The research question I chose to look at was how much the gravestones varied according to the death date, especially the difference of the 1800s to 1900s. I want to explore why, for example grave one is a fairly large monument, while grave 2 is a flat stone, but these people were related, so you'd assume they would want the same thing.
In my cultural anthropology course (ANTH 310- Anthropology of Religion) I read a very interesting article about how after the first World War, people didn't make as big of a deal of burying someone with luxurious monuments, but started using flat grave stones. In this article, the main point they're saying is that in our modern society today "each generation tends to think more of itself than of other generations, previous or subsequent; and individuals increasingly care very little about what happens to their bodies after they have shuffled off this mortal coil" (Gill 1996, 251). Although this is talking about the United States, I feel like there was a similar trend that happened in Canada. It's true that people are spending less money on funerals and it makes sense since people are spending more money on keeping people alive longer. I also believe that since after the First World War there were so many deaths, people started to become more desensitized to death, which made them put less effort into the grave. So, in grave 1, this is a family monument of people who died from 1884-1905. This was before World War I. Grave 2 was buried right beside this monument, and was closed in by a cement surrounding it and grave 1, but was a completely different looking grave. This person also died in 1936, which means it was after the war. This supports my hypothesis. Another example is grave 9, in which the person died in 1925 and their stone is in the ground and not very detailed. With grave 10, the person died in 1882, but doesn't have an upright monument. However, you can still notice a big difference between 9 and 10 comparing how much more detail grave 10 has.
I found another article titled American Attitudes to Death. They claim that a reason why tombstones may be less detailed and small and in the ground rather than out of the ground is demonstrated in the following quote: "The consequence has been to reduce and make impersonal the impact of the great majority of deaths which will touch individuals in their lifetime" (Jackson 1977, 306). This is implying that because our society is started to feel as though death is impersonal, that people are less likely to spend as much money on things like details in a gravestone. In my personal opinion, I feel like this is happening because it seems like there's a decrease in beliefs in a higher power. It seems as though there are more atheists today than back in the early 1900s. On grave 14, there is a lot of inscription that says things like "united with the infinite The Eternal and All-Wise" and "She has crossed the shining River and has gained the radiant shore." These quotes sound religious and spiritual, whereas with grave 9, the person died later (1925 compared to 1892) and it only says "In loving memory of."
I enjoyed how this project made me not only think about the material aspect of death, but also what was happening in society at this time. Although I did find some trends within these graves, there are still some mysterious graves that stray away from this pattern. It's too bad we weren't able to gather all that information.
Bibliography:
The map for our group project:
http://www.google.com/mapmaker?ll=48.411378,-123.339638&spn=0.000846,0.001918&t=h&z=19&hl=en&lyt=large_map |
Richard T. Gill, "Whatever Happened to the American Way of Death?" in Sacred Realms, 248-252. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Charles O. Jackson, "American Attitudes to Death," Journal of American Studies 11 (1977), 297-312. accessed February 13, 2012.
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