THE GRAVE AS A CONTESTED SPACE

The cemetery is often described as a heterotopia: a world within a world that is set apart from society by virtue of the rupture in time it represents. Perhaps because of its heterotopic status, the cemetery has been the subject of analysis from many different disciplinary perspectives. A key insight emerging from this body of work sees the cemetery as a place of conflict. The purposes, and persons, a cemetery serves within its community are the subject of debate and interpretation, the overlapping roles played by these spaces of the dead - as places of mourning, community, history and commerce - often existing in contrast, if not outright conflict. Within the wider cemetery context, some attention has been paid to the individual grave as a place of contestation: a place where private grief is performed as public mourning and where the ‘rightness’ of that mourning is assessed by others. This chapter adds a legal lens to this analysis. Its central contention is that the legal framework that surrounds the dead body and its disposal, by seeing the grave as little more than a plot of land that can be the subject of multiple intersecting and conflicting private law rights, actively facilitates social and familial conflict. Examining the fragmentary legal relations that surround the grave and the conflict they engender provides several important insights into the law’s interactions with death and the dead.