Flames of Transformation: the Role of Fire In Cremation Practices

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in World Archaeology on 19 Aug 2009, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ full/10.1080/00438240802008593 Flames of transformation: the role of fire in cremation practices Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille Abstract This paper explores the transformative power of fire, its fundamental ability to change material worlds and affect our experience of its materiality. The paper examines material transformations related to death as a means of illustrating the powerful property of fire as a materially destructive yet socially generative and creative element. While fire has been widely discussed archaeologically as a technological element, and recently coupled with the social and symbolic powers of pyrotechnology, we focus on the sensuous staging of fire in disposal practices. The paper employs two case studies focusing on cremation burial from Bronze Age (c.1300–1100 BC) and modern Denmark in order to demonstrate widely different sensuous engagements with fire and its experiential significance in a cremation context. Keywords Fire; burial; cremation; Early Bronze Age; Denmark. Fire suggests the desire to change, to speed up the passage of time, to bring all life to its conclusion, to its hereafter. In these circumstances the reverie becomes truly fascinating and dramatic; it magnifies human destiny; it links the small to the great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world. The fascinated individual hears the call of the funeral pyre. For him destruction is more than a change, it is a renewal. (Bachelard 1968: 16, emphasis in the original) The presence and impermanence of fire Fire is an element that triggers an ambiguous fascination for most human beings at a material as well as at a psychological level. Fire may devastate us, destroy our homes and World Archaeology Vol. 40(2): 253–267 Elemental Archaeologies ª 2008 Taylor & Francis ISSN 0043-8243 print/1470-1375 online DOI: 10.1080/00438240802008593 Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 254 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille engulf our world in fear and desolation, yet at the same time make us dream, create social bonds and keep ourselves alive. Only recently, with electrification, have fire and light truly become separated phenomena, with the electrical light bulb replacing the dependency on illumination from oil or gas lamps or candlelight (see also Bille and Sørensen 2007). Unlike a light bulb, fire appears multi-sensuous as it may keep us warm, form the hearth of our dwellings, slowly deprive the room of air, while illuminating our worlds and entice us by means of an almost magical enchantment. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard candidly stated that ‘[f]ire is . . . a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything. If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. Fire is the ultra-living element’ (Bachelard 1968: 7). Bachelard’s reasoning is interesting: if all that changes slowly may be explained by life, we would expect all that changes rapidly to be explained by death, thus equating death with fire. Nevertheless, for Bachelard fire is the epitome of the living. The ultraliving element is defined by the relentlessly moving flame; even the calmest flame is in constant motion, unceasingly consuming its fuel, flickering, waving or blazing. With its unstable movement and dynamic materiality, which cannot be touched or seized without pain or injury, it defies any easy and firm ontological definitions. As such, fire is more readily approached as an experience and as metaphor. Thus, the power of fire is not so much what it is but what it does. At the same time, as Bachelard describes in La flamme d’une chandelle, fire is fragile, exemplified by the delicate existence of the flame, which may be ignited by a spark and destroyed by a breath of air: ‘The flame is quick birth and quick death’ (Bachelard 1996 [1961]: 39–40). The vulnerability of the flame is a condition of its material appearance. The constitution of the flame is intrinsically connected to its fuel and to the air surrounding it, as it shapes and is shaped by its material, social and spatial context. Not only does the flame move itself and its fuel, it also moves human beings, because the fragile flame is liable to vanish, is in danger of dying out. The potential death of the flame is one of the reasons why it holds such a strong symbolic potential, which is expressed in the ‘eternal flame’, e.g. in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, the Olympic Flame or at numerous war memorials throughout the world. In order to work as a material analogy to the ephemeral domain of memory, the flame needs to be nourished, maintained and protected for it not to die out. The knowledge and meaning contained in the fire sustain commemoration, remembrance or re-enactment. This symbolism is also reflected in the metaphorical realm, where both love and hate are expressed through metaphors of fire. Hatred is glowing, ignites violence and is dying out. Love is a fire. Another metaphor was used in nineteenth-century archaeology, where civilization was considered a torch that was passed from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and on to Medieval Europe and current Western civilization (Larsen 1989: 233). Fire – and light as its extension – is in a sense a metaphor for enlightenment, truth and clarity (Blumenberg 1993: 31). Fire and light may be seen as intermediate phenomena between the solid and the ethereal, if not considered both one and the same, as within Zoroastrianism or Shihab alDin Yaya Suhrawardi’s concepts of illuminations (Asher 2004; Kapstein 2004; Park 1997: 91–2; Ziai 2004). According to Bachelard, ‘Among all phenomena [fire] is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 Flames of transformation 255 shines in Paradise. It burns in hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse’ (1968: 7). In this perspective, disposal of the body by fire is a means of destroying the dead, yet at the same time it is also a way of consuming them, because the corpse is transformed, whereby the living need to conceive the deceased through a new materiality. Nevertheless, such practices of fire disposal and consumption may also be considered blasphemous, eliminating possibilities of a blessed afterlife. Cremation reiterates the burning sensation of hell and leaves the soul in a hopelessly desperate situation as the body cannot be resurrected, as argued by some opponents of cremation (Prothero 2001: 7–8). The flame’s fragile composition, its destructive yet creative qualities – e.g. in forging memory, reconciliation and links to the past, as well as its metaphorical use – suggest that the dialectical meaning of the flame incorporates and emphasizes the intimate presence of the flame. The bodily sensation of the flame adds to it an ambiguous experience of social meaning and sensuous presence in a temporary bridging towards immateriality. Our question, consequently, is in what ways the very transformative properties of fire may constitute a simultaneous transformation of meaning as well as transformation of presence. The specific context that we deal with in this paper is the cremation of the human body in mortuary practices in Early Bronze Age (c.1300–1100 BC) and modern Denmark. The mortuary context is the stage for a very particular role and situation of fire in the sense that its fuel and subject matter cannot be rendered neutral. At least in the examples we draw out, the burning of the dead body was and is by no means culturally, emotionally or experientially insignificant. This further means that we need to understand the workings of fire in cremation as more than those of simple destruction through pyrotechnology. While the practice of cremation does indeed entail destruction, it is also more than destruction of the body, which leads us to discuss critically the materiality of flames, of transformation and its consequences. Transformative flames of cremation In a remarkable article on Anglo-Saxon cremation, Howard Williams (2004) suggests how the visual, auditory and olfactory impressions of the process of cremating a human corpse on an open-air pyre may invoke agency by the deceased. He illustrates how the possible movements of the corpse during the cremation process may be experienced as actions on the part of the dead over a ten-hour-long process. In a similar vein, Oestigaard (2004) shows how the duration of a cremation among the Hindus of Varanasi may be seen to relate to the moral habitus of the deceased. While an ordinary cremation takes between one and two hours, a sinner’s pyre could burn for at least six hours. Likewise, when the sons of the deceased begin to break down the pyre structure to ensure total cremation of the deceased, the presence of flesh still on the bones is believed to indicate an unfavourable destiny for the deceased (Oestigaard 2004: 27). Cremation may technically be divided into two general categories: open-air pyre cremations and incinerator cremations. In contemporary Western societies, cremation Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 256 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille takes place in a crematorium, in a furnace designed to burn the corpse and thus reduce it to ashes and bone fragments that are later ground to dust, while a traditional Hindu cremation, for example, is carried out on an open-air pyre. The pyrotechnology of these two forms of cremations is widely different, as the fuel and combustion for the burning of the corpse are based on different principles and materials. More importantly for the argument in this paper, the roles of fire in the cremation, the social staging of the burning and the remains from the cremation are also very different, yet the materiality of the flame as a transformative vehicle is identical. On an open-air pyre the fire and flames would change appearance over several stages during the cremation process. When the pyre was lit, the initial flames would set the immediately inflammable parts of the pyre ablaze, igniting reeds, clothes and hair, while logs and the torso of the deceased would catch fire at a slightly later stage. At this point the flame has gradually or spontaneously – depending on the construction and materials of the pyre – assumed more manifest and potent form, and the flames would be licking up the total extent of the pyre, engulfing the corpse, while the decomposition and combustion increased. The intensity of the fire would also increase at this point, gradually changing the appearance of the fire with regard to colour, sound and smell, as indicated by Williams (2004). From this stage on the corpse would be burning, turning the skin black, gradually reducing the texture and amount of flesh, while at the same time exposing skeletal parts and internal organs, until the pyre and the corpse would collapse. The fire would then gradually die out, leaving embers glowing amid the remnants of the pyre and skeletal remains. In the course of cremation, fire and pyre would thus change form, colour, smoke development, temperature, intensity, smell, sound and extent. This means that not only the fuel of the fire changes materiality, transforms, but also that the fire itself is subject to transitional materialities. In this way fire has a life of its own; it narrates its own life story from ignition through flaming to dying out as embers, while spreading smoke in the air and soot and ashes on the ground, in parallel with the decomposition and consumption of its fuel, the wood and the corpse. Fire is an active force, where smoke and soot/ash are two passive products. Smoke rises into the air with few or no physical remains, while ash and soot fall as a more material by-product. Ashes and soot preserves traces of past practices of bodily transformations by the flames (Zbikowski 2002: 433). Thereby the cultural, emotional and aesthetic significance of the funeral pyre is composed of its elements: fire, fuel, the identity of the deceased and the process and end result of the cremation. These transformations and transitions may hold the clue to the question why cremation is undertaken as a means of disposal in many societies. What fire does, at a tactile as well as at a metaphorical level, is to transform the corpse while transforming itself. As Bachelard phrases it, ‘Death in the flame is the least lonely of deaths. It is truly a cosmic death in which a whole universe is reduced to nothingness along with the thinker. The funeral pyre accompanies him in his passing’ (Bachelard 1968: 19). This passing is the important aspect of many death rituals, where the act of cremating the dead does not only depend on passing on emotionally and socially, but may actually be witnessed by the bereaved and part of the deceased’s community in an immediately tactile and sensuously present way. This is, in Julia Kristeva’s (1982) terminology, a form of ‘abjection’. Flames of transformation 257 Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 To abject is to part with something we as human beings conceive as a member of ourselves, be it psychologically, emotionally, bodily or socially. This means that the process of parting with the abject – i.e. the item that is abjected – is not simply a matter of rejecting or discarding the corpse as waste matter, because conflicting emotions and bodily connotations characterize the relationship between the bereaved and the corpse. Abjection is the process of dealing with the deceased (the abject) in a way that transposes the corpse away from the physical proximity of the living, while it also allows for the bereaved to conduct this transposition in ways that are emotionally sustainable. In short, abjection is the process where belonging turns to longing and where subject becomes object: where the deceased formerly belonged to a family, a spouse or a community, s/he becomes the object of longing. Embraced by flames: cremation in Early Bronze Age Denmark During the fourteenth century BC in Denmark, cremation gradually began to gain footing as a way of disposing of the dead, and had by and large replaced inhumation at around 1100 BC (Olsen 1990: 150). The change in burial form relates not only to the means of disposing of the dead, i.e. how the dead is transposed from the spatial proximity of the living, but, more important, to how the corpse is ‘abjected’. While inhumation in oak-log coffin and stone cists were the commonest means of disposing the dead during the earlier periods of the Early Bronze Age in Denmark, cremation gradually became increasingly frequent during Period III, i.e. c. 1300–1100 BC. When cremation had replaced inhumation by c. 1100 BC, the practice of cremation ordinarily resulted in urn burial, the urns often being inserted into older burial mounds. However, the later part of the Early Bronze Age was subject to a wide array of intermediate or hybrid practices, involving both cremation and the application of aspects of inhumation burial. Even though cremation and inhumation are radically different forms of disposal (Oestigaard 1999: 353), some of the cremation burials were placed in traditional stone cists and more rarely in oak-log coffins that were interred in burial mounds. These were documented by excavations in the nineteenth century, e.g. at Sortehøj, South Jutland, where the ashes of a cremated human body were found in an oak-log coffin (Aner and Kersten 1986: 50–2). Even more evidently at Hvidegård, eastern Zealand (Aner and Kersten 1973: 143–5; Herbst 1848), the ashes and bone fragments of a cremated individual were wrapped and lumped together in a cloth that extended through the longitudinal axis of the coffin as if a corpse was present (Fig. 1). Likewise, weapons and other personal adornments were organized in what seems to imitate an anatomically correct order, and thus represent the traditional way of inhumation burials in stone cists and oak-log coffins. Thus, as mentioned above, the practice of cremation does not emerge as a coherent package replacing an older disposal practice. As in most other burials of this type, the specific construction of the pyre remains elusive. However, in a number of cases there is evidence of the actual burning of the deceased, where the place of cremation can be connected directly to the site of deposition of the ashes and bone fragments. Some of these finds show that the cremations could be carried out in a pit in which a pyre was set up. At Damsgård in Thy, north-western Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 258 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille Figure 1 Hvidegård, East Zealand. Original sketch from the excavation in 1848, showing the stone cist that contained the cremated bone fragments of an adult man enveloped in woollen cloak, located upon an ox hide underlay and with a bronze sword along the cloak. The length of the cist is 2.15m and the width is c. 0.5m (after Aner and Kersten 1973: 144). Jutland, the excavation of a pyre-pit showed that the body was placed on a bed of organic materials, peat and branches, which were then lit and the pyre would burn out almost without the spread of burnt material outside the confines of the pit (Olsen and Bech 1994: 162–5). A few other pyre-pits have also been documented, most evidently at Villerup in Thy (Aner and Kersten 2001: 216–18) and at Keitum and Wennigstedt on the island of Sylt, North Germany (Olsen and Bech 1994: 186). At some of the cremations in the Early Bronze Age, the body and possibly its dress were burnt at the cremation with some personal adornments, while other items were preserved and added unburnt to the remains of the cremation burial. At Damsgård this is clearly illustrated, because the pyre-pit was not cleared out entirely, and a forearm was left in the pit after ashes and bones had been moved to be buried in the nearby small stone cist. The forearm was lying in a bronze arm ring with a ring close by. This illustrates how the deceased had been cremated with some personal jewellery, while other unburnt items were put in the stone cist, which contained a bronze fibula, a bronze knife and a bone pin (Olsen and Bech 1994: 160, 162). The integration of different practices and their intersecting materializations is further attested for at Egshvile in Thy (Olsen 1990), where a grave contained a bronze sword, which was located in the middle of the transverse axis of the cist and shifted to the side of the longitudinal axis (Fig. 2). It thereby assumed the same position as it would have in a contemporary inhumation grave, and may thus be seen as mimicking the presence of a corpse. Similarly at Lækjær, also in Thy, a cremated woman’s grave was organized with a bronze belt plate in the centre of the stone cist upon the ashes of the deceased with a bronze dagger next to the belt plate. This position clearly imitated the positioning of items in a traditional inhumation grave (Fig 3; Aner and Kersten 2001: 59–61). Other finds further attest to the combination of burial forms, indicating that inhumation and cremation were conceived not as opposing disposal strategies, but as complementary Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 Flames of transformation 259 Figure 2 Egshvile, Northwest Jutland. Similar to Hvidegård, the positioning of the bronze sword and cremation remains in the grave suggests an imitation of inhumation burials with the sword placed in accordance with a body (after Aner and Kersten 2001: 81). Figure 3 Lækjær, Northwest Jutland. A woman’s grave orchestrated to mimic the presence of a corpse. The belt plate and dagger – characteristic features in female graves of the Early Bronze Age – are located in the centre of the grave on the ashes of the cremated individual in correspondence with their location at the waist of a corpse (after Aner and Kersten 2001: 61). practices. This is evident in the light of the presence of both disposal practices not just within the same geographical area in one period, but also within one burial mound and even in one grave. The burial mound at Nørhågård, Thy, is a clear example of the Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 260 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille capacious embrace of burial forms. Grave A in the mound contained an inhumation grave in a stone cist as well as a cremation burial in a stone frame that had been added to the cist, both roughly dated to the Early Bronze Age, and most likely buried at the same time (Fig. 4; Aner and Kersten 2001: 106–8). This indicates rather unequivocally that the conception of fire as a disposal strategy did not assume an antipodal position in relation to inhumation burial. The disposal of the deceased by fire constitutes a transformative element in connection with the ashes, dust, soot, charcoal, burnt bone pieces and fragments, because the disposal practice in its entirety alludes to the absence of the deceased as a person at the same time as it mimics the presence of corporality. The altered embodiment of the deceased by the burning was furthermore articulated through the sensuous immediacy of handling first the corpse and later the ashes, charcoal, dust, soot, dirt, bone fragments and more or less recognizable skeletal parts of the cremated individual. Hence, in the process of cremation fire transformed the deceased person’s body from present to absent, an absence which was later in a very tactile way rendered present in the deposition and organization of the ashes. The spatial organization of objects in the grave, as if the complete body were present, suggests that the absence of the dematerialized person was part of a sensuous, intimate presence and social experience of coping with death, loss and passing in materially creative ways. Flames of controversy: the concealed cremation of modernity As previously argued, to appreciate fire necessitates a consideration of what the flames consume and the social and cultural understanding of this fuel. In this vein, the role of fire in disposal practices was discussed fiercely during the later part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century in many Western countries (Jupp 2006; Lahtinen 1989; Nicol 2003; Parsons 2005; Prothero 2001; Sommer 2006). Cremation was proposed by a number of doctors, pathologists and military persons as a solution to the sanitary problems of the Figure 4 Nørhågård, Northwest Jutland. The partial skeleton of an adult man and the remains of a cremation buried in the same grave, most likely at the same time (after Aner and Kersten 2001: 108). Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 Flames of transformation 261 many epidemics and wars in Europe. Already in 1431 the victims of a battle during the Hundred Years’ War were burned on a pyre outside Paris, just like the corpses of 4000 soldiers after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and eventually the Prussian army used portable cremators, which were employed in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 and other conflicts (Davies and Mates 2005: 416). The adoption of cremation in these extreme cases gave way to a more positive attitude to cremation in some parts of the European countries, where cremation was suggested as a means of solving both hygienic and spatial problems in the overloaded urban cemeteries. One of the proponents of cremation, the Italian pathologist Ludovico Brunetti, presented a model for a crematorium at the World Exposition in Vienna in 1873, where he also displayed a glass case with the ashes of a cremated human body. The exhibition text read, ‘Saved from the worms, we are consumed by the flames’ (Prothero 2001: 9). Such a view of the disposal of human bodies was largely seen as un-Christian and blasphemous by its opposition. In clerical circles the primary associations to fire disposal were images of hell, the burning of heretics and passages in the Bible that refer to burning as a punishment for capital sins (e.g. Genesis 38, v. 24; Leviticus 20, v. 14; 21, v. 9; Ezekiel 28, v. 18). One of the opponents of cremation, Jules Rochard, argued that modern cremation is too fast a method of disposing the body, as everything the bereaved held most dear is transformed within an hour, rather than the peaceful transformation in the soil as in conventional burial practices. After the cremation, Rochard explained, the relatives receive one kilo of ashes, which in the secretive and concealed depth of the conventional grave would take years to accomplish, offering the possibility for ‘delusion’, as he phrased it (Rochard 1891: 24). What Rochard is aiming at is the idea that the dematerialization of the dead should take place over an appropriate amount of time. The length of time is naturally culturally variable, but to Rochard at any rate the speedy process of cremation was simply too fast. This attitude to the slow progress of putrefaction gradually changed in the course of the twentieth century. The change of opinions relates intimately to Protestant views on afterlife that had been slowly changing ever since the Reformation, which occurred in Denmark in 1536. During the twentieth century we may thus detect a gradual shift from the belief in the resurrection of the body (Rochard 1891) – that is, the physical rising of the dead on the Day of Judgement – to a less figurative and more abstract belief in the immortality of the soul. This change, alongside a number of other historical and cultural changes (Sørensen n.d.), facilitated the wider adoption of cremation in Denmark during the twentieth century, which seems to have culminated in our present day at 70 to 75 per cent of all deaths resulting in cremation and urn burial. The striking development is not simply the large-scale implementation of cremation, but how the materiality of the dead and the means of disposal are conceived. While the body was previously seen as the prerequisite for resurrection – and here the emphasis lay on body, not on corpse – fire has instead entered the cultural domain as the preferred method of disposal. Fire was previously, and is still by some, considered the ultimate desecration of the human body, because fire obliterates the body within an instant and not least because fire transforms the corpse in ways that may be considered cruel. As described earlier, the actual process of cremation transforms the corpse radically and forces it to undergo changes that involve charring, bloating, cracking, dissolution, the exposure of Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 262 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille internal parts and burning. Interestingly, it is precisely these aspects of cremation that are of the utmost importance and constitute the very significance of fire disposal in other societies (see Oestigaard 2004). In contrast, in the modern West, particularly in Denmark, this sensuous part of cremation is relocated from the public sphere and transferred into a hidden, professional sector; in this way it would satisfy Rochard’s appreciation of the concealment and ‘delusion’ of the decomposition process. Thus, the materiality of fire in the actual process of cremation remains disturbing and unpleasant, even though cremation today is predominant. At the same time, the products of fire disposal have obtained the very opposite role: the ashes of cremation are considered pure and clean, ethereal and honourable. This has further consequences for the materialization of the disposal of the ashes. When cremation gradually became the most dominant form of disposal in the 1970s in Denmark, the sections of the cemeteries where the urns were deposited were restructured and largely adapted to the format of the urns. Many cemetery sections were thus designed as grass lawns, where ashes were interred in narrow pits, shaped according to the limited size of the urn. This type of cemetery section became the dominating form of urn burial section, while coffins were still buried in traditional cemetery sections with individual bounded grave plots. However, within recent years, coffin burials are beginning to occur in grass lawns as well, interments under modest gravestones lying horizontally in the grass carpet, thus mimicking the urn graves and their minimalist material expression (Plate 1). In effect, the Plate 1 Rørvig cemetery, Northwest Zealand. The cemeteries’ lawn sections have traditionally been used for urn burial, but coffins have recently also been buried in lawn sections, indicated here by their imprint in the grass (photo: Tim Flohr Sørensen, 19 July 2007). Flames of transformation 263 changes in cemetery design and disposal practices in twentieth-century Denmark have come full circle: the inhumation graves are, at least in many cases, subject to the same minimalism and purity ideal that applies to cremation and the disposal of ashes (Sørensen n.d.). Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 The presence of absence The interpretation of the case studies suggests that we need to tackle two central problems that are of particular importance for the understanding of fire in relation to cremation practices. First, we need to appreciate the particular transformation and conceptualization of the material and the immaterial aspects of cremation. According to Kristeva the corpse poses a central and inescapable problem to the human being, the problem of self-reflection: the mirroring of one’s own materiality, one’s own future. Corpses cannot simply be avoided and rejected, which would in Kristeva’s thinking lead to the ultimate pollution in mental as well as physical terms. Instead the corpse must be processed, and what the bereaved must process is not only the dead body but also the idea of the dead. Kristeva does not suggest that any one mode of disposal is better suited for processing the corpse than others, and the abjection of corpses can assume widely different forms, ranging from destruction to embellishment and preservation. In a cremation context the processing of the corpse appears primarily to resemble destruction, but the destruction is not absolute as ashes and bone fragments continue to exist after the corpse is burnt. Thus, the flames of cremation may better be conceived as transformative and functioning as a vehicle for dealing with the corpse, rather than a tool of its ultimate obliteration. What is at stake in the case of Christian modernity is a notion of immateriality, by which the soul is transported to the realm of an abstract afterlife. As the case study suggests, the change in conceptualization of the body is coherent with the cremation strategies, where the corporality of the body is no longer a material representation of the soul in the immaterial world, but rather these are separate entities. Second, we have to deal with the paradoxical staging of absence and presence of death and decay that are especially distinct in fire disposal practices. The archaeological focus on ‘meaning’ or ‘function’ appears to fall somewhat short of explaining the active manipulation and transformation of the material world, especially in the light of the concern with memory, materiality and body in the present case. Recent work in other disciplines tries to theorize how ‘presence’ is an active part of engaging with things (Engelke 2007; Gumbrecht 2004; Runia 2006; see also Ong 1967). Eelco Runia (2006) recently noted that what is pursued in monuments and commemorations of loss is not the transfer of meaning but presence; the aim is not to understand what happened, but to feel the presence of what is lost: ‘‘‘Presence,’’ in my view, is ‘‘being in touch’’ – either literally or figuratively – with people, things, events, and feelings that made you into the person you are’ (Runia 2006: 5). This desire for presence calls for a sensuous immediacy of what is actually absent; it is a yearning to be able to touch, hold and embrace that which is gone. Such a craving may seem paradoxical and unsolvable, but nevertheless assumes a common role in the commemoration of the dead. Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 264 Tim Flohr Sørensen and Mikkel Bille The element of fire may in this context seem further paradoxical, because it actually dissolves the person, whose sensuous presence may be longed for. On the other hand, fire may be seen as a vehicle for taking action in the face of loss and bereavement, and as creating a sensuous immediacy and a connection with the dead by being able to change the appearance, sensation and classification of the corpse. In this sense, a study of the materiality of fire, or any other aspect of material culture for that matter, is not only about the meaning of things, even though this is of course part of it, but also about the sensuous intimacy and relationship between person and object, or transformation of such, and here also the ephemeral nature of the flame. By emphasizing presence, it implies a re-conceptualization of materiality, which incorporates meaning with the intimate sensuous and emotional encounter or absence of person and thing in place, as two different, yet complementary, aspects of materiality. This also means that the concept of materiality incorporates a temporal aspect, in the case of cremation represented by the physical change of the body and the fire. Destruction by fire rapidly leads to a material absence of the thing that was burned. With cremation, as witnessed in the two examples from Early Bronze Age and modern Denmark, the fire shapes new materialities, through the transformation of the body, into smoke and ashes. This transformed composition of the deceased is not necessarily one well-defined substance, such as the contemporary notion of ‘ashes’ might imply. In the case of cremation in Early Bronze Age Denmark, it is also evident that the cremation of the deceased turns the person into a variety of materials, constituted by ash, dust, dirt, charcoal, cracked bones and more or less intact skeletal parts, which were in turn ‘re-built’ in the grave with the deceased’s personal adornments. In what may appear rather paradoxical, the ashes become, at least in these two case studies, a monument of absence. The ashes shape a literal sensuous encounter with the presence of absence, through the transformation of skin, flesh, bones, tissue, fluids, gases, etc. The dual agency of fire – as destructive and benevolent – reiterates at once the passing of the past and the presence of the past. In the Danish Early Bronze Age graves, the cremation forged an absent body, transformed into ashes that played a role in the subsequent practice of placing objects in a way that suggests its presence. Precisely because of the dematerialized nature of the body, the absence of the deceased became present through paraphernalia and the very sensuous engagement with her or his cremation. In modern times, this sensuous engagement with decay is transferred into a concealed realm of institutionalized professionals, through which this decaying phase is minimized and quickly transforms the material body to the state of conceived immateriality. Thus, the concealed decay of the body in the grave has been transferred during the late twentieth century to the concealed space of the crematorium. Presence of absence is in this case understood in a rather different way than in the case of the Early Bronze Age. Absence is represented in both cases by the perishable properties of the material body after death, the corpse, as clearly illustrated by Brunetti’s above-mentioned statement that it is better to be consumed by flames than worms. Here, the rapid practice of dematerializing the corpse by fire disposal becomes an alternative to the lengthy putrefaction of the body underground. The absent body becomes present through its transformation into an acceptable or even desired materiality, ashes as well as the minimalist grave plots on the modern Danish lawn. Flames of transformation 265 Downloaded By: [Aarhus Universitets Biblioteker] At: 07:11 28 January 2010 Conclusion To Jules Rochard it seemed that the pyrotechnological efficiency of cremation was too fast a means of disposal of the dead human body. By contrast, in the concentration camps of the Second World War cremation was perceived as conveniently rapid and was employed as an efficient means of eradicating the historical agent. Bodily decay, it appears, is a sensuous fear that is to be processed carefully, while its temporal staging through cremation suggests a conceptualization of death and the immaterial, which today differs considerably from previous notions. Thus, we are arguing that fire is a means of shaping a material process of ‘toward-ness’ that bridges conceptions of material and immaterial. We have shown that the materiality of fire is highly illusive, as the social expression fire has is not just of its physical nature, but as that which has the potential to bring the ethereal and the physical together. Being a vehicle for transforming presence into absence, the flame is both destructive yet also constructive of a potent element in remembrance and in shaping the absent present, through ashes. Fire is renewal, as the opening quote from Bachelard suggests. Thereby the flame is simultaneously a transformation of meaning. 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