What lies beneath: Reflections on historical and contemporary burial beliefs and practices
What are we doing when we bury the dead?
Across history and cultures, there are rich variations in beliefs about burial and in burial practices themselves. By attending to these, we can learn not only about the dead, but also insights that might otherwise remain hidden about the beliefs, values, cosmologies and politics of the society in which they lived.
Drawing on eighteenth and twenty-first-century examples, and approaching these questions from social anthropological and literary-historical perspectives, this panel examines in both literal and metaphorical terms what our relationships with the dead can reveal and why this matters.
Please note that this event is in-person only.
About the speakers
Dr Laura Davies is an assistant Professor in English Literature and Director of Studies in English at King's College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on British literature of the long eighteenth century with a particular interest in life writing and the textual representation of experiences and ideas that resist language or narration, including sound, time, death, spiritual visions, and dreams. She founded and leads the research and public-engagement project , which uses literature and the arts to facilitate conversations about death, dying and bereavement through events, workshops, and creative collaborations.
Dr Sally Raudon, a social anthropologist and ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow, researches death, care, ritual, memory, absence and forgetting, citizens and the state, law and policy, massed graves, and memorialization. One research project focuses on Hart Island, New York City鈥檚 massed grave for its unknown, unclaimed, and poor. Another project is lonely funerals, which examines the relationships prompted by changes to how people die. When someone dies without anyone to take care of them, is that because they have no social relations, or because their relationships are not recognised?
"'It comes to us all': Death and dying" series
This event is part of an ongoing series on Death and Dying taking place at the Intellectual Forum in October and November. Find out more about the series.
