Volume 32, Number 21 & 22 · January 16, 1986
Burying the Dead
By Jean Starobinski, Translated by Peter France
The Architecture of Death: The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris
by Richard A. Etlin
MIT Press, 441 pp., $37.50
Mankind is a peculiar species in that the essential moments in our biological development are all given meaning and form by culture. Being born, growing up, eating, coming of age, pairing off, growing old, being sick, and dying—all are events or successive stages in natural life that have to be interpreted by the discourse of culture and given structure by the symbols of discourse. The study of these structures was long the prerogative of the ethnologist or the folklorist. Then it became the legitimate concern of the student of classical antiquity. It was a long time before these institutions began to be 'scientifically' studied as they exist within our own civilization, no doubt because our excessive proximity to them made sociological detachment difficult. But since the beginning of the century, historians have responded to the sociologists' challenge, and their attitude has begun to change. The originality of the 'new history' is to have turned its attention to everyday life, eating habits, table manners, sexuality, the family, the treatment of the sick, death, and so on, in their social and economic setting.
Review, 5320 words
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