Death enchanted: comparing conventional and conservation burial in the United States with a technological mediation lens

ABSTRACT

Though conventional burial continues to dominate whole-body internment in the United States, natural burial practices are growing in acceptance and use. These shifting dynamics necessitate consideration of how the body’s material end shapes the actions and imaginations of the living. This paper situates conventional and conservation burial as ethically resonate technologies using the the theory of technological mediation in order to analyse and contrast the realities, ethics, and imaginations shaped by each. It argues that conventional burial is aligned with the logic of neoliberal capitalism to which conservation burial provides an alternative which fosters multispecies thriving. Additionally, it constructs two technomoral scenarios to further develop the death-imagination of conservation burial. This interdisciplinary analysis contributes to ongoing discussion around natural burial, as it considers how burial practices reciprocally shape individuals and societies and invites a novel way of reflecting on one’s material relationship to death.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation burial
• natural burial
• technological mediation
• neoliberalism
• enchantment
• ethics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The way Mittermaier uses the idea of ’technologies of the self’ is not commensurate with the kind of entrepreneurial, self-management, self-as-profit-project practices which Rogers-Vaughn skewers in his work discussed earlier. Rather, for Mittermaier, they are ways of intentionally cultivating one’s capacity to reach more advanced states of (spiritual) experience.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Levar Spivey

Sebastian Levar Spivey is a researcher, writer, and artist with a master of divinity from Vanderbilt Divinity School and a certificate in bioethics from Yale.