This event is part of the CDAS Conference 2024: Death and Communities. Links to join the event will be sent to all conference ticket holders, but is also free to attend for anyone who would like to join. If you are interested in attending the full conference, full details and tickets can be found here.

The Unclaimed: Abandonment and Hope

For centuries, people who died destitute or alone were buried in potter’s fields—a Dickensian end that poor families tried to avoid by joining burial societies and forgoing life’s necessities to buy burial insurance. Today, more and more next of kin in the US are abandoning their dead, leaving it to local governments to dispose of the bodies. Common explanations blame rising funeral costs, homelessness, and the entwined epidemics of drug addiction and untreated mental illnesses. Certainly, these are factors contributing to the rising numbers of Americans who have no next of kin willing or able to claim their bodies when they die. However, this study, which draws on extensive participant-observation, interviews, archival research, and quantitative analyses, locates a different and far greater problem: social isolation caused by eroding family ties. In this talk I address the roots of this erosion, discussing how changes in household demographics, widespread family estrangement, and restrictive laws around who qualifies as bureaucratically legitimate kin) contribute to the rise of unclaimed bodies. Simply put, we live in a diversity of family forms, but at critical life moments those diversities are not recognized. In this talk, I explain who the unclaimed dead are, the factors that lead to their abandonment after death, and the role the state is increasingly forced to play as a result of the fracturing of family ties.

For those who want to learn more, Stefan has recently written a book on this, with Dr Pamela Prickett.