Against rectitude: Understanding the global burial crisis through a postural ethics

The world is facing a burial crisis: across the globe, approximately 170,000 people die every day, with many urban locations including Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, New York and London set to run out of interment space within the next ten years or so. To illustrate the scale of this problem, if it takes approximately three minutes to read this abstract, more than 360 new dead bodies are likely to have been generated across the world.

In this paper, we draw on our British Academy funded research to examine how this is not simply a logistical and organisational problem; it is also an ethical one. Specifically, we examine how the growing global burial crisis is due not only to environmental, political, and cultural factors but also to the values and beliefs shaping enduring ways of understanding and commemorating what it means to be a human who ‘matters’.

Via affective ethnographic accounts of two cemeteries in the UK and Italy, and drawing on feminist writing on ethics, we explore how the burial crisis calls for a rethinking not only of cemeterial spaces and their purposes, but also of the values and beliefs that shape them. Further, we suggest how this rethinking could open up possibilities for imagining more egalitarian, communal, and ‘more-than-human’ ways of organising how we live, work and die together, and how we commemorate one another now and in the future.