Landscaping Death

Resting Places for Cornish Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID2390830
AuthorsP Laviolette (0000-0003-1042-7043, University College London, corresponding author)
Year2003
Volume8
Issue2
Pages215-240
Publication date2003-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/13591835030082005
OpenAlexW2144550727
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited17

This article explores the cultural construction of death and revival in Cornwall. In examining the ways in which these issues intertwine with the affirmation of local landscape identities, it surmises that an obscure and diffuse sense of `deathliness' exists that generates collective and contested topographical memories and perceptions. By offering ethnographic interpretations of how people relate to contemporary burial places as well as a material culture analysis of prehistoric and derelict industrial environments, the article reveals three ways in which Cornishness rests in iconographical settings and material elegies. (1) from a prehistoric pedigree, where death and ancestry connect to expressions of folklore and custom; (2) through the ties that mortality has with the past's dangerous local industries; and (3) from the symbolic death brought about by the extensive emigrant diaspora or the dissipation of identity from tourism and immigration. These factors illustrate that enduring tangible aspects of identification are perpetuated by a partial relating back to dying-out ways of life. I thus propose that the prominence of death itself becomes a significant yet ambivalent material metaphor - a motif for shaping personhood and advocating solidarity

Aesthetics · Afterlife · Art · Diaspora · Epistemology · Ethnography · Folklore · Identity (music · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Personhood · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy