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Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Mortality: Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying

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Memory, mourning, landscape

Professor Paul Gough
a a

University of the West of England, Bristol, UK Version 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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Book Reviews

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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 Duckworths 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 Shefeld, 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 benet from a longer title, or a sub-title that reects 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 ne 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. In conceptualising 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 ones feet, sousterrain, our eyes cast down into history, reinforcing the vertical axis of reection. Insightful and provocative though it is, Winters essay is slightly at odds with the spaces generated in the following essays. Whereas Winter invites us to kneel,

Book Reviews 283 prostrate ourselves at the altars of commemoration, other contributors takes us into the raw air of recent and past conict. And what an extraordinary global panorama it is, stretching from the sacred names of the Nations 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 in the aftermath of the 19921995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not all chapters, though, emerge from the fallout of military conict 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 farung corners of the Scottish Highlands, a ercely 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

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Natures embrace: Japans aging urbanites and new death rites, by Satsuki Kawano, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2010, 232 pp., $27.00 (paperback), 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 Japanese medias attention by performing the rst of its ash scattering ceremonies. Members of the Tokyo-based nonprot 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 Natures 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 Japans 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