Landscape Structural Violence: A View from New Orleans’s Cemeteries

Abstract

“Structural violence” is a term used to describe inflicted systematic violence on a disenfranchised group by an established order, usually framed as a government or the social majority. The disenfranchised groups are marginalized and not provided with the same access to resources such as healthcare or food, the effects of which can be observed directly in their death. Bioarchaeologists often can detect the visible effects of this violence on skeletal remains, which provide a visual representation to and reinforcement of social prejudices inflicted in life and death. Discussed here is how the same concept of structural violence can be inflicted on the landscape through damage to or obliteration of cemeteries. We propose a definition of “landscape structural violence” exhibited through cemetery erasure as a reinforcement of preexisting social prejudices in death where the governments or the social majority, intentionally or passively, destroy, remove, or obscure a cemetery without consultation with the descendant community. This definition is applied to several examples of New Orleans cemeteries to determine the functionality of the definition and what activity is and what is not structural violence inflicted on the landscape.

Introduction

“…Others claim the underlying implications of the legislation have no real bearing on their particular brand of anthropology, even as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples demonstrates otherwise (see Claw et al., 2017; Hudson et al., 2020). While some archaeologists have conversely been among the key advocates for the protection of cemeteries, encouraging the conservation of burial markers and the upkeep of grounds, there has been a clear imbalance in the kinds of cemeteries positioned as priorities for preservation (Beisaw et al., 2021; Nichols, 2020; Seidemann and Halling, 2019). Implementing this legislation has been challenging, and the journey to repatriation for Indigenous peoples in the United States is far from complete (Atalay, 2018; Bondura, 2020; Colwell, 2017).…”

Confronting the Present: Archaeology in 2019

“…González‐Tennant (2018) also uncovers lost histories of violence against African Americans in his archaeology of US race riots. Seidemann and Halling (2019) extend the project beyond the unearthing of landscapes of interpersonal violence to include “landscape structural violence.” They argue that express and tacit state consent for the damage or destruction of cemeteries serving marginalized communities constitutes “systematic violence on a disenfranchised group” (669). As part of “the political work of memory” (Sesma 2019) that African‐descent archaeologies undertake, Seidemann and Halling's concept “focuses on the violence wrought against the landscapes of memory themselves and the present collective memory of those violent events” (670).…”