As far back as the historical record goes, humans have had reasons for the ritual handling of dead bodies that range from the practical to the mystical: they smell, or they’re diseased, or the souls within them need to be properly escorted into the next realm. We speak to the dead, pray for the dead, bathe and clothe the dead, burn the dead, and bury the dead, but for historian Thomas Laqueur, neither sanitation nor the soul fully explain the amount of attention we pay to the dead. For him, there is a deeper anthropological truth at work: caring for the dead marks the human transition from “nature” into “culture.”
Laqueur says, “There is a liminal moment when we leave nature and enter culture, when we say the dead body isn’t just nature, the dead body is part of culture, and it’s a part of our culture and part of our history.” This recognition imbues the dead body with a deep significance, where it not only represents the individual who died, but also represents the larger concepts of mortality and consciousness that define being alive.
Laqueur says this makes dead bodies “laden with the past,” which explains the prohibitions of things like exhumation, grave-robbing, and other crimes against the dead. “Digging up a dead body and mutilating it,” he says, “is digging up and destroying history.”
Even though these issues stretch back millennia, some contemporary death practices are relatively new. According to Laqueur, the mid-eighteenth century development of the cemetery “created a new cosmopolitan community of the dead.” Because the cemetery was secular, it allowed people of all religions — even people who were anti-religious — to be buried together. But that democratization of burials was complicated by questions of economic class: unlike the community church graveyard, cemetery plots were private property and available only to families that could afford them.