Theres no place like home: minority-majority dialogue, contestation, and ritual negotiation in cemeteries and crematoria spaces

This chapter explore the notion of ‘home’ in practices of bodily disposition and remembrance for minority ethnic and migrant communities. It draws on a larger study of minority cemetery and crematoria provision across medium sized towns in England and Wales. Using mapping, focus groups, key participant and biographical interviews across four case study towns, we explore how ‘translocal’ identities can shape and be shaped by changing practices on the ground. We argue that understanding everyday deathscapes is a vital part of understanding everyday life, and these spaces refract and distil the ways home is made, claimed and challenged for people of different faith and familial backgrounds. Reflecting postcolonial negotiations of “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005), local-transnational diasporic identity (Brah 1999) and “living with difference” (Amin 2002), we see how everyday practices and encounters around death and deathscapes shape the possibilities of establishing and engendering belonging of diverse groups in precise, yet underexplored, locations.