The universal nature of death drives different communities to create rituals to confront it. Each ethnic group or religion expresses its own conception of death, which is inseparable from its cosmogony, theology, and psychology, giving rise to a language of death that is expressed through ceremony, architecture, and the use of funerary space. Cemeteries occupy a prominent position that gives rise to rites and periodic visits.
The way in which societies or social groups confront death, through a set of rituals and habits, finds its fullest expression in the West in the ways of burying bodies in the ground; this custom is rooted in Judeo-Christian precepts, which over time gave way to the construction of various spaces such as churches, graveyards, and cemeteries, among others.
We consider heritage cemeteries to be socially constructed spaces that display, in their various dimensions, both tangible and intangible, expressions of the social, ethnic, or religious group to which they belong.
We find elements of memory expressed not only in the spatiality of cemeteries, but also in the monuments and plaques present within them. We therefore consider the term “monument” in its original Latin sense, monumentum, derived from the verb monere, meaning to remember or admonish, used to indicate a work of a commemorative nature created to keep alive over time the memory of people or events.
We regard cemeteries and their monuments as implicit and explicit supports of a dimension of memory; in the case of those commemorating collective tragic events, they are part of a discourse on a collective event that affected, and continues to affect, society, or at least the part of it that built and maintains it.
The funerary monument as an object is a system of signs, a vehicle that carries and transmits messages, expressions, and ideas that affect the surrounding environment and make manifest the cultural system, and which is therefore an important social mediator.
In this symposium we invite colleagues from different fields to discuss the current problems of preserving these unique spaces, conceived in the eighteenth century and built from the early nineteenth century onward, which suffer constant deterioration due to multiple causes, ranging from vandalism to neglect.
