**2. State of the Art and Literature**

It hardly needs stating that our approach constructively engages with a host of literature in the fields of religious studies, ritual studies and death studies. In all three fields, the concept of space is either foundational or has become important in recent decades. The study of ritual, in particular, has had space and place at heart. Van Gennep [1909] (1960) notes that all rites of passage are accompanied by a territorial passage (e.g., carrying the bride over the threshold or a procession with the newly dead to the cemetery), whereas Smith (1987) even entitled his major study of ritual *To take place*. As we have indicated, in spite of all the interest in ritual space and place, the concept of ritual space needs further refinement. A good illustration of this is, for instance, Grimes (2014, pp. 256–62) long list of (alleged) "misconceptualizations" of ritual space in binary oppositions or Alles' (2017) rejection of too rigid understandings of borders and boundaries that define ritual space. This has become even more pressing in view of the pluralization of societies in Northwestern Europe (e.g., Baumann 1992). Post and Molendijk (2007, p. 279) point at "the rise of increasingly multireligious urban ritual spaces"; an example *par excellence* of these ritual spaces is public cemeteries. In this article, we look at the "pluralistic communities of the dead" (Laqueur 2015, p. 294) in Maastricht's municipal cemetery Tongerseweg from its establishment in 1812 until today. What have been the dynamics of this ritual space in a period of over two centuries?

In the fields of religious studies and death studies, the "spatial turn" (Knott 2010) has become something of an orthodoxy. Academic scholars of death too have taken note of the concept of deathscapes (Kong 1999; Maddrell and Sidaway 2010) and understand cemeteries as sequestered places (Hüppi 1968; Rugg 2000; Sörries 2009). Much of the current literature refers to Foucault's 1967

<sup>1</sup> Regarding the historical material, we maintain, against some skeptical currents, the possibility of reconstructing the meanings of, and authorial intentions behind, historical sources, but we cannot embark on this discussion in the present context (see, e.g., Bevir 1999, ch. 2 for a robust defense).

talk (published much later as Foucault 1986) "Des espaces autres", in which he invents the category of "heterotopia". Heterotopias are "real places ... which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted" (Foucault 1986, p. 24).

Foucault reflects in the short text twice explicitly on cemeteries as instances of heterotopias. In the present context, we cannot review or engage the rich literature that comments on Foucault's sometimes cryptic remarks (but see, e.g., Dehaene and Cauter 2008; Spanu 2020). Suffice it to say that we see our effort here as a constructive engagement with Foucault's theory: our attempt to combine symbolic anthropological and historical research strategies dovetails with Foucault's attempt to see the category of the spatial as the sedimentation of the historical. Our effort here tries to mine the potential of Foucault's approach even where he (in our view) underutilizes the potential of the new category: most importantly, Foucault still talks of the cemetery as a unitary space, "where each family possesses its dark resting place" (Foucault 1986, p. 25). Such depictions of the cemetery as a depot of (bourgeois) family history may reflect iconic French cemeteries such as Père Lachaise. Against this background, it is, we tend to think, doubly interesting to analyze with the case study of Tongerseweg Maastricht, a cemetery that followed at its inception French regulations, and has over the course of its 200-year history reached a point where it has to grapple with cultural and legal changes in Dutch society that have ended cemeteries' monopoly as mandatory resting places, with all the reverberations of that change.

Foucault himself allows for heterotopias to juxtapose "several sites that are in themselves incompatible" (Foucault 1986, p. 25), but does not relate this in any way to cemeteries (his examples are the theatre, the cinema and the garden) and curiously he does not, for all his usual interest in power constellations, present cemeteries or, for that matter, other heterotopias as historically contingent ritual spaces that are coproduced by different actors.

For all the heuristic value of Foucault's concept of heterotopia, our approach highlights that the cemetery is less of a "counter site" but very much a continuation of the struggles, identity formations, appeals and positionings that characterize our society. Moreover, our approach highlights the internal divisions in the cemetery and the complex relationship with communities and groups.

Cemeteries are, in the words of Tarrés et al. (2018, p. 12), "spaces where communities can express their identities and their construction of otherness." The modern cemetery is a social and public arena in which identities can be claimed in a more or less ostensive way, subsumed, suppressed, denied or contested (see also Francis et al. 2005). The "new model of the cemetery" emerged at the end of the eighteenth and even more markedly in the beginning of the nineteenth century (Ariès 1985, p. 216; cf. Etlin 1984; Worpole 2003). Under the influence of the Enlightenment, mainly for hygienic reasons, the graveyards were to be located outside of the towns. The new cemeteries had a predetermined layout of grave plots. Some were even parklike with a geometrical ordering of space, dividing it up into distinctive grave fields (Kolnberger 2018; Heemels 2010, pp. 127–28). The future cemeteries envisioned in the eighteenth century took terribly long to materialize (Cappers 2012, p. 241). In the years just before the French Revolution, it followed from the plans that "the topography of the cemetery reproduces society as a whole," according to Ariès (Ariès [1977] 1981, p. 503). In his view, the "primary purpose of the cemetery is to present a microcosm of society" (Ariès [1977] 1981, p. 503).2

This idea of the modern cemetery as a "mirror image" of society has been taken up in the literature on cemeteries (e.g., Kamphuis 1999, passim; Sörries 2009, p. 177). Heemels (2006) examined this with regard to the main cemetery of Roermond, another town in the province of Limburg (Netherlands), for the period between 1870 and 1940. He found that in the predominantly Catholic town, the social stratification was clearly reflected in the locations of burials around 1880, but less so around 1930,

<sup>2</sup> Other phrases used by Ariès are that "the cemetery is the image of public society" (Ariès [1977] 1981, p. 503) and that "[t]he cemetery is a schematic image of the society" (Ariès [1977] 1981, p. 553).

partly because this was affected by the earlier purchase of family graves (Heemels 2006, pp. 154–58). Maastricht, with twice the number of inhabitants compared to Roermond, knew and knows greater diversity. As Francis et al. (2005, p. 195) note, "for members of minority and immigrant ethnic groups, cemeteries can play a significant role in creating a sense of community beyond the strictly familial.". We are interested in the question of how the cemetery inscribes the identities of various communities in spatial terms.

At the same time, we argue that the spatial order of a cemetery as a ritual space should not be considered as a mere reflection of society. Clifford Geertz (1973, pp. 93–5) distinction between a model *of* reality, in contrast to a model *for* reality is still helpful here. In other words, we need to distinguish what is from normative ideals, from what actors believe ought to be. How space in the cemetery is divided up in bounded areas can also speak to aspirations or to "an idealized conception of the social order" (Rugg 2013, p. 5) and feed back to the social relations of the living.

We want to make headway with an analysis of the complexities of such a process of "cocreation" of ritual space that gives full weight to the recognition of the cemetery being home to plural communities, whose diversity is reflected or enhanced, but also downplayed, mitigated or denied in the complex interactions that create the cemetery as a plural ritual space.

Those complexities have not been fully understood, even though helpful, partial observations have been noted in the literature. For instance, Sutherland (1978, p. 47) highlighted the interactive nature of the nexus between social organization and physical environment:

When we try to understand how societies use space, how they divide it up both conceptually and physically, we are looking at a combination of their form of social organization and their perception of the physical environment. Both of these elements, the social as well as the physical, will form a single interacting whole in which no one element can be said to determine the other.

Social identities or categories are marked by boundaries in physical space. They have to be understood in relative terms. The boundaries distinguishing one from the other are betwixt and between. They separate and connect at the same time. Because the boundaries need to stand out, being neither the one nor the other and both at once, and, therefore, are ambiguous, they happen to be addressed with ritual (Leach [1976] 1978, pp. 41–4). Identities are always relational: "the identity *is* in important senses the boundary" (Jenkins 2008, p. 142). Cemeteries do not passively "track" societal developments; they are constructs that have been and are continuously shaped, actively, on the basis of social, political and economic ideas and ideals at different levels of government and on the basis of the aspirations and ideals of their users. As a result of explicit or implicit contestation, the cemetery can be conceived of as an arena (Turner 1974, pp. 129–36). Cemeteries should be considered "temporal topographies" in which space and time coalesce (Nielsen 2017). "As liminal, betwixt-and-between sites where geography and chronology are reshaped and history is made spatial, cemeteries are places of social, religious and ethnic continuity and belonging" (Francis et al. 2005, p. 195). In order to tease out how cemeteries as ritual spaces produce communal identities, special attention should be given to processes of territorial segmentation.

The cemetery is often seen as the epitome of modernity. The churchyard, in contrast, has become associated with tradition. Rugg (2013, p. 9ff), however, argues that the binary opposition rests on stereotypes. She speaks of "false dichotomies" and relates that a churchyard can also be profitable and express social distinction, whereas a cemetery is not necessarily secular but can, in part or whole, be consecrated (ibidem). Although Rugg does not mention them, the stereotypical contrast fits well with Tönnies' notions of civil society (*Gesellschaft*) and community (*Gemeinschaft*), respectively (see Tönnies [1887] 2001). Cemetery Tongerseweg, as we will see, was also for the largest part consecrated.3

The present article demonstrates the need for and usefulness of a fresh look at the nexus of ritual space and cemeteries with a case study, the monumental Cemetery Tongerseweg in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Tongerseweg is a particularly rich case study due to it being a municipal, public cemetery in a culture defined by Roman Catholicism: the cemetery has its roots in the burial reforms ushered in under French rule during the Napoleonic era, is still in active use after two hundred years and currently undergoes a new wave of redevelopment. After a short overview of the history of the cemetery (3), we will analyze Cemetery Tongerseweg in four episodes (nineteenth century (4), early twentieth century (5), late twentieth century (6), future planning (7)) as a pluralistic ritual space that is continuously (re)constituted and (re)negotiated by administrators, users and their allies. We continue (8) with a discussion of the relationship between ritual spaces and communities in which we propose a new "Arena Model" of this dynamic relationship. We end with a brief reflection on the applicability of the Arena Model beyond the case of Maastricht (9).

## **3. Cemetery Tongerseweg, Maastricht**

Cemetery Tongerseweg was planned and realized in the early nineteenth century under French rule, in the name of the hygiene and societal reform. The decision to build a general cemetery to the west of the crowded medieval town center of Maastricht was made in 1805. The cemetery was to replace several cemeteries run by religious communities (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist, Jewish) in the old center and was to cater for the dead of all religions and social echelons (Minis 1994, 2012; Noten 1998). The French legal situation at the time was defined by a law from 1804, leaving municipalities the choice between separate cemeteries for the different religions or indeed a single communal one, with provisions for the different faiths. In that case, walls, hedges or canals should separate the different sections, which each should be given separate entrances.4 In Maastricht, this was seen as an opportunity to fuse the different cemeteries into a single one, following the French example (cf. Ariès [1977] 1981; Van Helsdingen 1987; for further details, see Cappers 2012, pp. 240, 253). In 1809, the site at the road towards Tongeren (in Belgium) was selected, then located in the village of Oud-Vroenhoven (Bruijnesteijn van Coppenraet and Denessen 2002, p. 21). The main, Catholic part of the cemetery was consecrated on the 27th of January 1812 by Hendrik Partouns, vicar of the Roman Catholic Saint-Nicholas Church (Minis 2012).

With growing needs, the cemetery was extended three times in the north-eastern direction, towards the city center of Maastricht (in 1857, 1910 and 1956; see Figure 1) and is today part of Maastricht's western perimeter. Each extension came with significant cemetery developments which related to changing religious, political, legal and economic circumstances. For instance, after the first extension, the Catholic dead could be buried in grave plots of three distinctive classes: the most expensive were alongside the pathways, whereas the cheapest plots were out of view and practically out of reach (Heemels 2010, p. 130). Furthermore, a Catholic chapel was added to the cemetery in 1885, founded by the Clarenboets family and representing the four Catholic parishes of Maastricht of that time (Van Raak 1995, p. 95). With the second extension, new grave fields were opened for Socialists and other "dissenters". The third extension drastically altered the plan of the cemetery; a new main entrance was created at its northern perimeter, next to parking lots along the street (Figure 1, C).

<sup>3</sup> Cappers (2012, p. 247) explains that due to the Napoleonic Concordat of 1801, his agreement with the pope, the Roman Catholic Church regained its status as a State Church. This was also relevant for Maastricht, which was incorporated into the French department Meuse-Inférieure between 1795 and 1814.

<sup>4</sup> *Décret impérial sur les sépultures* du 23 prairial an XII (12 June 1804), article 15: "Dans les communes où l'on professe plusieurs cultes, chaque culte doit avoir un lieu d'inhumation particulier, et dans le cas où il n'y aurait qu'un seul cimetière, on le partagera par des murs, des haies ou fossés, en autant de parties qu'il y a de cultes différents, avec une entrée particulière pour chacune, et en proportionnant cet espace au nombre habitants de chaque culte" (Fortuijn 1840, p. 309).

At present, over 125,000 people are buried in the over twelve hectares of consecrated and unconsecrated ground. As the numbers of traditional burials are decreasing, and the amount of people who opt for cremation is increasing, the story of the cemetery's development does not end here. A new business plan (Gemeente Maastricht 2018) prepares the cemetery for the future by making possible a fourth extension towards the Northwest. In the main section of this article, we will delve into these historical and future developments in more detail.

**Figure 1.** Schematic map of the development of Cemetery Tongerseweg (T.K.).
