Cul is Digging a Hole by Cul Magazine

cul

Is digging a hole

What will we do when we’re all underwater?

Burials from around the world

The dark side of diamonds

Colofon

Independent anthropological magazine Cul is connected to the Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology department at the University of Amsterdam.

Editor’s note

Editor in Chief: Ethan Fenwick

Deputy Editor in Chief: Ines Mittal Gros

Graphic Design: Livia Aimee Kofler

Image Editors: Alžbeta Szabová

Berit Anna Rojer

Sadu Saks

Text Editors: Alex Dieker

Morrigan Fogarty

Aleksandra Dudek

Treasurer: Auriel Dirks

Cover: Berit Anna Rojer

40 centimetres. That is as deep as you are allowed to dig in the Netherlands. Though it might not be wise to go deeper regardless, that is if you don’t want to get your feet wet.

We started this edition with the idea of digging a hole, not for any particular reason, perhaps in the hope you, the reader, might give it your own meaning. Yet, in this edition, you will find articles that range from the ludicrous to the deadly serious, and all, in the end, unearthed more than we had first anticipated. Now it is your turn to start digging.

Best wishes,

Ethan Fenwick & Inés Mittal Gros

Cul magazine is always searching for new aspiring writers. The editorial team maintains the right to shorten or deny articles. For more information on writing for the Cul or advertising possibilities, email cul.editorial@gmail.com

Printer: Ziezoprint

Prints: 200

Printed: December 2023

ISSN: 18760309

Cul Magazine

Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 1018 WV Amsterdam cul.editorial@gmail.com

Column (ENG)

4 Drowning in Development: Our Illogical Conception of Growth in Modern Times

Alex Dieker

Column (ENG)

7 I've dug myslef into another situationship...

Berit Anna Rojer

Research (ENG)

10 Buried Legacy: How to stop people from going into the hole

Alžbeta Szabová

Research (ENG)

12 Highlighting Beauty, Posing Danger: Tracing the Origin of Diamonds

Aleksandra Dudek

Research (ENG)

14 Exploring Global Traditions of Funerary Practices

Auriel Dirks & Inés Mittal Gros

Column (ENG)

18 Burying Normativity

Morrigan Fogarty

Opinion (ENG)

20 Falling into the Soundhole

Morrigan Fogarty

Column (ENG)

22 All the Toilets in my Life

Livia Aimee Kofler

Drowning in Development

Our Illogical Conception of Growth in Modern Times

Text Alex Dieker

Image Berit Anna Rojer

Sometimes, when I’m particularly bored at home, I’ll look outside my window to the street below. I live on a quiet street in the Bijlmer, quiet enough that, most of the time, only one or two people are in view. It could be a middle-aged man, or an elderly woman carrying her shopping bags. It could be a family excitedly jumping out of a car returning home from a weekend trip. Frequently, I see not a living soul for minutes on end and am reminded of where I am. Below me lies building material, placed on top of the block’s foundation, on top of swampland. This is not a place that makes life easy for us humans. The sheer amount of infrastructural work completed by the Dutch to make their country livable is astounding to me, especially as someone whose home city has endured years of over-budget construction shenanigans. Without it, these streets would be quieter, our cars and bikes replaced with aquatic lifeforms.

With the onset of a worldwide climate disaster in recent centuries, emphasis has become placed on how we might reverse the effects of rampant capitalist development and disregard for what economists term ‘externalities,’ things ranging from flooding and drought to sex-gender system inequality and warfare. These are crucial aspects of human life, but our economic system is like a weightlifter who keeps needling himself with steroids while failing to eat healthy, sleep well, and live a well-balanced, happy lifestyle. We believe in development for development’s sake without accounting for what this growth has done to the Earth, or whether unlimited growth is even something desirable or possible in the long-term. It’s as if we live in a hyper-realistic simulation of the Cities Skylines videogame, whereby the demand for constant growth of commercial, residential, and industrial properties is facilitated by some unknown code embedded behind the scenes.

Our ‘growth and damn-the-consequences’ mentality comes from a peculiarly anti-scientific economic logic which has consumed business, academia, and legacy media. More philosophically, however, is the distinction we’ve managed to make between man and nature. In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh explores this distinction in relation to the creation of what became the United States. Building on the logic employed by the Dutch to subjugate the Bandanese for their nutmeg, the settlers in America quickly terraformed the land

of New England to make their settler colony. Terraforming evokes the idea of a Minecraft building project, but for the settlers it was not just about adapting the land for their usage. It involved renaming places, using a genocidal form of warfare against people and their animals, and generally reshaping the natural systems of the new continent to make everything suitable for European life and trade.

When I was home for Christmas break, I was reading the history of the small New Hampshire town in which my parents live. I was immediately struck by one passage during the period of the French and Indian War in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The local Indian groups participated in a fur trade with the settlers and generally lived in peace with the white-skinned Europeans, but the latter still concocted a plan to take all of them prisoner:

Inviting them to a sham battle, the militia surrounded them after the Indians had fired blank charges [provided by the settlers] and disarmed them. The friendly Pennacooks were set free, and the remaining two hundred southern tribesmen were sent to Massachusetts as prisoners. Six were hanged for past offenses, and some of the others were sold into slavery. This was the end of friendly relations between the English and the local Indians. [Newington, New Hampshire: A Heritage of Independence Since 1630]

The end of friendly relations, indeed – in a relationship always bound for disaster. If you force yourself to create the mental image of man separate from nature, while simultaneously associating groups like Amerindians to that very same nature, it is but a small leap from exploiting the ‘natural resources’ around you to taking captive and expelling those people who get in the way of that exploitation. They might as well be just another natural resource, not fit for human consumption, but certainly good enough to trade in slavery.

In Boston, all of the hullabaloo regarding infrastructure in my lifetime has been about the ‘Big Dig,’ a lengthy, expensive construction project that spanned nearly four decades from its ideation to completion. The project rerouted a major interstate artery which cuts through the centre of the city and one almost got the sense that, upon completion, the Big Dig would permanently improve public infrastructure and transportation in New England’s largest city.

Yet, as Harvey and Knox straight-forwardly explain in their ethnographical exploration of Peruvian infrastructure, Roads, the ribbon-cutting ceremony is only the beginning of work. Constant maintenance and rethinking are required to keep construction projects up to scratch. This is not the nuanced thinking that got us to where we are, and it shows: even more recently, a renovation worth tens of billions of dollars to a line on the T, Boston’s metro system, was found to contain faulty measurements, which required an almost complete overhaul.

Growth, and damn the consequences!

Failure to provide basic safety measures, and logical thinking?

These are all externalities.

The overcoming of Amsterdam’s watery underbelly provides a stark contrast to things like the T renovation or Big Dig in its sheer existential necessity: if the dikes don’t hold, if the street foundation begins to crumble, we are left with the swash of the North Sea. But all of this rests on the logic that if something can be done to maintain the system as-is, and it makes a tidy profit, it shall be done. Jan Peterzoon-Coen’s men pillaged and killed the Bandanese to shore up Dutch control over the spice trade, providing the monetary basis for the very kind of infrastructure from which we now benefit. It seems to me that we never stopped to ask the important questions: Is it sustainable to live with these never-ending construction projects? What is going to happen when our socioeconomic system can no longer sustain this rapid growth?

Most importantly, when we’re all underwater, what will we make of this so-called success in development?

I’ve dug myself into another situationship…

Text Berit Anna Rojer

Image Sadu Saks

You are stuck floating by. The days come, the days go. Suddenly, a person, whose presence feels familiar, comes by. You get introduced to your roommate’s friend, hit it off with a coworker, get in touch with a long-lost connection, or a forgotten acquaintance pops up on your Bumble. They show up at the perfect time, and share mutuals, evoking a sense of safety and trust. You gravitate towards them. And so it starts: the dreaded situationship.

As you hit swipe you are sucked in, unable to resist its force of magnetization. It’s all fun and exciting in the beginning. You send a playful text and get an instant reply, hours later you look up from your phone and see it’s 5 AM. You realize you’ve been talking to them for days on end, getting to know every detail of their life. Every night you lay in bed, struggling to put the phone back down. Amazingly, you’ve shared your deepest thoughts, your biggest inspirations and your craziest dreams. You start to feel so close to the person you imagine is behind the screen. Two days later you finally physically meet. They are even more handsome than you could imagine. All your worries glide off your body as you realize the person you have been texting is real. Your time together is out of this world; your coffee date turns into 24 hours of walking around the city, cooking a nice dinner, and cuddling up in bed. Again you find yourself laying in bed, talking until morning, different from anything you’ve ever experienced before. How is it possible you’ve met someone with whom you share such a genuine connection? With whom you feel so safe…

Yet, a sense of uncertainty constantly lingers. You know it’s too good to be true, yet you never question it. It goes on like this for a few weeks, becoming more intense every time you meet. You continuously text, both move plans so you can see each other sooner and dread saying goodbye. Still, you share a kiss and go back to your normal steady life, longing for the thrill you feel with them. One night, before your next date, you get a sudden text: ‘Hey we need to talk’. You panic but try to stay calm, after all, you guys are on a trajectory of becoming something serious. You’ve never talked about it, but you both knew there was something. Part of you has always been a bit confused, but you are scared to ask for clarity as that may lead to reality.

You pick up the phone and ask ‘whatsupp’. ‘I am not in the right headspace right now for a relationship’. ‘I am not looking for anything serious’. And my personal favourite: ‘I’m not over my ex’. You’re shocked, struggling to speak, ‘you didn't see this coming’. You’re perplexed, trying to gather

your thoughts. You force yourself to hold back your tears. Anxiety runs through your body as your worst thoughts of insecurity prove to be true. Was it not nice? Did they not share the same feeling as you? Was any of it ever real? Months later you find yourself questioning how you’ve ended up here, in emotional turmoil. You still long for the other person, unable to comprehend what has happened, incapable of understanding why it had to end.

I’ve found myself here many times. Despite my best efforts to avoid a situationship, I always find myself back in one. Something about them always pulls me back in. The gravitational force of a situationship is so impeccable: one cannot deny the attraction to this hookup with emotional benefits. Nothing can escape this prolonged talking stage, like a black hole it swallows up every living being in its vicinity. Yet, this casual affair stays hollow, leaving a void no one can fill. They leave you spiralling into a dark deep emotional hole that takes months to crawl out of and years to close. And that all from a one-month, undefined relationship shared with a person that was never really right for you.

So what even is a situationship?

Ocean (20): “A situationship to me is like a relationship but without emotional security.’’ “So you are constantly on the edge because you might never know what might happen next and you can never fully relax and let yourself fall into the relationship. There are no clear boundaries because it is kind of not allowed to speak about any feelings as that is already considered too much to ask for’’

Alex (20) “It’s a relationship in which one likes the other person more’’

Sam (19) “A sexual and romantic relationship where the commitment level is unclear, with or without agreement’’

Melmon (20) “When two people meet and one of them likes the other much less, but pursue a relationship regardless because it benefits them. For example person A doesn’t like person B enough to have a relationship despite person B really liking person A, but it doesn’t end because person A doesn’t want the validation they get from person B to end.’’

Gloria (21) “If a relationship is a dance between two souls, a situationship is the moment one asks for the others hand in the dance.’’

*fake names used for privacy reasons

I would argue that situationship remains a synonym for ‘I am not looking for anything serious’. It’s sugar-coating for ‘I want the perks and comfort of a relationship but none of the effort they require’. The words “let's just see where this goes’’, marks the situationship's ambiguous kickoff, hiding that one party is aware of its bitter end. Sticking the label ‘situationship’ onto this undefined relationship masks the imbalance of feelings and conflicting intentions between the parties involved. Despite presenting itself as unconditional, casual and clear-cut, people never leave a situationship without feeling anything. In this hookup with emotional benefits, the person who likes the other less drives the other’s hopes up and instantaneously shatters those fantasies with an equivocal conversation. Yet, due to the undefined boundaries of their casual affair, they are left with no blame because there was never a clear commitment. Thereby, the term ‘situationship’ fails to hold the person responsible for inflicting pain on the other.

Part of the experience is the delusion. See, in a situationship, you never manage to see each other for who you truly are. Instead, you favour the idea of each other: a glamorized, polished version of the other person, the potential of who they could be, not who they are. This makes you glance over every red flag in the relationship. You both hold each other on a pedestal. You try to live up to the expectations you have for each other, even though you know you’ll inevitably disappoint each other as the relationship carries on. When it ends, you are blindsided by reality, forced to see that they were just an ordinary person, a fellow human being, capable of hurting you. Both parties are consumed in delusion, wrapped up in future hopes and caught off guard by reality.

The freedom a situationship grants may be beneficial as it relieves traditional pressures of committed relationships, but it also hides pain and averts responsibility. Why do you only find out after weeks of seeing each other that you are not in the right headspace for a relationship? Why do you only realize now that you are not over your ex? Why do you only communicate now that you are not looking for anything serious? Why did you have to waste my time to figure out what you desire?

And after all that, I dug myself into another situationship, one that will take me a while to recover from. I mourn the idea of them, the idea of us. The version of myself I wished I was with them. I stay in a state of purgatory, questioning how I ended up here again. The situationship was hollow, yet again left a void in me. Its boundaries remained undefined, leaving the ending vague. Closure is not in my periphery, as neither I nor them can take responsibility for our part in this messed up play. Liminally, I float in space, waiting to be sucked in. I’d do anything to feel that thrill again.

So… Buckle up and get ready for another situationship.

Buried legacy

How to stop people from going into the hole

Text&Image Alžbeta Szabová

Sometimes we are forced to shift perspectives and look at our current situation from an imagined future in order to think about a problem we’re dealing with. If we ask questions about the legacy of our age, history can help us understand how it is to look back at the times long gone. When we are constructing our image of history, we’re limited by having to do so with the remains that have carried on from the past. As evidence is carried off with the wind, the probability of creating a truthful reconstruction lessens, and we’re stuck picking up the few pieces which we have left; as time marches on, signs of human influence dissipate. We only have a few paintings from ancient Greece that withstood the past millennia, and the only thing that remains of entire cities is their brief mentions in writing. Who knows how much has been washed away with rain, re-purposed, built over and decomposed, until no trace of what formerly was can be found, and no one knows to even search for the past. But, new discoveries can still be made that can fill out the blanks, and sometimes by people who were never even looking for them. History appears unexpectedly, and when it does, its creations can be seen by the living again.

Coincidence and luck can lead to a sudden change in our knowledge - it was a couple of boys who discovered the Lascaux cave filled with palaeolithic paintings when they went to rescue their dog that had fallen in. While we associate prehistory with cave paintings, it is probably not the case that prehistoric people had only been creating art inside caves, but those cave paintings are now the only remnants that have survived. And in some cases, that is probably for the better, for it is not only a myriad of painted bison one might find in a cave, but also death. Many caves have been discovered in the past centuries and then consequently sealed off and filled with warning signs after they became the final resting places of adventurers, scouts or unlucky passers-by. The deaths we know about are nasty, and the ones we do not know about are numerous. There are assumptions being made about how possible it is that a lot of missing people in remote areas have met their fate by stumbling on a sinkhole of an extensive cave system. Being enthusiastic about caving can mean one might

find oneself stuck upside down in a hole in the ground (and this hole probably has a silly name like“the Birth Canal”) and remain there until others seal them in with cement so no one else can become permanently stuck.

This article will, however, not be about the past and the inevitable entropy of time but about the legacies that outlive the imaginary “us” that gets assigned to humanity, and what remains after our period of history is long gone.

Within caves, history can stand still. Right now, arguably the biggest scientific breakthrough of the last century - nuclear power - has created waste that we know will outlive us, waste that will last for longer than human history exists. It is possible that ten thousand years from now, there will be contemporary architecture, art or literature that carries on. But we know for sure that not even plastics can compare to the longevity of nuclear waste. So far, radioactive waste has been mostly disposed of the same way as unlucky cavers: buried in a deep hole and filled with cement. Since this waste

Research

needs to be out of reach far into an incomprehensibly distant future in order to keep people out of these radioactive burial sites, there needs to be a way to create a communication plan that spans tens of thousands of years into the future.

So, when we know certain parts of the Earth should remain untouched, lest some adventurous discoverers face a cruel demise, what can be done? The site has to be avoided, and the markings maintained. This is not in itself an engineering task - it is not that difficult to bury something. The problem lies in stopping people from digging it back up. Since the issues arise from the actions of future societies, social scientists must come onto the scene. Nothing can be written, for language

will change, but pictures aimed at making people avoid the site might also make them think that there is a treasure inside (we can now go and see the ancient Egyptian messages to “Keep Out” displayed in museum exhibitions). The sense of danger must then be conveyed differently.

One team of researchers from the 90’s, while designing a deterrent for a nuclear repository in New Mexico, proposed the creation of something monumental, which would motivate future generations to revere the structure protecting the ancient markers. At the same time, the site must look repellant in order for the danger to be apparent. The idea is to go beyond hostile architecture, into the evil and menacing. Some examples include an enormous spike field, a big black circle of concrete which makes a part of a landscape unusable because it radiates heat all day long, or a grid of black cubes that also emanate heat so you boil if you go in between them. Other plans have ventured more into the realm of science fiction. With hope that where scientific knowledge gets lost to time, myths and legends prevail, the proposal to found a religious order tasked with protecting these sites was born. And my favourite: the breeding of special cats that glow when radiation is near.

None of these plans have (to my great dismay) been carried out since their proposal at the end of the last century, but the lack of long-term solutions for contemporary problems remains. When trying to address climate change and being swept away by existential dread about the following century, we hardly want to think of what will be here in ten thousand years. But (this one is for the anthropologist readers) the next time a family member asks you what it exactly is that anthropologists do, you can tell them that at least some of them have been thinking ahead. And thanks to them - long after we are all gone - there might be a really weird enormous spike pit in New Mexico.

Highlighting Beauty, Posing Danger

Tracing the Origin of Diamonds

Shiny. Astonishing.

Delighting in their beauty. What makes diamonds so desirable?

What makes people go crazy at the mere sight of these shining gems?

Text Aleksandra Dudek Image Berit Anna Rojer

Diamonds are gems that have been evoking emotions in people for centuries. Associated with class, for some even with magic, they have gained a lot of fans. For centuries, diamonds have had symbolic power. They have been part of the complement of the soul, accompanying conflicts, bloodshed (sometimes being the reason behind conflicts), love and betrayal. They have captured the imagination of those who dreamed of possessing them, and as the hardest minerals found in nature, they symbolize indestructibility and durability.

Once associated with wealth, diamonds seen in store windows are no novelty these days. It has become natural to be able to buy jewellery made of this precious bullion in one of the millions of jewellery stores across the globe. Those eyecatching stones are fueling the world’s consumption today. Despite their rather expensive nature, diamonds do not lose their value, and luxury jewellery conglomerates seem to spare no expense in offering customers ever-newer collections, of which diamond jewellery is a significant part.

Today, the global diamond market is estimated to be worth ore than $100 billion, and as its value continues to grow, it is predicted to exceed $150 billion in the next few years. The size of the market therefore has the potential to become one of the world’s most important economic sectors. But while millions of people marvel at the beauty of diamonds and are eager to keep the industry going, few really think about their origins. Perhaps the potential of the industry is leading people to do absolutely anything to get their hands on diamonds? Maybe their extraction costs human lives? In an age of everincreasing product availability, it is easy to forget where the items that end up in our closets, around our necks or on our

hands come from. Perhaps it is worth taking a moment to think about where the products we buy come from and what the real price of the product we own is.

The occurrence of diamonds is quite limited as it is determined by the existence of the right conditions. For pure carbon to become diamond, very high pressures and temperatures are required below the earth’s surface. However, such conditions are only found in certain areas of the world. The largest diamond mining areas are found in northern Russia, Canada, and in the southern part of the African continent in countries such as Botswana, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and in the central part of the continent in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

So…what is the actual path the diamonds take to reach the storefront and the price paid to mine them?

Few people know the true origin of the diamonds that sparkle in store windows and on the sight of which some lose their minds. These inconspicuous gems travel a long way to reach jewellery stores and have often been the cause of local and national conflicts. Today, more than 50% of the world’s diamond production comes from African countries. In 1998, Global Witness (an NGO focused on protecting human rights and combating problems such as corruption, poverty, and the exploitation of natural resources) published a report that brought the blood diamond issue to light, exposing the problem of the diamond industry funding conflicts and brutal wars in several African countries such as Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Blood diamonds, as the name implies, are diamonds mined in areas of armed conflict and the proceeds from their sale are used to fund military operations in the areas. These military operations have led to the displacement and violent deaths of millions of local people in countries such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and Angola. In 2003, the Kimberley Process (KP) Certification Scheme was launched to regulate the diamond trade and combat conflict diamonds. The KP as a multi-stakeholder coalition of governments, diamond industry representatives, and activists has been committed to promoting transparency in the international diamond trade.

However, according to another Global Witness report, while information about the corrupt blood diamond industry has been made public, little has changed in the real fight against the problem for local people. Countries that have experienced extremely violent armed conflicts fueled by the illicit conflict diamond trade are still struggling with the consequences. Many illegal diamond trade routes that were closed after the introduction of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme have reopened in other countries and continue to allow the flow of illegal diamonds into the legitimate market. And what represents beauty in its noblest form for many has become a lifelong curse for others. What do I own?

Of course, not every diamond that arrives in a jewellery store is an illegally traded diamond, the sale of which is responsible for the displacement of a family or the death of innocent people. However, as the availability and popularity of diamonds increases, so does the desire to own them, and there seems to be no end in sight to this race for luxury. But if you knew in advance where the diamonds you were about to buy might have come from, would you think twice about buying them?

Research

Sacred Spaces

Exploring Global Traditions of Funerary Practices

Text Auriel Dirks & Inés Mittal Gros Image Alžbeta Szabová

Around the world, many different beliefs and practices are observed in regard to the one thing we all have in common: mortality. Our final ways of saying our goodbyes, if we can even speak of goodbyes in the first place, range from sky burials to physical holes dug into the ground where the body will be laid to rest. The ways in which we speak to the dead, or the way death speaks to us, are infinite. Although impossible to cover in its wide array of diverse beliefs and practices, a few of them will be briefly presented here. Some of these places and societies were chosen due to our own backgrounds, and others were brought in through interests and previous courses. While the selection might at first seem random, it is relevant, in our opinion at least, to emphasize that the reasoning behind them was to be able to write about diverse ways in which humans have managed to be so different yet similar to one another.

1. The Toraja (Sulawesi, Indonesia)

Funerary rites in Indonesia are as diverse as the country’s vast stretches of sea and thousands of islands. The Toraja people of the island of Sulawesi practice funerary rites centred on the belief in ancestor spirits. When an individual passes away, their soul does not leave the world right away. Instead, the Toraja believe they linger until the funerary rites have been properly conducted. For this reason, the deceased is referred to as Mamma (sleeping person) or Masaki (sick person). During the actual ceremony, the deceased are buried in carved-out tombs on cliffsides. Precious heirlooms such as knives and rare textiles are brought to the person’s grave. Furthermore, wooden figures resembling humans called Tau Tau are brought to accompany both the dead and the living. Depending on the deceased’s social status, buffalos and ceremonial dances can be performed in their honour as well. Only when a Mamma or Masaki is finally put to rest do they become a Membali Puang (a person who has become one of the gods) or a Mate (a dead person).

2. The Netherlands

Despite the country’s size, the Netherlands observes different funerary rites depending on the people, location and time of the passing. In the past, most funerary rites were Christian in nature - in this case, referring to church burials and memorial services - however, as an ever-decreasing number of people practice Christianity, funerary rites of this type are in decline. Instead of being buried, an increasing number of people opt for cremation instead. Furthermore, some funerary rites are regionbound. For instance, on the island of Vlieland the deceased’s body is laid on a carriage, whereafter the carriage will take the deceased on a final journey through the island at precisely 13:30 on the clock. Islanders can accompany the procession to bid their final farewells. Another regionally bound custom is the funerary rites aided by a Noaberschap (neighbours) in Twente. Upon the passing of an individual in the community, the Noaberschap will immediately come to the deceased family’s aid by offering them emotional support and carrying the coffin in the deceased’s final procession, for instance.

3. India

Hindu funerary rites in India do not involve any sort of holes. That is because after death Hindu’s believe that the physical body serves no use. It is instead burnt and the ashes are spread in the river Ganga in a place called Varanasi in order to escape the cycle of rebirth and go to heaven instead. During the rites, the body is first kept in the house for 24 hours before hindu religious rites are conducted by a Pandit. Then they are taken to a sort of open crematorium where the body is placed within blocks and cremated. The ashes are picked up the next day and transported by the closest family members to the ‘Ghats’ or ar as where the ashes can be spread in the river.

4. Spain

In Spain, where the majority of people are Catholics, the same rites are followed. From being at a ‘tanatorio’ or in English, tanatory where the deceased is left so family members can have their last moments with the loved one. They are then placed in caskets, and buried underground. The body is hence returned to the ground and they can rest in peace. However, due to a lack of space, Spain has started adopting a stacked method of burials, thus creating tall structures reserved for families/persons where flowers can be left in their memory. Usually, some families like keeping remembrance items within the grave as well, these items can range from images and letters to sentimental jewelry amongst other things.

5. Amazon Forest; the Wari’

Funerary rites take a different turn when it comes to the Wari’. The Wari’ are a community of people found within the Amazon forest. They believe that burying their dead is disrespectful and even scary at times, thus adopting a different method of mourning and respecting their dead. When reading Beth A. Conklin’s book Consuming Grief (definitely a book I would recommend) she explains how the Wari’ dislike the thought of being kept in a cold and dark place where animals could eat away at their deceased. Hence, finding comfort in funerary cannibalism. This kind of cannibalism amongst the Wari’ is not uncommon. They instead considered it important to consume at least a part of the body. It is important to remember that they did not eat their dead because they enjoyed the taste, but out of a sense of respect and compassion not only to the deceased but also to the immediate relatives.

6. Egypt

In Egypt, the majority of the population follows and practises Islam. Therefore, funerary rites in Egypt are largely Islamic in nature. Once an individual passes away, their body must be buried as soon as possible, and it should be washed thoroughly and laid to rest in a Kafan (a pure white cloth). The body is then taken to the mosque, where the final prayers for the deceased, referred to as Janazah, are conducted. After this, the deceased’s loved ones take the body to its final resting place, where the body is laid to face Mecca. It is believed that the deceased’s soul will continue to visit every Friday, so that communication between the dead and the living continues. For instance, a common funerary practice found in Egypt is the writing of so-called death letters. The deceased's loved ones write letters, which are sometimes published in local newspapers, addressed to the dead. Apart from letters, dreams and grave visits are also common ways of talking to the dead.

7. Tibet

A sky burial is a common practice in Tibet and has been for thousands of years. Instead of burial or cremation, after a person dies, their body is taken to a special monastery, where a sky burial operator dismembers the deceased. They are later laid out at a special sky burial site to feed vultures, who are considered to be sacred. Every night the lamas, or spiritual masters, at the monastery read sutras (scriptures) for the dead. One of the reasons that Tibetans have sky burials is because they practice Buddhism. Feeding the body to the vultures is considered to be a final act of charity. In their minds, the spirit of the person moves on and the body is an empty vessel and the vessel needs to be destroyed for the soul to move on and not try to come back. This is called transmigration of the spirit. By exposing the body to the elements and animal scavengers, the body is returned to the earth as generously as possible.

Burying Normativity

Text Morrigan Fogarty Image Alžbeta Szabová

The main inspiration for this article was that it was going to be a counterpiece. Following writing on different types of funerary and burial practices around the world, I wanted to take the time to examine what a “normal” burial is like. Imagine my surprise when after a preliminary look, no such thing exists. Even though there is definitely a norm as to how we end up after we’re dead, it would be foolish to say that this norm is a concrete thing. As I sat down to write this article it became clear to me that what it should really be about is how the norm, in this case the norm on burials, is not ever a concrete thing that we can point to. Instead, the norm represents an idealized standard of how things “should be” or how things “are” which is only truly defined whenever something breaks that norm. For example, getting buried in a cemetery after a priest has given you rites would be considered a normative burial, but it certainly isn’t the only “normal” way to get buried. Likewise, having your dead body flung out of a trebuchet into a forest would be a non-nor-

mative way of dealing with your body, and while this is an extremely silly example it illustrates my point that the norm is more easily defined when you look outside of it. Not everyone gets embalmed, put in a casket and lowered into a grave. Not everyone gets cremated and has their ashes spread somewhere. These two examples seemed to be where my assumptions lay. Sure enough, if you want to argue our norm is that of a white Christian practice, you’d imagine that the practice of putting our dead in the ground comes from somewhere in early Christianity, but "whose" norm is this? To start this journey and to say in any way “our norm” you’re making leaps and bounds assuming things about yourself, and I’m assuming things about you as the reader. I'm assuming that you’re living in a country similar to the one I’m living in, that it has an Anglo-European heritage and that the majority of normative structures were set up in the past by white people, and if I wanted to talk about burials that didn’t operate on these assumptions, none of this would make

sense. When we want to look at things different from ourselves, we construct the other. We see something and say “We’ll that’s certainly different” and from there write about what is so different, but we rarely make the turn to look at ourselves. This is a two-way process, and just as we might falsely understand the other, we also tend to falsely understand our own practices. There’s never going to be one way a person's body is treated after they’ve died, and that goes for both the other and the familiar. A false dichotomy between the two, saying that there’s such a thing as “our burial practices” ignores the fact that the “our” we’re talking about is a lot less homogenous than we think, and the more you narrow down your exploration of a topic so that you’re only looking at the “most normative”, be it by looking at the most popular or most culturally relevant, you’re still turning away from a host of practices occurring all around us every day.

Falling into the Sound Hole

Text Morrigan Fogarty

Image Alžbeta Szabová

This is an article about falling into a trap and writing about nothing.

I got my first acoustic guitar when I was sixteen years old, and if I were to list the number of different guitars, basses, keyboards, and synthesizers I’ve gone through from then to here, this would turn into an article about my own self masochism. There’s a notable absurdity to the many years I’ve played guitar, namely that I’ve only memorized about three songs. I’ve been obsessed with the instrument, I worked as a guitar technician briefly, I’ve memorized chord progressions, scales, and weird tunings, and I’ve played hard enough to bleed so often I think I can register some of my instruments as kin. But at the same time, the only song I can play entirely from memory is the “Whistle Theme” from the video game Deadly Premonition (a game I haven’t even played). This opens a host of questions, why do we play instruments? Why do I play instruments? What does it mean that I only make music in sporadic bursts, with no care about how it's being recorded or understood by others, what's the point of me making art purely for myself? Why keep playing the instrument, why call myself a guitarist? After all, I’m sure some wouldn’t be happy with me calling myself one. In essence, I play the guitar for the art of doing nothing, no goal, no reward, just doing nothing. Killing time, wasting time, idling, laying about, lolling about, beating time with a hammer, resting, slouching, being the idle hands of the devil you were warned about, that's what I play guitar for. Is it fun? Sometimes, but sometimes it's frustrating, most of what I mean when I say doing

nothing is playing chords and scales in patterns that you could argue are actually songs if I bothered to write them down, but I don’t, I can’t be bothered, I’m just doing nothing. I want to make a clear statement about what this article is about, I’m not trying to make some grand claim about bringing back the art of doing nothing, if anything I think we do nothing a lot more than we realize, and I’m not really interested in addressing a host of different questions such as:

Are my feelings towards my own hobbies deeply affected and ruined by capitalism?

Have we become such a hyper-individualized and work-centric society that playing music, something that can do great work at bringing people together, is instead more fun for me when I’m playing alone?

Does art have to have a purpose?

I have no answers to these questions, and people more qualified than me can probably introduce a lot more nuance or critique of these ideas. However, I think there’s a fundamental concession about art, in that it seems to want to be used to communicate something, I’d argue this is close to “the point of art”, at least for me. It also means that when I spend hours playing chords and scales pointlessly, I don't think that I’m “doing art”, but if it starts to sound like the notes and chords are evoking something, a mood or a feeling, and I show this arrangement of sounds to someone else, then it's at least closer to my own definition of art. I don’t know if I fully agree with myself. I don’t think art has to do something to be art, but I still feel this urge to label what I’m doing as not art because it doesn’t feel like it. I think I've written the word art so much it doesn’t look like a word anymore. It doesn’t lack anything or feel incomplete, it just feels like nothing.

There are definitely larger systems at play in this, multiple people more equipped than me have tackled the idea of “wasting time” and come up with a host of explanations. Maybe we feel like leisure time is a waste because of the hellish conditions of late-stage neoliberal grindset capitalism. But this explanation doesn’t really change anything. I only think about the time of wasting when I’m taking time to think about it, when I’m actually doing the act of doing nothing I’m not thinking “Well shucks, looks like I’m showing late-stage capitalism who's boss!” I'm just playing an instrument pointlessly. There’s definitely a value in this process of doing nothing, it’s an outlet for emotion, it can help with anxiety, it's also just plain fun, but there’s still this strange need to explain it. To take a stand against pretentiousness by being even more pretentious and arguing that wasting time is a higher form of art, to connect my hobbies with global power structures, to write about doing nothing, all of this feels like as much of a waste of time as plucking a few notes on a string.

All the Toilets in my Life

A collection of random toilets

Text&Image Livia Aimee Kofler

Have you ever thought about how many toilets you have encountered in your life?

When I was in Kyrgyzstan with my mother and her boyfriend from Berlin, we were on a road trip through the countryside close to Bishkek and the streets were so bumpy and my bladder so weak, that I had to tell our family friend who was driving the car to stop every 30 minutes. I felt very embarrassed.

Writing all of this makes ce of writing about toilets will people think? I will portfolio. It shows I’m quirky, will appreciate that.

As a proud anthropologist, I argue that research on lavatorial facilities holds significant importance within the realm of anthropological discourse. Respectfully, Mary Douglas wrote an entire book on dirt. Enough said I think.

Knowing there is a toilet around makes me feel safe and secure.

I moved a lot as a kid. In our third or so apartment, the one which was located right opposite the disco (I call it disco because ‘club’ would be too much of a stretch - it was after all in the middle of nowhere in an Austrian village named Lieserbrücke). Anyway, in that apartment we had one of these toilets with a decorated seat. You know the seashell ones. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I think about that toilet a lot.

makes me think about my choitoilets in this magazine. What definitely put this into my quirky, I’m sure employers

Toilets, probably one of the few things we all really need in life. Inevitable.

From when I was little, my mom told me to never sit on public toilets, she told me I have to squat. I still do this every time. I talked to my friends, they say they don’t squat.

We take toilets for granted until we are somewhere, having to hold our pee, with no toilet in sight. In remembrance of the many times I had to sneak into restaurants to go for a quick piss.

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