Dead Bodies that Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death in American Culture

Across geographies, histories and cultures the various rites that have accompanied the disposition of the dead suggest that the dead body has long mattered to the living (Habenstein and Lamers 760). The classic Western tale of Antigone, who defied Creon's law and out of love and respect for her dead brother buried him on her own, remains a timeless reminder of the value in putting the dead "to rest." Even in times of war, treating enemy dead with reverence has often been a matter of military protocol. USA Today's David Jackson reported how such regard was reflected in the care US forces took with Osama Bin Laden 's remains and his swift burial at sea - an act that was, in the words of President Barack Obama, "... something appropriate that was respectful of the body." And yet the value of the dead body has also faced a history of challenge. Cultural historian Thomas Laqueur traces the skepticism of the dead body's value back to the Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic, who must have surely lambasted the acts of Antigone, calling for his own dead body to be thrown over the city wall to the dogs (Laqueur, "The Deep Time of the Dead"). If ambivalence toward the value of the corpse has a history, it is not a thing of the past. This is certainly evident in American culture where both doubt and certainty of the dead body's importance permeate both the fictitious and the real. In a time when a search for meaning around death is palpable, attitudes toward the dead body appear to be in flux. Perhaps no place is this more evident than in American film and television where forensics investigations (CS/, Bones), ghostly hauntings (Ghost Whisperer, Medium), zombies and other tales of the living dead (True Blood, The Walking Dead) flood story line and plot.1 'HBO's Six Feet Under, the popular and powerful drama set in a family funeral home, skillfully laid bare those shifting attitudes by situating each episode around a corpse(s). In the world of nonfiction, millions flock to see the highly contentious preserved-body exhibit, Bodyworlds, while newspapers thick with stories of the ever-growing black market in human body parts,2 the desecration of graves, and the foul play at crematories are met with more than equal amounts of outrage.3 If what is repressed, as Freud argued, will eventually make its return, then the heightened presence of the dead body in American popular culture, coupled with the felt horror over egregious acts against the dead, are no coincidence; such morbid happenings are likely outgrowths of decades of repression, denial and repudiation. Still, while the return of the dead may be forcing us to face our fears, in this sea of competing narratives a dominant American attitude toward the fleshy facts of death seems less and less identifiable. In light of these complex and shifting views and because even if we could arrive at an answer to the question of whether the dead body matters other than morbid interest what would be the point? Would knowing aim us toward a different more meaningful way of death, one that made the dead body matter more to us? If that's the goal, getting there will prove quite difficult, for while American funerary practices remain fairly uniform, death has become an ever more personal affair. Free from the constraints of a shared faith, the dead body has become increasingly secularized (Laqueur, "Spaces of the Dead" 10), leaving us bereft of a place to root some shared sense of meaning. Given this secularization, is there no locus around which some common meaning of the dead body might coalesce? If the question "does the dead body matter?" is resistant to yielding a clear answer and/or a path toward some common ground, perhaps it is the question itself that needs some redirection. What if we were to focus the question away from merely human meanings and sensibilities (i.e., cultural, personal, political, religious and/or scientific), to widen the scope to include morethan-human ends, to question whether the dead body - as matter - matters to nature? …