Heidi Exercise 1

"Sacred" Mortuary Spaces? From Agra to 21 Brown…

In one of our first course meetings together, Ian challenged us to identify a list of characteristics constitutive of “sacred space.” Among the resulting propositions, two characteristics in particular, perhaps better formulated as issues, stuck in my mind: the first involved the question of whether “sacred space” is necessarily “religious space,” and the second, the evocation of a sacred / profane binary as a possible method for defining the former (i.e. sacred space is marked apart from profane or mundane space in ways that are deliberate, identifiable, and significant). While this exercise was off-the-cuff and, I suspect, intended to foreground some of the deconstructive work we are now engaging in with increasing awareness and sophistication, I find myself continuing to wrestle with the above issues in thinking about sacred space. I suspect that they are particularly vexing for me because the form of memorialization with which I am best acquainted is firmly located in mortuary cultures.

Equally compelling arguments could be proffered for defining mortuary spaces as sacred, or not. I remember one morning many years ago when a friend and I were sharply upbraided by a stranger for veering from our normal running path down Blackstone Boulevard to explore the memorial gardens of Swan Point cemetery. Neither of us intended to violate any conventions for appropriately engaging with this space. To the contrary, it was still early on a clear winter morning and the cemetery looked especially idyllic and inviting. Although I found it puzzling that two young women jogging quietly through a cemetery were so offensive to her, far more so than several other groups of exercisers who were using the same pedestrian paths for fitness walks, she effectively shamed us into leaving without demanding an explanation.

It was clear that this woman viewed Swan Point as a markedly separate kind of space from the Boulevard just beyond its entrance, and also, that she held some notion of how one should behave there within. While it is not all that surprising that someone should view a funerary landscape differently than a recreational path, a difference which my friend and I too perceived and reacted to in our own fashion, this woman’s response was rooted in a highly personal, but no less imposing conviction about what proper comportment should entail within this setting. The self-evidence with which she censored our activities betrayed a tacit understanding of the cemetery as a place collectively ascribed with sacral qualities, of which we were obviously in violation.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I was struck by Edensor’s observation that the notion that the Taj as a site of remembrance, specifically in its necral capacity, is characteristically Muslim, while for some Hindu visitors the monument is tainted by its association with death. Although anxieties about the polluting quality of death appear in any number of religious and cultural traditions, as far back in time as we have evidence, I found this example particularly evocative to the extent that it illustrates the array of associations a funerary monument can generate. I found it interesting that tourists for whom either of these extreme understandings applied seemed to be the only interviewees who gave any real thought to the fact that this monument – albeit as a national symbol, a religious space, or colonial object – is fundamentally, perhaps first and foremost, a memorial for the corpses interred with its walls.

The various tourist accounts Edensor assembles in his book capture reactions to the Taj Mahal ranging from devotional, to aversive, to conveniently oblivious in respect to this necral function. Offering explanatory context for the first two stances, Edensor cites Bhardwaj, who “draws a distinction between the ways in which different religious traditions perceive and use sites of death or ‘necral landscapes’ (Edsenor, 1998, 139).” Accordingly, Islamic practices localize the dead through entombment whereas in Hindu practice, where the body is cremated and not considered to exist after death, sites affiliated with death are regarded as impure. While the fundamental differences between Muslim and Hindu perceptions of the Taj qua tomb are fascinating, I am more intrigued by the degree to which the monument’s mortuary element is suppressed, or at the very least romantically tempered, by most tourists. Rarely if ever do most interviewees seem to focus on the Taj Mahal as a tangible burial site – even as they relish contingent traditions about Shahjahan’s expression of love for his deceased wife.

While each of us could supply countless examples of funerary memorials that have achieved some “sacred” status, at least as one possible resonance, it is less clear why some monuments are able to mediate predictable anxieties about their association with death, either individually or collectively, while others do not. Although Edsenor attempts to explain why the Taj Mahal’s necral character generates different associates for Muslim and Hindu tourists, he does not address the question of why some mortuary sites can and do become sacred, while others cannot and/or do not. Nor does such an insight shed light on the topic of when and why the “gritty death component” of a funerary monument might pose a problem for those engaging with it, while at other times this “grittiness” is conveniently suppressed or even celebrated (hello Christian pilgrimage and the collection of corporeal relics!). In short, even if we accept that different religious traditions have different perceptions of and practices associated with sites of death, this doesn’t really tell us anything about why some, but certainly (overwhelmingly!) not all, funerary monuments are socially important and thought of as being sacred, even in traditions where attitudes toward death are inconsistent.

At risk of getting too far away from a certain monument upon which, I think, many of these questions come to bear, I want to toss out a few quick points that further frame my interest in how mortuary spaces function as places of remembrance and in some cases are conceived of as sacred. Over the past several years I have become increasingly aware of how uncomfortable most Americans are with and how strangely they behave toward places associated with dead bodies (driving from Colorado to New England once with my boyfriend’s mother, for instance, I observed with perplexity as she held her breath every single time we drove by a cemetery, for as long as necessary until we were safely past). Numerous factors undoubtedly contribute to this unease – our substantial remove from the corpulence of death, the popular lore attached to corpses and their places of interment, to name but a few possibilities – and I wouldn’t claim to have extricated myself entirely from this bizarre web of associations. But summers spent exploring tombs and navigating through the gloom, cobwebs, exposed graves, and death gook (a highly technical term) of subterranean burial complexes have made me more sensitive to ways in which people mediate the relationship between funerary monuments and the unpleasant matter they contain. Although I suspect that I am no better prepared to handle death than anyone else, I have grown quite comfortable engaging with burial spaces as burial spaces, whatever this means.

Although when I began this assignment I had planned to graft my questions about mortuary spaces and memorialization onto one of the many Christian martyria I have visited in Rome (or this is what I told Claudia over the phone while buying groceries earlier today), in formulating these questions I keep returning to a monument that lies much closer to home, on our own Brown campus, in fact. Since many of us have attended a lecture or lively CRAM session in the Annmary Brown Memorial, I will limit my discussion of the building to the oft-unnoticed or deliberately ignored fact that, in addition to functioning as a library, art gallery, and lecture venue, it is a mausoleum commemorating two bodies entombed in its crypt.

What little information the University provides about this memorial does not (surprise!) highlight its mortuary premise. Aside from the handful of students and faculty who have had occasion to enter the building for an academic gathering, I would guess that most of the Brown community is largely unaware of the fact that there is such a place on campus, located, conveniently, next to Health Services and directly across from the largest freshman dormitory complex. Those who are “in the know” and do engage with the monument for some reason or another tend to make awkward comments about how creepy it is to be sitting in (often having lunch in) a tomb, or else ignore these potentially troubling aspects of our context. At least this has been my experience. Although the monument was undoubtedly intended as a memorial to General Rush C. Hawkins and Mrs. Hawkins, its resident corpses (whose relationship to Annmary Brown is entirely unclear), this tendency to disassociate memorial from monument, monument from crypt, crypt from the bodies interred within them, results in a significant disjunction between how the monument was conceived and how people think about it today, if they think about it at all.

So how does the Annmary Brown Memorial, the mausoleum of General and Mrs. Rush Hawkins, offer an entry point into some of our questions about social processes for making space sacred? This question circles back to the initial problem of if, when, how, and in what context mortuary spaces come to be understood as sacred, or as having some sort of sacred character, in the first place? The Memorial has its own rhythms, maintenance practices like the daily opening and closing of the ornate gates of the crypt that conform to and iterate the particularity of its function and which set it apart from other buildings on campus. For a student of the macabre, namely for me, the space elicits a sensation that is difficult to articulate -- a sense of ease that arises from reacting instinctively to a source of discomfort, but then adjusting to its perceived liminality. While I doubt that even people who are familiar with the building would immediately think of it as a sacred space, the ways in which they inhabit this space differs from how they inhabit other buildings on campus, even if the difference lies in a deliberate disassociation from its mortuary function.

One of the reasons I chose to write about this monument is that I am not sure how to answer the question of what social reality it is attempting to reflect, and subsequently, of whether or how it manages to transform our engagement with that reality. Part of the problem seems to lie in the fact that one aspect of this intended reality – a reality that I would crudely describe as a particular version of death, which we are then forced to encounter unexpectedly, amidst a collection of art on a university campus – paradoxically forces many of its observers to so viscerally disengage.

Link to the Brown University Library Page for the Annmary Brown Memorial http://dl.lib.brown.edu/libweb/about/amb/

I found this really interesting! One thing, one ritual, that connects both your examples (the cemetary and the Annmary Brown memorial) is the act of placing flowers on a grave or tomb site. What I find especially bizzarre about the Annmary Brown Memorial is the stipulation that whenever a talk, class or lecture is taking place, the crypt door must be open and fresh flowers must be placed over the coffin. However, during the last event I was at, the crypt door was open but the flowers were definitely not fresh (rather wilting actually). This led me to wonder at a cemetary when is the appropriate time to remove dead flowers? does someone? or do they just wilt away, their death fitting their surroundings?? There is the ritual act of memorializing the dead with flowers, but is there also the opposite? Insulting or disgracing the dead by removing their dead flowers? -Claudia

Posted at Mar 04/2008 02:46PM:
elisa: Heidi, I have often thought the same thing about the AnnMary memorial when I have attended lectures there. I think you are very correct to question the difference between appropriate (ritual) actions at mortuary sites, especially those whose mortuary function has been disassociated, disengaged or de-emphasized for tourism purposes or more "vivid" historical contexts. (ie. the Vatican)