Part of the Ghost[s]: Archaeology and Recollection Series 

If we apply the premise behind James Deetz and Dethlefsen’s now classic archaeological study of American cemeteries, in which changes in material culture index changes in dominant ideologies, then today we are witnessing a revolutionary metamorphosis in American beliefs and values. In the words of my ethnographic interlocutors, cemeteries are evolving from “subterranean parking lots” into “ancestral forests.” This talk will be the first public presentation from a chapter on the relationship between the dead and the U.S. landscape from a forthcoming book that focuses on disposition of the corpse and beliefs in different types of afterlives. In this talk, I will describe the move toward green burial, human composting, and conservation cemeteries being pushed by both activists and entrepreneurs to ask what it might signal about a changing moral and metaphysical landscape.

Bio:

Shannon Dawdy’s scholarship combines archaeological, ethnographic, and archival methods to better understand the intimacies of human-material relationships. Enduring themes of her theoretical work concern temporality and affective economies. Recent work has focused on gender dynamics of romantic-era capitalism, the pluriverse of urban space, and disaster debris. She is the author of Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (2008, University of Chicago Press) and Patina: A Profane Archaeology (2016, University of Chicago Press).  She is now wrapping up a major research project on contemporary American funeral practices, presented through a short documentary film (I Like Dirt, 2020) and a forthcoming book (American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century, Princeton University Press). Her next project involves an archive for the deep future being assembled in the arctic.