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Source:
Albert Hamscher, 785-532-0436, aham@k-state.edu
News release prepared by: Keener A. Tippin II, 785-532-6415,
media@k-state.edu
Friday,
October 27, 2006
K-STATE
HISTORY PROFESSOR SAYS CEMETERIES OFFER A GLIMPSE OF ATTITUDES AND
VALUES OF TIME GONE BY, PROVIDE AN INTERROGATION OF THE PAST
MANHATTAN
-- A cemetery might seem a less than desirable place for a history
lesson -- and the very last place many of us want to be -- but to
a Kansas State University history professor, a cemetery is like
taking a walk through the geological layers of time; an interrogation
of the past.
K-State's
Albert Hamscher sees more than headstones as he walks through a
cemetery. He also notices how the geography of this sacred final
resting place changes; how the symbolism on tombstones transforms
over time.
"You
ought to try it sometime," Hamscher said. "Take a walk
through your local cemetery and you'll see how things have changed
over time."
One
can learn a lot about people and their lives through their tombstones,
Hamscher said.
The
author of scholarly articles on the cultural history of cemeteries
in the United States, Hamscher is the editor of a recently published
collection of articles, "Kansas Cemeteries in History."
He
began his studies of cemeteries as an offshoot of a course he first
taught nearly 30 years ago, "Death and Dying in History."
"It
was really cutting edge back then," he said of the course that
he still teaches today.
One
aspect of the course is about cemeteries. Hamscher started to give
talks around the state, through the Kansas Humanities Council, when
it occurred to him that he knew "a lot about this stuff."
"Even
though my day job is mainly teaching about early modern France,
I decided to kind of take it on as a secondary field," he said.
Through
his studies of burial grounds, Hamscher uses his historian background
to make sense out of the cemeteries.
"It's
not easy to describe in a few minutes what you can get out of a
cemetery," he said. It's a sacred place; it's where we put
our loved ones. Many people do not take lightly what we do with
them."
Hamscher
has come up with a theory that the attitudes and values of people
are often expressed on tombstones -- what is important to them.
Those attitudes and values change over time.
"You
can learn a lot about people, their attitudes and values, by seeing
how they handled their dead and the symbolism around that,"
Hamscher said. "People are talking to us; they're telling us
about themselves and what is important to them. Religious symbolism
changes over time, the way it is expressed reflects attitudes at
any given moment."
To
demonstrate his point, Hamscher says to imagine you are from Mars
and you're walking through a cemetery. You're starting with the
assumption that what people do with their dead matters. As you move
on through you see religious symbolism; references to spouses; and
with the advent of technology, secular things such as pickup trucks,
golf clubs, etc., on headstones.
"Coming
from Mars, you would be curious after you saw old-fashioned headstones
with the Star of David, crosses or linked wedding rings, and then
all of a sudden you see pickup trucks, etc., and you wonder what
is going on here? What are these people all about?" Hamscher
said. "That's where being a cultural historian comes in, trying
to understand the various things that are going on that help to
explain the things you see in the cemetery."
According
to Hamscher, there is a message conveyed to us through cemeteries.
He calls them "an open textbook of theology; a window of a
culture at large; a collective of attitudes that people possessed."
"Can
you really imagine people 200 years ago, in a far more religious-oriented
society, putting golf clubs and stuff on their tombstones? It says
something about us," Hamscher said. "Here you see a physical
artifact and by exploring it in an intelligent way, you can learn
a lot about the people and the values they had."
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