Close family ties not only allow for specifying the loss and anticipating a future for both the community and the deceased, but also exert an obligation to organize a funeral (Woodthorpe & Rumble, 2016). This double movement of the rite of passage- holding on through remembrance of what has been lost and letting go by disposing of the bodily remains-is facilitated by the prior connections the attendants have to the deceased, usually as family or friends.
Funeral attendants enact a rite of passage that remembers and memorializes the deceased while at the same time acknowledging that the deceased is now in a different realm, with religion often filling in the spiritual dimensions of the transition. More generally, our analysis speaks to how community members marshal rituals to turn a situation that threatens to tear apart the social fabric into an event that strengthens community ties.ĭominant social-psychological perspectives suggest the purpose of the modern funeral is for loved ones to process their loss and to grieve in such a way that life can go on (Davies, 2017 Walter, 2005 White et al., 2017). In this article, we use the case of a community of volunteers who buries unclaimed babies to theorize the power of rituals to unite when division seems more imminent. Burying a stranger, therefore, poses profound challenges for the funeral to integrate a community of mourners.
In most funerals, this fostering of community ties rests on a personal relationship with the deceased or their relatives (Bailey & Walter, 2016 Woodthorpe, 2017b). Rituals around death are particularly important because they address existential questions about who we are as a society, what ties us together, and what our collective purpose is. Durkheim ( 1912), for instance, argued that we gain reason, a sense of self, and our most basic ability to relate to one another through ritualized moments of shared purpose and collective effervescence. Sociologists have long recognized that rituals constitute a key opportunity for community integration and cohesion (Collins, 2005 Douglas, 1966 Durkheim, 1912 Hertz, 1960 Turner, 1969). Similar processes of ritualistically inverting social meanings occur whenever people gather to turn potentially negative into group forming events.
We find that in their efforts to mourn babies to whom they have no connection, these volunteers temporarily foster new social bonds that allow them to work through unresolved grief. Drawing on ethnographic research over a two-year period, we advance the concept of cultural palimpsest to capture the process by which a gathering of strangers turns a potentially divisive political issue in to a community forming event. This paper examines the efforts of a US community of volunteers who gather to bury unclaimed, or “abandoned,” babies. Death rituals raise existential questions about the purpose of society and generally foster preexisting social ties. Rituals allow people to come together across many differences and experience similar thoughts and feelings. Classic sociological theories hold that rituals offer opportunities for community integration and cohesion.