A saturated void: Anticipating and preparing presence in contemporary Danish cemetery culture

Abstract

It may appear rather straightforward to connect cemeteries with the notion of absence. After all, a cemetery is most often seen as a place for the dead, who are frequently conceived as absent, gone, missing or lost (e.g. DuBose 1997; Durkheim 1915: 339; Freud 1984 [1917]; Rubin 1985). The state of being - or non-being - of the dead is otherwise poorly defined, and may simply be considered a form of no-moreness (Sheets-Johnstone 1986: 50). At the same time, the cemetery can be said to contain the absent, because it is ordinarily a place where prolonged spatial and material relations to the deceased are allowed to exist as opposed to e.g. a mass grave, where the dead are meant to disappear (Rugg 2000: 260). © 2010 Springer-Verlag New York.