Text Morrigan Fogarty
Image Alžbeta Szabová
The main inspiration for this article was that it was going to be a counterpiece. Following writing on different types of funerary and burial practices around the world, I wanted to take the time to examine what a “normal” burial is like. Imagine my surprise when after a preliminary look, no such thing exists. Even though there is definitely a norm as to how we end up after we’re dead, it would be foolish to say that this norm is a concrete thing. As I sat down to write this article it became clear to me that what it should really be about is how the norm, in this case the norm on burials, is not ever a concrete thing that we can point to. Instead, the norm represents an idealized standard of how things “should be” or how things “are” which is only truly defined whenever something breaks that norm. For example, getting buried in a cemetery after a priest has given you rites would be considered a normative burial, but it certainly isn’t the only “normal” way to get buried. Likewise, having your dead body flung out of a trebuchet into a forest would be a non-normative way of dealing with your body, and while this is an extremely silly example it illustrates my point that the norm is more
easily defined when you look outside of it. Not everyone gets embalmed, put in a casket and lowered into a grave. Not everyone gets cremated and has their ashes spread somewhere. These two examples seemed to be where my assumptions lay. Sure enough, if you want to argue our norm is that of a white Christian practice, you’d imagine that the practice of putting our dead in the ground comes from somewhere in early Christianity, but "whose" norm is this? To start this journey and to say in any way “our norm” you’re making leaps and bounds assuming things about yourself, and I’m assuming things about you as the reader. I'm assuming that you’re living in a country similar to the one I’m living in, that it has an Anglo-European heritage and that the majority of normative structures were set up in the past by white people, and if I wanted to talk about burials that didn’t operate on these assumptions, none of this would make sense. When we want to look at things
different from ourselves, we construct the other. We see something and say “We’ll that’s certainly different” and from there write about what is so different, but we rarely make the turn to look at ourselves. This is a two-way process, and just as we might falsely understand the other, we also tend to falsely understand our own practices. There’s never going to be one way a person's body is treated after they’ve died, and that goes for both the other and
the familiar. A false dichotomy between the two, saying that there’s such a thing as “our burial practices” ignores the fact that the “our” we’re talking about is a lot less homogenous than we think, and the more you narrow down your exploration of a topic so that you’re only looking at the “most normative”, be it by looking at the most popular or most culturally relevant, you’re still turning away from a host of practices occurring all around us every
day.
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