Stuart Mclean (University of Minnesota)
Out of the (Invisible) Crowd: Memorialization and the Cult of the Dead as Practices of Detachment
Elias Canetti refers to the “invisible crowd” of the dead as being among the oldest and most ubiquitous of human conceptions, found in variety of forms from southern Africa to Siberia to the Scottish Highlands. Sometimes likened to a vast sea or a swirling cloud of vapour, knowing no boundaries, these hosts of the dead are an all-pervasive backdrop to the existence of the living. How then are we to conceive of the relation between these teeming and anonymous masses of the dead and the particularized (and sometimes named) dead who are usually the objects of ancestral cults, ritual offerings and various acts of memorialization? Can these practices be understood as the condensation and detachment of individuated presences from out of the undifferentiated mass of the dead? Is it perhaps by this means that the living are able to enter into interactions with the dead, to the extent that such interactions depend upon a precariously established distance between living and dead, whereas the dead portrayed en masse as an all-pervading substance threaten constantly to engulf and overwhelm the living? In this sense, acts of memorialization and the cult of the dead, far from bringing the living and the dead into closer proximity, can be seen as strategies of detachment, aimed at effecting a separation both between the living and the dead and between the individuated dead and the undifferentiated backdrop of the massed dead out of which they emerge.
