On the history of modern cemeteries

"I want to reverse the causal arrow: changing burial practices, themselves imbricated in larger cultural developments, produce, or at least invite new meanings of death. "Concepts of death" might be regarded less as the coalescence of attitudes and beliefs and more as practices which take on meaning as strands in a larger web of cultural transformation. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are not among the causes of cemeteries, if anything the converse is true: cemeteries produce a cultural world fit for the new economic order.
Cemeteries, in this account, are to death what Lombard Street was to Bills of Exchange or the stock market to equities: no mere venue but a sign that the underlying cultural assumptions of capitalism had taken root, that what might have seemed outrageous in an earlier age - the ready circulation of commercial paper or limited liability companies or freehold in grave sites, divorced from the Church - could be taken as part of the landscape of everyday life". (T. W. Laqueur, Cemeteries, Religion and the Culture of Capitalism, in Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in honor of R. M. Hartwell,  edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p 139-140).



In her 1997 book, "La vie des morts", Marie Capdecomme made an argument that also connected death culture and capitalism (following the logic and the facts presented in the studies of Jacques Le Goff): the origins for the social invention of capitalism reside in the medieval peasant's ghost stories. Because of the strict Church rules that allowed only specific souls into heaven, some souls, according to popular belief, couldn't get in, but were not so bad as to deserve hell either. Therefore, folklore solved the problem by inventing ghosts, caught between the two worlds. Because the Church resented the superstitions that followed the belief in ghosts, it issued a new "in-between" world: Purgatory. And since in purgatory all sorts of people found at least a bit of redemption, there suddenly was a place for the moneylender other than straight to hell. Thus, the practice of moneylending (for a profit) became more "forgivable", which leveled the ground for the basis of capitalism.

The connections between modern capitalism and the culture surrounding how we deal with the ultimate loss are fascinating to me at this point.

I'm planning to write a paper some time about the contemporary economic practices regarding death and cemeteries: from the traditions that still survive (like what objects people still buy and give away at a funeral) to the opulent tombs meant to display a superior wealth of the owner(s). On the same note, I was very surprised to find out, a couple of years ago, how many crypts, very old peasant crypts, actually still exist in Romania. But the main focus here is the modern economic order of cemeteries and how it defi(n)es us. :)