The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries

Cemeteries can tell us a lot about the social and cultural dynamics of a place and time, as they participate in the grassroots cultural work of crafting social connections and provide a measure of a culture's values. In The Vital Dead, Alison Bell explores the communities of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and the cemeteries that have both claimed and sustained them, using objects left on graves, images, and epitaphs to suggest a landscape of symbols maintaining relationships across the threshold of death.

Format: Hardback
Length: 288 pages
Publication date: 18 November 2022
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press

Anthropologist Alison Bell proposes that cemeteries actively contribute to the grassroots cultural process of forging social connections, while simultaneously challenging the enduring essence of the deceased and providing a gauge of a culture's values. In her book, The Vital Dead, Bell applies this framework to the communities of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and the cemeteries that have both embraced and paradoxically sustained them.

Bell conducts a comprehensive survey of various objects left on graves, images and epitaphs inscribed on grave markers, and other tangible remnants of material culture to suggest a landscape of symbols that transcend the boundaries of death. She delves into the practices and transformations of cemeteries over time, presenting her interpretations primarily as a resistance against alienation. The book is replete with evocative examples, both contemporary and historical, derived from fieldwork interviews, archival sources, and recent anthropological theories.

The chapters of The Vital Dead span across different cemetery types, with a particular focus on African American burials, the grave sites of institutionalized individuals, and modern community memorials. Ultimately, The Vital Dead is a captivating account of how lives, both renowned and forgotten, undergo transformation and vitality through the communities and artifacts they leave behind, yielding profound and unexpected narratives of mortality. Bell's masterful storytelling is complemented by her scholarly acumen, resulting in a reading experience that is both fascinating and emotionally resonant.

In its innovative approach, The Vital Dead makes significant contributions to the fields of cemetery and material culture studies, as well as anthropology, archaeology, history, geography, and folklore.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781621906964