Status, Sentimentality and Structuration

An Examination of 'Intellectual Spaces' for Children in the Study of America's Historic Cemeteries

Bibliographic Data

ID2984299
AuthorsJ E Baxter (0000-0002-1118-4031, DePaul University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume6
Issue2
Pages106-122
Publication date2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueChildhood in the Past (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1758-5716 • E-ISSN: 2040-8528
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1179/1758571613z.0000000009
OpenAlexW1971277828
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited27

This paper presents a case study of the contemporary intellectual and scholarly spaces that children occupy in the study of America’s historic cemeteries. Published works on nineteenth-century cemeteries were evaluated, analytical frameworks were traced, and common themes were identified. The purpose of this exercise was not to evaluate the results of these studies, but rather to examine the ideas that informed them. This particular study identified two main themes in research on children’s headstones, funerary hardware, and epitaphs: children as indicators of a family’s wealth and status and children as subjects of grief, mourning, and sentimentality. Studies of wealth and status tended to focus on entire populations, and those primarily addressing grief and commemoration focused on individual monuments. Several underlying commonalities in these studies are presented and Giddens’ (1984) concept of structuration is introduced as a way to potentially reconcile analyses that focus on cemetery populations (status) and those that focus on individual actors (grief and commemoration). By tracing the historical trajectories of disciplinary thought that have informed contemporary research, it becomes possible to understand how the scholarship of children is constructed and limited in the present, and how new directions in thinking become possible because of this historical awareness

Aesthetics · Art · Discipline · Focus (optics · Grief · Memorialization · Political science · Scholarship · Sentimentality · Social science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub