In this image, the cover of a burial vault lies open, revealing its underground walls. Leafy plants and moss peek through the slabs, in contrast to the hard textures of the concrete slabs, marble headstone, and rusted iron gate that surrounds the plot. Burial vaults are containers that surround a casket to help prevent a grave from sinking or collapsing as the body and wooden casket eventually decompose, and are common across the country (aside from areas that experience frequent flooding, such as New Orleans). Despite a lack of evidence of these claims, vaults have also often been sold as a mechanism to keep water from seeping into a casket and nonhuman entities such animals and bacteria from making their way inside to feed on the body.
These deployments of concrete, a synthetic material that cannot be absorbed into the wider environment, seem to immortalize fantasies of human control over the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of the dead body. They also work as “dispositional techniques” of containment and enclosure where separation of the emplacement helps to create senses of order (Foucault 1977). Relatedly, I argue that burial vaults also idealize purity through the idea that we have the power to confine and control phenomena such as the ‘problem’ of decay or the multispecies ecosystem that typically flourishes around a corpse. Reifying contemporary regimes dictating individualist responses to impurity (Shotwell 2016), this seemingly benign framing of danger calls upon family and other next of kin to be responsible for the vulnerability of the dead by purchasing expensive burial products that are almost always destined to fail. Furthermore, it is within this desire to control the liminality of death by keeping different categories of substances and social statuses separate from one another (Douglas 1966) that material toxicity is produced as embalming chemicals, casket varnishes, preservatives, sealants, and metals slowly leech out.
In this image, the cover of a burial vault lies open, revealing its underground walls. Leafy plants and moss peek through the slabs, in contrast to the hard textures of the concrete slabs, marble headstone, and rusted iron gate that surrounds the plot. Burial vaults are containers that surround a casket to help prevent a grave from sinking or collapsing as the body and wooden casket eventually decompose, and are common across the country (aside from areas that experience frequent flooding, such as New Orleans). Despite a lack of evidence of these claims, vaults have also often been sold as a mechanism to keep water from seeping into a casket and nonhuman entities such animals and bacteria from making their way inside to feed on the body.
These deployments of concrete, a synthetic material that cannot be absorbed into the wider environment, seem to immortalize fantasies of human control over the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of the dead body. They also work as “dispositional techniques” of containment and enclosure where separation of the emplacement helps to create senses of order (Foucault 1977). Relatedly, I argue that burial vaults also idealize purity through the idea that we have the power to confine and control phenomena such as the ‘problem’ of decay or the multispecies ecosystem that typically flourishes around a corpse. Reifying contemporary regimes dictating individualist responses to impurity (Shotwell 2016), this seemingly benign framing of danger calls upon family and other next of kin to be responsible for the vulnerability of the dead by purchasing expensive burial products that are almost always destined to fail. Furthermore, it is within this desire to control the liminality of death by keeping different categories of substances and social statuses separate from one another (Douglas 1966) that material toxicity is produced as embalming chemicals, casket varnishes, preservatives, sealants, and metals slowly leech out.