Abstract
The process of selecting and showing a film to students in a course can consume a great deal of time without much return. There have been numerous films produced that pertain to the theory and practice of sociology, but many of them are outdated or too dull to seize the attention of an audience. This may lead to faculty questioning the value of putting such time and effort into such an assignment. In fact, faculty may resort to using alternative activities that meet the same course objectives and have fewer details to prepare. This film, however, is worth the time and preparation to assign to students.
The film Built on Graves is a production about the recycling of graves, the abandonment of cemeteries, and the ongoing practice of using abandoned cemeteries to develop on. In many cases, the bodies were left in the ground and were paved over. Entire cities were once used to bury the dead. The city of Colma, California, was originally established as a burial city after burials were outlawed in San Francisco in 1900. There are few policies that assure burial grounds remain in situ or that they are properly reported and moved when an old cemetery becomes prime real estate for new development. As a result, many graves are moved or built over the top of without anyone being notified.
It appears the target audience for Built on Graves is general, but the documentary could be used as part of a curriculum related to fluidity of mores and folkways, social construction of death and dying, and memory and forgetting. This film has garnered considerable recognition, winning several awards and receiving nominations/selections from several festivals and organizations, such as Retro Avant Garden Film Festival New York City, Central Florida Film Festival, Rome Independent Prisma Awards, the Lift-Off Sessions, and Miami Independent Film Festival. The coproducers, Joseph Mazzaferro and Joseph Daniel Thomas, framed this film as somewhat of a crime mystery as they unveiled each story about a historical cemetery or mass burial and what it was replaced with. The documentary was made with six main cast members, who speak throughout the film. A weakness of the documentary is that it does not appear to be structured in any organized fashion. There were categories or topics that are presented (as if they are different parts of the documentary), but there is a great deal of overlap throughout the whole film.
Mazzaferro and Thomas present the cemetery as a neighborhood for the dead. There are entire civilizations throughout history that have been built on top of dead bodies. This film provides students with some wonderful philosophical questions about human ethics and whether/how they apply to the deceased. Historically, prior to 1831, the deceased were buried by the family on plots of land they owned or in mass graves. There are still many hidden family plots where human remains have been left and forgotten. Once these family plots are discovered (as a result of land being excavated for new development, washing up on shorelines, or surfacing in the ground), the unidentified corpse is often relocated to tombs built for the unknown dead.
According to the coproducers, in 1831 the Malcolm Cemetery was established in Massachusetts as the first garden cemetery built in the United States of America. The coproducers share that the cemetery was established as a real estate venture, with lucrative returns on the purchase of burial plots. The cemetery earned more money per square footage burying the dead than any farmer could return from harvesting crops. This return on investment, however, is exhausted once all burial plots are claimed. This results in real estate owners having a loss on investment if they do not find innovative ways to make profit. The alternative options are to declare bankruptcy, resell, or abandon the cemetery. According to Mazzaferro and Thomas, some locations that were once cemeteries and are now profiting from new developments include Founders Memorial Park, Ohara Airport, and Lincoln Park.
The burial ritual for the deceased is stratified. Those with the most wealth are privileged enough to have their deceased buried in the ground in a permanent location and can have them relocated when a cemetery is abandoned. The bodies of the poor may never be buried and could end up anywhere after a cemetery is abandoned. Throughout history, there have been many graves that have been recycled in response to cemeteries nearing or surpassing their capacity, particularly in overpopulated major metropolitan cities. The employees of Paradise Park, California, routinely dug up caskets for resale.
The inception of using the garden cemetery as the primary mode of burial resulted in a paradigm shift in the disposal of the dead. The burial ritual as a personal matter, where survivors mourn the loss of the deceased on private land, came to an end. The burial ritual and the mourning process are now as public as the ground in which the bodies are buried. The rules and norms associated with the burial process have become institutionalized to some extent. This paradigm shift can be partly attributed to prolonged life and death (see Lofland 1978), advancement of technology, and neoliberalism. The birth of America and Europe (i.e., the Industrial Revolution) also resulted in many people leaving rural settings that had abundant green space to live in central urban cities where space is both a valuable and scarce resource that humans compete for.
The inadequate amount of space has resulted in disposal of a corpse and burial rituals becoming a niche market. The shortage of space resulted in the grave plot and burial rituals becoming largely unaffordable for the average person to have a proper burial for their loved one(s) who perished. The burial process has become a niche product (or market) in an open-market environment that is largely unregulated. This results in cemeteries being inaccessible for most people. Those who are most privileged and have the greatest wealth have the ability to purchase burial plots and headstones to bury their dead. The poor, however, are unable to afford burial plots in a cemetery and may be left to use temporary burial sites that may one day be purchased and developed over by wealthy development agents (e.g., Madison Square Park, Richmond District, Zion Cemetery, Hart Island in New York, Union Square in New York, and the Dozier School for Boys). The development of this land leaves the most impoverished individuals with only faint memories of their fallen family members.
The film makes for excellent discussion among students about the way in which death and dying are framed across time and place (see Goffman 1963), the posthumous identity of the deceased and the process of memory and forgetting the deceased (see Olick 2008), and the fluidity of mores and folkways across time and place (see Sumner and Keller 1906). While the directors/producers were not sociologists, their historical narrative of cemeteries and gravesites can be understood through a sociological lens. Sociologists may assign readings from David Charles Sloane’s (2018) Is the Cemetery Dead? and Thomas F. Geiryn’s (2018) Truth Spots: How Places Make People to pair with the viewing of this film to establish a discussion with students about the intricacies associated with the identities of the deceased as well as the cultural embeddedness of placing value on human life and death.
The film Built on Graves allows students to critically think about and question their own experience(s) with burial rites and the processes of death and dying. The film shows how personal experiences with burial rites and the processes of death and dying are a stratified event that cannot be reduced to a single script for all people over place and time. The dramatic nature of this film will certainly catch the eye of students and allows for the film to be used in its entirety or as smaller clips. The assignment by Gerry R. Cox (2010) published in TRAILS: Teaching Resources and Innovations Library for Sociology may be used with this film. Students would use the paper to collect their thoughts and compare burial rituals and laws across time and geography. In this process, students will identify how well the burial rituals and laws represent society and the different social groups that are part of it (e.g., by age, cause of death, gender, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation). This film may be utilized at the undergraduate or graduate level. At the undergraduate level, it could be part of a course on marriage and family or death and dying or as part of an individual unit in Introduction to Sociology. At the graduate level, it could be part of a course on cultural sociology or economic sociology. At the graduate level, students would need to provide a more extensive response to the questions than would be expected of undergraduate students.
The material covered in this review and in Built on Graves is relevant to contemporary society and the accessibility that people have to day-to-day death counts related to COVID-19. There is a long-standing idiom about death and taxes being the only two things that are certain in life. This documentary shows that death is inevitable, but what happens to a body after death is everything but certain. Burial rituals have transitioned from being a private matter to becoming a public matter. The establishment of the garden cemetery in 1831 also resulted in burial rituals becoming economic and political events. This increases the value placed on burial grounds and further stratifies the experience that the wealthy and poor have with death and burial. The future of burial looks to be bleak, because there is currently a high rate of death and burial space is already scarce.