Burying the Dead and Religious Diversification in 21 st Century Chile: Christianity and Modernity in a Contested Topology

Abstract

This paper (number 2) in the research project “Burying the Dead” follows the introductory comments and typology of a previous paper ( Aguilar, 2024 ) but moves the material context of cemeteries to Chile assuming a diverse context. In India and Chile, indigenous centralised civilisations existed well before the arrival of European colonisers, and Chile became the second site within globality in which the topology of the dead is explored. Research visits to cemeteries in Chile and archives were carried out between June and September 2024 while research on mass graves from the period 1973-1989 in Chile has been carried out since 1999 1 . This paper outlines the historical departure from Catholic parish cemeteries, the only possibility during the colonial Spanish period in Chile (1541-1910, that took place at the end of the 19 th century with the foundation of the Santiago General Cemetery. By examining the historical and material realities of the Santiago General Cemetery and the Recoleta Catholic Cemetery, this paper opens academic discussions on public health policy, constitutional issues of secularity, and faith-reason within the state of Chile. The 1925 Chilean Constitution made a clear division between the roles of Church and State allowing for the first time for the legal existence of non-Catholic cemeteries. Indigenous burial places already existed long before the arrival of the Spaniards and some of those cemeteries have been kept as historical patrimony of Chile. Protestant cemeteries were allowed within the larger state cemeteries since the 19 th Century, namely the British cemeteries of Santiago and Valparaíso. This paper introduces the socio-reality of monuments and memorials to the dead by arguing that the socio-political relationality of the living is broken when the living die because the epistemological theologies of the dead are enacted on material ways that divide the world of the dead according to their systemic and semantic universe. Thus, previous works on Patio 29 of the General Cemetery where the bodies of political prisoners were buried without the consent of their next-of-kin after the 1973 military coup in Chile as well as other burials within churches such as the Archbishops’ Mausoleum in the Metropolitical Cathedral of Santiago are incorporated within a material separation of the dead and the building of monuments to the dead that represent a disunity in diversity.