Tourism at Bonaventure Cemetery

When I drove up through the gate, pulling over into the grass to park, there was a group of what looked like 6 or 7 tourists and a guide, who was presumably giving a bit of info, the beginning of a tour of the cemetery. A lady sort of scowls at me and dramatically turns back to the smart looking fella in lead. It was great. Short espadrilles, chinos, a top that flattered her body, the tan and the obviously thoughtful ‘do, and the entitlement of purchasing something. Who was I to bother her experience with my loud, ugly pickup truck, just driving in like my presence was as legitimate as hers? Why was I the crying baby in the restaurant?

It’s a cemetery though. People come here to visit the graves of loved ones and famous people, to reflect on the loss of someone close or someone respected. It’s a sort of solemn place, one of the few social spaces where a person can sit quietly just looking and thinking. No engagement required or expected. There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It’s almost like going to the bathroom, one of the few sacred places where being alone is socially sanctioned and protected. When someone sits next to a grave, there’s an unspoken pact to not bring social protocol into a person’s quiet space of reflection and sorrow and mourning.

But what we’re working with here is different. There was a different kind of protection going on between this lady and me. It was the protection of owning something. If I purchase a lovely scarf, social-consumer convention says that no one will touch this lovely scarf without my permission. It becomes part of my territory. And the same seems to go for experiences that I purchase. I paid for this fancy dinner, quite a lot actually, now please keep your screaming children out of my territory. Part of what I purchased was the atmosphere. I came here to dinner to have a special celebration with a person I love maybe. If the food is fouled up, then I’ll send it back, and I feel the same sense of ownership over the romantic atmosphere. It’s part of the bargain.

I think that’s tricky, though, when this ownership of experience happens in a public space, not a consumer space (in the restaurant, we’ve all bought into this experience, but the cemetery is open to buyers and non-buyers alike) and especially complicated if one is gaining entitlement over those reflective (and arguably sacred) moments of solitude. The trouble is that in a cemetery, everyone’s grief/reflection is legitimate and equal because death/grief doesn’t discriminate. (What’s the Johnny Cash line “We’ll all be equal under the grass”?) However, once the cemetery visit becomes a consumer experience, the refuge of equality (this ideal that what is in our hearts, which is key to the process of grief/reflection, is ultimately the same) becomes structured by the class system inherent in a consumer environment. The experience of some people (consumers) becomes more legitimized (through purchase) than the experience of others (non-consumers, grievers and grave-visitors).

I want to specify, though, that what I’m thinking about here is not the commodification of the cemetery as a space. I think it’s relevant to recognize the well established classed nature of the cemetery with the grave markers indicating social honor and position and with the funeral market and all, so much money exchanged and social honor symbolized. Instead, I mean to focus on the transformation of the cemetery visit as an experience.

So what? What does it mean about us that we’re doing this to ourselves socially-culturally? What is this? Bringing an economic/class-based hierarchy into an experience that is not an economic experience (indeed, it’s instead a spiritual experience, or at least in some way generally a reflective one).

In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard writes that “[e]very system that approaches perfect operativity simultaneously approaches its downfall … it approaches absolute power and total absurdity; that is, immediate and probable subversion” (4).

I’m thinking of the “perfect operativity” of a consumer model in terms of the absence of moral incentive or human element. There’s no telling what people will do, especially given the relative and evolving nature of morals. The human element/moral incentive is an unpredictable variable. The pure logic of capital could be challenged by a human element. Without this (wily, rowdy, beautiful) variable, the functioning of the system can be flawlessly predictable and efficient. So, consumerism (with all of the subtleties of symbolic capital and exchange), of course, has strictly material incentive, with the power to perfectly transform anything into capital. Consumerism/capitalism doesn’t discriminate; there is simply the procession of capital. By procession, I only mean this ability of consumerism to transform non-consumer spaces/experiences into consumer markets (the way that American democracy, education, etc. have been transformed into systems of material/symbolic capital).

So, if we think about this idea of Baudrillard’s, and connect the perfect operativity with the non-human (and thereby perfectly systematic) quality of consumerism, then what seems to be suggested here is that this procession of capital, the expanding (transformative) nature of capitalism is in some sense its downfall, absolute power, and total absurdity. Subversion comes from this lack of moral incentive (perfect operativity). Its perfection causes its own destruction. But is this the actual case that we see played out? This absurdity and downfall seems to be at the horizon of what is happening at Bonaventure Cemetery. I don’t get a feel for the self-destruction of this perfect machine. It just feels so damn powerful and totalizing. The subversion is endlessly deferred. At what point is the precipice reached?

At Bonaventure, we can easily see the ability of capitalism to transform a non-market into a market, redefining experience and restructuring social exchange. However, there are two competing modes at work: the procession of capital (which doesn’t discriminate, having no human element) and the process of socialized grief/reflection (which doesn’t discriminate, having a universalizing, humanistic ethic at its core). So, it seems like a real contact-zone. Is there conflict present?

Yes. The grief of grave-visitors is invalidated through this process. Grieving, reflecting people are photo-bombing the souvenir shots of memorials and oak trees. Frustrating my friend with the scowl and espadrilles. (When do grievers stop getting in the way and start becoming the souvenir shot target like the monks at Boudhanath? Is that a full transformation, the commodification of the individual in prayer?) It’s the transformation of a spiritual experience into a market experience. Conflict is present as long as there is a spiritual experience with which the consumer experience contends. Once the spiritual is entirely transformed into consumerism, there’s no conflict. The Chinese have brilliantly and cruelly done this to the remaining monasteries in Tibet, destroying them by making them into tourist attractions after torturing and killing monks and nuns. (Please don’t misunderstand me to mean that the kind people running these tours are as cruel as the Chinese military presence in Tibet. That would be insane. However, it makes for a good example for clarification due to how extreme it is.) And we wonder why people get all hot and bothered and fantasize by reading Eat, Pray, Love.

[ I wrote this on June 5, 2012 after visiting Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. ]