Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (review)

On 6 December 1876 the corpse of Baron de Palm, an impoverished Austrian nobleman, was incinerated in the town of Washington, Pennsylvania. De Palm's cremation was a foundational performance: out of his ashes a movement arose, dedicated to overturning American funerary practice by substituting burning for burying. Cremation took a long time to catch on; it was at first controversial and unpopular, but by the year 2000, it had been transformed into a routine option on a menu of lifestyle (make that deathstyle) choices. Purified by Fire is a richly descriptive account of the rise of cremation in America.

Cremation has a complicated history. In its early phase (1874-96), it was a cranky bourgeois reform among cranky reforms. Offered as a sanitary solution to the unsanitary, unsightly, unrefined, and uneconomical practice of cadaver burial, cremation contravened Christian doctrines and violated dominant notions of funerary honor and aesthetics. Accordingly, it was denounced in the pulpit, mocked in the press, and reviled by cemetery managers and funeral parlor owners, who were then building an innovative and highly profitable death-services industry. Cremation was bad for religion and business. And that's the way the cremationists liked it. Cremation was an antiritual: For cremationists, the burial of the dead had become a contaminating orgy of materialism and exploitation. Lacking spirit, the dead body was a degraded, impure thing that harbored germs, gave rise to miasmatic vapors, and inspired vulgar expenditures of money and sentiment. The American funeral was a danger to the moral and physical health of the community. Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion, locates the cultural logic of cremation within the structure of the Christian theology of spirit/matter, without losing sight of the social identification that linked spirit to social and cultural privilege, and matter to the laboring classes and darker races.

In its middle phase (1896-1963), cremation began to shed its affiliation with funerary dissent, religious critique, and sanitary reform (even if funeral directors and religious conservatives still disparaged it). Cremation ceremonies began to feature ornate caskets and urns, floral arrangements, fancy mausoleums, even embalming. Yet for all that, cremation still occupied the fringe of funerary practice until the early 1960s, when a "boom" phase commenced. It then became the funeral of choice for counterculturalists and secular humanists, and gained acceptance among mainstream Christians and nonorthodox Jews. It also acquired a constituency of Asian immigrants who cremated their dead according to Hindu and Buddhist custom. Currently, more than a quarter of American deaths are followed by cremation.

Cross-cutting this periodization, Prothero offers several intersecting cremation stories: a story of theological disputations over the moral and eschatological status of dead bodies; a story of class distinction; a story of religious distinction; a story of medicalization; a story of professionalization; a story of marketing and market share; a story of individualism versus prepackaged ritualism. No one strand or theoretical approach predominates. Cremation starts out as a marginalized practice that becomes the vehicle for all sorts of sociocultural critique, and ends up assimilated into a proliferating market of funerary services. At present, it figures as a signifier of religious pluralism and eclecticism, consumer choice, and American (packaged or nonpackaged) individualism.

There are riches here, but also missed opportunities. In the 1870s, when cremation was born, newspapers were filled with sensational stories of ghoulish bodysnatchers who stole corpses from cemeteries and hospitals to supply the medical colleges with anatomical subjects, a trade that desecrated the body by rough handling and the dissecting scalpel; the dead body was reduced to a commercial commodity and the plaything of an overreaching medical authority. Bodysnatching was an indispensable part of the cultural context that structured and conditioned the birth of cremation. One wishes that Prothero had provided more than a glimpse of its funerary politics: part of the debate over bodysnatching concerned the relationship between death and the market. Against the sacralization of death, the world of...