Article From monuments to megapixels: Death, memory, and symbolic immortality in the contemporary United States Anthropological Theory 2015, Vol. 15(3) 338–357 ! The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1463499615575943 ant.sagepub.com Jeffrey Bennett University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA Jenny Huberman University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA Abstract This article explores transformations in the American way of death from the Victorian period to the present. It asks: What do recent shifts in mortuary practice and memorialization reveal about larger changes in American culture and society? And what is at stake in charting and understanding these changes for anthropologists interested in technology and culture change more generally? We argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from ‘monuments’ to ‘megapixels’, the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media. We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating the transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combatting death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today’s virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss. Corresponding author: Jenny Huberman, Department of Sociology, 5100 Rockhill Road, 208 Haag Hall, University of Missouri, Kansas City, MO 64110–2499, USA. Email: hubermanj@umkc.edu Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 339 Bennett and Huberman Keywords death, digital age, memorial paradigms, memory, object loss, symbolic immortality Introduction In 1996 the Harvard economist Richard Gill wrote an article for National Affairs magazine entitled ‘Whatever Happened to the American Way of Death?’. In that piece, which is partly a repudiation of Jessica Mitford’s work, Gill nostalgically contrasts the lavish Victorian funeral of the late 19th century with the low-cost, non-traditional methods of disposing of the dead that have become popular in the US more recently.1 Put simply, Gill concludes that the Victorians had a tremendous stake in a future they could not live to experience, and they responded to this dilemma by investing enormous sums of time, money, and energy in death celebrations designed to guarantee that they would live forever, in memory. In contrast, Gill argues that contemporary Americans are victims of temporal myopia, a form of historical short-sightedness that has severely constricted time horizons, making it difficult for the individual to envision any future beyond his or her personal death. According to Gill, this condition has short-circuited investments in the deep future, resulting in a loss of interest in ornate caskets, mausoleums, granite statues of angels, and other symbols of immortality. Instead, cheap cremations and non-traditional funerals are on the rise, reflecting a disturbing lack of concern with posterity. In Gill’s words, ‘Apparently the only thing that matters is what happens in this world, and in this world now. . . Live for yourself. All the rest is basically incomprehensible’ (Gill, 1996: 117). Gill’s attempt to link death celebrations to memory and anticipatory consciousness is worthwhile and thought-provoking. However, the specifics of his argument are far from satisfying. Americans may not be able to look as far into the future as their Victorian predecessors, but is it really reasonable to think that Americans, who probably take more photographs than any people on earth, are really unconcerned with posterity? And why should we assume that cremations and non-traditional funerals signify a lack of interest in the dead or immortality when the burgeoning popularity of internet sites such as www.cemetery.org, virtual-memorials.com, and the preservation of Facebook pages of deceased loved ones seem to suggest just the opposite? In short, Gill showed great foresight when he asked ‘Whatever Happened to the American Way of Death?’, but he did not leave us with a particularly compelling answer. This article is an attempt to initiate an anthropological dialogue about contemporary transformations in ‘the American way of death’ by offering a new response to Gill’s question.2 Instead of assuming Americans have lost interest in death and memorialization, in what follows we argue that the move away from the lavish Victorian funeral to cheaper, less traditional ways of caring for the dead is more productively conceptualized as a shift in differing memorial paradigms. We use the term memorial paradigm to refer to the dominant practices, objects, places, spaces, Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 340 Anthropological Theory 15(3) and actors that are invoked in processes of memorialization, as well as to reference the dominant modes of historical and anticipatory consciousness that accompany these efforts. In the case at hand, we characterize this paradigm shift as one from ‘monuments’ to ‘megapixels’, the former being ascendant at the beginning of the era of film photography (approximately 1860), and the latter becoming ascendant with the rise of social and digital media (approximately 2000). We trace the development and central features of these two memorial paradigms, showing how the rise of film photography played a central role in facilitating a transition between them, and we explore how these memorial paradigms have provided Americans with alternative ways of combating death anxiety since the 19th century. Ultimately, we argue that today’s virtual memorials and online cemeteries have arisen to provide a growing number of Americans with a sense of symbolic immortality that has become increasingly difficult to realize by more traditional means. However, we also consider how these new means of digital memorialization might be altering the memorial landscape in new ways and changing how the bereaved cope with object loss. Outlining these large-scale transformations and commenting on what we take to be emergent trends in a country as large and diverse as the US require that we situate our argument at a somewhat unwieldy level of abstraction.3 We can only hope that, as others join this dialogue, a body of more specific, ethnographically grounded studies will emerge to address the many questions posed by what follows. Death anxiety, symbolic immortality, and mortuary ritual The term ‘symbolic immortality’ is derived from Robert Lifton and Eric Olson’s study entitled Living and Dying. Lifton and Olson contend that establishing palpable connections to others is precisely what enables ‘active, vital life to go on’ (Lifton and Olson, 1974: 60). The death anxiety that our species universally suffers from is thus rooted in our fear of permanent disconnection from a world of others, a disconnection forced upon us by the inevitability of bodily failure and the extinction of individual consciousness.4 Given that organic death cannot be conquered in actuality, Lifton and Olson believe that humans everywhere, throughout history, have attempted to safeguard their connections to the vital flow of human life symbolically. Symbolism, according to Lifton and Olson, is humankind’s only means for achieving a sense of immortality which, in turn, provides a central strategy for coping with the anxiety of death. Lifton and Olson’s observations can be applied to a wide range of human practices and interests. For instance, upon hearing this, many Americans probably associate to what they commonly call ‘religion’, and, for Lifton and Olson, certain theological conceptions, transcendent experiences, and even identifications with the natural world play roles in manufacturing a symbolic sense of immortality. However, more mundane means of achieving this sense include the bearing and rearing of progeny, making contributions to one’s community, and even writing articles for academic journals such as this. All of these activities, the authors Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 341 Bennett and Huberman suggest, provide human beings with a way to participate in a ‘general flow beyond the self’ and achieve the sense that some part of them will remain alive and active even after the conscious self has ceased to exist. Lifton and Olson’s insights take on particular poignancy when applied to the anthropological literature on mortuary ritual. For instance, although Durkheim and Hertz were more concerned with the needs of society than the needs of the individual, they were also intrigued by human attempts to transcend the finality of death through symbolic means. ‘Society’, Hertz famously wrote, cannot admit that an individual who was part of its own substance, and on whom it has set its mark, shall be lost forever. The last word must remain with life: the deceased will rise from the grip of death and will return, in one form or another, to the peace of human association.. . . Thus, at whatever stage of religious evolution we place ourselves, the notion of death is linked with that of resurrection; exclusion is always followed by a new integration. (Hertz, 2004: 208) Indeed, the ethnological record is replete with examples where the biological death of the individual is represented not as the final terminus of life, but rather as the basis for its collective regeneration (Bloch and Parry, 1982). In many societies the dead live on as ancestors or spirits who contribute to ‘the general flow of life beyond the self’ through safeguarding the harvest, providing animals for the hunt, or ensuring the fertility of future generations (Conklin, 1995; Dernbach, 2005; Hasu, 2009; Lohmann, 2005; Rasmussen, 2000; Stewart and Strathern, 2005; Vitebsky, 1993). In short, although Lifton and Olson’s observations were informed by their training in psychiatry and clinical psychology respectively, the anthropological research on mortuary ritual certainly seems to confirm their idea that human beings, if not universally, then at least very pervasively, rely upon symbolic means to combat death anxiety and achieve a sense of immortality. Taking this as a departure point, we now want to explore how the two memorial paradigms introduced above have provided Americans with alternative means of pursuing symbolic immortality and maintaining connections between the living and the deceased. The monumental memorial paradigm According to Gill, American death celebrations changed dramatically during the post-Civil War era. Although the country as a whole became much more secular during this period, the public invested more time, money, and attention in funerals, graves, and monuments than ever before, marking a significant departure from the simple, austere death celebrations that had been popular in the US since the arrival of the Puritans (Gill, 1996: 110–112). Gill explained this new obsession with death ceremony by arguing that, nineteenth century believers in the Idea of Progress envisioned the future (posterity) as giving meaning and vindication to the present. These believers could take Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 342 Anthropological Theory 15(3) satisfaction – in some cases, their greatest satisfaction – in the thought that their children and heirs would live richer, better, and happier lives than they themselves had. These same individuals would also certainly imagine their children and heirs as thinking of them and remembering them, perhaps even being a little grateful to them, for having helped bring about this beneficial outcome. Their stake in the future was real and important and essentially took the form of being remembered – i.e., memorialized in one way or another. (Gill, 1996: 114) This hyperopic desire to be remembered, even celebrated for the role that one had played in creating a better world, coincided in important ways with demographic and institutional realignments associated with industrial manufacturing. As such, it dovetailed with the birth of the funeral industry and the popularization of the notion that the cost and extravagance of the funeral was an index of the value of the deceased. As Habenstein and Lamers have noted in an essay on late 19th-century funerals, ‘the preciousness of the human body was felt to be best expressed to the world symbolically by the aesthetic luxury of the casket, and dramatically to the world by the funeral ceremony’ (1977: 95). Consequently, mortuary catalogs began offering hundreds of new casket styles. Funeral apparel, transportation, and music all became socioeconomically stratified commodities. In keeping with this, ‘immortelles’, mass manufactured, non-perishable flowers, quickly became staples of American death celebrations. Beauty aside, artificial flowers eased the burden of perpetually maintaining funeral plots marked by the ornate monuments and grave markers that characterized the period. These funeral plots were increasingly located in new cemeteries designed to exist as beautifully landscaped oases where families could venture to marvel at the rhythms of nature and celebrate the continuity of their kin groups. As Neil Harris has noted, by the late 19th century the public had embraced the notion that cemeteries were intended to serve the needs of the living rather than the dead, and in an era of rapid social change and widespread religious skepticism, the living seemed to be in even greater need of symbolic guarantees of immortality (Harris, 1977: 104).5 Moreover, by materializing memory in public ‘sites’ that facilitated experiences of collective identity, the American cemetery movement can be viewed as part of a larger attempt to renegotiate the relationship between history and memory and ultimately ward off the dislocating effects of modernity (Connerton, 1989; Hallam and Hockey, 2001; Le Goff, 1992; Nora, 1989).6 In short, the monumental memorial paradigm drew upon a number of means to provide individuals with a way to secure a place in a future that would otherwise exclude them. These included: the participation of kith, kin, and the larger community in the death ritual; the attempted beautification and preservation of the corpse; the celebration of the deceased’s life through eulogy and the erection of permanent markers or monuments that reinforced a sense of public and placedbased memory; and the communion with nature in an idyllic cemetery where artificial flowers suggested that life was everlasting.7 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 343 Bennett and Huberman From monuments to photographs By the late 19th century photographic portraits had found their way into mainstream American death celebrations. The scientific mystery of the camera coupled with the pretense of objectivity that the photo offered had tremendous appeal for people committed to what Gill called the ‘Idea of Progress’, and this, coupled with the photo’s capacity to preserve images of the deceased beyond the grave, resulted in a very early wedding of photography with death (Hallam and, Hockey, 2001; Ruby, 1995).8 In fact, some of the earliest uses of photography involved the creation of death portraits – staged productions that most often included parents cradling deceased children (sometimes dressed as angels) or a newly widowed spouse posing with his or her lifeless partner. These photos literally expressed the American willingness to embrace death, and they reflected a world in which the living and dead comingled rather than existing in radically separate and unbridgeable domains. As cameras became increasingly available to the general public, however, death portraits gave way to life portraits. Despite the fact that film photographs were expensive to make, difficult to share, and eminently perishable, by the middle part of the 20th century the family photo album had become a priceless treasure.9 It was the one thing home evacuees grabbed as they fled fires, floods, and hurricanes, and it was something that, when lost, left people feeling deeply saddened and uncertain of the reality of their past. In other words, during the 20th century, as Americans were becoming both geographically and socially detached from the kin networks and communities they had grown up with, photographs became increasingly central to their attempts to maintain connections with both the living and the dead. More specifically, they helped facilitate three important shifts in regard to mourning and memory work.10 First, as mediators of memory, film photographs slowly displaced a universe of objects (pocket knives, quilts, jewelry, bronzed baby shoes, bibles, family recipes, stories, dwellings and geographical landmarks, etc.) that formerly functioned to metonymically preserve links to the dead and guarantee the continuity of kin groups via cross-generational inheritance. And as objects became mass produced rather than hand crafted, ultimately cluttering the lives of Americans who became increasingly mobile and accustomed to disposable goods, the conveniently sized and stored photo became all the more precious. However, the increasing dependence on the photo as a mediator of memory inadvertently resulted in Americans privileging visual, iconic forms of remembrance at the expense of other varieties of sensual memory.11 Thus, the ‘aura’ of the deceased was gradually replaced by twodimensional captures of singular instances of past life. The intimacy of touch and smell was gradually replaced by the gaze. Nonetheless, the photo remained a safe and comforting means for preserving connections with the dead in a world where the spheres of life and death were becoming increasingly detached, resulting in death becoming something to be avoided or otherwise overcome rather than something one had to learn to embrace.12 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 344 Anthropological Theory 15(3) Second, because film photographs were capable of vividly capturing singular instances of life, they altered the way Americans conceived of life and history more generally. The photograph made the ongoing documentation of life possible, and in time, even a normative ‘duty’ or ‘vocation’ (Nora, 1989: 13).13 Baby baths, the first day of kindergarten, lost teeth, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, family vacations, and so on were all captured on film by Americans and archived into albums that showed rather than told how multiple life stories folded and unfolded together. Ultimately this established a new set of understandings and expectations regarding what American life looked like and how it ought to be lived, recorded, and remembered. The widespread use of photography not only ‘multiplied’ and ‘democratized’ memory, it also widened the gap between seeing and doing, between documenting and living life (Le Goff, 1977: 89). Consequently, memorable experience came to be configured along a temporal arc that reached its apex not at the time at which it actually occurred, but at the moment documentary evidence of the experience was consumed and commented on by some other. Indeed, in many respects this has become even more pervasive today: reliving has become more vital and validating than living. And the experiential vitality, value, and longevity of undocumented experience has diminished as Americans have become increasingly dependent upon the photograph to affirm all forms of existence. Throughout the 20th century, film photographs also helped Americans cope with the privatization of death and mourning.14 As mourning became an increasingly private affair, family photographs played an important role in small-scale efforts to preserve connections with the dead. They also contributed to ‘the intensification of the home. . . as a site of materialized memory. . . conducive to personal reflection and remembering’ (Hallam and Hockey, 2001: 141). With photographs of the deceased ‘enshrined’ on living room mantles and walls, it no longer became as imperative to visit the cemetery in order to keep the memory of the deceased alive. Finally, taking all of these changes into account, we can begin to view the protests that Mitford and others staged against the bloated American funeral industry in the 1960s in a new light. Occurring during the heyday of film photography, their calls to abandon the traditional funeral should not only be read as an indictment of the funeral industry’s attempts to profit from the loss and despair of American mourners, they should be understood as part of a larger shift in which the central features and practices of the monumental memorial paradigm were, for a variety of reasons, no longer as compelling or practical for 20th-century Americans who were learning to come to terms with the emerging regime of ‘flexible accumulation’ and its attendant social and subjective transformations (Harvey, 1990). In critiquing the commercialization of death, therefore, Mitford and others simultaneously gave expression to a new set of cultural sensibilities regarding the changing relationships between life, death, place, time, and memorialization. Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 345 Bennett and Huberman The megapixel memorial paradigm Since the publication of Mitford’s seminal study, The American Way of Death, these changes have become even more dramatic and pervasive. For example, birth rates have declined, families and communities have become far more fragmented, and kinship in general has become less important to most Americans. In a world filled with disposable commodities, even the kinds of heirlooms that people once bequeathed to their kin to preserve a sense of biological continuity across generations have begun to disappear, including old photographs. In many cases they have become regarded as increasingly burdensome, adding to Americans’ struggles with over-accumulation and clutter. Similarly, attachment to place, and by implication place memory, has weakened significantly as society has become more mobile. The pace of change has accelerated to the point that many if not most individuals will work in a variety of occupations and settings, and even in cases where individuals make novel and valuable contributions, they will likely be superseded and forgotten within the space of their lifetimes.15 In short, the formerly conventional biocultural and creative mechanisms Americans relied upon to leave enduring marks of their presence in the world have seemingly been jeopardized by sweeping social changes since the Victorian era. Concomitant with this, the American attachment to death rituals that once brought kin and community together, in a meaningful place, to literally and figuratively reposition the deceased within a variety of relationships, has begun to breakdown. These and other changes have, of course, also impacted formerly vitalizing relationships with nature, theology, and certain varieties of self-transcendent experience. As Gill noted in 1966, these developments have also constricted time horizons and inhibited investment in the deep future. Taken together, all of this would seem to suggest that Americans today are far less prepared to embrace death than their Victorian ancestors. And this may be true. After all, people today are made profoundly uncomfortable by late-19thcentury photo portraits of deceased children sitting in the laps of grieving parents. However, as noted earlier, Lifton and Olson’s work gives us good reason to believe that most Americans are still finding meaningful ways to secure a sense of symbolic immortality. The question is, how? We suggest that digital photography and the related development of personal websites and virtual information vaults that actually exist outside of time and space may be part of the answer. In fact, we propose that the pre-mortem creation of vast personal archives made possible by digital technologies represents the latest chapter in the ongoing American struggle to preserve a sense of life after death. These archives, made up of a conglomeration of digitized artifacts, are more than the disaggregated residue of an individual existence. In most cases they take the form of carefully curated self-narratives that are integral to the formation of what Rodney Carter has called ‘personal mythologies’ – highly idealized visions of oneself and one’s life that, like the photo albums that served as their prototypes, are intended to be viewed by others and passed on to future generations (Carter, 2007: 568).16 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 346 Anthropological Theory 15(3) Over the past decade such archives have likely supplemented more traditional means of remembering the dead, and this may hold true in the future. However, even as supplements these curated memory vaults have had a profound impact on the way the living relate to the dead, and to death more generally. José Van Dijck makes a similar argument in her fascinating book, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Van Dijck is interested in how digital culture is revamping our concepts of memory and experience, individually and collectively, and unsettling the boundaries between the public and the private. In tracing the shift from analog to digital photography, she explores how digital photography and internet technology are increasingly used to engage in acts of ‘identity formation’ and attempts to maintain connections to others (Van Dijck, 2007: 113). She argues that, in many ways, the ‘communicative function’ of these ‘memory objects’ has displaced their ‘commemorative function’ (p. 99) She writes: Whereas in the analog age, photos, cassette tapes, or slides were primarily intended to be shared or stored in the private sphere – a slide show with the neighbors, a forgotten shoebox in Grandpa’s attic – the emergence of digital networked tools may reform our habits of presentation and preservation. By nature of their creation, many digital memory items are becoming networked objects, constructed in the commonality of the World Wide Web in constant interaction with other people, even anonymous audiences. Technologies of the self are – even more so than before – technologies of sharing. (2007: 48) Although Van Dijck does not take up the issue herself, her work provides a useful frame for both contextualizing and considering the profusion of online memorial sites and cemeteries that have emerged on the World Wide Web over the last decade, as well as the ways in which Social Networking Sites are being used to memorialize the dead. Numerous studies have shown how these sites provide the bereaved with an opportunity to maintain connections with both the living and the deceased, and simultaneously cultivate a self that is based ever-more on a technology of sharing (Brubaker et al., 2013; see also De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Hume and Bressers, 2009–10; Jones, 2004; Moss, 2004; Roberts, 2004b; Stokes, 2012; Veale, 2004). For instance, consider the description posted on the World Wide Cemetery website, which clearly presents online memorialization as an effective way to facilitate sharing and heightened connectivity: [V]irtual monuments, unlike real ones, will not weather with the passage of time and can be visited easily by people from around the world. Monuments in the World Wide Cemetery allow people to share the lives of their loved ones in ways that traditional printed death announcements or stone inscriptions cannot. Photographs, moving images and even sounds can be included with a monument. People can create hypertext links among family members, and in doing so forge a genealogy of Internet users and their families online and in real time.. . . It is our sincerest hope that, when you erect a monument to a loved one in the World Wide Cemetery, doing so will provide Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 347 Bennett and Huberman you with a measure of solace, and, if you are walking through the Cemetery, that you delight and wonder in the diversity, uniqueness and accomplishments of its inhabitants.. . . A Virtual Memorial Website provides a wonderful way to preserve memories for future generations of friends and family.17 In her study of the online cemetery, Virtual Memorial Gardens, Pamela Roberts reports that over 80% of her respondents said they created web memorials to ‘share their experiences with others’ and to ‘offer guidance and help to others in similar circumstances’ (Roberts, 2004b: 69). She observes that some of the people who create memorials even leave notes for the webmaster in which they acknowledge the unknown others who might visit their sites and express their gratitude for the opportunity to memorialize the deceased loved ones. One example taken from the site reads: Thank you for the opportunity to ‘immortalize’ my mom. When you lose someone, I guess you kind of need to shout it out to the world or something so that they know a great person has gone. I feel better knowing that others might view her name and even though my memorial to her was kind of short, at least they will get the general idea of what a big part she played in the life of my 5-year-old daughter and myself. Again, thank you for this opportunity. (Roberts, 2004b: 67) Furthermore, Roberts found that once memorials were created for the deceased, ‘severing these ties’ was ‘not considered an option’. Eighty-eight percent of the memorial creators she interviewed indicated that ‘they definitely would not take these links down, with some including notes on the importance of online contacts’ (Roberts, 2004b: 70). Indeed, if digital and internet technologies have played a role in people’s attempts to maintain connections with others who are living and dead, they have also, we argue, contributed to a heightened fear of disconnection. This fear of disconnection can be observed in ordinary Americans’ everyday anxieties about being parted from their cell phones, a condition now known as ‘nomophobia’. It has also manifested itself in the emergence of new post-mortem message delivery services such as www.finalthoughts.com. As the site advertises, ‘Through our revolutionary, e-mail service, Final Thoughts.com allows you to share your final wishes and personal feelings with your loved ones, after you have passed away. Our unique e-mail service puts YOU in control and assures that your personal objectives are communicated to your family and friends when the time is right’ (Jones, 2004: 85). The fear of disconnection is perhaps even more palpable in the anxiety that is produced when a Facebook friend dies. Consider, for instance, a forum thread from www.allfacebook.com entitled ‘should-you-unfriend-a-dead-friend-onFacebook?’ The thread opens with the following: A few months ago I lost a sister friend, who was near and dear to my heart. . . Now that my friend is gone, she still lives on, oddly enough, via Facebook.. . . My Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 348 Anthropological Theory 15(3) friend has 303 people on her Facebook site. It has now been four months since her passing and not one person has unfriended her.. . . I visit her page each day, several times a day in fact and still, friends have continued to post comments, share stories and pictures, plus even hold one-sided conversations with her. She still receives pokes and offers to play games.. . . Is it possible that all 303 of us friends are psychologically twisted, choosing to continue a relationship with a Facebook ghost? This particular post generated 30 comments, which were all very similar insofar as they were sympathetic and affirmative. Some examples include: I don’t think that’s twisted. In fact in my opinion that’s the most amazing way to keep their memory alive! Just another way to live on after we are gone. I think we as a society glorify our internet presence.. . . Will our Facebook pages live on forever? Weird thought. I think there is something inherently human about wanting to stay in contact, to not have the relationship end. Facebook enables the relationship – the connection – to continue. When my friend passed away his ‘fiance’ had his twitter, facebook, and personal website deleted.. . . When she deleted that stuff, she didn’t just delete webpages. She deleted years of priceless pictures and memories, and now that’s gone forever. It’s like she tried to make it that he never even existed. With this, we begin to realize how far away we have moved from the Victorian era, when undocumented experience was not necessarily unformulated or irrecoverable experience. In any case, this last post makes it clear that for many today the internet has become the primary means for securing a sense of attachment to a flow of life that transcends the self. And for such people, the only thing they leave behind to remind the world that they ever existed is an archive, a personal mythology, a museum of electronic traces. However, these electronic memory repositories seem more than sufficient to meet the needs of those left behind, and in meeting those needs they offer survivors hope that they too may live forever in digital and perhaps even holographic form someday.18 This, we propose, helps explain the emergence of the unspoken taboo against unfriending a dead friend. Deleting them, so to speak, is akin to casting them into oblivion, detaching them from the vital flow of human life. And confronting that possibility, confronting the factuality of death, triggers acute defensive responses in Americans who have seemingly become more fearful than ever of disconnection.19 Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 349 Bennett and Huberman Conclusion: Some reflections on memorialization, symbolic immortality and object loss in the digital age As we noted in the introduction, a little less than 20 years ago Richard Gill argued that Americans had exchanged the Victorian obsession with memorializing the dead to ensure their perpetual survival for a ‘you only live once’ obsession with gratifying short-term desires. Here, he was echoing Charles Jackson’s earlier contention that, ‘For Americans in the twentieth century, connection between the world of the dead and that of the living has been largely severed and the dead world is disappearing’ (Jackson, 1977: 229). We have argued that this late-20thcentury account of things no longer seems accurate. Contrary to the claims of authors like Jackson and Gill, in the 21st century the links between the living and dead have become more, not less prominent and pervasive. Additionally, today Americans are as concerned with being remembered by future generations as ever. They are still in search of a sense of symbolic immortality. This is not, however, to say that Gill and Jackson were wrong. Their observations were made during the heyday of film photography and were descriptive of a large-scale cultural shift away from what we have called the ‘monumental’ memorial paradigm. This paradigm featured the creation of tangible links between the living and dead that included new public cemeteries, ornate grave markers, and family heirlooms that ranged from quilts and recipes to land and dwellings. As American society became more urban and mobile during the 20th century, mortuary expenditures decreased and film photographs gradually replaced the linking objects that dominated 19th-century life, raising questions for authors like Gill about American concerns with posterity and respect for the dead. We have also argued that 20th-century film photography helped to lay the foundations for the recent evolution of what we have called the ‘megapixel’ memorial paradigm, made possible by the mass digitization of photography and development of easily accessed online information vaults, which, along with social media sites like Facebook, currently provide millions of Americans with assurances that some part of them will remain connected to the vital flow of human life even after their organic bodies have perished. Clearly, the defining features of the megapixel paradigm are still emerging and more research is required before their implications can be fully grasped and theorized. However, we want to conclude our discussion by offering some very brief and tentative reflections on how this paradigm shift might be reconfiguring memory, memorialization and mourning in the contemporary United States. And we want to raise a few questions for future consideration. Van Dijck notes that one of the fundamental differences between the way digital and analog photographs operate as ‘memory objects’ pertains to their mutability. In contrast to analog photos, digital photographs become ‘living pictures amenable to infinite change’ and manipulation (Van Dijck, 2007: 106). This, she argues, creates a situation where, in the digital age, the boundaries between memory, imagination, and desire become much more fluid. Thus, in contrast to Victorian Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 350 Anthropological Theory 15(3) forms of memorialization, where representations of the deceased were literally set in stone, now there is much greater potential ‘to update and revise’ the memory of the deceased (Roberts, 2004b: 69). This is also made possible by the interactive and ‘dynamic’ nature of many of these memorial sites, which enables a much wider range of participants to actively influence the way the deceased are remembered. Commemorating the dead in the digital age has indeed become more ‘democratic’, yet this may also mean that it has become a more contested and anxiety-provoking process, particularly as the bereaved increasingly find themselves struggling to control the way memories of the deceased are produced (Brubaker et al., 2013). Moreover, as Van Dijck has argued, in the digital age memory objects and media technologies are increasingly charged with a ‘communicative’ as well as commemorative function. Digital photographs are not only ‘intended for veneration or ritual use’, they also ‘metamorphose into virtual objects of exchange’ which are widely circulated and used to create connections with others (Van Dijck, 2007: 119–120). If Van Dijck is correct about this shift, then perhaps we need to change our future research questions. Instead of asking how digital technologies provide the deceased with a means to achieve symbolic immortality, we might also ask how online memorialization provides the living with a means to create and reaffirm connections amongst themselves. How are the dead being used to forge relations with living others? How is online memorialization not only indicative of an obsession with commemoration but also with a much larger cultural emphasis on constant communication and connection? And might using the dead as a means of communicating and interacting with others be contributing to the sense that the deceased are still ‘alive’, and the world of cyberspace is itself an ‘enchanted’ or perhaps ‘haunted’ ‘techno-spiritual system (Bell 2006; Sconce 2000, Sherlock 2013)? This brings us to the way the preservation of electronic bonds with the dead might be affecting mourning and bereavement in the digital age. As we have noted, during the 19th century death was something to be accepted, even embraced. High infant mortality rates, the prevalence of extended families and home funerals, and the relative precariousness of daily life ensured that most Americans experienced the death of friends or family members early in life and ‘up close’. Concomitant with this, the early 20th century psychoanalytic discourse regarding bereavement suggested that healthy adjustment to loss involved accepting death, severing ties with the dead, and fully reinvesting one’s energies in life and the living. From this perspective post-mortem experiences of dead loved ones who were believed to have the power to see, hear, offer advice, forgive, torment, or otherwise make their presence felt in the world of the living were treated as signs of pathological mourning, raising questions about the grieving subject’s capacity to accept the reality of the loss. However, by 1996, the same year Gill published his essay on the American way of death, this traditional view of loss and survivorship had been challenged by Silverman and Klass, who observed that, in reality, many if not most Americans Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 351 Bennett and Huberman maintain rather than relinquish bonds with the deceased, and this has probably always been the case. Moreover, these researchers suggested that these ‘continuing bonds’ may play a crucial part in the healthy adjustment to loss (Silverman and Klass, 1996).20 In Silverman and Klass’s reconceptualization of the ‘normal grieving process’, relationships with the dead are transformed by and through interacting with them in various ways, and memories of the dead remain alive and subject to ongoing revision instead of being mummified and buried. In short, these authors recast what was previously viewed as a pathological refusal to let go of the deceased as a normal and potentially healthy need to hold on to them for as long as necessary. This shift raises many fascinating questions, but for the purposes of this paper it makes clear that normative understandings of death and mourning within the burgeoning American grief industry have changed in parallel with the movement from monuments to megapixels, and it raises questions about the way electronic bonds with the dead might ultimately affect the grieving process. Given the social and technological changes we have described, might we be entering an era where the dead are experienced as intruding in the world of the living via perpetual Facebook reanimation? And if so, might there not be good reasons to fear that the electronic preservation of the dead may complicate the way some people come to terms with object loss while ostensibly easing this process for others? Again, it is far too soon to tell, but it is not too soon to initiate an anthropological dialogue about these issues, particularly since digital and online technologies are already undoubtedly affecting indigenous understandings of death and afterlife in other parts of the world. In conclusion, the American way of death, or more accurately the American way of symbolically overcoming death, has been profoundly transformed by the development of digital media technologies that have allowed Americans to obsessively document their life experiences, store the resulting memory traces in a timeless medium, and electronically share the personal mythologies manufactured from those traces with a virtually limitless number of people. In life, these acts and objects are bioculturally and creatively vitalizing, and they help assuage death anxiety by providing individuals with a sense that some part of them, in fact, the most important part – the mythologized self – will survive organic death and continue to influence a world of others. After death, these same acts and objects allow the living to continue communing with loved ones who can be almost magically resurrected in electronic form with the touch of a button. It is still not clear whether or how these changes might be connected to the current American obsession with the undead or how digital memorialization might be affecting funerary practices, the experience of bereavement, clinical understandings of grief, and many other things. The intersection of death, memory, and technology is undergoing rapid reconfiguration in the US and, as we have indicated, much more research needs to be done to define and more fully understand what we have called the ‘megapixel paradigm’. As a result, we cannot answer the question Gill posed in 1996. We can only conclude by saying we believe the changes we have described give us good Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 352 Anthropological Theory 15(3) reasons to alter the tense of Gill’s question to ask: ‘What is happening to the American way of death?’ Notes 1. In 1963 Jessica Mitford published a scathing study of the American funeral industry entitled The American Way of Death. In this book, she lambasted the funeral industry for its commercial exploitation of death and decried the high cost of funerals. Mitford argued that Americans would be far better off spending their money on the living rather than the dead. 2. Within the fields of cultural and media studies, as well as gerontology and thanatology, there is a growing literature on online memorialization (Bambridge W (2013); Bollmer G (2013); Church S (2013); DeGroot J (2014); De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Graham C, Gibbs M and Aceti L (2013); Hume and Bressers, 2009–10; Jones, 2004; Kera D (2013); Lingel J (2013); Moss, 2004; Roberts, 2004a, 2004b; Roberts and Vidal, 1999–2000; Stone, 2010; Veale, 2004). Anthropologists, however, have been slow to engage these new developments in American mortuary practice. For a notable exception to this see Sherlock (2013). 3. For example, as of 2012 the state of Nevada had a 74.2% cremation rate while a mere 16.9% of Mississippi residents were cremated (http://nfda.org/about-funeral-service-/ trends-and-statistics.html). Data of this type suggests that dispositions toward death, funerary practices, memorial technologies, and so forth vary widely in the contemporary US, and these variations need to be studied more exhaustively. As of now, we are unaware of reliable statistical data that might provide a clearer picture of which Americans are actively utilizing online memorials and other digital technologies to celebrate death. However, the preponderance of new online cemeteries, virtual memory banks, and social media memorials suggests that the number of people taking advantage of these resources is growing. 4. Of course, not all scholars agree that human beings are universally plagued by a fear of death, and even those who do believe so emphasize that the fear of death may have multiple determinations (Choron, 1964). Moreover, as Metcalf and Huntington rightfully note, ‘if the fear of death is indeed universal. . . it [still] cannot explain the variation of mortuary rites from one place to another’ (Metcalf and Huntington, 1991: 203). 5. Indeed, it might be argued that during the Victorian period the cemetery not only became a key site for pursuing symbolic immortality and combatting death anxiety. It also became a key site for the construction of what Nietzsche referred to as ‘monumental history’: a history that brings the great achievements of humanity into focus and, in so doing, enables future generations to ‘live more courageously’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 15). As Nietzsche writes: ‘Now, what purpose is served for contemporary man by the monumental consideration of the past, by busying himself with the classical and rare person of earlier times? He derives from the fact that the greatness which was once there at all events once was possible and therefore really will be possible once again. He goes along his path more bravely, for now the doubt which falls over him in weaker hours, that he might perhaps be wishing for the impossible, is beaten back from the field’ (Nietzsche, 2010: 11). 6. Thus, while we argue that the desire for symbolic immortality is a human universal, we also recognize that the felt need to materialize memory and continually ‘archive’ it Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 353 Bennett and Huberman 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. through a proliferation of public ‘sites’ is, as Pierre Nora has proposed, a particularly modern preoccupation, if not imperative (Nora, 1998: 12–14). Moreover, these biosocial, creative, and nature-based mechanisms for manufacturing a sense of symbolic immortality freed theology from playing a dominant or even necessary role in assigning meaning to life and death. Although American funeral rituals clearly evolved in ways that reflected basic Christian theological understandings, by the turn of the 20th century the ritual itself was no longer dependent upon the theological scaffolding that allowed for its creation. In fact, Gill (1996) seems to think that the relative austerity of the Puritan funeral was due to the importance of Christian theology in American life during the 18th and early 19th centuries, when worldly ties were devalued in the service of emphasizing other-worldly realities. For example, during this period flowers were often prohibited at gravesites due to their close association with pagan rites (Habenstein and Lamers, 1977: 96), and expensive and/or ostentatious death celebrations were generally viewed as threats to communal harmony rather than obligatory expressions of reverence for the dead. The Victorian funeral thus marked the evolution of a new set of compromises and departures in the history of religion in America. As Rob Kroes has noted in his book, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History, the mystery of the camera did initially evoke feelings of awe and wonder. He writes: ‘There was a sacral element in photography’s potential to capture and freeze instantly what to the human mind and eye was always in flux, in motion’ (Kroes, 2007: 59). For a detailed discussion of the significance of the family photo album also see Bourdieu (1965: 53–54). Or for a discussion of the role that photography has played in not just capturing but constituting family life see Sontag (1973). Annette Kuhn defines memory work as: ‘an active practice of remembering which takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory work undercuts assumptions about the transparency or the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as ‘‘truth’’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated, mined, for its meanings and its possibilities. Memory work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory’ (Kuhn, 2000: 186). Along similar lines, José van Dijck writes: ‘Memory work thus involves a complex set of recursive activities that shape our inner worlds, reconciling past and present, allowing us to make sense of the world around us, and constructing an idea of continuity between self and others.. . . Memory work involves the production of objects – in this case snapshots and video footage – with a double purpose to document and communicate what happened’ (van Dijck, 2007: 5). Hallam and Hockey also note the way that photographs have displaced a world of material objects in memorialization practices. However, they also take issue with the idea that contemporary forms of memorialization do not include forms of sensual memory, arguing that ‘in the contemporary West, the body has become a major ‘‘site of memory’’’ (Hallam and Hockey, 2001: 197). Alternatively, in contrast to the memento mori of medieval times which served as ‘constant reminders of mortality’ (Hallam and Hockey 2001: 72), it might be argued that photography helped perpetuate a denial of death through its capacity to ‘freeze’ images of the deceased in time. Quoting Warner, Hallam and Hockey note: ‘the photograph has the capacity to preserve, or maintain as living, aspects of that which has passed and those who have died: ‘‘to enshrine identity, creating a memorial which pleads for Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 354 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. Anthropological Theory 15(3) deathlessness and issues a challenge to time – on behalf of someone’’ (Warner 1995: 41)’ (Hallam and Hockey, 2001: 142). As Pierre Nora writes, ‘Modern memory is, above all, archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of recording, the visibility of the image. . .The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through scaffolding and outward signs – hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past.. . . Memory has been wholly absorbed by its meticulous reconstitution. Its new vocation is to record; delegating to the archive the responsibility of remembering, it sheds its signs upon depositing them there, as a snake sheds its skin’ (Nora, 1998: 13). Exploring the causes of this privatization of death and mourning is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it can certainly be linked to demographic shifts and changes in lifeexpectancy, the relocation of cemeteries from town centers to peripheries, as well as the changing nature of modern subjectivity. Moreover, as Blauner has noted, modern societies tend to defend themselves against the disruptive effects of death by systematically excluding at-risk populations, namely the very young and very old, from involvement in essential social, political, and economic processes (Blauner, 1977). This also means that ‘untimely’ deaths – that is, the deaths of adults who are typically embedded within a variety of social institutions and processes – are the most socially disruptive and existentially disturbing. As a result, these deaths tend to attract the most attention and they are often publicly celebrated to help restore a sense of integrity and continuity to the larger social groups the deceased actively participated in. From this perspective, the dramatic diminution of mortality rates in the US from 17.2 per 1000 in 1900 to 8.7 per 1000 in the year 2000, combined with the fact that many fewer young and middleaged Americans are dying annually than did during the opening decades of the 20th century, suggests that the disruptive effects of individual death have been experienced on almost constantly shrinking scales over the course of the last century. For a more extended discussion of these shifts and some of their consequences, see Sennett (1998) This emphasis on using photographs to elaborate the individual has also been noted by the anthropologist Barbara Harrison. In her ethnographic study of how people connect photographs to memory and narration, Harrison observes that self-presentation – rather than family re-presentation – has become a major function of photographs (Harrison, 2002). See http://www.cemetery.org/about.html. Clearly, given what has been said thus far, the numerous references to monuments put forth here are of interest to us, as is the pervasive use of virtual flowers in these online cemeteries and memorial sites. As Hallam and Hockey have argued, despite significant changes in practices associated with death, we do find that certain items and images, such as flowers, exhibit a ‘striking tenacity’ and ‘resiliency’ as ‘expressive materials of memory’ associated with death (Hallam and Hockey, 2011: 5). Miriam Moss also notes some of the continuities between traditional and online cemeteries. As she writes: ‘Four key visual characteristics tend to define an English cemetery: The solid enduring gravestone, the words on the stone, the intensity of feelings expressed by those visiting the cemetery, and the imagery of nature. . . each of these is present in some clear way in Web memorials, often referred to as ‘‘Web cemeteries.’’ They promise continuity, are text-based, involve intense feelings, and use imagery of nature.. . . Visits to both the traditional cemetery and to the Web memorial are post death rituals symbolizing private mourning in public space’ (Moss, 2004: 78). Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at UMKC Libraries on October 1, 2015 355 Bennett and Huberman 18. As Patrick Stokes notes in his essay, ‘Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook?’: ‘A website called virtualeternity.com now offers a service whereby users can upload a photograph of themselves and provide a script. The photograph is then animated and becomes an avatar for an artificial intelligence (AI) programme which uses elements in the script to engage conversationally with other users via digitised speech. The idea is, quite explicitly, to enable customers to leave a digital version of themselves that their survivors, and even as-yet-unborn descendants, will be able to interact with’ (Stokes, 2012: 370). 19. On this note, it is worth pointing out that the same social changes that have undermined formerly strong senses of connection to stable kin groups, communities, places, occupations, and so forth have given rise to a hunger for personal connection in the US that is quickly transformed into unbearable anxiety – death anxiety, when, for example, students are parted from their cellphones. 20. 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