Abstract
The cemetery is a cultural landscape that represents themes of great relevance to interpret the structure of a society, roles, and hierarchies, as a reflection of its social life. The cemetery gathers a whole symbolic universe where local social histories are represented, beyond the history of art and the architectural aspect. As a heritage element, the cemetery shows us the socio-cultural changes of a territory: religious questioning, changes linked to the family, individualization of contemporary society or broader questions about socio-economic structure. This article presents the experience conducted during the last 6 years in the Cemetery “Nuestro Padre Jesús” in Murcia (Spain), through a collaboration among the Sociedad Murciana de Antropolgía (SOMA), the University of Murcia and the Municipality of Murcia, developing the project “Funerary Cultures”, whose main objective is to promote the heritage, cultural and historical values of the funerary culture. Specifically, as a result of this teaching innovation experience, the six thematic guides to visit the cemetery are presented as an experience of patrimonialization of elements of the cemetery and its consequent selection and consensus exercise to determine what was considered as heritage in the context of the cemetery. Finally, a proposal of a systematic process in the valuation and selection of the material objects in the cemetery is presented; this proposal allows us to establish a debate on what considerations to take into account when considering the relationship between cultural heritage and the cemetery as a cultural landscape in permanent transformation.
Highlights
Received: 9 December 2021Human beings’ attitude towards death has always been a dialogue with their own time
If construction had begun earlier, it would have been more varied in terms of style, but the Murcian cemetery is dominated by eclecticism, as was the architecture of the city at the time the cemetery was built
The history of the municipal cemetery of Murcia is the story of the modernization of a country and of how the City Council of the time, within its possibilities and overcoming the difficulties posed by the religious authorities, conducted this work
Summary
Received: 9 December 2021Human beings’ attitude towards death has always been a dialogue with their own time. As an imagined and constructed enclosure, the cemetery allows us to understand how the city reinterprets its relationship with those who inhabited it, and what its function and meaning is In this sense, the cemetery is the territory of remembrance and collective memory. It responds to the need to regulate the separation between the living and the bodies of the deceased, and, on the other, it has a cultural and symbolic heritage dimension In this second function, art, the epitaphs engraved in stone, with a claim to permanence, have their place with the same importance, the cemetery is a reflection of historical periods and events, of the social hierarchy, and can be analyzed as a mirror of a society and its history
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