Levi-Strauss and Today's Relationship between the Living and the Dead

Something that struck me as interesting in this week’s readings was Pearson’s allusion to Claude Levi-Strauss’s description of the relationships between the living and dead.  Strauss argued that “the wide variation of power relationships between living and dead [fall] somewhere between two poles, epitomized by stories of the 'grateful corpse' and the 'enterprising knight.'  These two metaphors represent two worlds in which one is shared with the dead, and in the other the dead play little part as long as they are respected.  This interpretation of relationship to the dead set me thinking.  What does our society represent? Perhaps more importantly, what do I believe?  It seems that today our society may have become so secular that even the latter interpretation is redundant.  However, the more introspection I did on the topic, the more I came to realize this is not so cut and dry.  All around us are monuments to the dead.  People still feel that no ill will should be said of the recently deceased.  This is probably not the best example, but when a famous figure or celebrity passes away, it is frowned upon to joke on the subject.  Is this because we believe the dead should be respected? Does this respect come out of a fear of retribution? Probably not.  What I find interesting though, is that it is done out of a sense of avoiding harm to the recently deceased.  It is almost as if they can still be present and have feelings in the living and tangible world. 

            Personally, I can relate to the second interpretation of Strauss’s.  Although, I would argue that I respect the memories of those close to me, not because I fear retribution, but because I feel that allows them to continue partially in my life.  If I recall the lessons from my grandfather, and I imagine him there telling me how to live and what to do, in a way his memory is contributing to my world today…

Using Access and Excel

How do you find using Access and Excel for working with this kind of data? What is the difference for you between wading through a cemetery in a database, versus wandering through it in real life?

   As a visual person, I find using Access and Excel for working with this kind of data to be detrimental to the study of the graves.  We must consider what we are working with here.  There is more to these graves than sets of data and information for us to mine. These are real sites of remembrance for people who did once live, and turning their memories into a spreadsheet to me feels a slight bit sacrilegious.  I do recognize that  this is often the only viable option when we cannot visit the cemetery ourselves, and for the purposes of learning how to manipulate data relating to the archaeology of death we need this sort of information.  In the only way I can describe, it still does not feel right...
   I think it is undeniable that there are certain feelings that one feels when entering a cemetery or burial site. There is also a certain amount of respect afforded to the monuments, the atmosphere, and the memories enclosed in the land.  I feel that if I were to walk around the St Stephen’s Cemetery, and personally deal with the monuments and burial sites, I would have a better understanding of the people that were buried there.  So much information is not included in the database that could shed light on their lives.  Condition of the graves, the landscaping around them, their location within the burial ground.  All could prove interesting and relevant to further research on the cemetery and some of this is impossible, or too convoluted, to include in a database.

 
 

A little bit of Luke

Well that was easy,
My name is Luke K, I am an anthropology/history double major at Uvic.  As you can see from my blog title, making amazing (terrible) puns is a lifeskill I posses.
Not much else to say, except that I've managed to make this far in my life without ever having a blog. I guess it had to end someday.....