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.57Ultimately, all these metaphors and associations supported very dif-ferent views of cremation itself.Was cremation a desecration or apurification and spiritualization of the body? Was it crisping and crack-ling or sweetness and light? Was it like charring a pig on a spit? Or wasit “like snow [disappearing] in the genial warmth of the sunshine” or,better yet, “like laying your friend robed in white upon a bed of roses”?Was earth the great purifier? Or was fire? It all depended, of course, onwho had your ear.58Purity and PollutionThe Gilded Age, America’s age of debate, was also an era beset with bi-nary oppositions.Capital pitted itself against labor, and science wres-tled with religion.Whites passed anti-Asian legislation in the West andJim Crow legislation in the South.Boxing, not baseball, was the na-tional pastime.According to one social historian, at the end of the nine-teenth century there was an obsession with social and racial hierarchiesand with ranking individuals and groups on a continuum from dirty toclean.There was also “a popular fixation on the dirt associated with thebodily functions of human beings: their excrement, urine, blood, pus,96Birth, 1874–1896and other secretions.” This historian does not mention in his work thepopular fixation on the oozings of the dead body itself—perhaps themost polluting of those “other secretions.” But there is no reason to ex-empt those fluids from his analysis.Both sanitary reformers in generaland cremationists in particular divided American society into high andlow, “washed” and “unwashed,” pure and polluted.The movement forsanitary reform was obsessed with these categories, and the debate overthe disposal of the dead was littered with references to them.Partisansof burial appealed on occasion to the rage of the age for purity (for ex-ample, when they insisted that cremation would pollute the atmospherewith “the reeking stench of burning bodies”).But denunciations of pol-lution were largely the coin of the cremationists, for whom “pure air,pure water, pure soil” was a mantra.59To the cremationists burial was polluting on both sanitary and rit-ual grounds.In fact, so intertwined were the movement’s appeals tosanitary and ritual cleanliness that it is impossible to disentangle them.Consider the many ways in which, from the cremationists’ perspective,the old-fashioned urban graveyard mixed up what should not be min-gled.It caused the living to interact with the dead.It also brought thedead into contact with one another, as flesh and bones shifted andsank, and as the fluids of one corpse drained into the fluids of a neigh-bor.In another instance of bringing together what should be left sepa-rate, the burial of the Union dead in what were to become Southerncotton fields brought Yankee bones into unseemly contact with theheirs of the Confederacy.Burial was even said to mix up the races andsexes in ways that were unimaginable among the living, since in at leastone exhumation the bones of an African-American man were found tobe nuzzling up against the remains of a white woman in what had be-come a shared grave.Cremation would, of course, solve all of theseproblems and more—as long as crematory operators were scrupulousabout incinerating only one body at a time and used magnets to sepa-rate out unwanted iron flakes from the pure, white ashes of the dead.Placing those ashes in individual urns would eliminate the possibility ofuntoward mixing of races or genders in the world of the dead.According to Catherine Bell, the ritualization process does far morethan create rites; it also fabricates worldviews.Bell sees three key dy-namics at work in ritualization.First is the construction of a series of bi-nary oppositions.Second is the ordering of those dyads into a hierarchywhere some are seen as superior (⫹) and others as inferior (⫺).Third isthe arrangement of the binary oppositions into a loose scheme in whichResurrection and the Resurrectionists97each element is related to every other.All these dynamics were at workin the Gilded Age cremation movement, which developed not only analternative means of disposal of the dead but also a new way of viewingthe world.60There were two key binary oppositions in the cremationist world-view: burial and cremation, and pollution and purity.The cremationistsevaluated pollution negatively and purity positively, and they associatedburial with the former and cremation with the latter.Hence the mostbasic scheme in their worldview was:Burial (⫺)Cremation (⫹)Pollution (⫺)Purity (⫹)To this basic scheme cremationists added a series of elaborations,which appear in table 1.The webs of meaning spun by the cremation-ists run down the columns (for associations) and across the rows (forcontrasts).So, for example, cremation was associated with purity,which was associated with cleanliness and science, but contrasted withburial, which was associated with pollution, uncleanliness, and super-stition [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.57Ultimately, all these metaphors and associations supported very dif-ferent views of cremation itself.Was cremation a desecration or apurification and spiritualization of the body? Was it crisping and crack-ling or sweetness and light? Was it like charring a pig on a spit? Or wasit “like snow [disappearing] in the genial warmth of the sunshine” or,better yet, “like laying your friend robed in white upon a bed of roses”?Was earth the great purifier? Or was fire? It all depended, of course, onwho had your ear.58Purity and PollutionThe Gilded Age, America’s age of debate, was also an era beset with bi-nary oppositions.Capital pitted itself against labor, and science wres-tled with religion.Whites passed anti-Asian legislation in the West andJim Crow legislation in the South.Boxing, not baseball, was the na-tional pastime.According to one social historian, at the end of the nine-teenth century there was an obsession with social and racial hierarchiesand with ranking individuals and groups on a continuum from dirty toclean.There was also “a popular fixation on the dirt associated with thebodily functions of human beings: their excrement, urine, blood, pus,96Birth, 1874–1896and other secretions.” This historian does not mention in his work thepopular fixation on the oozings of the dead body itself—perhaps themost polluting of those “other secretions.” But there is no reason to ex-empt those fluids from his analysis.Both sanitary reformers in generaland cremationists in particular divided American society into high andlow, “washed” and “unwashed,” pure and polluted.The movement forsanitary reform was obsessed with these categories, and the debate overthe disposal of the dead was littered with references to them.Partisansof burial appealed on occasion to the rage of the age for purity (for ex-ample, when they insisted that cremation would pollute the atmospherewith “the reeking stench of burning bodies”).But denunciations of pol-lution were largely the coin of the cremationists, for whom “pure air,pure water, pure soil” was a mantra.59To the cremationists burial was polluting on both sanitary and rit-ual grounds.In fact, so intertwined were the movement’s appeals tosanitary and ritual cleanliness that it is impossible to disentangle them.Consider the many ways in which, from the cremationists’ perspective,the old-fashioned urban graveyard mixed up what should not be min-gled.It caused the living to interact with the dead.It also brought thedead into contact with one another, as flesh and bones shifted andsank, and as the fluids of one corpse drained into the fluids of a neigh-bor.In another instance of bringing together what should be left sepa-rate, the burial of the Union dead in what were to become Southerncotton fields brought Yankee bones into unseemly contact with theheirs of the Confederacy.Burial was even said to mix up the races andsexes in ways that were unimaginable among the living, since in at leastone exhumation the bones of an African-American man were found tobe nuzzling up against the remains of a white woman in what had be-come a shared grave.Cremation would, of course, solve all of theseproblems and more—as long as crematory operators were scrupulousabout incinerating only one body at a time and used magnets to sepa-rate out unwanted iron flakes from the pure, white ashes of the dead.Placing those ashes in individual urns would eliminate the possibility ofuntoward mixing of races or genders in the world of the dead.According to Catherine Bell, the ritualization process does far morethan create rites; it also fabricates worldviews.Bell sees three key dy-namics at work in ritualization.First is the construction of a series of bi-nary oppositions.Second is the ordering of those dyads into a hierarchywhere some are seen as superior (⫹) and others as inferior (⫺).Third isthe arrangement of the binary oppositions into a loose scheme in whichResurrection and the Resurrectionists97each element is related to every other.All these dynamics were at workin the Gilded Age cremation movement, which developed not only analternative means of disposal of the dead but also a new way of viewingthe world.60There were two key binary oppositions in the cremationist world-view: burial and cremation, and pollution and purity.The cremationistsevaluated pollution negatively and purity positively, and they associatedburial with the former and cremation with the latter.Hence the mostbasic scheme in their worldview was:Burial (⫺)Cremation (⫹)Pollution (⫺)Purity (⫹)To this basic scheme cremationists added a series of elaborations,which appear in table 1.The webs of meaning spun by the cremation-ists run down the columns (for associations) and across the rows (forcontrasts).So, for example, cremation was associated with purity,which was associated with cleanliness and science, but contrasted withburial, which was associated with pollution, uncleanliness, and super-stition [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]