it and it won’t mean anything to anyone when I die. I don’t talk about it really.’ Kula valuables, Samoan mats or Maori cloaks are understood as special and inalienable by the whole of those societies, but there is no comparable universal recognition of the examples considered in the Irish context of death. Neither is the data presented here comfortably within the realm of moveable statuses and possessions elaborated by Carrier (1993) when considering the dichotomy of commodities and possessions. The material items, which are transferred in meaning and space after a death, may be individualistic and idiosyncratic, but they are circulated within a set of

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rules that stretch to encompass a social network and are viewed within a wider cosmology of life and death. The imperative to hold onto physicality resonates with Christian religious beliefs of an afterlife and with particular notions that the dead be kept a part of the family and community. The relationship between value and circulation is in inverse proportion. The giving and receiving of items after a death are indicators of relationships among the living and are practical strategies for affirming social boundaries and renewing or initiating connections (see Singh Uberoi 1971: 69). Death transforms the meanings of objects, and behind the notion of holding onto material things is the cultural value of holding onto the dead, perpetuating their existence in life. Relationships are also transformed at death; work has to be done on renewing the social network, and part of this work is in the giving and receiving of things. What value is placed on a relationship is transferred also to an object, and this value can be specific to a memory and a person. Thus, inalienable possessions are used in kinship and social networks. Similar to how Cappelletto (1998: 379) describes the jewels in the Bagolino carnival, they are transferable objects, ‘which pass from one generation to the next; they are impregnated with emotional qualities joining together the present owners with the past ones, and they condense the person’s social identity’. The data here have been used to consider the value and circulation of objects across divisions of gender, age and social status. Within the geographically contained area of the study, distinct patterns on how items are distributed and how value is ascribed have emerged. The giving and receiving of mementos, keepsakes or heirlooms serve to cement family and community relationships and heal the particular unities that have been rent by death. Material items are also used to establish and cement a family’s and a social group’s presence within a geographical area, and the inclusion of deceased loved ones is an important imperative in deeply rooted ideas of a sense of place. The overriding desire to ‘keep the dead’ as an integral part of that severed kin and social group is played out through the handling of their material possessions and the carefully circumscribed manner in which they are distributed. The next chapter examines the public manifestation of remembrance and discusses the differences between the domestic and public modes of remembering. Note 1. Bringing coal or turf into a house on New Year’s Day is part of a tradition called ‘First Footing’ that is practised in parts of Ulster, Scotland and the northeast of England. The idea is that the first person to come into your house on New Year’s Day should be a dark-haired male who brings a piece of coal and/or something

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to eat or drink, to symbolize good luck for the household for the coming year. Joe’s father came from Belfast where First Footing would have been widely practised.

Bibliography Appadurai, A. (ed.). 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Belk, R. 1992. ‘Moving Possessions: An Analysis Based on Personal Documents from the 1847–1869 Mormon Migration’, Journal of Consumer Research 19(3): 339–61. Bird-David, N., and A. Darr. 2009. ‘Commodity, Gift and Mass-Gift: On GiftCommodity Hybrids in Advanced Mass Consumption Cultures’, Economy and Society 38(2): 304–25. Cappelletto, F. 1998. ‘Kinship Festivals’, Social Anthropology 6(3): 365–79. Carrier, J.G. 1993. ‘The Rituals of Christmas Giving’, in D. Miller (ed.), Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1995a. ‘Maussian Occidentalism: Gift and Commodity Systems’, in J.G. Carrier (ed.), Occidentalisms: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon. ———. 1995b. Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700. London and New York: Routledge. Curasi, C.F., L. Price and E.J. Arnould. 2004. ‘How Individuals’ Cherished Possessions Become Families’ Inalienable Wealth’, Journal of Consumer Research 31(3): 609–22. Edwards, E., and J. Hart (eds). 2004. Photographs, Objects, Histories: On the Materiality of Images. London: Routledge. Feil, D.K., F.H. Damon and C.A. Gregory. 1982. ‘Alienating the Inalienable’, Man (NS) 17(2): 340–45. Finch, J., and J. Mason. 2000. Passing On: Kinship and Inheritance in England. New York: Routledge. Gregory, C.A. 1982. Gifts and Commodities. London: Academic Press. ———. 1997. Savage Money: The Anatomy and Politics of Commodity Exchange. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Herrmann, G.M. 1997 ‘Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the US Garage Sale?’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 910–30. Howell, S. 1989. ‘Of Persons and Things: Exchange and Valuables Among the Lio of Eastern Indonesia’, Man (NS) 24(3): 419–438. Kahn, M. 1996. ‘Your Place and Mine: Sharing Emotional Landscapes in Wamira, Papua New Guinea’, in S. Feld and K. Basso (eds), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press. Kockelman, P. 2007. ‘Inalienable Possession and Personhood in a Q’eqchi-Mayan Community’, Language in Society 36: 343–69. Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Liep, J. 1986. ‘Further Comments on “Inalienable Wealth”’, American Ethnologist 13(1): 158–59.

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Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York: Dutton. Mauss, M. 1966 [1950]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West Ltd. Miller, D., and F. Parrott. 2009. ‘Loss and Material Culture in South London’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS) 15(3): 502–19. Price, L., E.J. Arnould and C.F. Curasi. 2000. ‘Older Consumers’ Disposition of Special Possessions’, Journal of Consumer Research 27(2): 179–201. Singh Uberoi, J.P. 1971. Politics of the Kula Ring: An Analysis of the Findings of Bronislaw Malinowski. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Thomas, N. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Weiner, A. 1985. ‘Inalienable Wealth’, American Ethnologist 12(2): 210–27. ———. 1992. Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving. Oxford: University of California Press. Weiss, B. 1997. ‘Forgetting Your Dead: Alienable and Inalienable Objects in Northwest Tanzania’, Anthropological Quarterly 70(4): 164–72.

5



Collective Remembrance

This chapter considers collective remembrance events that are held at different times of the year in various parts of the fieldwork area. I concentrate on the public face of remembrance and examine how public remembrance entails many private elements. This is explored through analysing the dissimilar elements of the private and public in terms of the expectation of individuals and institutions, the attendant material culture and how private moments manifest in public events, illustrating how elements of mediation, negotiation and integration are performed in the collective arena. There is a transformation and a change in the public arena, an arena that is contested and shifting, and different ideas about how remembrance should be enacted. Data gathered at twelve remembrance events coupled with a large body of interviews are used to inform the analysis (appendix, table 7). Particular events are associated with different religions (Protestant or Catholic), and attitudes to some practices of remembrance are also divided along religious affiliations, as discussed below. The main collective events, held throughout Ireland, are Remembrance Day services, Cemetery Sundays, and All Souls’ Day services. These are ceremonies that are centrally organized by a church or civic body, follow a proscribed rite and take place in designated spaces that allow general public access. Much of the associated material culture of these events are ephemeral symbolic items – things that represent an element of Schwartz’s (1982: 34) ‘continuous feeding’, as by their nature they require renewing, and contrast with the more durable objects of remembrance in the home examined earlier. Another form of public remembrance that I include here is the practice of placing obituaries and anniversary notices in local newspa-

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pers as instances of individual remembrance that are enacted in a collective public medium. Winter and Sivan (1999: 6) view collective remembrance as ‘public recollection’ where the ‘public’ is the group that produces, expresses and consumes the remembering. Yet it has to be acknowledged that producing, expressing and consuming are undertaken by different subgroups of that public and are often in conflict. This will be elaborated on below in a discussion of how institutional codes of remembering are differently interpreted by participants. Remembering by individuals is linked to their sociocultural heritage (Middleton and Edwards 1997: 1), and it is the negotiation of that heritage when confronted with a formula for commemoration events that is the focus here. Commemoration may seem to ‘silence the contrary interpretations of the past’ (Middleton and Edwards 1997: 8) and adhere to expectation of active remembering that is situated within a framework (Irwin-Zarecka 1994: 5–6) that exhibits a repetitious ‘ritualized and cathechismic quality’ (Middleton and Edwards 1997: 8). Such homogenization of memory, however, never fully subsumes competing interpretations. Much of the literature on collective memory, including Halbwachs (1992 [1952]), deals with the state of memory – where memory is situated cognitively and how it is made to operate as a collective text for communities and nations (Palgi and Durban 1995; White 1999; Winter and Sivan 1999). Within the public events of remembrance are the individual and private concerns of the people taking part, and both Schwartz (1982) and Nora (1989) have drawn attention to the shifting nature of memory that can be individual and collective at the same time. It is within the context of collective events that there is opportunity to explore individual experience and how the public scripting of events may differ from the private reasoning that informs a person’s decision to participate. Halbwachs postulated a differentiation between ‘autobiographical memory’ and ‘historical memory’ (1992 [1952]: 23). The notion of autobiographical memory is self-explanatory. It refers to the remembering of events that are part of a person’s personal past experience (Coser 1992: 23–4). While these memories are inevitably individual and internalized, their capacity for enduring is ultimately dependent on groups; it is the interaction with other people with whom the memories are shared that ensures their continuance (Halbwachs 1992 [1952]: 53). Schwartz (1982: 34) agrees that memory requires ‘continuous feeding’ and this is done through collective sources and ‘sustained by social and moral props’. Historical memory is seen as conditional on the past being ‘stored and interpreted by social institutions’ (Halbwachs 1992 [1952]: 24). These concepts of memory can be applied, in part, to data collected from the public remembrance events here considered. Halbwachs’s ‘autobiographical memory’ is instrumental for

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some people but it does not inform everyone’s experience. Whether it is the remembering of a dead relative or the numerous war dead, subsequent generations could be described as being part of a ‘collective vicarious memory’ (Hynes 1999: 206).

Social Interaction in Public and Private Throughout the year many individual acts of remembrance are enacted by people who have lost loved ones. The public remembrance rituals necessarily entail a social context, and I consider people’s different expectations of sociability at public commemorative events and explore the centrality of interaction with others at collective services. From late spring through to the end of August, in parishes throughout Ireland, the Catholic Church organizes what are called Cemetery Sundays or the Blessing of the Graves ceremonies. Throughout the spring/summer of 2006 I attended six of these ceremonies in Counties Down, Armagh and Louth. I have concentrated on two ceremonies that illustrate the importance of community interaction and outdoor space (themes common to all six events). In contrasting the ceremonies, I also show how events are localized despite the overarching purpose of commemorating the dead. Cemetery Sundays are occasions of intense preparation by the church, local undertakers and individuals. For weeks beforehand there is a flurry of activity when graves and cemeteries are tided and tended. Many families undertake this annual clearing up by designating certain members to look after particular graves, but often a local undertaker is paid to clean and tidy gravesites. The church or civic authority will also make sure that paths and access routes are cleared and cleaned, and communal areas of landscaping are tidied as old autumn leaves are gathered up and the grass is cut. In most of the graveyards there are older headstones belonging to families who have died out or permanently moved away. Volunteers from the local churches clean these abandoned stones. Thus, the preliminaries of looking after the gravesites in readiness for the ceremonies are also social in nature and provide opportunities for people to meet up, often by chance, when they are tending to graves. Each parish organizes its own special Sunday and great care is taken that dates do not clash with other events. One priest told me that he had to be sure to get the date of the Cemetery Sunday set many months in advance: ‘We have people who come back every year for this service, from other parts of Ireland, from England or even from America. So I have to make sure that once I set a date I won’t have to change it.’ Charles’s family have been funeral directors in Co. Down for nearly two hundred years, and each year, in the weeks before the local round of Cem-

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etery Sundays, he is inundated with bookings to clear and tidy gravesites. Charles outlined the work he does: I am always very busy from about the middle of April onwards. Everyone wants his or her graves done. Sometimes I have to work late into the evening to try and get my own family graves seen to as well. It’s a very important time for people and they take a great pride in making sure that the graves look special. I will tidy up and there are always lots of flowers on the day. It’s a big community thing. Even if you aren’t particularly religious in that maybe you don’t go to church that much, these Cemetery Sundays bring out the crowds.

I examine two of the Graves Blessing ceremonies that I attended in order to illustrate the importance that people place on sociability at these ceremonies, the various ways in which communal gathering to remember the dead are viewed by both institutions and individuals, and the importance that is attached to the geographical space. These extracts also illustrate the concept of community as articulated by the people with whom I worked. For those attending the ceremonies, community means a shared origin in a particular locality and a shared dead by having relatives and/or friends in the same graveyard. Despite the fact that Cemetery Sundays are exclusively Catholic events, there was no sense among these people that religion was a primary consideration in shaping their decisions to attend. It was however, a paramount consideration for the clergy, who constantly referred to doctrinal notions of the dead and why and how they are remembered. Material is also used from the other four ceremonies I attended to inform my analysis.

Case 1 On a chilly Sunday afternoon in May, with a threat of rain that did not materialize, I met up with the Murray family from Newry to accompany them to a Graves Blessing service in St. Mary’s Churchyard (illustrations 5.1 and 5.2). The church is built at the top of a steep hill, and the graveyard spreads out from older nineteenth-century plots around the building down the slope onto the more level ground of the newer end of the graveyard. The older graves cluster, higgledy-piggledy, on high ground around the south, east and west of the church. A road bounds the north end, restricting the number of graves placed at this point. The graveyard is surrounded by a high stone wall but, due to its large size and lack of surrounding tree cover, is open to chill winds even on a warm day. I arrived early, and at the entrance to the churchyard men were handing out small bottles and vials of holy water – this is water that has been blessed by the priest and is used to sprinkle over the graves. I made my way down

Illustration 5.1. Catching up at a Cemetery Sunday

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Illustration 5.2. Newry churchyard

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the north wall and then turned right onto one of the many pathways until I found the graves of the Murray family. The atmosphere inside the graveyard was casual but purposeful. Families in large groups were arriving, greeting each other and meeting old friends. All age groups were represented. As I stood watching I could see the graveyard gradually filling up as more and more people arrived. People came with bunches of flowers or with plants in small tubs or large stone containers and busied themselves making lastminute adjustments to the gravesites. They chatted with neighbours, took walks around to look at other graves and explained to people whose grave they were visiting and when and how the person had died. Small children and adults alike sat on grave edgings and munched on snacks and drinks that had been brought along for the occasion. There was no strict dress code. Older men and women came dressed in more formal wear, men in suits and women in ‘Sunday best’. Others were more casual, in jeans and warm jumpers or jackets. When the family arrived I was quickly introduced to sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews and grandchildren. We gathered around their grandparents’ graves and also the grave of a niece who had been killed in a road crash three years earlier. A microphone and small stage had been set up along the north wall close to a large statue of the Virgin Mary. The priest officiating began by reading excerpts from scripture and prayers for both the living and the dead. He emphasized the importance of gathering to ‘venerate the places where the deceased lie’ and as a reminder of our own mortality. ‘To remember our dead and to bless their graves is a way to keep us all connected and remind us of the joy that people gave us in life and the joy in sharing in Christ’s resurrection in the next life,’ he said. The short service ended with hymns and a collective blessing of the graves with holy water. The formality of the religious rite was contrasted with the informal atmosphere and behaviour of people in the graveyard. Young children played on graves, teenagers chatted with friends and older members of the family took the opportunity to immerse themselves in news with cousins, nephews and nieces with whom they met only sporadically throughout the rest of the year. No subject seemed to be off limits and talk of a new baby or a recent medical procedure was of equal interest. The contrast between the formal scripting of the service and the casual behaviour and conversations attest to competing forms of discourse. Such different readings of events were also observed in a study of religion in Donegal by Taylor (1995), who cautioned that it would be misleading to assume that there was an underlying ‘shared understanding’ (1995: 31). For the priest in Newry the remembrance of the dead was linked to religious beliefs and adherence to church teachings. For those with whom I spoke the event was largely about connecting with the living and reinforcing kin associations. And this was done through attention

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to the dead. As one man said: ‘It’s not that I don’t come at other times. But this day is special because everybody is together. You get to meet old friends and reminisce about past times, and catch up with relatives. I suppose in a way it’s like a gathering of the clans.’ A few weeks later in a small churchyard just east of Newry I stood with Michael and his family as we watched people engage in that ‘catching up’ that is mentioned in an almost formulaic sense at these ceremonies. The service was over and the tall trees around this old graveyard were singing their own music as a spring breeze swirled and sallied through the leaves. For Michael the social focus of the event held more profound undertones of connection beyond the functionality of surface interaction with others. He explained: On a Cemetery Sunday you look at all the people standing above the ground, and then you think of all the generations below the ground. I look around here now and I see people who have turned into their fathers and mothers. People I played football with and went to school with. It’s like people growing out of the ground, out of the dead generations. I come here because it helps me to bridge the gap between my parents, their parents and myself and because I need to feel that bridge and that connection. We need a connection with the living and a connection with the dead because that is what bridges the gap and completes the circles of what we could be.

Michael’s reading of the collective gathering at these graves was that it imbued him with a sense of history and belonging to people and to geographical space, without which there would be gaps in his sense of who he is: To come together collectively makes you realize those connections with the living. These people here, we went to each other’s wakes. It gives you a sense of belonging and you need these people to exist and know who you are. In a way the graveyard is the ultimate parting place and it is also the ultimate meeting place. Here today, this is the time and the place where I would introduce new members of the family.

The dead are being used, in this and the other examples, to connect with the living. These events are conceptualized by those who attend them as relating to the living, albeit within a framework of reverence and remembrance for the dead. Yet, in this next case, those expectations of social interaction were unfulfilled.

Case 2 A somewhat different type of Cemetery Sunday occurred a few months later in August just over the border in Omeath, Co. Louth. The importance of the opportunities to socialize were emphasized when a stormy and wet day

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disrupted plans for a graveyard service (illustration 5.3). This service also differed in the form of the ritual and was centred on a Mass rather than what is called the Liturgy of the Word.1 Both services do, however, include a collective prayer for the dead. The local parish priest or curate will decide which rite to choose for a Cemetery Sunday. One priest remarked: ‘It is very much a personal decision. Whatever that particular priest wants to do. There is no strict code on this.’ The dismal weather spoiled the informal aspect of the gathering, and the driving rain and wind meant that the graveyard had to be abandoned in favour of the warmth of the adjoining church. The temporary outdoor altar, covered with a canvas awning, was left to battle the rain as priests and hundreds of visitors filed into the church. During the Mass the priest reminded the congregation that they were praying not just for those in the adjacent graveyard but also for living relatives and for friends and family who were buried elsewhere. He complimented the relatives on the efforts in decorating the graves, despite the harsh weather. The usual blessing of the graves with holy water was also improvised. Instead of the collective blessing, people were provided with small bottles of water to sprinkle on their graves after the Mass. One young man quipped that there was ‘plenty of water’ on the graves that day.

Illustration 5.3. A sea of umbrellas on a stormy day

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One of the women I had accompanied, Elaine, was more openly concerned with the social side of the gathering and the opportunities for publicly displaying respect for the dead. She had brought cushions and waterproofs to sit on the side of the grave had we been in the cemetery. She said she missed the occasion of talking to people, meeting extended family, greeting neighbours and other people she saw maybe only once a year. Another woman talked of coming to the graveyard Mass because her aunt died recently and she felt she ‘owed it to her’ to meet up with other family members. If remembering the dead is a way to ‘keep them with you in the sense of achieving some kind of sociality,’ as Harvey (2001: 233) noted in relation to the Bajo Urubamba of Peru, it is also, in the cases presented here, a sociality with the living. For the people attending these communal events it is this aspect of sociality that is paramount. The attitudes of the women above are a glimpse of how personal meanings are layered onto prescribed texts dictated by religious authorities, layers that include kin and duty to both the dead and the living. These are private meanings in the public forum but other considerations connect people to pre-Christian ideals about ancestors. As Elaine said: ‘It’s really very pagan isn’t it? It’s about the ancestors – bit of respect.’ The obligations to remember and tend to graves is part of the need felt by people to defer to the dead and keep them from manifesting annoyance (something we have seen in chapter 2 in analysing the talk of the dead). When Susanne visited her family graves after the end of the formal ritual, she explained why her elderly aunt expected the visit: ‘We have to visit Aunt Lily, otherwise she’d be very offended. We’ll just go and say hello to her and tell her the news. She might do something nasty on you if you did forget about her.’ The private moments illustrate how memory takes on a self-relational quality – personal memories of experiences of and interactions with a deceased loved one. This allows the ceremonies, while not static forms, to facilitate ‘ever new versions of experience without deviating from the familiar’ (Kuchler 2001: 226–27). And while many people openly admitted to me that they were little concerned with church teaching and dogma, this does not, of course, apply to everyone. For Michael the ritual and authority of the service were clearly important, but he accepted and accommodated them within his own view of ways of remembering: For me the ritual is important, it’s authoritative and the priest is the one who represents God. Even if not everyone believes that, I feel it’s is important because it gives the ceremony a legitimacy which is out of the ordinary everyday, so it has a special quality for that occasion. Yet if you take away all the church power structures the rituals will remain. They are old and powerful. In a way the priest today is just the latest authority figure to direct rituals.

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As Taylor (1989a, 1995) has shown, individual meaning can be situated within the collective, and the next section will examine how the individual person becomes a focus during different communal services.

Private Moments in a Communal Service The experiences at Cemetery Sundays can illuminate notions of the dead unconnected with church canonical teachings, but the commemoration of All Souls in the liturgical calendar (2 November) is more deeply rooted in orthodox observance, as it is always celebrated with a Mass in a church. All Souls’ Day was established in the ninth century (Johnson 1968: 140) and is the other major collective event in the Catholic calendar of remembrance. Yet within the format of the Mass individual churches may adapt procedures, readings and music to suit the particular wishes of congregations. The annual All Souls Memorial Mass in the village church of Carrick along the South Down border is arranged specifically to remember named people, particular groups and all the dead of the parish. The event is organized by the local parish bereavement counsellor Marilyn and a special committee that meets for the purpose of arranging the Mass. The members select and arrange music, scripture readings and the order of service. The team also ‘dresses’ the church and arranges candles for use by those who attend. At this Mass it is the laity who decides the form and content of the service, and the priest takes his instructions from them on how the ceremony will proceed. On the night I attended in November 2006 the church was overflowing with people. Many of them had arrived early and were seated or kneeling quietly in prayer in their pews. Ushers showed people to available seats and soft music played in the background while the church quickly filled with parishioners and visitors. The church choir sang softly throughout the service in contrast to the silence of the congregation. People had come to remember their individual dead and engaged in silent prayer. As the priest explained: ‘This is very much a quiet, listening service for the congregation. It is their time for peaceful reflection and we don’t expect too much by way of audible involvement.’ They had also come together to share in the solidarity and support that the church service afforded. A man in his early thirties who had lost a young nephew just a few months previously said it helped to have people around to remember on that night: ‘We all need people with us. I suppose coming here gets me through some of the sadness. And it’s a bit like a funeral. It’s comforting. I don’t really know how it works. It just sort of lifts you out of yourself a bit.’ As the service began the priest, who wore the purple vestments of the funeral Mass, pointed out that All Souls’ Night was a time to remember:

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Yesterday we celebrated All Saints’ Day – those who are enjoying the full glory of God. Tonight we are praying for those who are perhaps not yet ready to share in that full glory. A theme of Resurrection runs through this Mass. We in Ireland, and particularly in the North, face the reality of death. It is part of life and I believe we can deal with death better than some other cultures. We don’t try to camouflage death.

To remember the dead for Catholics in this and other Masses is to pray for the happy repose of the souls of the dead. Although Purgatory2 was not mentioned by name, it is the souls in Purgatory in particular that are being prayed for when the priest mentions those ‘who still have to enjoy that full life with God’. The Catholic Church points out that it prays for all the dead, irrespective of who they are. One priest remarked: ‘This is a collective prayer for the collective dead. All through the month of November we have Masses for the Dead, all the dead.’ Just after the homily the formal reading of names was enacted. It is at this stage that remembrance is publicly personalized. The names of everyone who died within the previous twelve months are read aloud, emphasizing the individual within a collective context. As one man said: ‘It is special for those people who have lost someone, as they can hear the name of their loved one being read out.’ The priest explained: ‘There is a power in vocalizing things. To hear the name is to make it present, to make the person close by, and it allows bereaved people to know that their relative was important not just to them but to the whole body of the church.’ As each name was read a lighted candle was placed in their memory on a central cross at the front of the altar. Hearing the name is an invocation of the deceased and placed each individual within the public manifestation of commemoration. It also elevates the family of the deceased to a special position of focus within the ceremony. Tambiah (1968) talks of the magical power of words and believes even ordinary words have sacredness and particular efficacy within a ritual context. Rappaport (1999: 108) argues that the effectiveness of ritual is bound to ‘self-referential messages that are indexical in character’ (an element we have already seen in the Cemetery Sunday services). For Rappaport (1999: 107–8) ritual is not just symbolic, it also brings things into being. In similar ways the performative force of naming renders the names material. They are heard and acknowledged in the church. The audible reading of names brings the dead back into the fold of the religious community and assures the bereaved of the continued thoughts, prayers and intercessions of that community. Hugh, a forty-year-old man, said that hearing the name somehow validated the person’s life. ‘It means they aren’t forgotten, that they had a special place.’ Another man said he felt the reading of the names was very poignant: ‘It’s sad but it’s also a good thing. It helps people to know that they have

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some support.’ At the end of the Mass each person in the church was invited to place a lighted candle on the altar steps in an act of individual remembrance. This situating of the private within the public domain is enacted also in the secular arena by the placing of anniversary notices in newspapers. This form of commemoration introduces a further consideration of the boundaries of public/private space and is illustrative of a degree of contestation that arises also in relation to graveside memorializing, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

The Private in Public Space Although individually placed, the sympathy and anniversary notices, often accompanied with photographs of the deceased, are printed in papers that circulate throughout an undifferentiated public. They are simultaneously public, collective and private acts, because they are the product of a deliberate decision to include a memory within a particular part of a publication and alongside many other individual notices. They are an acknowledgement of the dead, or their place in the community, and a conscious act by a family or friends to place themselves, as the living, within that community and its accepted practices. The practice of placing anniversary notices in newspapers is widespread in the South Down, Louth Armagh and North Louth areas and elsewhere in Northern Ireland and parts of the Republic of Ireland. Death and funeral notices are usually placed in both national and local weekly papers, but the anniversary notices proliferate in the weekly papers. These newspapers, on both sides of the border, are published in the local large towns and concentrate on news within a particular hinterland. Pages of notices are produced each week under headings such as ‘Family Announcements’ or ‘Family Notices’. Many of these anniversary notices commemorate deaths that occurred up to thirty years previously. There is little variation in the language used and notices begin with one of a few formulaic statements such as ‘In loving memory of’ or ‘Treasures/precious/cherished memories of’. A short or long verse then follows and is ended by one or other of the following lines: ‘Always/fondly remembered’ or ‘Deeply/sadly missed’. The verses are not usually religious, and an analysis of the notices in weekly papers during a fifteen-month period found that only about 25 per cent of them mention God. More generally they are sentimental rhymes with an emphasis on how memories keep the person who had died close to the hearts of the living. The photographs used in these notices are the most recent that were taken before someone died. Out of the pages of these newspapers come images of babies, children, young teenagers, parents and grandparents.

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Notices may appear for varying periods, and who places them depends on individual views on how long the practice should continue after a death and with consideration of the kin or societal distance from the deceased. Two men in their twenties said they had placed a notice for two or three years consecutively for a friend but did not feel it was necessary to continue the practice: ‘The first couple of years after Jimmy died, yeah; sure, we missed him and wanted to do that for him. It was sort of to let him know we still thought about him, and let his family know.’ An older couple, in their forties, said they would continue to inset anniversary notices for their son who died of cancer. For the mother it is an especially powerful medium of remembrance: ‘It’s letting people know that he is remembered. He’s still a part of our lives. I keep the very first anniversary notice with some of his things I still have. His photograph is a nice way of remembering what he looked like before he got sick.’ The photographs of the dead in the newspapers can, however, prove disconcerting for some people. One young girl in her twenties, a Protestant, remarked that she found the pictures a ‘bit freaky’. ‘You have these dead people looking out of the newspaper at you. That’s a bit weird. It’s like putting pictures on headstones. Makes you shudder.’ So why was it not strange to look at pictures in frames or in an album? ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that it’s a bit unexpected. You just open the paper and suddenly there they are. Sort of out of place maybe. If they’re in an album or something it’s a bit less public, isn’t it?’ Other Protestants to whom I spoke also indicated that they might mark a first anniversary with a notice in a paper but would not continue to do this annually. One man explained: ‘I like to keep things a bit more private.’ This tension between private and public, and how private motivations are negotiated within public arenas, also draws on notions of public and private space, perhaps no more so than in considering how private space is conceptualized within public graveyards. A couple of months after the Omeath and Newry Cemetery Sundays I accompanied Damien to his family graves in South Armagh. Along with his cousin, Jim, we embarked on an extended tour of an old churchyard. These gravesites dated back nearly one hundred years, and Jim recalled all the kin connections and where people had lived and what they had done in life. The recounting of family histories in reference to markers in the landscape is an example of how memory is tied to physical objects and to the landscape. In this instance memory is bound up with the materiality of the gravesite that is situated within a particular localized landscape. What makes a particular place special and worthy of the continued attendance to the stories are the kin connections with which it is associated. Kin, objects and landscape are bound together in an interweave of memory, with

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each element dependent on the other. There is the duty to remember and to recall and retell family histories, and part of that re-telling is to place the stories in a particular and localized geographical setting. Damien commented that he was trying to learn the genealogies from his cousin. ‘Because when he dies no one else will know about these people and these graves if I don’t learn them. And it would all be lost.’ The oral history transmission of kin connections recalls genealogies stretching back more than one hundred years, and different branches of a family are identified with specific locations in the landscape, farms and houses. It is through the longevity of residence and the authority of the oral histories that families claim legitimacy to land. The landscape is ‘fixed’ by the dead in a very public way. As Bloch noted of the Merina of Madagascar: ‘The anchoring of the individual to a particular place’ is essential to the continuance of a system of obligations to the dead and living kin (Bloch 1971: 37–38). While the physicality of that space and its connectedness with particular family groups is an overriding facet of belonging, the importance of its deepseated hold on an individual’s sense of himself or herself was explained by Michael: It is important to stand on the ground of the grave at this ceremony [a Graves Blessing]. It is a physical and psychological rooting. In the graveyard I see all around me my family and cousins and second cousins. If I stand at my parents’ grave, then next to them are my first cousins, then second cousins and so on.

What Michael is describing is that the spatial layout of the graves mirrors the blood distance of kin from him. Any of his cousins could stand at their own parents’ graves and construct a similar set of circles radiating from that grave. He added: ‘There is a sense of loss when people die, and going to the graveyard is almost as if you have to get even with death – it is part of pulling back the victory that death has had – that there are more of us growing above the ground.’ Throughout this border area a long history of the worship and remembrance of the dead is evidenced materially by prehistoric tombs, dating from the Irish Neolithic. Sited on hillsides and mountains, overlooking modern graveyards, they are testaments also to the longevity of claiming space through the dead.

Collective in the Public Protestant communities also, when they engage in public commemoration, are conscious of space and of a shared belonging. Whereas remembrance

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through material items in the domestic setting displays no discernible differences, the public face of Protestant commemoration centres on Remembrance Day services connected to honouring the dead of the two world wars. Although, as will be seen below, there have been recent changes and innovations in this area. Remembrance Sunday is marked with wreath-laying ceremonies at cenotaphs and war memorials in towns and villages. These ceremonies are organized by the Royal British Legion and local councils and are, therefore, the civic face of community and collective remembrance for those who died in the two world wars and other conflicts. It is traditionally associated with the Protestant community in Northern Ireland when people wear poppies, and the day is also marked by smaller ceremonies held in individual schools and churches. Kennedy Neville (1989: 163) points out that one of two semantic locations where the Protestant dead appear collectively is in remembering the war dead.3 While anxious to point out that Remembrance Days are not exclusively Protestant, she says they can be powerful motifs of Protestantism and memorial days are ‘part of the cultural universe of civic nationalism in general’ (Kennedy Neville 1989: 163). There is an emphasis on the sacrificial nature of soldiers killed in war, young men who left their homes to engage in a cause for the benefit of their communities and country. They are viewed as having died for the common good, imbued with altruistic motives and grounded in a strong moral sense of justice and love of country (Weiss 1997: 91–101 on Israeli commemoration). Remembrance Day services are held in Protestant churches in the area. This extends also to the Presbyterian church I visited in Dundalk. Although the majority of the congregation in Dundalk are natives of the Irish Republic, they feel a strong sense of duty to wear poppies and remember the war dead. ‘We had lots of soldiers from the South,’ one woman said. The wearing of the poppy is the most recognizable material symbol of remembrance at this time of the year. It signifies a connection to the dead and is a public manifestation of beliefs and solidarity. It is worn with pride as a symbol also of identity. It is also a contested symbol and has different connotations for many members of the Catholic community, many of whom view it as standing for an authority and government that for them, historically, represented an alien national identity. One young woman in her twenties, a Protestant from South Armagh, said she always wore a poppy because it was just habit. ‘But I don’t really know what it means now. I suppose it doesn’t mean the same as it did years ago because there’s really nobody left who fought in those wars. Maybe it doesn’t mean the same thing anymore. I don’t know, but I wear it anyway.’ The public rituals of Remembrance Day have been used to express feelings of nationalism and a reaffirmation of identity. In honouring the war dead there are inherent values of duty, service and the nation (Newell 1976: 228). What happens in Remembrance Day services can be part of what Orta

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(2002: 477) saw as social groups producing and aligning themselves ‘within and with respect to more encompassing identities’. In similar fashion to the changes in the content and behaviour of Orange parades (Tonkin and Bryan 1996), there have been changes in attitudes among those attending services. A considerable effort has also been made by local organizations to produce a more inclusive form of commemoration that is cross-community in its ethos (discussed below). The Remembrance Day service held at the Church of Ireland in Clanmore in South Down was attended by a large number of people. This church has a small congregation and is relatively poorly attended during the year. For this occasion an invitation had been extended to all denominations in the area but it was only the local parishioners who came. Everyone wore poppies and all age groups were represented. I asked people why they felt it was important to come to the Remembrance Day service and to bring their families. One of the elders of the church explained: ‘Well, it’s paying respect to people who fought in the wars. And it’s also about people in the security forces who died here over the last thirty years. They all put their lives on the line and we have to remember and respect them for that.’ A young father, who had brought his small children, said: ‘It’s really part of who you are. We remember all who died today. And we don’t just remember the soldiers and the police officers. It’s about remembering everyone who lost their lives in the Troubles. And it’s being mindful of their families and remembering them also.’ These two replies highlight the shifts in emphasis on who is remembered and is perhaps attributable to better relations and a greater sense of personal security since the ceasefires of 1994 and the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that led the way for a return of local government to Northern Ireland. During the service, which followed the usual format of scripture readings and hymns, wreaths were laid at a memorial plaque in the centre of the north wall of the church. They were placed by representatives of the Royal Legion and by elders of the church. Clanmore is an old early Christian monastic settlement that dates back to the sixth century. The sense of history, identity and continuity that emanates from this ancient site was brought firmly into the present by the themes woven into this Remembrance Day service. The minister spoke of the importance of remembering all who had died and of praying for the bereaved: On this ancient site, which connects us to our early Christian forebearers, we are continuing a tradition. We have a duty to preserve the history and rites associated with this place and that connects to our duty in preserving the history and remembrance of those who died in conflict. Just as this site is part of our identity, so also is the service given by those in the armed forces. But we remember all who died violently today and pray for those who were bereaved.

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The collective identity that is being negotiated in these services and the form of both church and civic ceremonies are examples of how bereavement is appropriated into the collective of the public (Weiss 1997: 91). Here the collective is the ideal of ‘national ideology’ that consolidates group solidarity through attention to the war dead, akin to what Weiss (1997: 94) observed in Israel. In an examination of remembrance in contemporary Israeli society, Weiss postulates three ways in which this is done: by ‘sustaining collective boundaries, an ethos of sacrifice, and a standardisation of commemorative practices’ (Weiss 1997: 91). Remembrance Day services throughout this border area in Ireland conform to boundary maintenance by appealing to those who have or had relatives in the armed forces or police. The ethos of sacrifice is clearly paramount, and ceremonies are standardized by their order of service and the public designated spaces used for them. Bereavement and commemoration of those who have ‘fallen in battle is particularly important in the context of national solidarity’ (Weiss 1997: 91). Yet, despite such outward appearances of standardization and uniformity, changing attitudes and a new and growing sense of a shared suffering that is not exclusive to denomination are now becoming more evident. One event that is new to the Remembrance Day calendar but has established itself over the last couple of years is the Ardree House Festival of Remembrance. Ardree House was set up in Newry to highlight the diversity of culture in the area, especially among the smaller Protestant community in the city and its hinterland. It promotes numerous cross-cultural events in the arts and runs programmes to promote the Ulster-Scots traditions. The Festival of Remembrance in 2006 took place in Milltown town hall. Hundreds of people of all ages turned out for the night of ‘commemoration, nostalgia and remembrance’ as one of the organizers described it. He emphasized that remembrance was not just about the two world wars but also about those caught in many other conflicts since 1945 who are fighting for peace. The emphasis again was on sacrifice and peace and the service given by those who voluntarily join the armed forces for the cause of peace. This was an inclusive and interdenominational event, with contributions from both Protestant and Catholic clergy. The cross-community nature of the event is very important to the organizers. A warm welcome had been extended to people of all religions, and an emphasis was put on the collective nature of the loss that had been suffered by families in the Newry and Mourne area and how that should serve to cement communities and give them a shared sense of remembrance. Many of the people attending the festival said they felt it was a positive way to bring people together. One elderly man remarked: ‘This is about remembering those who fought for our freedom and us. And that’s for everyone.’ The event was both sacred and secular, combining scripture readings and

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hymns with expositions of the different music traditions in the area. One of the differences between the church and civic ceremonies was that while the churches were actively cooperating, there was no crossover in attendance at their services; but the secular groups have been able to bridge the theology and bring people together to perpetuate a shared sense of history and community. That sense of history is also communicated through materiality and the differences between private and public material forms.

Public and Private Material Culture The material symbols used at public ceremonies are ephemeral items: poppies that break apart and are discarded, wreaths and flowers that fade and wither, candles that burn out, water that evaporates or diffuses into the ground. The anniversary notices in newspapers provide an opportunity for the retention of a more durable item; notices may be cut from a page and saved in the home. In practice, however, this is an opportunity that is rarely realized. Few people keep even first anniversary notices, and no one I spoke to collects notices from subsequent years. The transitory nature of material culture that is connected to the rituals at annual commemorations contrasts with the enduring quality of items that are kept in the home and passed down through generations. It is the graveside (itself a mixture of private and public) or the public monument that provides the space for the mixing of both the transient and the lasting. It is the decoration of gravesides that provides the greatest contrasts. Here cut flowers rest alongside durable items such as toys and religious artefacts. (Attitudes to the changing types of material displays at graves are discussed in the following chapter). Cut flowers and poppies highlight the finite nature of life, but they are also symbols of renewal and are brought fresh and new each year to the ceremonies of remembrance. They are a potent metaphor for the renewal of relationships between the living and the dead and the continued negotiation of liminality. The sprinkling of holy water onto graves during Cemetery Sundays is symbolic of new birth but is also a reminder of impermanence. At the Omeath ceremony (case 2) the two families I was with had very different interpretations of the symbolic use of holy water. One couple, in their forties, deeply religious and observant Catholics, remarked: ‘We like the whole idea of putting the water on the grave. It sort of connects them with us in what we believe.’ But another couple, similar in age, felt the symbolism of water was a continuation of a pre-Christian ritual. The husband, James, said: ‘It all goes back much older than Christianity. Just look around, the countryside is dotted with ancient tombs and old sites. And water was the entrance to the Celtic underworld and the Celts revered watery places.’

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In Omeath, during the homily, the priest echoed the ephemerality of the symbols when he emphasized the futility of investing in material possessions in this life. He said it was important for people to appreciate the virtue in values other than money. The intangible nature of such values means that they, like the symbols used at Graves Blessing ceremonies, have to be constantly reinforced and renewed. The candles used at All Souls Masses and the lists of names that are read remind us again that these ceremonies are as much about the living as they are about the dead. Brandes (1998a: 187–88) argues that the iconography of the Day of the Dead in Mexico is similarly designed for the living. The ephemeral nature of the art used and consumed in Mexico is generally ‘constructed from flimsy, non-durable material. For the most part, at the popular level in Mexico, they are not saved for display or enjoyment. They exist to celebrate the moment’ (Brandes 1998a: 187–88). After the All Souls Mass in Carrick people bring home the candles to light them again in remembrance. The ‘moment’ extends beyond what Brandes (1998b) found, but only slightly.

Conclusion Collective remembrance services are important arenas for reinforcing identity, community and history. They evoke a spirit of communal values in sacrifice at Remembrance Day, in ancestors at the Blessing of Graves services and in spiritual beliefs at the commemoration of All Souls. But, as shown above, there are different dynamics and values that operate between the private and the public spheres of remembrance. The individual and spatially contained remembering that is enacted in private homes contrasts with the enlarged sense of social interaction, collective involvement and shared beliefs about the importance of remembrance at public events. The forms of material items used in public or private settings are also different. Objects of memory kept in the home are durable and lasting and are designed for keeping and passing on to younger generations. The participants at collective services that are enacted at permanent memorials (monuments or headstones) use symbols that are fleeting. The fresh flowers or flimsy artificial poppies that wither and die need to be replaced and renewed, repeated like the ceremonies. Attendance at any of the ceremonies described is not dependent on religious observance, yet can be demarcated along denominational differences. The compulsion to attend these annual events comes from a sense of duty to community and to those who have died. Yet, as has been seen, individual readings of events and motivations for taking part reveal an equal concern with making connections with the living. White (1999: 505) has talked of

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public remembrance as being ‘public and private, collective and individual, personal and national’. Yet, while this may be true if all remembrances services are themselves viewed ‘collectively’, it does not address every situation. The personal and private are present when people remember a named individual but cannot be a general attribute of Remembrance Day services, where the emphasis may equally be on a sense of belonging to a previous generation. The vast attendances at Cemetery Sundays are a phenomenon that continues to surprise both participants and observers. The outwardly collective nature of these events is contrasted with the individually felt disappointment at the disruption to form in Omeath (see Irwin-Zarecka 1994: xi). The institutional codes for organizing public collective remembrance are moulded and adapted by individuals (Winter and Sivan 1999; Orta 2002; White 1999). Within the institutional texts and the participatory acts of remembrance, the continuation of existence is stressed, and there is a realization that the repetition of public services annually is required in order to consolidate memories. The transience of symbols ensures that people are continuously involved in subsequent remembrance events. In theorizing his hypotheses about religious rituals, Whitehouse (2005: 105) suggests that the survival of some rituals may depend on ‘strategies of either repetition or emotional arousal’, conditions that can be applied in part to the communal events discussed above. Remembrance Day services may historically have served as an arena for a shared sense of fate and assertion of national identity (Gillis 1994: 7–9; Lifton 1987: 240) but are increasingly localized and actively inclusive of other communities. Throughout all these memorial punctuations in the year there is a continued concern with material items and particular space. Nora (1989: 9) talks of memory taking root ‘in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.’ Public and collective remembrance takes up those spaces and objects to create its own images and gestures. In the next chapter I analyse what happens when memorial objects in public space are contested by focusing on the material culture at graves.

Notes 1. A Mass includes the Eucharist ceremony that involves the offering of Communion to the congregation. The Liturgy of the Word involves biblical readings, a homily, the creed and intercessions. The prayer for the dead is said at every Mass during the Eucharist. An example is: ‘Remember Lord those who have died and gone before us marked with the sign of faith.’ 2. Roman Catholic doctrine teaches that Purgatory is a purification stage for souls on their way to heaven. It is believed souls may be helped onwards to heaven

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through the prayers of the living. ‘The Final Purification, or Purgatory’, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part 1, Section 2, Chapter 3, Article 12, retrieved 19 May 2016 from: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_P2N.HTM#6. Reformed Churches reject this teaching and believe that there are only two destinations when you die, heaven or hell, and therefore also reject the practice of praying for the dead. 3. The other location Kennedy Neville (1989: 163 identifies is ‘the kin group of ancestors in the American South,’ where there are collective events to remember the dead ‘by their descendants in the Southern United States in large kinreligious gatherings. … These honoured dead are the original Scottish and ScotsIrish emigrants and their descendants.’

Bibliography Bloch, M. 1971. Placing the Dead. London: Seminar Press. Brandes, S. 1998a. ‘Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning’, Ethnohistory 45(2): 181–218. ———. 1998b. ‘The Day of the Dead, Halloween and the Quest for Mexican National Identity’, Journal of American Folklore 111(442): 359–80. Coser, L.A. 1992. ‘Introduction’, in M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gillis, J.R. (ed.). 1994. Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Halbwachs, M. 1992 [1952]. On Collective Memory, trans. L.A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, P. 2001. ‘Part 11: The Debate’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Hynes, S. 1999. ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in J. Winter and E. Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irwin-Zarecka, I. 1994. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Remembrance. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Johnson, H.S. 1968. ‘November Eve Beliefs and Customs in Irish Life and Literature’, Journal of American Folklore 81(320): 133–42. Kennedy Neville, G. 1989. ‘The Sacred and the Civic: Representations of Death in the Town Ceremony of Border Scotland’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 163–73. Kuchler, S. 2001. ‘The Past Is a Foreign Country: Part 1, Presentations’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Key Debates in Anthropology. London: Routledge. Lifton P.J. 1987. The Future of Immortality and Other Essays in a Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books. Middleton, D., and D. Edwards (eds). 1997 [1990]. Collective Remembering. London: Sage. Newell, V. 1976. ‘Armistice Day: Folk Tradition in an English Festival of Remembrance’, Folk Lore Journal 87: 226–29.

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Nora, P. 1989. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory: 7–24. Orta, A. 2002. ‘Burying the Past: Locality, Lived History, and Death in an Aymara Ritual of Remembrance’, Cultural Anthropology 17(4): 417–511. Palgi, P., and J. Durban. 1995. ‘The Role and Function of Collective Representations for the Individual among the Mourning Process: The Case of a War-Orphaned Boy in Israel’, Ethos 23(2): 223–43. Rappaport, Roy A. 1999. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, B. 1982. ‘The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory’, Social Forces 61(2): 374–402. Tambiah, S.J. 1968. ‘The Magical Power of Words’, Man (NS) 3(2): 175–208. Taylor, L. 1989a. ‘The Uses of Death’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 149–202. ———. 1989b. ‘Ba InEirinn: Cultural Constructions of Death in Ireland’, Anthropological Quarterly 62(4): 175–87. ———. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholicism. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Tonkin, E., and D. Bryan. 1996. ‘Political Ritual: Temporality and Tradition’, in A. Boholm (ed.), Political Ritual. Gotenburg: Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. Weiss, M. 1997. ‘Bereavement, Commemoration and Collective Identity in Contemporary Israeli Society’, Anthropological Quarterly 70(2): 99–101. White, G. 1999. ‘Emotional Remembering: The Pragmatics of National Memory’, Ethos (27)4: 505–29. Whitehouse, H. 2005. ‘Emotion, Memory and Religious Rituals: An Assessment of two Theories’, in K. Milton and M. Svašek (eds), Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling. Oxford: Berg. Winter, J., and E. Sivan (eds). 1999. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

6



MATERIALITY IN THE GRAVEYARD

Contemporary and historic graveyards are not just places of the dead but also repositories of individual and community histories and an eclectic array of fixed and fleeting material culture. By focusing on the changing styles of headstones and graveside decorations we can discover how contemporary forms, and people’s attitudes to them, inform of wider changes in society and negotiations between the old and the new. Design and text can be analysed in order to determine patterns of change and how new fashions in symbols are situated within historic practices. These concerns are examined within the context of a growing body of theoretical and ethnographic studies on the fusion of traditional and new types of materiality at graves (Collier 2003: 742) and how this can inform us about choice within a cultural context (Effros 2003: 118). I begin by examining how headstones and other materiality at graves contribute to the creation and perpetuation of the personhood of the deceased and later address issues of taste, and religious and gender differences. Headstones in four different graveyards are used as examples of overall trends. The implications of how objects and pictorial symbols are utilized are analysed through the reactions of twelve people whom I accompanied on visits to the four graveyards. Their attitudes and feelings are taken as representative of data collected during a wide range of interviews and conversations with stonemasons and undertakers, clerics, individuals and groups (appendix, tables 1–9). I begin by discussing one striking example of a headstone before considering the standard everyday styles of gravestones later.

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Creating and Perpetuating Personhood at Graves Down a winding laneway, cut between field boundaries and close to the Armagh/Louth border, a small graveyard is set on a gentle incline with views out across the surrounding countryside. Tucked behind an early nineteenth-century Catholic church, the neat rows of graves and headstones are enclosed on three sides by stone walls. Towards the southern end of the churchyard, where the newer graves are laid out, the top of a polished black granite headstone is fashioned into the shape of a guitar. Erected in memory of Craig (who died aged twenty-six) the style of headstone indicates his favourite hobby and interest in music. The grave is covered in green baize and enclosed by a polished black kerb and silver-coloured wrought iron railings. A statue of an angel sits close to his headstone and a bottle of holy water is positioned beside the stone. An inscription on the front kerbstone reads: ‘Where there is love in the heart, there is peace in the soul.’ On the day I visited this grave I was accompanied by three young men, all in their twenties, who had played music with Craig. One of them, Laurence, said they came to the grave once or twice a year: ‘We just come to say hello. It’s really good what they did with the headstone. That kind of sums him up really; he loved his music.’ Fashioning a headstone into the shape of a guitar, or other shapes, is one way in which the living make a personal and permanent statement about the dead. The particular aspect of Craig’s persona that has been prioritized on his headstone is that of musician. The inscription reads: ‘You sang your songs and loved to play.’ More detailed aspects of Craig’s identity as a son, a brother, and a boyfriend are detailed on smaller individual stone plaques set into the gravel on the gravesite. His personhood, what made him an individual, is channelled through his links with music, and this is perpetuated permanently in the style and text of his headstone. Mythum (2004: 137) argues that the deliberate selection of a specific identity as a primary focus on a headstone is often a way to signal that the individual is a member of a particular group. These groups can be religious, ethnic, linguistic or vocational (Mythum 2004: 138–48). In the case of the guitar headstone, however, it is not a corporate identity that is emphasized, but it is a corporate association that draws his friends to the grave. His expertise as a musician and songwriter, coupled with his potential to excel in his field, are the most important facets of his identity that are given special attention by his family on the memorial. But this identity is part of a wider agglomeration of musicians, people who share ideals and life-views tied into the type of music they listened to and played. For the different people remembering Craig, their ideas of who he was are connected in type but are

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conceptualized tangentially. As Laurence said at the grave: ‘That was how he saw himself and I suppose that’s how he wanted to be remembered.’ This headstone is just one example of the growing trend towards ‘stressing the individual and the personal on graves’ (Garattini 2007: 193). And it is the mourners who perpetuate the personhood of the deceased through material display and visiting (Francis et al. 2005: 21). The types of materiality displayed at graves are reflections of changing practices of consumerism and religion more generally. Through the increasing democratization within the churches, the congregations are increasingly realizing their power to verbalize and initiate change, and the styles and displays at gravesides are one way that that power is manifested through an emphasis on the individual. Graves are, however, multi-faceted sites of memory that also accommodate individuality in the mourner and perpetuate a personhood that was arrested by an untimely death. A very visible manifestation of this is the creation of personhood through the choices of materiality on the graves of infants and young children, graves that are decorated with an eclectic array of artefacts and symbols. The particular case of child graves, and how graves generally are presented, is indicative of how modern trends in graveside designs make both the living and the dead visible and can provide further insights into wider changes in society and how relationships with the dead and the living are mediated and negotiated through that materiality.

Visibility of the Living and the Dead The greater emphasis on the personality of a deceased begins when a memorial is chosen, a process that has changed in the past generation due to diverse factors such as innovations in technology and a greater inclusion of whole families in decision-making processes. Collier (2003: 727) argues that cemeteries are mirrors of social structures. In studying changes in memorial markers over a 150-year period in an American cemetery she found that, in the last forty to fifty years, there was evidence of a growing trend in symbols on headstones that represented the personal and the recreational. She contends that these findings support ‘theoretical descriptions of larger trends that place great emphasis on the self in the present for recent generations’ (Collier 2003: 727). This emphasis on the ‘self’ is not, however, confined to the dead; it is an emphasis that has its origins with the living (as Collier 2003 noted) who make the decisions on how someone is remembered. It is the erection of new headstones that can reveal how changes in style are indicative of new ways of expressing relationships and celebrating the deceased (Howarth 2000: 127).

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Choosing a headstone has become a family concern, with a greater involvement of women and children in the procedures. Jim Taylor, a stonemason in Newry, explained that it is more usual now that all the family is involved in picking a headstone: Children and all will come along and have a say in what the headstone will be like. It’s a way to get them involved. It used to be it would have been the deceased partner, or eldest son or father. Now the whole family comes; it makes it more meaningful for the children and helps them in their grief to be involved in memorializing a mother or father or sibling.

The inclusion of women and children in the process is a departure from what would have been common practice a generation ago. Many of the older people with whom I spoke recalled how it was always men who negotiated and decided on a headstone. ‘That sort of thing was just left up to the men; we didn’t take anything to do with it,’ said one elderly lady. This was a sentiment evidenced also in archives of oral histories in local museums in the area. Many of the recorded stories of deaths and death rituals emphasize the prominent role of male kin in arranging the erection of a headstone. It was older men who were a family’s public representative at death. But the public face of death in the graveyard now involves the greater visibility of women and children. This democratization of decision-making in the arena of death mirrors a greater involvement of women and children generally in public life. The democratic nature of choice can also be discerned in uniformity of the spatial and ascetic organization of new cemeteries (Collier 2003: 736) discussed below. The changing nature of the practicalities of picking a headstone is also part of the more visible expression of emotion that is evident, mainly, on the graves of infants and young children. The material displays of emotions are not, however, equated with stereotypical notions of women and children. Young fathers, brothers and male friends are equally included in contributing to emotional symbols at gravesides, attested to through textual references to brothers or separate memorial plaques placed by male relatives. In the case of small children, Garattini (2007) has attributed the outpouring of public expressions of emotions to changing attitudes in Ireland to infant deaths. Up until about twenty years ago unbaptized children were buried in unmarked and peripheral areas of Catholic churchyards. A senior member of the Catholic clergy admitted that untold hurt had been caused by these policies and considerable efforts were now being made to rectify past practices. ‘I have officiated at a number of reburials of babies and we have a special Mass for them,’ he said. ‘Everything is more open now and attitudes have softened and changed. We have to be compassion-

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ate and realize that parents need to have a focus for their grief and these infants are with God.’ The growing social and economic changes, especially in the Republic of Ireland in the last fifteen to twenty years, have also contributed to more open discussions of infant deaths (Garattini 2007: 194). These new attitudes of church and people are made visible in the graveyards. Throughout the fieldwork area children’s graves command the attention of visitors with their colourful displays of toys, cards, wind chimes, statuettes and flowers. Teddy bears cast in stone, and painted blue or pink, sit squat alongside the headstones, resting easily beside angel statues or figurines of the Virgin Mary. The proliferation of artefacts and flowers at times threatens to tumble out over the plots, as if an abundance of things is needed to keep a child happy and to provide parents with a way of continuing to care for their child. Objects and symbols thus contribute to creating a personhood that had no opportunity to develop (Garattini 2007: 193). In a study of the use of material culture at one particular graveyard in Dublin, Garattini (2007) concentrates on how memories are created for infants who had been buried in a communal and unconsecrated plot. She traces the practice of individualizing this area of the cemetery to the 1970s when people first began to leave personal items at the site (Garattini 2007: 196). The display of objects, especially items that would have been used in the home by babies and children also creates personhood for parents who never had the opportunity to parent that child (Garattini 2007: 201–3), giving them the visibility of a status that was truncated by early death. Graves can, therefore, be read on different levels. Friends and family may focus on different aspects of a deceased’s identity, be it for example a father, son, sportsman or musician. The nature of a headstone and plot allows individual acts of interpretation, but not all of the reactions to such contemporary designs are favourable. Marked differences emerged during discussions and interviews on the appropriateness of modern trends in headstone style and decoration. Several younger people, in their teens and twenties, expressed a degree of unsettlement over headstones that they considered conveyed a shift too far towards secularization. While reluctant to openly criticize people’s choices, Danny’s reaction serves to indicate the general feeling among some of the younger people with whom I spoke on several occasions: ‘I would prefer the older headstones, individually carved by the craftsman. I think it is more respectful of a dead body. A lot of care and attention went into those stones, and they still look good today. Someone who took a bit of pride and invested time in their work.’ This preference for artisanship or for plainer, understated memorials accounted for about 10 per cent of the attitudes of younger people. But there was a greater desire for what people called a ‘traditional’ stone among those

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over thirty-five and, especially, among Protestants. These ideas about style and taste are discussed in the following section by analysing the reactions of the twelve people with whom I visited the different graveyards. Their notions of taste and cemetery aesthetic are an example of the overall patterns in attitudes derived from the wider data of interviews and consultations.

New Tastes and Old Habits It was a bright, but chilly, day when I met up with the grave-visiting group, seven women and five men aged between twenty-six and fifty years old. The graveyards we were travelling to lay in Armagh, Down and Louth. Everyone in the group had a relative or friend in one or other of the cemeteries and we set off in four cars to our first stop, the new cemetery in Newry. Prominent signs displaying prohibitions in the cemetery greet every visitor as they arrive. You are cautioned not to walk on graves and forbidden to plant trees or shrubs on them. The cemetery stands on a prominent hill just outside the northwest of the city, and graves are laid out in neat rows down the slope (illustration 6.1). Graves in new cemeteries no longer follow the traditional east-west orientation. Today the headstones, 98 per cent of which are polished granite,

Illustration 6.1. Back-to-back headstones all in rows

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lie back to back in neat rows on cut lawns, and railings or border kerbstones no longer demarcate the plots. Civic regulations state that each stone can be no higher than three feet six inches (which is also the width of a single grave plot). Permission is needed from the local council authorities to erect a headstone, and plans have to be submitted for approval. The rules of cemetery layout present the visitor with a material example of bureaucratic ordering and ideas of neatness. Such ordering, and civic notions of taste, can be viewed as an attempt by the cemetery/civic management to move the space towards ‘a private, secular commercial enterprise’ (Francis 2003: 225). While the arrangements have the advantage of facilitating easier access to graves, there are various strategies that people employ to individualize graves within this regimentation and to counteract the imposed uniformity. Looking along the rows of graves we were struck by the variety of headstone styles and decorations, a variety that has been facilitated by computer-aided technological advances in graphic representation: images of animals, painted landscape scenes, photographs of the deceased and shapes that ranged from hearts to modern versions of Celtic crosses. Two of the women in the group felt the individual interpretations of the basic headstone were a good way to mark out your grave. Tess, who is twenty-eight, remarked: ‘I think it’s nice to do something different. It makes it more interesting to visit.’ Marion, a woman in her late forties, said she would not like the idea that her grave just blended into someone else’s plot: ‘I know it doesn’t, but it seems like it does. I would like to think I had some sort of edging around my grave. That way you know it’s yours. It’s all very impersonal and all the same now. It doesn’t seem like you have somewhere special.’ Only one of the group, Alan, who is fifty, said he preferred the new layout. ‘I have an uncle here and it’s great for my mother to visit. It’s really easy now, instead of having to clamber over old graves and watch where you are walking,’ he said. Woodthorpe (2010: 117–32), in examining the contemporary cemetery as ‘a contested and dynamic space’ (2010: 117) and the attitudes and expectations of ‘what constitutes “appropriate’’ memorialising behaviour’ notes that similar restrictions on headstones and artefacts have been introduced in England in an effort to adhere to safety regulations. She found that the removal of certain types of artefacts from graves by cemetery authorities often resulted in upset and resistance from the bereaved (2010: 119). The proscription on planting trees or shrubs in the Newry graveyard has led to people devising other ways of signalling the limits of a plot. On a number of graves, displays of flowers and artefacts have been laid along the length of the grave at its ‘edge’ in an effort to demarcate a plot. The newer areas of older graveyards are also increasingly laid out in similar fashion to the civic cemeteries. But some graveyards still permit hard

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landscaping around graves. People felt that the undifferentiated nature of new plots seems to make the graves anonymous and that was why they preferred to individualize them. When we left the Newry cemetery and arrived at an older Catholic churchyard, Peter, who is forty-five, took us to the grave of his grandmother. ‘It’s better here because I can plant some flowers and miniature shrubs. Sort of things my granny liked. Makes it more homely.’ The deliberate personalizing of gravesites corresponds with Goffman’s (1961: 187) theories of the assertion of individuality within institutions. Although Goffman (1961) concentrated on hospitals for the mentally ill, his more general focus was on examining how people assert their sense of self when confronted with organizations that manage ‘whole blocks’ of people’s lives (Goffman 1961: 18). If we consider that churches and civic authorities handle a large area of people’s lives, then there is the potential within bureaucratic strictures to subvert or bend authority. The rules governing the layout of gravesites or large permanent plantings are generalizing and bureaucratic and, by their nature, result in an institutional distancing from individual concerns. Yet, as we have seen, people can and do personalize the dead to a much greater degree than in previous generations. In this graveyard are several graves for small children. The most elaborate display is a grave with a massive statue of a man in a hat and coat that dominates the surrounding graves and stands sentinel over the burial place of an infant boy (illustration 6.2). The grave is crammed with heart-shaped granite plaques and toys and games are arranged at the base of the statue along the kerbstone. This huge memorial was erected for a child from a prominent Travelling Community family. But other graves in this churchyard also sport numerous artefacts and symbols, a mix of religious and secular. Statues of dogs or etched images of golf clubs or bicycles are juxtaposed with painting or figurines of saints or Jesus. The mix of non-religious and quite consumerist objects and symbols with sacred icons and representations blurs the lines between sacred and profane and produces conflicting responses from people. The new images and new material forms are viewed by many of the respondents as a secularizing of the sacred, something that is driven by consumerism. Alongside these negative attitudes is a paradoxical acceptance of the use of these items as meaningful for individuals. It is the meaning projected onto the secular objects by the living that is one of the main reasons they are used. If we agree that ‘artefacts of death possess a reverence’ (Kong 1999: 5) the evidence from fieldwork shows that this applies equally to artefacts of the dead. Whether it is a headstone fashioned to proclaim a distinct individuality or a toy left as an offering at a graveside, these materialities come to possess a reverence through the context of their placing within a sacred space. As the secular is sacralized the boundaries between them become foggy. Demerath

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Illustration 6.2. The large statue that dominates the grave of a six-month-old baby

(2000: 3) contends that the processes of sacralization and secularization are ‘symbiotic rather than conflicting’. The possibility that each contributes to the other’s output can, as Demerath (2000: 3) argues, act as ‘a major factor in producing continued religious vitality through change rather than religious decline and irrelevance through changelessness in a changing world’. But the fusing of forms, not just between sacred and secular, but also within the sacred, can contribute to a revitalization of traditional symbols. Catholic churchyards are less proscriptive on grave furniture and adornment, and it is in these graveyards that the greatest variety of styles is found.

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Examples include modern high Celtic crosses, painted friezes of the Last Supper or insets of stained glass. There are also other decorative differences between the headstones made for Catholic clients and those made for Protestants. A Dundalk undertaker explained: ‘We cater for all religions but obviously there are particular Catholic designs such as the Virgin that won’t go on Protestant headstones. Also, Catholics no longer use the psalms and I think that is a pity to have lost that. You still get text on Protestant stones.’ The older members of the group on the visit said they did not object to the religious symbols or artefacts on the graves but felt too many secular items might detract from the sacred aspect of the grave. Yet no one offered criticism of the decoration of children’s graves. Amy and John, a couple in their thirties, said it was difficult to make any comment. ‘If you haven’t lost a child you don’t know how you would react,’ said Amy. John nodded and added: ‘I think with children you have to understand.’ Their reluctance to comment is echoed by the civic and church authorities that are hesitant to publicly criticize what objects people place on graves, even if they do not approve of the displays. One of the cemetery attendants said he did not like photographs on headstones. Kellaher et al. (2005: 243) found in their study of cemeteries in London that many of their informants disliked these photographs because they were ‘too intimate’ and somehow represented a secularization of what was held as sacred space. The objections among the people I worked with were centred on aesthetics and personal taste. The group felt that the home was ‘the proper place’ for the photographs and complained that they did not ‘fit in’ with the polished headstones. Looking around the headstones, Mary, a 38-year-old, whispered quietly: ‘Those are nice polished headstones but sticking a photograph in the middle of them just ruins the whole effect.’ The cemetery attendant explained that there were no rules against photographs but he disliked them because ‘they fade after a while and just look tacky.’ He added: ‘Some people put a lot of stuff on the graves and we try to encourage them to keep them tidy with the signs to remove rubbish, but you can’t really start telling bereaved people not to put little statues on a grave.’ The strong cult of remembrance in Ireland (MacConville and McQuillan 2009) informs these attitudes of the attendant and other people. Headstones in Protestant graveyards are subjected to stricter regulations and guidelines. The Church of Ireland has clear rules on the type of headstone and inscription allowed and strongly deters emotive displays. A senior clergyman explained that they have a greater control than the Catholic clergy over displays, as within a Church of Ireland graveyard the parishioner does not own the plot of ground: ‘It is just leased in perpetuity so we can restrain any excessive individualism because the church owns the graves. The placing of artefacts such as pictures or toys is not permitted in the

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graveyards. This type of pouring all this emotion onto the grave is more akin to pagan practice than Christianity.’ Two cemeteries in South Armagh are taken as typical examples to illustrate differences in taste that stem partly from contrary ideas about the body in death and the fate of the soul (Goody and Poppi 1994: 167–68). A Church of Ireland graveyard and a Presbyterian churchyard sit side by side on the outskirts of a small village (illustration 6.3). Only a stone wall and a small iron gate separate them. The burial grounds can be entered through the driveways of either church. On the day we visited, we parked our cars on the roadway and made our way into the churchyards through the oldest part of the Presbyterian cemetery. An opening in a stone wall leads onto steep stone steps that follow the contours of an incline, past old graves, and onto the level ground of more recent burials. The plain polished stones display only brief biographical details of the dead: a name, date of birth and death and a short ‘In Memoriam’ line. Examples include ‘In loving memory’ or ‘In memory of’. Only four of the stones in both churchyards had no religious text inscribed along the bottom of the headstone. The most common legends are ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’, ‘Safe in the arms of Jesus’, or simply ‘At Rest’.

Illustration 6.3. Presbyterian (left) and Church of Ireland (right) graveyards, South Armagh

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Three of the grave-visiting group were Protestants. One of them, Sara, a 28-year-old, on entering these churchyards, swept her gaze around from the top of the steps and remarked: Doesn’t it all look nice and tidy? But look, you can still see that people choose different types of headstones. I really feel that Catholic graveyards are very tacky. I mean, all that stuff, those plastic windmills, plastic cartoon characters, really kitsch stuff. Or those awful plastic domes with flowers in them that just get dirty and mouldy.

Sara’s outburst was greeted with a few laughs and smiles from the rest of the group, but they did agree that too many items on a grave were a bit ‘unsightly’. Damien, who is thirty-five, said he felt that sometimes the things people put on graves were becoming a bit ‘ridiculous’. And Anna, a fortyyear-old Catholic agreed: ‘The type of stuff some people put on a grave is really over the top. It’s like they are trying to make a bedroom or something out of it.’ As we walked down into the graveyards, Lucy, whose mother is buried in the Presbyterian churchyard, said she felt that the general impression of the graveyard was ‘respectful and dignified’. Why did she think this? ‘Just some flowers. That’s all you need. Nobody wants to be looking at all that other paraphernalia when they come to visit,’ she explained. Notions of taste, therefore, are connected to what people perceive is the most respectful way of remembering. Danny (above) equated ‘respect for the dead’ with ‘traditional headstones’, and this reminds us of Benjamin’s (1968 [1935]: 223) argument that mass technical reproduction removes an object ‘from the domain of tradition’. But it is Benjamin’s notion that the value of an original work ‘has its basis in ritual’ (1968 [1935]: 223) that provides insight into why many people resist elaborate grave decorations. The graveyard is the site for both private and public ritual, and the presentations of headstones is an integral part of ongoing ritual behaviour. Headstones have an ‘exhibition’ value (like Benjamin’s works of art 1968 [1935]: 226) and it is the differences in the perceived audience for these stones that, in part, determines their style. The headstone signals who a person was and is directed towards families, friends and casual visitors. The production of headstones and the array of designs available have been greatly enhanced by new technology. Families who consult a stonemason do so in the comfort of showrooms and make detailed choices in front of computer screens. Every type of design and etching can be produced with computer and laser cutters (Mythum 2004: 100–1). This creates an unending choice, but does it, as Benjamin argued, detach the object ‘from engaged human contact’ so that ‘it loses that uniqueness afforded by human endeavour’ (1968 [1935]: 233)? The physical human bodily effort is removed, but human contact is engaged through a new

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medium. Each person and each family become their own artist and make decisions based on individual preferences and the aspects of the deceased’s identity that they wish to emphasize. Bourdieu (2008: 174–5) argues that taste is a matter of distinction; people choose things in opposition to what others have chosen. In a critique of taste of the French middle class, he states that decisions on what is aesthetically pleasing are made by mechanisms of opposition. Thus, things that are distinguished acquire this designation ‘by their rarity’ (2008: 176) and other things are ‘socially identified as vulgar because they are both easy and common’ (2008: 176). Laser cutters and computers make design easy and accessible to people who are not experts. It is this element of the ‘common’ that Danny and other informants find difficult to reconcile. The individuality of designs has resulted in what people feel is sometimes an uncomfortable mix of symbols that spills into too much secularization. The bringing together of traditional forms and new symbols or new ways of using older symbols is, in itself, part of a continuing evolution of ideals and societal values. Traditional forms are necessary because they inform practices that deviate from it (Kellaher et al. 2005: 238). They also illustrate shifting values and emphases in wider society, as we have seen with the greater democratization, not just in cemetery layout, but in who becomes involved in decision-making and in how marginal groups are now more visible in the churchyard. Historically, headstones were used to depict a person’s trade or profession, or membership of a secular group (McCormick 1976: 5–16; Mythum 2004: 149). The mixing of secular and sacred symbols is not therefore a new practice in graveyards. It can be placed within a fluctuating pattern of how materiality has been used in remembrance that stretches back to prehistory.

Monuments in Time In the early years of Christianity the dead were buried outside of settlement areas, but within a few centuries this situation had changed and it became more common to bury the dead in and around churches (McCormick 2007: 358–9). There was, however, little interest at the time in creating monuments to the dead as a form of commemoration (McCormick 2007: 358). In Europe, generally, by the beginning of the Middle Ages the marked tomb or gravestone had more or less vanished in the Christian world (Aries 1981: 53). There was no concept of a family grave and no markers; the usual practice was that people were buried in communal plots in churchyards (Aries 1981: 53).

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This lack of material forms to the dead in the landscape contrasted with the legacy of monuments from prehistoric Ireland. The elaborate stone tombs and cairns that were constructed nearly six thousand years ago are scattered across the country and are testament to a preoccupation with ancestors and a cult of the dead (Waddell 1998: 57). In the Carlingford area there are forty-four tombs of various types dating from the Neolithic (4000– 2500 bc). These range from passage graves sited on top of Slieve Gullion in Co. Armagh and Slieve Foy in Co. Louth, to court tombs and portal tombs set on lower slopes (Cooney 2000: 139–40). From the zenith of the Neolithic tomb builders to the smaller cemeteries and individual graves of Bronze Age Ireland (c. 2500–900 bc), many centuries passed before marked gravesites again began to proliferate in the landscape. The headstone in the churchyard first appeared in Ulster, in areas of Scots settlement, from around 1700, and in Co. Louth from 1710, and show an overall rise from about 1760 (McCormick 2007: 365–66). But the real boom in headstones, evident throughout the British Isles, came in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Tarlow 1998; Mythum 2006: 96). The different types of Stone Age tombs that appear to have been erected contemporaneously (Cooney 2000: 139–42) are echoed in the variety of graveside decorations and headstone designs that represent modern variations on memorial monumentality. It is possible, therefore, to discern an oscillating pattern in memorialization that ranges from the communal Neolithic tombs, grandiose in stature and dominating the landscape, to the simpler mounds of Bronze Age Ireland, and later to Early Christian communal burial that gradually gave way to the individual family plots that we recognize today. What is happening is that symbols are being reconfigured and may differ in kind but are placed within the same typology. So a child’s grave may have a picture of a lamb rather than a cross (Collier 2003: 742). The new representations of crosses, whether it is a headstone shaped into a cross or a cross etched onto a stone face, are the twenty-first-century version of a religious art form that has been used in Ireland for more than one thousand years. The earliest Irish crucifixion scenes date to around ad 800, and historic crosses show a wide range of artistic styles and interpretations, from early tomb scenes to a more recent bronze crucifix in Armagh Cathedral (Harbinson 2000: 96). Even the use of text and pictorial etchings that advertise the recreational pursuits of the deceased – the guitar headstone or images of bikes or dogs – is, on one level, an adaptation of older practices. While people have a perception that displays on headstones are new, it is the proliferation of a wider variety of symbols that signals the new. These, in conjunction with the types of artefacts placed on graves, are ways in which democratization and individualism are celebrated within the arena of the cemetery. In his

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study of religion in Donegal, Taylor (1995: 242) believed that religion may take new forms but does so within the context of already existing materials, ‘language, objects, places, notions’. Buckham (2003: 160–175) has argued that commemoration is ‘used to express both personal relationships and affiliations to social groups’, but the contemporary forms used still achieve that purpose, albeit in a looser, less formalized fashion. It is individuality that is now emphasized through individual choices. Personal choice and taste have determined the contemporary look of the graveyards and, as Effros (2003: 118) noted for the Early Mediaeval period, are the products of choices made ‘within the limits of the prevailing cultural context’ and are ‘a negotiated balance between individual and collective concerns’. The civic authorities dictate the space allocated to each person and public rules governing headstone size, but the families negotiate these rules to make each space particular to them. Choices about headstones are made with a wide audience in mind and within recognition that cemeteries are social spaces where sacred and secular activities sit alongside sacred and secular symbols. Irish churchyards have a history of use for secular activities. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries graveyards were used to host fairs, to graze cattle and pigs and as a venue for community gatherings and games (Tait 2002: 65). But secular activities in churchyards were also recorded much earlier, with accounts of dancing at vigils and in commemoration of the dead dating from the ninth to twelfth centuries (Caciola 1996: 40–42). There are also documentary records of the living dancing with the dead, and Caciola (1996: 42–43) believes many of these dances symbolized the crossing of the boundary between life and death. She suggests that while the dances may have been attempts to ‘fix’ the dead within their own realm, they also celebrated ‘the communal linkages between living and dead’ (Caciola 1996: 44). The social uses of the graveyard for both secular and sacred activities continue today, but in different form. Visiting graves affords people the opportunity not only for private prayer and connection with the deceased (see also Woodthorpe 2010: 117–132), but also for socializing with friends and neighbours (as we saw at collective remembrance events discussed in chapter 5). Visitors also take time to stroll around graveyards, and on the occasions I visited with informants, I was treated to a cascade of diverse opinions and comments on the state of churchyards and the styles of headstones. The graveyard in Ireland, and especially the historic churchyard, is a powerful symbol of shared identity (Cashman 2006: 149). This contrasts with what Rugg (2006: 228) discovered in relation to London cemeteries, where the audience for a memorial was ‘other family members rather than the wider community’. In a re-evaluation of Warner’s (1959) classic

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account of American cemeteries, Francis (2003: 222) reminds us of his theory about the cemetery as a ‘collective representation’. Irish graves also differ from other parts of the British Isles as they usually hold more bodies, and headstones, therefore, will record a greater number of generations of a family (Mythum 2006: 103). The aesthetic and general visual impression of a graveyard is therefore important to those who visit. As the majority of those who visit have kin connections, the headstones are also ways in which histories and kin connections are re-forged.

Kin Places and Connections Churchyards and cemeteries are repositories for personal and local histories that are displayed on headstones and passed on through stories associated with the dead. They are places that invite memories and reflection (Cashman 2006: 149). The continuing attention to graves, the growing floral and artefactual displays at plots, and the sociability enacted at the sites draw the dead back into fellowship with the living and give them a permanent investment in the lives of their kin. Attention to the upkeep of graves, visiting and bringing flowers are ‘ways of maintaining networks of kin’ (Goody and Poppi 1994: 150). The grave acts as a catalyst and focal point to bring kin together, as seen when people travel long distances to attend annual Graves Blessing ceremonies (see chapter 5). The headstones, through their text, can identify social and familial relations and provide a focus for memory (Mythum 2006: 106; Tarlow 1998: 33–43). The intermittent tending of graves throughout the year can also act to ‘strengthen distant ties’ (Goody and Poppi 1994: 150). Children or other relatives who have moved away from an area can be called on to share in the duties of keeping a grave tidy and ensuring that flowers and decorations are renewed (Goody and Poppi 1994). The people consulted during this fieldwork had divergent and often conflicting views about how a graveyard should look to the visitor, but all of them regarded graveyards as places that contained information about local communities. One particular change in headstone texts, evident in the last fifty years, is the absence now of townland1 names from inscriptions. Miriam, a thirty-year-old, said she felt it was sad that local names were no longer used: ‘You don’t know where someone belonged now. Before it was like a whole family history and you would know immediately who someone was.’ Greater mobility within the population has also meant that it can be difficult for visitors to graveyards to connect a deceased with their wider kin in the absence of references to townland residence. The demise of the use of townland names, which was fashionable from the mid-nineteenth century,

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has been replaced by new ways of reflecting belonging and history on headstones, ways that are decided by the individual consumer.

Conclusion The changes in how graveyards are laid out and how individual plots are marked and decorated are barometers of wider changes in society. As we have already seen in analysing people’s engagement with mementos, there are processes of personalization and perpetuating personhood, which are also negotiated through the material object of the headstone. The desire to have people remembered, and remembered through materiality, is not simply a matter of relegating items to the role of memory substitutes (Garattini 2007: 197). While all memory entails selection and thus a necessary element of forgetting (Forty 1999: 5–7), the graveside acts upon the living as the living act upon it; the living choose how a grave plot is presented and also make choices on the frequency of visits to the graveyard. The renewal of connections and personhood that is enacted through graveyard materiality and visits (something also noted by Francis et al. 2005: 80, 124; Woodthorpe 2010) is also facilitated by the particular design of the headstone, the inscription on the stone and how a gravesite is adorned with either fixed or portable artefacts. The individual consumer decides, within some civic and church rules and guidelines, how their loved one will be remembered (Francis et al. 2005: 46–54). The reluctance of civic authorities in the fieldwork area to make pronouncements on the type or number of artefacts on graves is an indication of how individualism has become more acceptable and more prominent. The deliberate refusal to confront bereaved people over the adornment of graves also shows that the authorities are unwilling to upset grieving relatives and that the places of the dead are ritually and symbolically sacred. The audiences for these headstones can have mixed and conflicting views about the aesthetics of the cemetery, how materiality is used to show respect for the dead and how different identities are portrayed. When Taussig (2006: 6) visited Walter Benjamin’s grave on the border between France and Spain, he was uncomfortable that Benjamin’s identity as a writer, the important element for Taussig, was being ‘subsumed’ by the concentration of most visitors on finding the grave. Similarly, there is a dislike of over-individualizing on headstones and graves, as articulated by three-quarters of people interviewed. The increased involvement of women and children in negotiating the style of a headstone is a reflection of a greater democratization in society and more pronounced visibility of previously marginal groups, such as the

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Travellers. Yet, within all of the new trends, there are older symbols and attitudes that mix and blend and sometimes vie for prominence. The ‘new’ is therefore not so new overall. The contemporary forms would probably even make sense to and be meaningfully read by those from past times. Symbols of secular and recreational pursuits or corporate identities are evident on historic stones, and varieties of these elements are used today. Specific iconography or texts that decorate stones remain distinctive signifiers of religious affiliation. The graveyards and headstones that I visited, whether historic or modern, tell stories for families and casual visitors and provide ways to glimpse changes in society that are being transferred to burial places. How people decide on the styles, images and artefacts that they use is dictated by personal circumstances and taste. Some people prefer totally new and idiosyncratic styles (guitars or stained glass windows) but others reinterpret classic styles or crosses. The common pattern that underlies the choices is that the boundaries between secular and sacred, public and private, and individual and institution are being pushed continuously. The attention to burial, as opposed to cremation, which accounts for an estimated 2 to 5 per cent of disposals in Ireland (Kellaher et al. 2005: 239), is part of the continuing attachments to local churchyards and the importance that people place on having a focus for ongoing remembrance and relationship. This also indicates how the social aspects of graveyards remain essential to the inhabitants of this area. In addition, the mixing of social and sacred activities in the graveyard and the fashioning of a plot to advertise who someone was in life are all indicators of how the dead are regarded as worthy of continued attention and brought into a new state of reunion. This new state is facilitated by the way in which people anchor notions of personhood to the grave and headstone through texts and artefacts and use these also to reinforce kinship. The continuing relationships between the living and the dead are ‘articulated, reinforced, contested, renegotiated and reconstructed through memorial behaviour’ (Francis et al. 2005: 177). Through all of the mechanisms for continuance, remembrance and reconnection, the contemporary practices and attention to materiality in graveyards are acts of ritual that borrow and bend from earlier times and attitudes, a bricolage that comes in a new form but roots itself in the past. Note 1. Townlands are particular divisions of land that are peculiar to Ireland. They derive from Gaelic names for pockets of land and may or may not be coterminous with parish boundaries. A townland can consist of a small village or town, or extend to a few miles of fields and scattered farmsteads.

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Bibliography Aries, P. 1981. The Hour of Our Death. London: Allen Lane. Benjamin, W. 1968 [1935]. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York: Schocken Books. Bourdieu, P. 2008. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge. Buckham, S. 2003. ‘Commemoration as an Expression of Personal Relationships and Group Identities: A Case Study of York Cemetery’, Mortality 8(2): 160–75. Caciola, N. 1996. ‘Wraiths, Revenants and Ritual in Mediaeval Culture’, Past and Present 152: 3–45. Cashman, R. 2006. ‘Critical Nostalgia and Material Culture in Northern Ireland’, Journal of American Folklore 119(472): 137–60. Collier, C.D.A. 2003. ‘Tradition, Modernity and Postmodernity in Symbolism of Death’, Sociological Quarterly 44(4): 727–49. Cooney, G. 2000. Landscapes of Neolithic Ireland. London: Routledge. Demerath, N.J. 2000. ‘The Varieties of Sacred Experience: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Grave’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 39(1): 1–11. Effros, B. 2003. Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Forty, A. 1999. ‘Introduction’, in A. Forty and S. Kuchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting: Materialising Culture. Oxford: Berg. Francis, D. 2003. ‘Cemeteries as Cultural Landscapes’, Mortality 8(2): 222–27. Francis, D., L. Kellaher and G. Neophytou. 2005. The Secret Cemetery. Oxford: Berg. Garattini, C. 2007. ‘Creating Memories: Material Culture and Infantile Death in Contemporary Ireland’, Mortality 12(2): 193–206. Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums. London: Penguin. Goody, J. 1962 Death, Property and the Ancestors. London: Tavistock. Goody, J., and C. Poppi. 1994. ‘Flowers and Bones: Approaches to the Dead in Anglo-American and Italian Cemeteries’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 36(1): 146–75. Harbinson, P. 2000. The Crucifixion in Irish Art. Dublin: Columba Press. Howarth, G. 2000. ‘Dismantling the Boundaries between Life and Death’, Mortality 5(2): 127–138. Kellaher, L., D. Prendergast and J. Hockey. 2005. ‘In the Shadow of the Traditional Grave’, Mortality 10(4): 237–59. Kong, L. 1999. ‘Cemeteries and Columbaria, Memorials and Mausoleums: Narrative and Interpretation in the Study of Deathscapes in Geography’, Australian Geographical Studies 37(1): 1–10. MacConville, U., and R. McQuillan. 2009. ‘Remembering the Dead: Roadside Memorials in Ireland’, in A. Kasher (ed.), Dying, Assisted Death and Mourning. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi. McCormick, F. 1976. ‘A Group of Eighteenth Century Clogher Headstones’, Clogher Record 9(1): 5–16.

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———. 2007. ‘Reformation, Privatisation and the Rise of the Headstone’, in A. Horning, R. O’Baoill, C. Donnelly and P. Logue (eds), The Post-Mediaeval Archaeology of Ireland: 1550–1850. Dublin: Wordwell. Mythum, H. 2004. Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period. New York: Kluwer Academic. ———. 2006. ‘Popular Attitudes to Memory, the Body and Social Identity: The Rise of External Commemoration in Britain, Ireland and New England’, PostMedieval Archaeology 40(1): 96–110. Rugg, J. 2006. ‘Lawn Cemeteries: The Emergence of a new Landscape of Death’, Urban History 33(2): 433– 64. Tait, C. 2002. Death, Burial and Commemoration in Ireland: 1550–1650. Hampshire, England: Palgrave. Tarlow, S. 1998. ‘Romancing the Stones: The Graveyard Boom of the later 18th Century’, in M. Cox (ed.), Grave Concerns: Death and Burial in England 1700 to 1850. Council for British Archaeology Research Reports 113, York: Council for British Archaeology. Taussig, M. 2006. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, L. 1995. Occasions of Faith: An Anthropology of Irish Catholicism. Dublin: Lilliput Press. Waddell, J. 1998. The Prehistoric Archaeology of Ireland. Galway: Galway University Press. Warner, W.L. 1959. The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Woodthorpe, K. 2010. ‘Private Grief in Public Spaces: Interpreting Memorialisation in the Contemporary Cemetery’, in J. Hockey, C. Komaromy and K. Woodthorpe (eds), The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality. London: Palgrave MacMillan.



CONCLUSION

This book has concentrated on the materiality of remembrance among inhabitants of a particular area along the Irish border. The material consistently shows that all kinds of boundaries are constantly being pushed and re-evaluated by people in the arena of remembrance. The blurring and fusing of boundaries is present in how people use and interact with the materiality of the dead across a range of scenarios that are summarized below. The findings reveal that through the media of objects, stories and places, the dead are reintegrated into the lives, the communications and the places of the living. In negotiating the new relationships with the dead through materiality, the relationships among the living are also consolidated and renewed. In considering how materiality becomes the critical element in informing the ongoing relationships with the dead, this book addressed themes of containment and displacement, separation and reunion, and sentiment and value. The analysis of how that materiality is used, contested and negotiated has revealed the importance that people in this area place on attendance to the dead. The examination of the material culture of the dead at the micro level and the use of materiality as a metaphor to explore cultural ideas have provided new data in relation to Ireland and a new approach to the subject matter. The findings of this study have reaffirmed and consolidated some of the extant theoretical and ethnographic works, but they have also led to a critical look at the concepts of liminality, inalienability and the parameters of materiality that are discussed below. I have drawn on the work of, among others, Schiffer (1999), who contended that it is through materiality that lives are lived; on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) theories of how humans need to materialize the immaterial; and on Hoskins’s (1998) argument that the stories of objects tell the stories of people. These ideas have been reinforced through the data collected. The

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imperative to retain an ‘essence’ of the dead, the narratives of the deceased and the stories of objects, is a constant theme and reminder that materiality is a beginning and end point for making sense of the remembering of the dead. It has been shown, in accordance with Lakoff and Johnson (1980), that it is the desire to make the immaterial into tangible forms that underlies strategies to retain the physicality of the dead. People experience the dead through materiality, and this translates into an embodiment that becomes an inseparable element of our material selves. Unlike Hertz’s (1960 [1909]) contention that the funeral rituals he studied symbolized a denial of mortality and that death was viewed as an unnatural occurrence, for the people in this fieldwork area, death is acknowledged and accepted as a process of changing ontological states. Belief in a soul and an afterlife does not necessarily equate with a denial of mortality. The seeming paradox contained in this is balanced through the rituals of remembrance. The data from this study have shown that regardless of whether or not people hold religious beliefs, have doctrinal differences or ever attend church services, they attend to the dead through the medium of materiality. Part of what is being balanced is a liminality that, for many people, remains unresolved. The concept of liminality has been interrogated here through an examination of the constant attention that people pay to the dead through materiality and by the strategies that they use to enact repeated renewals of rituals, whether in the home or in public. The continuing negotiations that people make to balance the paradox between separation and reintegration bring into question the bounded characteristics attributed to rites de passage by Van Gennep (1969 [1909]) and Turner (1967, 1969). The narratives of the dead (chapter 2), the sensory experience of deceased persons (chapter 3), the attention to their former possessions (chapter 4), and the attendances at rituals (private and collective) enacted at gravesides (chapters 5–6), are continued negotiations of an unresolved liminality. The state of the liminal is neither neatly circumscribed nor contained. It is, in many cases, a fluid and continuous process; it is through repeated acts of remembrance that the liminal continues, and it is by the use of materiality that it remains an ongoing state. In her critical analysis of death warnings in Inner Mani, Seremetakis (1994: 48–9) has also argued for pushing the boundaries of liminality. She views death warnings, due to their dispersed nature (usually experienced by kin who are not members of the immediate bereaved family), as ‘boundary-violating’ (1994: 49). The warnings push the boundaries because they allow for muted multiple entries by the living into death and neither exhibit a linear progression in the dissemination of information nor constitute a definite ‘formal ceremonial beginning’ (1994: 50). But the liminality of these fuzzy beginnings is resolved when death is confirmed, as this signals

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‘impending resolution of … liminality’ (1994: 55). The grave is also viewed as a liminal place, a ‘temporary abode for the dead’ until the exhumation of the bones for secondary burial or removal to a charnel house (1994: 186). But if the liminality of death warnings is resolved by the death, there is, as discussed above, liminality after death that may still weave in and out of lives and keep violating those boundaries. Remembrance rituals may serve to obscure the disconnectedness of death but they also act to renew separation and reunion. Stafford (2000: 174–6) has argued that separations are necessary in order to make reunions meaningful. In addition to that, however, this study shows that it is because people believe that the dead are liminal, present in a different ontological state, and capable of affecting the lives of the living that it is the liminal that becomes important. It can be argued that for people who move far away from an area, have no contact with former neighbours and no kin residing in a particular place, there is no unresolved liminality. The graves and headstones are no longer used, perhaps for a number of generations, and are left untidy and dilapidated. So the unresolved nature of liminality can be relative and shifting. Yet even for those ‘forgotten’ dead there are instances of collective remembrance. At the annual Sundays, All Souls’ Day services or Remembrance Day services, we have seen that all the dead are included and remembered. It is how they are remembered through different and changing forms of materiality that has also provided insights into the culturally specific ways that people use items. How new forms appear and proliferate (through novel headstones or the use of new technology to record faces and voices) has illustrated the degree to which individualism is being integrated into remembrance. The shifting styles of remembering are set alongside older rituals and are contained within a traditional form of remembering that leads us to question how ‘new’ they are when viewed in the context of long-term patterns of material use in death. Thus, we have seen that a photograph may hang in a living room but also smile out from a headstone. A cross may mark an adult’s grave but a lamb will be etched into a child’s memorial. The symbols used are within a traditional typology of both secular and sacred icons and items of remembrance. In this respect the data concur with observations by Collier (2003) and Effros (2003) that modern items and symbols not only sit alongside traditional forms, but are also, in many cases, new kinds of symbols that are drawn from traditional types. These theories can be extended to contextualize the historic and prehistoric memorializing of the dead in this area. The marking of grave places stretches back more than five thousand years in the Carlingford area, but as has been shown, there is not a continuous visible memorializing of the dead. There have been fluctuations in the ways the dead have been remembered, and it has only been in the last four hundred years that individual marked burial places of the

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general population have flourished. The dead, however, were always present in the older tombs, in the domestic keepsakes and in the experience of them conjured by sensory engagement with the landscape. Through an examination of how senses, objects and emotions interplay, I have argued, as did Csordas (1993) and Damasio (2000), that senses and emotions are visceral and embodied, in order to show that they instigate a material experience of a deceased person. Further to this, cognitive and sensory aspects of remembrance are linked together in realizing the ability to recall and tell stories. Thus, for objects to be the crucial element in defining a deceased person, they must be tied to the senses, which play a pivotal role in setting remembrance in motion. In addition, sensory experiences of the landscape are important factors in remembrance and are essential to our understanding of how the geography of this area impacts on people and how they situate the dead, materially and cognitively. The material nature of remembrance in the home has been addressed principally through expanding the concept of inalienability. In moving beyond the gift versus commodity dichotomy that lay at the heart of Mauss’s (1966 [1950]) conception of inalienability and Weiner’s (1985) essentialized systems of high-status objects in ‘closed’ communities, I have expanded the parameters of inalienability to allow it to become fluid and relative. The inalienable items that I have discussed acquire their particular status after someone has died, and it is a status that is related to connectedness and how an object symbolizes the personhood of the deceased. Inalienability is tied to circulation but the acquisition of inalienable status is manufactured by moving through different stages. Certain criteria of meaning, context and relationships between people must also be present for this process to operate. This fits broadly with work by Feil et al. (1982), Hermann (1997) and Liep (1986) but explores ideas at a micro level and within the context of death as the initiator of the process. The analysis here also moves beyond Carrier’s (1993) notions of moveable statuses of commodities and possessions, as the objects considered in this ethnography are subject to cultural rules in relation to kin and social networks that determine redistribution. While extending the parameters of materiality to include embodiment, the book has also addressed the ambiguous demarcation of boundaries of objects and people and used this as a metaphor for the opaque boundaries between the living and the dead. The imperative to retain a physicality that is lost through death and to perpetuate personhood through objects and places of remembrance relates to notions of the boundaries of the ‘self’ that have been theorized by Hallam et al. (1999). The findings of my study show that the dead are ‘socially alive’ (Hallam et al. 1999) but also reveal that this conceptualization of the dead is culturally embedded, widely recognized, and actively engaged with through myriad aspects of materiality.

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Pushing Boundaries Overall, the data show that as people engage and interact with materiality in contemporary remembrance there is a constant negotiation of all kinds of boundaries. The demarcations between people and objects, the living and the dead, the sacred and the secular, the public and the private, and the individual and institutions are fuzzy and at times contested. Objects that once belonged to the dead may become imbued with meaning and vehicles for signalling and perpetuating personhood. These items are talked about by people as encapsulating the ‘essence’ of a deceased person and can evoke sensory and sentimental experiences of the dead. The things thus become more than material objects as they are enmeshed with the immaterial presence of someone who has died. The boundary between objects and people depends on the meanings projected onto objects by the living but also depends on a notion of the ‘self’ as being separate or capable of disconnection from the body (Hallam et al. 1999). This is also evidenced in all the various ways people engage with, talk about, and view the dead in rituals of reconnection and ongoing relationships. The boundary between the living and the dead is tempered with the boundary between love and fear of the dead that is continually negotiated through all the processes and acts of remembrance. But other boundaries are also being subjected to reinterpretations and are constantly being pushed and pulled. What constitutes either sacred or secular is subject to different criteria and interpretations. The changing styles of headstones and the types of decorations and artefacts placed on graves are mechanisms for encroachments on the boundaries of what constitutes sacred space or sacred symbols. Secular objects adorn the sacred space of graves, and secular places in homes and landscape become sacralized as foci of individual remembrance. The churches, through established rituals and regulations, negotiate to maintain control of meaning and the meaning of symbols, but the boundaries of their authority are contested by individual interpretations and material displays. Increased democratization within the churches and civic society, along with increased opportunities for consumerism, has opened the way for a greater emphasis on individualism and personalization in the materiality of remembrance. Contemporary practices can provide routes towards discerning how wider changes in society can impact on remembrance and be reflected in the materiality of the dead. But modern rites and rituals are always tempered with those older beliefs that inform specific ways of remembering through diverse forms of materiality. Not all the new forms are universally accepted and some, like the newer forms of material display in graveyards, are perhaps the most prominent example of how change is contested. Yet, even in this case, opposition is muted

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and the memorials are facilitated. As MacConville and McQuillan (2009) argue, there is a culture of remembrance throughout Ireland that permeates and transcends the bureaucratic boundaries between officialdom and private concerns. The non-interference with grave displays and the reluctance to remove artefacts from civic cemeteries are illustrative of how the dead are held in reverence and how those boundaries are breached in deference to the bereaved and their dead. While different types of boundaries are being confronted through contemporary material forms, they ultimately connect in the ways in which people conceptualize the boundary between the living and the dead. O’Donohue (1997) talked of the dead in Ireland as ‘our nearest neighbours’. In an exploration of Celtic wisdom, he noted that despite contemporary trends to deny and hide death in the developed Western countries, there remains in Ireland an adherence to older practices and beliefs. Like the priest who remarked at the All Souls’ Day service that the Irish ‘do not camouflage death’, we are conscious of a culturally specific placing of the dead within consciousness and practice that affords the deceased a position with the living, the manifestation of which is exhibited through the material culture of remembrance. Bibliography Carrier, J.G. 1993. ‘The Rituals of Christmas Giving’, in D. Miller (ed.), Unwrapping Christmas. Oxford: Clarendon. Collier, C.D.A. 2003. ‘Tradition, Modernity and Postmodernity in Symbolism of Death’, Sociological Quarterly 44(4): 727–49. Csordas, T.J. 1993. ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. Damasio, A. 2000. The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. London: William Heinmann. Effros, B. 2003. Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press. Feil, D.K., F.H. Damon and C.A. Gregory. 1982. ‘Alienating the Inalienable’, Man (NS) 17(2): 340–45. Hallam, E., J. Hockey and G. Howarth. 1999. Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity. London: Routledge. Hermann, G.M. 1997. ‘Gift or Commodity: What Changes Hands in the US Garage Sale?’, American Ethnologist 24(4): 910–30. Hertz, R. 1960 (1909). Death and the Right Hand, trans. R. Needham and C. Needham. Glencoe, IL: Free Press. Hoskins, J. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge. Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Liep, J. 1986. ‘Further Comments on “Inalienable Wealth”’, American Ethnologist 13(1): 158–59. MacConville, U., and R. McQuillan. 2009. ‘Remembering the Dead: Roadside Memorials in Ireland’, in A. Kasher (ed.), Dying, Assisted Death and Mourning. Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi. Mauss, M. 1966 [1950]. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. I. Cunnison. London: Cohen and West Ltd. O’Donohue, J. 1997. Anam Cara. London: Bantham Press. Schiffer, M. 1999. The Material Life of Human Beings: Artifacts, Behaviour and Communication. London: Routledge. Seremetakis, C. N. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder: Westview Press. Stafford, C. 2000. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, V. 1967. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. New York and London: Cornell University Press. ———. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Van Gennep, A. 1960 [1909]. The Rites of Passage, trans. M. Vicedom and S. Kimball. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Weiner, A. 1985. ‘Inalienable Wealth,’ American Ethnologist 12(2): 210–27.

 Appendix

Table 1. Stonemasons interviewed and subjects discussed Location

Co. Down

Co. Louth

Co. Armagh

Number consulted

2

1

1

Headstones

✓

✓

✓

Styles/changes/attitude

✓

✓

✓

Processes of choosing

✓

✓

✓

Brochures consulted

✓

✓

✓

Subjects discussed

Table 2. Undertakers interviewed and subjects discussed Location

Co. Down

Co. Louth

Co. Armagh

Number consulted

2

1

2

Headstones

✓

✓

✓

Funerals

✓

✓

✓

Graves

✓

✓

✓

Styles/changes/attitudes

✓

✓

✓

Brochures consulted

✓

Subjects discussed

146

Appendix

Table 3. Clergy interviewed and subjects discussed Denomination

Catholic

Church of Ireland

Presbyterian

Number consulted

6

4

3

Headstones: styles/changes

✓

✓

✓

Graves:rules/adornment/attitudes/ aesthetics

✓

✓

✓

Collective services

✓

✓

✓

Theology of death/the dead

✓

✓

✓

Funerals:form/materiality

✓

✓

✓

Subjects discussed

Table 4. Demographic profile of groups Name

Location

Denomination Number Age

Female/Male

Culnamore South Armagh History Group

Catholic

20

35–65 yrs

9/11

Silver Threads South Armagh Community History Group

Mixed

25

55–80 yrs

19/16

Altnaveigh Community Group

Cos. Down/ Armagh

Protestant

15

30–60 yrs

6/9

Presbyterian Parish Group

Co. Louth

Protestant

10

30–60 yrs

8/7

Presbyterian Parish Group

Co. Down

Protestant

15

21–70 yrs

6/4

Catholic Parish Co. Down Group

Catholic

23

28–55 yrs

12/11

Catholic Parish Cos. Down/ Group Armagh

Catholic

19

26–54 yrs

12/7

Dancers

Cos. Down/ Mixed Armagh/Louth

14

27–65 yrs

10/4

Youth Group

Co. Down

Mixed

8

21–26 yrs

4/4

Youth Group

Co. Armagh

Protestant

9

13–15 yrs

2/7

Youth Group

Co. Louth

Mixed

7

15–22 yrs

4/3

Total

165

92F/73M

Appendix

147

Table 5. Subjects discussed with groups Name

Objects

Headstones Graves Funerals

Services

Culnamore History Group, South Armagh

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Silver Threads Community Group, South Armagh

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Altnaveigh Community Group, Cos. Down/Armagh

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Presbyterian Parish Group, Co. Louth

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Presbyterian Parish Group, Co. Down

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Catholic Parish Group, Co. Down

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Catholic Parish Group, Cos, Down/Armagh

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Dancers, Cos. Down/ Armagh/Louth

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Youth Group, Co. Down

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Youth Group, Co. Armagh

✓

✓

✓

x

x

Youth Group, Co. Louth

✓

✓

✓

✓

✓

Table 6. Age and gender of people formally interviewed, subjects discussed and walks undertaken Individual Interviews Age groups (yrs) Subjects

Gender

18–27 28–40 41–60 61+

Totals

Mementos, heirlooms: M folklore/customs/ghost stories F

5 4

11 13

15 17

2 4

33 38

Graves: place/heritage/ folklore/customs

M F

3 5

2 3

3 10

2

10 18

Life histories

M F

1 2

1 2

House clearances

M F

1 2

2 5

Graveyard walks

M F

2 3

3 5

4 2

9 10

Landscape walks

M F

3 5

4 6

2 1

9 12

3 7

148

Appendix

Table 7. Number and type of collective events attended Remembrance Day Sunday

2

All Souls' Day

2

All Saints' Day

1

Cemetery Sundays

4

Wakes

5

Funerals

6

Memorial service for boating tragedy

1

Table 8. Number and type of individual events attended with informants Grave Visiting

10

House clearances

4

Church/social teas

8

Jumble sales/auctions

5

Table 9. Museums and archives consulted and interviews with curators Collections Consulted

Interviews

Subjects

Dundalk Museum

Public/catalogue/ Curators (2) oral histories/ archive/library

Wills/legacies/artefacts. Historical/current trends

Newry and Mourne Museum

Public/catalogue/ Curators (2) oral histories/ archive/library

Wills/legacies/artefacts. Historical/current trends

Burren Heritage Centre

Public/photographic archive

Curator (1)

Local history/practices/ stories/folklore

Crossmaglen Heritage Centre

Documentary archive

Curators (2)

Local history/practices/ stories/folklore

Co. Louth Archaeological Society

Documentary archive

Curators (2)

Archaeology of death/ prehistoric monuments

Co. Louth Archives

Documentary archive

Curators (2)

Wills and historical papers

National Archives, Dublin

Documentary archive

Curator (1)

Wills

Public Records Office, Belfast

Documentary archive

Curator (1)

Wills

 Index

Actor Network Theory (ANT), 2 aesthetic taste: graveyards, 122–30, 133, 134, 135 affection, touch and, 60 age differences: sensory behaviour, 60, 61 agency, 2; objects, 2–3, 72 All Souls commemoration, 105–7, 114, 140 altered state: the dead, 2, 7, 10, 11, 52 ancestors: pre-Christian ideals, 104 ancestral status, acquisition of, 47 anniversary notices, 107–8, 113 anonymity: research subjects, 33 anti-structure, 10, 11 Appadurai, Arjun, 8–9 archives: data collection, 32 Ardree House Festival of Remembrance, 112–13 Arensberg, Conrad M., 3 Aristotle, 56 auditory episodes: memory, 61, 62 authenticity: engaged human contact, 69–70 autobiographical memory, 96–97 Bachelard, Gaston, 57, 71, 72 banshees, 50, 52n3 Basque country: assemblage of objects, 13n1 Belk, Russell, 8 Benjamin, Walter, 69, 129, 134 Berliner, David, xi Bird-David, Nurit, 77 Bloch, Maurice, xii, 109 body, self and, 6–7. See also embodiment body parts, display of, 65–66, 72

border: closure of roads, x; crossborder focus, x–xi boundaries: between life and death, 132, 139–40; between living and dead, xii, 77–78, 80, 141, 142, 143; between people and objects, 2, 141, 142; between private and public, 107, 135, 142; between sacred and secular, 125–26, 135, 142; collective remembrance, 107, 112; objects, 64, 71–72, 76, 77–78, 80, 84, 91, 92; pushed, 135, 138, 139–40, 142–43; researcher, 20, 21, 22–24, 26, 28, 29–30, 33–34; the self, 6–7, 141 Bourdieu, Pierre, 130 Brandes, Stanley, 14n4, 114 Buckham, Susan, 132 Caciola, Nancy, 132 candles: All Souls commemoration, 106, 107, 114 Carlingford: prehistoric tombs, 131, 140 Carrick, 105–7, 114 Carrier, James G., 141 Catholic v Protestant symbolism: graveyards, 126–28, 128–29 cemetery layout, 123–25 Cemetery Sundays, 97–105, 109, 114, 115, 133, 140 charities, circulation of objects to, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91 child graves, 120, 121–22, 125, 127, 130 children: choice of headstones, 121, 134–35 China: beliefs about dead, 7; rituals of separation and reunion, 50

150

Christianity: maintenance of physicality, 92 Christiansen, Reidar Thoralf, 46, 47 church and people: contestation, 12, 15n11, 48, 142 church visits: Presbyterian church, 26–7 circulation: objects, 77–78, 84–93, 141 Clanmore, 111 class: lack of differences in attitude, 56 Classen, Constance, 9 clothes, 62–63, 66 coal, 79–80, 92n1 collective events, analysis of, xi–xii collective remembrance, 10, 95–116, 140; All Souls Day, 105–7, 114, 140; Cemetery Sundays, 97–105, 109, 113, 114, 115, 133, 140; Remembrance Day, 109–13, 114, 115, 140; research, 31–32 Collier, C. D. Abbey, 120, 140 commodity: distinction from gift, 77, 141 commodity to possession process, 78 ‘communal’: use of term, xii communal remembrance, 10 communitas, 10–11 community: All Souls commemoration, 106, 114; Cemetery Sundays, 98, 101–2, 104, 114 connectedness: gravesites, 109; quality of, 77, 141 contact, maintaining: living with dead, 46 contestation: church and people, 12; graveyards, 12, 107, 124, 135, 142– 43; poppies, 110 context: emotionality and imagination, 9, 72, 78, 90 Corish, Patrick J., 15n11 corpses: rituals, 7; treatment of, 64 cremation, 135 cross-community collective remembrance, 112–13 crosses, 131, 135 Crozier, Maurna, 48 Csordas, Thomas, J., 73, 141 Culnamore, 22–24 cultural acceptability, 12, 13, 28, 65, 66, 67, 71–72, 89 cultural transmission, 5–6 Damasio, Antonio, 72, 141 dances, 25, 26; graveyards, 132 Darr, Asaf, 77

Index

data collection: emotional labour, 31; museums and archives, 32 De Laine, Marlene, 33 dead, the: feelings, 45–46, 82, 83, 104; reintegration, 10, 47, 52, 88, 138, 139; visitations, 11, 46, 47, 50 death, anthropology of: Ireland, xi death masks, 65–66, 72 death warnings, 139–40 Demerath, Nicholas, J., 125–26 democratization, 142; gravesides, 120, 121, 130, 131–2, 134–35 display: objects, 3, 58–59, 64–66, 71–72, 80, 84–87, 90. See also gravesides: individualization distance: degree of emotional responses, 63–64, 65, 67–68 dolls: Wanindiljaygwa, 14n4 Donnan, Hastings, 13 Douglass, William, A., 13n1 dress: Cemetery Sundays, 101 Dundalk, 110 duties to deceased, 45, 51, 52, 82, 133; collective remembrance, 104, 109, 110, 111, 114 echoes, 57, 62, 64, 71, 72 Edwards, Elizabeth, 84 Effros, Bonnie, 132, 140 embodiment, 55, 57, 71–2, 72–3, 139, 141 Emerald Curtain, The (Harvey et al), xvn2 emotion, imagination and, 9 emotional insider status, 28–30 emotional symbols: gravesides, 121, 127–28 emotions: anthropological literature, 14n7; collective remembrance, 115; the dead, 45–46, 82, 83, 104; graveyards, 121–22; nature of, 56; objects and, 4, 8, 9, 55–73, 77, 80, 82–83, 92, 141; researcher’s experiences, 21, 22, 26, 28–30, 31, 32, 34; separation and collectivity, 15n9; women, 50, 51 essence: objects, 78, 79 ethics: research, 32–33 fairies, 46 family: graveyards, 108–9, 120, 121, 130, 133 fear, love and, 7 fear of the dead, 46, 142 feelings: the dead, 45–46, 82, 83, 104

Index

Feld, Steven, 71 Fernandez, James, 73n3 fiddle music, ban on, 12 Finch, Janet, 83 flowers, cut, 113, 114 folklore, 11, 46, 47–48, 50, 51 forgetting, xii, 134; divestment of objects, 90 Francis, Doris, 132–33, 134 friends, circulation of objects to, 88, 90, 91 friendships: research, 33 funeral games and rituals, 7 funeral tea as reincorporation, 48 funerals, 41–43, 48–50; men’s role, 51; placating the dead, 46; women’s role, 50; wakes and, 48 furniture, 87 Garattini, Chiara, 121, 122 Geary, Patrick, 13n2 Gell, Alfred, 2 gender: research, 24–26, 33 geographical space. See landscape; place Geurts, Kathryn Linn, 57, 60, 62 ghosts, 11, 45, 52; Nayars, India, 14n5. See also visitations of the dead ghosts of memory, 72 gift, the, 13n3, 76–77, 91, 141 Glassie, Henry, 13 Gluckman, Mary and Gluckman, Max, 11 Goffman, Erving, 125 Goody, Jack, 3, 5, 14n3 Gough, E. Kathleen, 14n5 Graeber, David, 6 grave: liminal place, 140 grave visiting, 46, 120, 124, 132, 134 Graves Blessing ceremonies, 97–105, 109, 114, 115, 133 gravesides: individualization, 120, 122, 124–25, 129–30, 131, 133–35, 142–43. See also headstones graveyards: Cemetery Sundays, 97–98, 98–101, 103, 104, 109, 113; geographical location, 71, 108–9; layout, 123–25, 134; materiality, 118–35; ownership of graves, 127; private-public space, 108 Greece: lamenting, 49 Halbwachs, Maurice, 96–97 Hallam, Elizabeth, xi, 1, 6, 8, 141, 142 Halloween, 46 Haniff, Nesha, Z., 34n1

151

Hart, Janice, 84 Harvey, Brian, xvn2 Hastrup, Kirsten, 29 head-hunters, Ilongot, 28 headstones, 118–22, 124, 127, 129–30, 131–32, 133–34, 134–35, 140, 142 Hedican, Edward, J., 29–30 heirlooms, 8, 86 help, requests for from dead, 51 Hertz, Robert, 139 historical memory, 96, 102, 109, 111, 113 Hoffman, Elizabeth, 30 holy water, 98, 101, 103, 113, 119 Hornstein, Gail, A., 33 Hoskins, Janet, xii–xiii, 3, 138 house clearances, 43–45 humour: wakes, 40, 47 Humphrey, Caroline, 1 hybridity and mediation of relationships, 77–78 identity: collective, 112, 119–20, 130, 132, 133; deceased, 4–5. See also headstones; individualization identity boundaries: researcher, 34 images: immateriality and, xii; memory and, xi, 9 imagination, emotion and, 9 immaterial: making material, xiii immortality: objects, 2, 3, 4–6, 76–93, 141 inalienability: concepts of, xii, 4–6, 13n3; negative, 67, 89; objects, 2, 3, 4–6, 76–93, 141 indigenous anthropology, concept of, 34n1 individualization, 142; gravesides, 120, 122, 124–25, 129–30, 131, 133–34 inheritance: potential for conflict, 5 ‘insider/outsider’ status: researcher, 20–1, 24, 25–26, 28, 31, 34n1; emotions, 28–30 interviews: diversions, 30; emotional labour, 30; formal, 32 intimate objects, 66–67, 71–72, 89 Ireland: border, ix–xi Irish Borderlands Project, xvn2 Irish Republic: anthropological approaches, xvn4 Israel: remembrance practices, 112 Johnson, Mark, xii, 57, 138, 139 Kahn, Miriam, 81

152

keening, 48–49, 50 Kellaher, Leonie, 127 Kennedy Neville, Gwen, 110, 116n3 Kevin, Neil, 47, 49 Kilmurry, 41 Kimball, Solon, T., 3 Knappett, Carl, 2, 72 Kohn, Tamara, 71 Kopytoff, Igor, 6 kula valuables, 14n3, 76–77, 87, 91 Lakoff, George, xii, 57, 138, 139 laments, 48–49 land: legitimacy to through oral transmission, 109; sale, 14n3; transfer, 5, 12–13 landscape, 9, 12–13, 141; folklore, 51; gravesites, 108–9, 141. See also place laying out, 39, 50, 61 Leavitt, John, 56 Leyton, Elliot, xi liminality, 10–11, 13, 48, 113, 139–40 Liturgy of the Word, 103, 115n1 loss and renewal, 11 love, fear and, 7, 142 Lund, Katrin, 58 MacConville, Una, 143 magical symbolism, 80 Magowan, Fiona, 58 Malafouris, Lambros, 2 malevolence: the dead, 45, 46, 52 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 7 mandolin, 81–82 Maoris: hau, 77 Mason, Jennifer, 83 Mass: contents, 115n1; variations, 105 Masses for the Dead, 106 material culture: transitory nature, 113, 114, 115 materiality: attention to, 1–2, 138; concept of, ix, xii–xiii; cultural specificity, 140; emotion of memories, 56–57; experiencing the dead, 138–39, 141; graveyards, 118–35; human condition, 6; onedimensional, 63–64 maternal side of family: establishing roots, 87–88 Mauss, Marcel, xii, 5, 13n3, 76–77, 79, 141 McQuillan, Regina, 143 mediation: loss and separation, 90; relationships, ix, 58, 59, 64, 77–78, 120

Index

mementos, 3, 4, 91; house clearances, 44–45 memorialization in Ireland: history and prehistory, 130–3, 140–1 memory: collective and individual, 96– 97 (see also collective remembrance); concept of, xi–xii; extended family, 5; graveyards, 120, 122, 133, 134; objects, 7, 8, 9, 55–73, 79–85, 88, 90, 92; stories and, 7, 9, 37, 52 men: choice of headstones by, 121; narratives concerning the dead, 51; role at times of death, 51; sensory behaviour, 60, 61 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 57, 62, 71, 72, 73 Mexico: Day of the Dead, 14n4, 114 Miller, Daniel, xii, xiii, 2, 90 Milltown, 112–13 Milton, Kay, 56 Mormons, 8 mortality, denial of, 139 museums: data collection, 32; touch, 58, 63 music: funerals, 42–43, 45, 48, 49, 68; memory, 68; Remembrance Day, 112–13 Mythum, Harold, 119 names of dead: All Souls commemoration, 106–7, 114 Narayan, Kirin, 21 narratives about the dead, xii–xiii, 7, 13, 32, 37–52, 141; funerals, 42–43, 49–50; ghosts and visitations, 11, 45, 50–51, 52; graveyards, 133, 135; house clearances, 44, 51; imparting memories, 64; laments, 48–49; objects, 4, 5, 6, 9, 24, 55, 64, 72, 84, 87–88, 138–39; patterns of talk, 45–46; places, 108–9; wakes, 38–39, 40, 41, 47, 51 national identity: Remembrance Day commemorations, 110, 112, 115 native anthropologist, concept of, 34n1 Newry, 112; cemetery, 123–24 Nora, Pierre, 96, 115 Northern Ireland: anthropological approaches, xvn4; dealing with death, 106; researcher’s religion, 26 notices: newspapers, 107–8, 113 Noyes, Charlies Reinold, 4 objects, xii–xiii; agency, 2–4, 138; consumerist: graveyards, 125;

Index153

display, 3, 84–87, 90; distinct from things, 2; essence, 78, 79; immortality and, 4, 6; inalienability, 2, 3, 4–6, 76–93, 141; intimate, 66– 67, 71–72, 89; memory, 7, 8, 9, 55– 73, 79–85, 88, 90, 92; personhood, 4, 8–9, 141, 142; public space, 115; selfhood, 3, 6–8, 9; sensory experiences, 55–73; sentiment and, 8–10; social lives, 8–9; social relations, 5 O’Donohue, Johm, 143 O’hOgain, Daithi., 7 older people: narratives concerning the dead, 50 Omeath, 113–14, 115 opposition, mechanisms of: taste, 130 oral histories: data collection, 32; transmission, 109 Orta, Andrew, 110–11 O’Suilleabhain, Sean, 7 Palach, Jan, 65–66, 73n2 Parkin, David, 8, 9 Parrott, Fiona, 90 personal information, disclosure of: research, 33 personhood: graveyards, 119–20, 122, 134, 135; objects, 4, 8–9, 141, 142 (see also selfhood: objects) photographs, 58–59, 59–60, 61–62, 84, 86–87; headstones, 124, 127; newspaper notices, 107, 108 physicality after death, 57, 63, 70, 91, 92, 139, 141 place, 9, 12, 13, 71, 92, 108–9, 134; graveyards, 133–34. See also landscape Pollak, Susan, 70 poppies, 110, 111, 113, 114 possessions, 46; house clearances, 44–45 power, negotiation of: interviews, 30 Presbyterian church: graveyards, 128–29 Price, Linda, 86 private-public: collective remembrance, 95, 96, 104, 105–8, 113–14, 114–15, 135, 142–43 Protestant v Catholic symbolism: graveyards, 126–28, 128–29 Protestants: border areas, x; newspaper notices, 108. See also Remembrance Day commemorations Proust, Marcel, 58

public-private: collective remembrance. See private-public: collective remembrance Purgatory, 106, 115n2 Rappaport, Roy A., 106 reciprocity, 5–6, 72, 91; researcher, 26 relationships: the living and the dead: narratives, 47, 50–51 relativity, 6 relics, medieval, 13n2 religion: people and clergy, 98, 101, 104, 105; questions to researcher, 26 remembering: cultural acceptability, 13; sociocultural heritage, 96 remembrance, collective. See collective remembrance Remembrance Day commemorations, 109–13, 114, 115, 140 reminiscence: wakes, 40, 41 renewal: symbolic items, 95, 114, 115 repulsion: intimate possessions, 66, 67, 72, 89 research: geographical area of, ix–x; methodology, 21–34 researcher: emotional insider, 28–30; seen as ‘local’, 20, 21–22, 24, 29, 32, 33–34 reunion, 13, 15n9, 45, 47–48, 50, 135, 140 reverberations, 57, 64, 71, 72 rites of passage, 10, 11, 48, 139; separation stage, 15n9 ritual: importance, 104, 106, 115, 129, 134, 139, 140; liminality, 10–11 Robben, Antonius, 1 Rosaldo, Renato, 28–29 Rugg, Julie, 132 sacred and secular: boundaries, 132, 142 Schiffer, Michael, B., xii, 138 Schwartz, Barry, 95, 96 secular and sacred: boundaries: 132, 142 secularization: graveyards, 122, 124, 125–26, 127, 130, 132, 135, 142 selection: memory, xii; objects, 90 selfhood: objects, 3, 6–8, 9, 141, 142. See also personhood: objects sense of place. See place senses: the deceased, 69; emotions and, 9, 55; mixing of, 71; objects and, 55–73, 141 sentiment, objects and, 8–10

154

separation, 13, 15n9, 45, 47–48, 50, 139, 140 Serematakis, C. Nadia, 139 seslelame, 57, 60, 62 set dancing, 25 sharing: objects, 3 sight, 58–59, 60–61 Simmel, Georg, 6 Sivan, Emmanuel, 96 smell, 64, 70–71, 83 social boundaries: circulation of objects, 92 social change: graveyards, 118, 120, 122, 134, 135 social relations: objects, 5 sociality: Cemetery Sundays, 98, 101–2, 104 soul: belief in the, 139; fate of the, 128 sound recordings, 68 South Armagh: graveyards, 128–29 Stafford, Charles, 15n9, 48, 50, 140 Stewart, Susan, 9, 58, 63 Stoller, Paul, 9, 57, 58 stories. See narratives structure and anti-structure, 10–11 subject and object, 65, 66, 72, 80 superstitions, 46 Sutton, David, 9, 57, 70, 73n3 Svašek, Maruška, 56, 64, 65, 72 symbolic items, 4, 5, 7, 77, 140; collective remembrance, 4, 95, 110, 113–14, 115, 130, 140, 142; graveyards, 118, 120, 121–22, 125–27, 130, 131–32, 134–35, 142; in the home, 66–67, 78, 79–80, 81, 83, 91, 92n1, 141 tactile sight, 61, 63, 65 talk. See narratives Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja, 106 taste, 9, 71; aesthetic: graveyards, 122–30, 133, 134, 135 Taussig, Michael, 9, 61, 134 Taylor, Lawrence, 12, 48, 49, 101, 105, 131–32 technology: graveyard ornamentation, 120, 124, 129–30 things: distinct from objects, 2; value, 4–6. See also objects Tilley, Christopher, xiii tombs, prehistoric, 109, 131 Tonkin, Elizabeth, 9, 14n7, 37 touch, 9, 58, 59–62, 63 townland names, 133–34, 135n1

Index

traditional forms, 140; graveyards, 122–23, 126, 129, 130 transmission, cultural, 5–6 Troubles, The, x, xivnn1–2; landscape and ethnicity, 13; Remembrance Day, 111 trust in researcher, 20, 21–22, 24, 27, 32–33 Turkle, Sherry, 9 Turner, Vincent, 10–11, 139 Ulster Cycle, 11, 15n10 United States, Southern: memorial practices, 116n3 value, forms of: objects, 4–6, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 89, 91, 92, 129 Van Gennep, Arnold, 10, 48, 139 videos, 68 visibility: researcher, 24 visitations of the dead, 11, 46, 47, 50, 51. See also ghosts visual, the, 9 wakes, 38–41, 49; distinction from funerals, 48; placating the dead, 46; women’s role, 50, 61 walking sticks, 69–70 war dead, remembrance, 109–13 Weiner, Annette, B., 6, 77, 87, 91, 141 Weiss, Brad, 79, 80–81, 112 welcoming: wakes, 38, 40 White, Geoffrey, 114–15 Whitehouse, Harvey, 115 wholeness, 71, 73n3 Wilde, Lady, 46 wills, 5 Winter, Jay, 96 women: choice of headstones, 121, 134–35; laments, 49; mortuary customs, 50; narratives concerning the dead, 51; sensory behaviour, 60, 61 Woodthorpe, Kate, 124 words, power of, 106 Worsley, Peter, 14n4 Yee, Susan, 63–64 young people: narratives concerning the dead, 50–51; sensory behaviour, 63–64 Zelizer, Barbie, 9