Representations of childness
The memorialisation of children in the Australian cemetery 1836 – 2018
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 15082008 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stephen Muller (0000-0002-4876-8567, Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 531-553 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Mortality (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1357-6275 • E-ISSN: 1469-9885 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/13576275.2023.2192341 |
| OpenAlex | W4361006985 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 40 |
This paper explores the cultural conceptualisation of children’s social identity and status through memorialisation, based on the study of children’s grave markers and plots in five South Australian cemeteries (from colonisation to the present), with an age range from infant (including stillborn) to 20 years. The idea of childness, the differing conception of being or being labelled a child, was used as a measure to identify the degree of variation in child identity realised by child-only and family grave markers, showing both change and continuity in the representation of children through family choices of form, style, wording, motif, spatial arrangement and grave furniture. Archaeological evidence of childness was observed through representations of smallness, innocence, domesticity, play, temporality and the distinct emotional nature of the parent-child relationship. Notably in the latter period of study, within the context of lower child mortality, revised understandings of child identity and status were observed representing the social re-evaluation of prenatally deceased and stillborn children
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Context (archaeology · Developmental psychology · Epistemology · Genealogy · Identity (music · Innocence · Motif (music · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Representation (politics · Sociology · Style (visual arts · Temporality · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology
A Saturated Void
Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period
Children, Childhood and English Society, 1880–1990
Mortuary practices, society and ideology
Pricing the priceless child
Forgotten children
Centuries of childhood
Introduction
Defining the place of burial
Reversing the past
Commemoration as an expression of personal relationships and group identities
Monuments for stillborn children and disenfranchised grief in the Netherlands Recognition, protest and solace
Choice and constraint in the burial landscape
The Dead Who Become Angels
On Bereavement
Lawn cemeteries
The Archaeology of American Cemeteries and Gravemarkers
The dating of graveyard memorials
Mortality, Money, and Commemoration
Angels
Modern innovations?’ Ideal vs. reality in colonial cemeteries of nineteenth-century New South Wales
A Garden from Ashes
Commemoration and Improvement
Do we deny death? II. Critiques of the death-denial thesis
Monuments in the garden
Death and society
Silent witnesses
Childness
Forgotten Children
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |