Wealth in people and the value of historic Oberlin Cemetery, Raleigh, North Carolina

Abstract

In its origins as a concept, wealth in people depended on the circulation and accumulation of rights and obligations among and over the living. But if a person is a source of wealth, what happens when the person dies? Would the person be excised from the relationships upon which wealth in people depends, or might his or her wealth remain accessible to the living? To address this question, we present the case of Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina. The cemetery was the core of Oberlin Village, a freedperson's African American community founded in the mid-nineteenth century. Today, development threatens historic resources surrounding the cemetery, but a community organization founded by descendants and neighbors has emerged to preserve and promote their heritage. We are a group of anthropologists, geologists, and historians who live and work near Oberlin Village and who collaborate to help this organization achieve its goals. Here we report how our efforts to document the cemetery's history have bolstered their advocacy and validated their claims to wealth in the people buried there. Thus we show how wealth in people extends to the dead when graves and the people within them are potent sources of value for the living.

“Paint it black”: Wealth‐in‐people and Early Classic Maya blackware pottery

“…For the Early Classic Maya, it was absolutely critical that a king be able to recruit not only large masses of people to participate in his funeral and subsequent veneration as an ancestor but also skilled artisans with the specialized knowledge to produce the material objects needed to guide him safely through the underworld in anticipation of his resurrection and apotheosis. The importance of the funeral as a time when a life is assessed and valued as wealth‐in‐people is a theme found in other wealth‐in‐people studies (Bähre ; McGill et al ; Mulder ). Here, as elsewhere, wealth‐in‐people as wealth‐in‐knowledge can inform politico‐religious behavior in contemporary and ancient cultures.…”

Embodied value: Wealth‐in‐people

“…As he put it, in Africa, the means of domination belonged to people who could control others. The relationship between demographic control and political centralization is a thread running through wealth‐in‐people studies in ecological anthropology (Nyerges 1992) and in archaeology, as reviewed in the articles by McGill et al () and Callaghan () that follow. Ethnographic studies of kinship and political organization echoed this point by drawing attention to rights‐in‐people (see reviews in Bledsoe ; Kopytoff and Miers ).…”

“…Applied anthropology is itself a process of composition that brings anthropologists together with their publics (McGill et al )—in the case of the historic African American Oberlin Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, a coalition of community members who worked to preserve the cemetery against planned commercial development. Oberlin Cemetery was the core of a free African American settlement as early as the 1850s.…”

“…Importantly, many of the instances of wealth‐in‐people in this volume invoke this sense of wealth that began in a specific past, endures, and makes claims on the future. Franzen's () farmers claim as inalienable their land, equipment, and cattle as “gold” and “real wealth.” Life cycle rituals build wealth‐in‐people and extend belonging to ancestors and the dead through their position of supernatural social power (Bähre ; Callaghan ; McGill et al ; Mulder ). Bähre () and Mulder () both discuss how funeral insurance guarantees that loved ones become venerated ancestors through a well‐attended and well‐appointed funeral.…”

“…Bähre () and Mulder () both discuss how funeral insurance guarantees that loved ones become venerated ancestors through a well‐attended and well‐appointed funeral. For African Americans connected to Oberlin Cemetery, the life stories of those interred are told and retold as geneology to “reclaim our stories that are specific to us” (McGill et al , 186). Finally, among the ancient Maya, blackware pottery was specifically produced and placed in royal tombs to help Maya kings escape from the underworld after death and be resurrected as a divine ancestor of their lineage.…”