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This article was downloaded by: [b-on: Biblioteca do conhecimento online UA]On: 26 December 2012, At: 09:38Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Mortality: Promoting the

interdisciplinary study of death and

dyingPublication details, including instructions for authors and

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Memory, mourning, landscapeProfessor Paul Gough

a

a University of the West of England, Bristol, UKVersion of record first published: 21 Jul 2011.

To cite this article: Professor Paul Gough (2011): Memory, mourning, landscape, Mortality:

Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying, 16:3, 282-283

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2011.586169

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ments that alcohol could not be stored within the building. To get around

this clause, they contracted an archaeological company to excavate part of the

cemetery, evicting the corpses of those alcohol-avoiding Methodists so that

booze could be stashed in their vacated graveyard.

This is an excellent little book. One of Duckworth’s ‘Debates in Archaeology’series, it has the virtue of being commendably short; this makes it easily readable

within an afternoon, a perfect text for students as well as busy professionals and

interested lay persons. I noticed only a few typographic mistakes (charmingly, a

‘descent community’ is referred to as a ‘decent community’) and the book is well

produced for its very reasonable price.

MIKE PARKER PEARSON

Professor of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, UK 

Memory, mourning, landscape, edited by Elizabeth Anderson, Avril Maddrell,

Kate McLoughlin and Alana Vincent, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2010, 218

pp., £41.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-90-420-3086-2

Three keywords - dislocation, disembodiment, disorder – appear to have been the

guiding criteria for those invited to contribute to this rich volume of new material.

However, in devising a title for this book has a marketing advantage been missed?

It could benefit from a longer title, or a sub-title that reflects the broad

geographical reach of the contributions. Not only does the collection draw upon a

diverse array of academic disciplines - anthropology and archaeology, architecture

and fine arts, historiography and literary analysis, law and theology, as well as

cultural history and museography - it is also a truly international survey of the

topographies of remembrance.

In the Introduction, the editors claim its reach in axial terms, describing a

temporal dimension and a spatial bearing, but also a verticality expressed in

accretions of archaeological memory, a topological ‘ghost story’ which must be

decrypted, unearthed and excavated so as to reveal the substrata of the past.

This is certainly the approach taken in the ‘anchor’ essay by Jay Winter. Inconceptualising the Historial de la Grand Guerre (Museum of the Great War) in

Peronne, northern France, the key visual organising principles devised by he and

his team are the horizontal (the axis of mourning) and the vertical (the axis of 

hope). In its layout, the museum seeks to avoid its visitors looking upwards (the

prerogative of over-optimistic memorials and other more conventional war

museums), but instead to look down into the hollowed-out fosses (shallow

dugouts), embrasures and funerary hollows that contain the fragments of memory,

the objects of the past which are laid out not at eye-level but at one’s feet, sous-

terrain, our eyes cast down into history, reinforcing the vertical axis of reflection.

Insightful and provocative though it is, Winter’s essay is slightly at odds with the

spaces generated in the following essays. Whereas Winter invites us to kneel,

282 Book Reviews

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prostrate ourselves at the altars of commemoration, other contributors takes us

into the raw air of recent and past conflict. And what an extraordinary global

panorama it is, stretching from the sacred names of the Nation’s dead in

Revolutionary France to the funerary practices on the Viking Frontier, from the

mourning poetry of the American Civil War to memory creation in Srebrenicia inthe aftermath of the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Not all chapters, though, emerge from the fallout of military conflict and the

‘archaeology of forgetting’. Closer to home there are stimulating essays about

private memorials and Scots Law, a provocative examination of the trend towards

spontaneous memorialisation in farflung corners of the Scottish Highlands, a

fiercely contested issue which brings to a head the challenges of ‘landscaped

citizenship’ and the desecration of wild places by a ‘tasteless minority’. A coda to

these nine scholarly essays is an insightful and well-illustrated piece on family 

memory, lido architecture, and the Thuringian Forest, all seen through the lens of 

Nazi Germany and re-presented as a set of drawings and paintings situated neatly and appropriately as a ‘third place between history and memory’.

There is much in here for readers of the journal. Indeed, this volume paves the

way for an even richer compilation of essays in ‘Deathscapes’ a new book by 

Ashgate that focuses on the relationship between space, place, death and

bereavement in Western societies, and therefore complements much of what

can be found in Memory, Mourning, Landscape, a book of essays whose full title

could have read: international perspectives on commemoration, place and

remembrance.

PROFESSOR PAUL GOUGH

University of the West of England, Bristol, UK 

Nature’s embrace: Japan’s aging urbanites and new death rites, by Satsuki

Kawano, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2010, 232 pp., $27.00 (paper-

back), ISBN 978-0-8248-3413-5; $47.70 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-8248-3372-5

In 1991 the ‘Grave-Free Promotion Society’ (GFPS) grabbed the Japanesemedia’s attention by performing the first of its ash scattering ceremonies.

Members of the Tokyo-based nonprofit have been performing these ceremonies

on land and at sea ever since, each time breaking with the Japanese norm of 

interning remains in family graves.

Satsuki Kawano provides a careful study of the GFPS in Nature’s Embrace,

which convincingly demonstrates that scattering in contemporary Japan, although

very much a controversial exception to an accepted rule, was nevertheless ‘born

out of, rather than apart from, postwar Japan’s mainstream trends’ (p. 180). To

reach this conclusion, Kawano shows that demographic trends have undermined

the ‘inter-generational contract’ (p. 11) on which Japanese have customarily relied

for posthumous care. It has long been generally expected for the eldest son of a

Book Reviews 283