Transgressing boundaries of grievability: Ambiguous emotions at pet cemeteries

Companion animals are striking in their ambiguity. Bred on an industrial scale, bought, sold and sometimes abandoned, they are also seen as beloved family members and friends. They belong to the cultural realm, mostly live in the home, have individual names and, instead of being eaten, receive caring attention from humans (Howell, 2018). They participate in their owners’ everyday lives and various joint activities. Nevertheless, they also belong to the realm of nature, the non-human world whose ontology and epistemology have been defined for centuries by the scientific discourses of biology. Companion animals are liminal creatures: they pass between and blur binary opposites such as nature and culture, object and subject, and commodity and companion (Sanders, 1995). As Brandes (2009, 100) argues, however, “it is in the domain of death [...] that the human–animal bond often manifests itself most overtly.” It is when we lose a pet that we understand how the creature has made us who we are (Redmalm, 2015; Schuurman, 2017). Dell’Aversano (2010, 104) points out that “animals make the presence of death much more intensely and frequently perceptible”. Living with companion animals brings a heightened sense of the fragility of life. Yet, bereaved pet owners are often wary about expressing their grief in fear of social sanctions – of being dismissed as overly sentimental, or of anthropomorphizing their pets (Woods, 2000; Morley and Fook, 2005). According to Butler (2009), publicly grieving beings for which grief is not normally expressed openly makes it possible to redefine the limits of grievability and grant these beings 'humanity'. By extension, grief for non-human animals can challenge and modify the normative frameworks that define which lives matter (Redmalm, 2015). The present study focuses on public performance of grief for nonhuman animals in pet cemeteries – spaces that are devoted to the mourning of animal death. Our interest is in what it means to grieve an ambiguous being, or a liminal creature. Drawing on photographic material, we explore the visible traces of mourning in pet cemeteries in Scandinavia (Finland and Sweden), where cats, dogs, guinea pigs, hamsters, birds, rabbits, horses and other animals lie buried. We use these traces, the ‘emotional sedimentation’ (Hallam and Hockey, 2001), to theorize the implication of pet cemeteries as spaces for the negotiation of grievability and for working the boundary between humans and animals. Pet cemeteries are growing in popularity; however, previous studies on pet cemeteries have been sparse, and viewpoints have been mostly historical (Brandes, 2009; Howell, 2002; Kean, 2013; Thorsen, 2001), although a few studies focus on contemporary pet cemeteries (Chalfen, 2003; Witt, 2003; Pręgowski, 2016). Many of the latter are rather descriptive in style, and what is lacking is a more thorough theoretical consideration of what it means that some animals are buried in specific spaces devoted to animal death. Thus, as Kean (2013) suggests, pet cemeteries might be viewed as places worth thinking of more carefully. Pet cemeteries are ‘good to think with’ (cf. Fudge, 2008) because public expressions of grief for beings existing at the limits of grievability can shed light on the normative framework that allows for some lives to be grieved, while other lives are automatically rendered ungrievable – such as wild animals as well as animals in the food and clothing industry. Theoretically, the paper derives from both death studies and the growing field of animal geographies. Emerging in the mid-nineties (Wolch and Emel, 1995), the new animal geographies “allow us a privileged viewpoint on the nature of culture and the culture of nature” (Howell, 2002, 6). The field has gained increasing attention (see Buller, 2014), with several volumes published (e.g. Urbanik, 2012; Gillespie and Collard, 2015; Nyman and Schuurman, 2016a; Wilcox and Rutherford, 2018; Bull et al., 2018). Recent work has focused on human–animal encounters as spatially situated (Buller, 2014), highlighting the fact that the site of the encounter, the space where it takes place, influences the ways in which animals are understood and appreciated. Attention has been paid to the embodiment of human–animal relationality and, especially, the agency of animals as they co-produce space with – or without – humans (Bull and Holmberg, 2018). Informed by work conducted within studies of the geography of death (Hallam and Hockey, 2001; Desmond, 2016; Maddrell, 2016; Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010; Stevenson et al., 2016), we approach pet cemeteries as 'deathscapes': material and metaphorical places and spaces that are “associated with death and for the dead” and that are