An experimental grammar of relations with agentive dead

Vol. 31, Issue 1I, pp. 7-26, ISSN 2232-3716. DOI: https://10.5281/zenodo.17469369 Research article An experimental grammar of relations with agentive dead Marc-Antoine Berthod, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), ORCID: 0000-0002-3112-1556 Abstract The relationship between the living and the dead has been the subject of numerous studies, which show a wide variety of ways in which this relationship has developed over time and in different socio-cultural contexts. Whether through the materiality of the remains of the deceased or the entities they have become over time, such as spirits or other ghosts, these relationships are deployed in various directions depending on the purpose pursued by the living. This article looks at the agentive part of the dead that underlies these relationships and drives the living to act in one or other of these directions. To this end, it first examines the way in which the notion of agency is mobilized in certain theoretical and empirical approaches. It then sketches out an experimental grammar of relations between the living and the dead, a grammar that makes it possible to identify and situate the intervention of more or less specialized intermediaries, likely to make this agentive part of the dead effective. KEYWORDS: death, entities, corpses, relational agency, anthropology Introduction: The becoming of the dead The relationship between the living and the dead has always been a subject of universal reflection, nourishing numerous philosophical and religious traditions and underpinning a diversity of individual and collective practices relating to the existential questions raised by death (Davies, 2002). From the mid-19th century onwards, the social sciences and anthropology in particular began to develop and publish works that stood out for their scientific aim and knowledge of the field (Berthod, 2007a; 2005); empirical research has since documented, organized and theorized the social, cultural and political components of a society’s relationship with its dead (Engelke, 2019; Palgi & Abramovitch, © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 7 1984). The ambition is to grasp, on the one hand, the way in which individuals assign a place to the deceased on a symbolic and relational level—which is very often reflected in the transformation of the status of the dead into “ancestors” or any other “surviving entity” as well as in conceptions of the afterlife (Godelier, 2014)—and, on the other hand, the spatial, temporal and material fates of bodies and human remains: burial, graves, cemeteries, temporary or permanent funerary spaces (Laqueur, 2018). With regard to the first point, a large body of literature is now seeking to renew the understanding of bereavement experiences. It aims to demonstrate that links with the deceased do not have to be severed, but that they can continue in another form (Neimeyer, 2001), leading to a redefinition of the nature and meaning of relationships between the living and the dead. As for the second point, relating to the materialities of death, debates often focus on what the remains of the deceased make the living do, which invites us to reflect on the configurations of gestures and practices woven with the imaginaries of death (Mencej, 2021; Verdery, 1999). Basically, do the dead act on the living? If so, with what status? In this article, I propose to shed some light on these questions, by putting the notion of agency of the dead into perspective. Indeed, this notion—which generally denotes their capacity to act—seems to subsume both aspects in a good number of contemporary works: it operates paradigmatically, explicitly or implicitly, to determine not only the place of the dead in interactions between living people, but also the ontological quality of the deceased. To achieve this, I am going to draw on some research from psychology, philosophy and anthropology, some of which lies at the intersection of these disciplines. I also refer to the empirical studies carried out by various anthropologists and to those I have conducted—mainly in the French-speaking world, on my own and as part of a team—over the last twenty years, in particular on clairvoyance and mediumship practices, as well as on funerals and mourning, especially for the elderly . I begin by commenting on differ 1ent ways of conceiving and operationalizing the agency of the dead, which helps to mark out the perimeter of the diversity of relations between the living and the dead. Experimentally, I then propose an outline of a relational grammar between those two categories, while defining the role of certain actors in the implementation of this grammar. I would like to stress that this text does not present the results of a specific research project. In the form of an 1 essay, it seeks to thematize the notion of the agency of the dead, central to the conference The Agency of the Dead in the Lives of Individuals: Experience and Conceptualization held between August 30 and September 1, 2024 at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana, at which these reflections were presented in a communication. This was an opportunity to look back at various fieldwork I had carried out, in which the notion of agency had not been conceptualized as such, hence the present attempt to identify, in particular, the extent to which this notion could subsume a set of reflections engaged on the relations between the living and the dead in different empirical frameworks. © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 8 The aim of the article is to grasp schematically both the place of dead bodies and that of the entities that survive them in the relations between the living and the dead, in order to appreciate the anthropological significance of the latter’s agency. Maintaining relations with the dead Let us start with the approaches that, over the last thirty years or so, have supported the importance for bereaved people of continuing a relationship with the dead. In their article tracing Western theoretical conceptions of bereavement, Rothaupt and Becker (2007) describe the gradual change characterizing interpretations of bereavement and, by extension, the clinical and therapeutic approaches that follow. At a glance, we have moved on from the Freudian concept of detaching oneself from one’s ties with the deceased, through grief work to recognize and accept the loss, to the constructivist concept of preserving these same ties, which are bound to change over time; the aim, above all, is to give them meaning. In this new perspective, there are no longer any specific stages or tasks to complete in order to “end” a bereavement, but rather actions and conceptions that gradually converge to maintain a relationship once it has been marked by the death of one of the two parties. As Rothaupt and Becker point out, “clearly, the field is moving toward a more growth-oriented paradigm of bereavement” (2007, p. 9). My purpose here is not so much to comment on this theoretical change as to highlight one of its empirical consequences. Indeed, this change has led to a renewed look at a whole range of practices and concepts relating to death and dying. For example, impressions of being in the presence of the deceased, voices heard in the absence of a physical person or visions of the dead are no longer interpreted as mere fictions, potentially problematic or even pathological illusions. On the contrary, these elements are analyzed as a set of manifestations likely to testify to the continuity of a relationship transformed by death. This basically normalizes an important statistical reality within the general population, as Klugman (2006) has shown after documenting Post Death Contacts (PDC) through a study conducted via a telephone survey of 81 questions in Nevada, United States . These PDC correspond to the feeling that a given individual has that a dead per 2son is in contact with him or her, like Carol, a bereaved woman quoted by Klugman at the beginning of his article: I feel like my grandmother’s been following me around and helping to protect me. Because I’ve done some pretty stupid things in my life and some of the The study has some recruitment biases that limit the scope of the results. Of the 202 eligible completed surveys, 2 there is an overrepresentation of women (72.8%) and Caucasian respondents (79.7%). © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 9 things I should have almost died from, or should have died from and I didn’t. So I feel like she’s had a hand in that somehow. Either a voice or a force or something that, that pulled me away or that said something at the last minute or at the right moment and had me make another choice (2006, p. 249).! Taking up this quote, I would like to highlight two central points. First, the feeling of being in the presence of a dead person—“Carol is not alone”—denotes the possibility of a specific relationship. The dead’s presence is justified for a good reason, in this case for protection. Second, the direction of agency—not only the direction of action, but also and above all the direction of the solicitation for a relationship: “her grandmother reached out to her”. Based on numerous examples of this type, Klugman’s quantitative study categorizes the ways in which such relationships between the living and the dead are said to be established: through smells, sounds, actions, associations of ideas or coincidences. In particular, the study shows gender differences depending on the category: for example, hearing voices, a footstep or having the impression of being touched is more prevalent among women, while men tend to mention chemical odors. Beyond these gender variables—and variables relating to educational level or economic capacity could also be mentioned—it is worth noting that this type of study aims above all to formulate hypotheses on the strengthening and maintenance of the bond with the deceased, sometimes over many years. Thus, according to the theoretical approach of “continuing bonds”, it is above all such “inner relationships” that count and enable the interpretation of grief experiences. But if it is nothing more than a kind of inner dialogue between ourselves and our representation of a dead person, can we still speak of a “relationship”? Philosopher Kathrin Norlock, professor at the University of Trent in Canada, has attempted to answer this question from a feminist perspective without, however, placing her examples in their social or cultural context. In her article, she introduces an ethical perspective that translates as follows: “Yet it is difficult to find work interrelating the efforts of metaphysicians and ethicists, especially when attempting to settle questions in ethics, such as whether one can forgive the dead, or whether one must respect the wishes of the dead or honor their memories” (2016, p. 342). For the action of a single individual cannot attest to reciprocity or mutuality: is forgiveness granted to a dead person effective in this sense if it is not validated or simply heard by the latter? By drawing on relationships with the dead, Norlock aims to go beyond the representation of moral processes as solely internal mental representations of an individual. She supports the idea that relationships with the dead remain meaningful even if there is no longer any effective reciprocity. © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 10 In particular, it is the interactions and links established before the death that will nourish and maintain the imaginal contents of the grieving person. Norlock argues that these contents support a whole range of new actions and interactions undertaken by the latter: Much of what it means for a relationship to be more than merely imaginary, to be predicated on past reciprocity or responsive activities, will turn on the material facts of the memories and interactions that support the imaginal content, including previous reciprocity or mutuality in a relationship (2016, p. 344). She believes that the dead continue to exert an influence that, in a way, exceeds the internal dialogue between an individual and his or her representation of the dead. It is this influence that offers a way out of the notion that the relationship between the living and the dead is merely fictional: “I argue that ongoing activities of remembering and imagination inform the real relationship; in short, just because a relationship with the dead is imaginal, doesn’t mean it isn’t very real” (2016, p. 345). This argument reveals a conception of the agency of the dead that is not specific or intrinsic to them, says Norlock, but situational and contextual: “The imaginal relationship is the reason that the real relationship is valuable to the bereaved, because we build up and rest our actions and attitudes on the importance of our memories and thoughts about the dead” (2016, p. 355). In this sense, forgiving the dead is seen as an imaginal aspect of an ongoing relationship that carries real meaning. The (in)ability of the dead to act In other words, the dead have a certain consistency, insofar as they retain a relational capacity to act on the living. This concept echoes that recently developed by Gregory Delaplace (2024). In La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts [The voice of ghosts.!When the dead overflow, my translation], this French anthropologist draws on a large amount of empirical work on the treatment of dead bodies and relations with the deceased in different societies to establish an ethnography of relations between the dead and the living. Contrary to the presuppositions of a moral and social obligation to develop these relationships and maintain the memory of the deceased at all costs, he stresses the importance of forgetting them too: “It turns out that concern for the dead is above all, from one place or era to another, a protocol of voluntary amnesia, a deliberate and sometimes virtuoso effort at!‘demomeration’” (2024, p. 22 [my translation from French]). The key here is the ability of societies to organize, both in the funeral ritual involving the treatment of the remains and during the mourning process, a collective accompaniment of individual loss that oscillates between remembering and forgetting, a © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 11 capacity that can vary greatly from one pole to another depending on cultural and social contexts. By highlighting this double movement, Delaplace invites us to reflect on the status that the dead occupy in these relationships. He points out that the dead are generally perceived in a passive way; that they are like objects manipulated by the living according to their sole expectations and needs. Reversing this point of view, Delaplace instead wants to show the active face of the dead, by envisaging them as subjects: “Rather than simply questioning the variability of the ways in which the living care for their dead, I shall show what kind of beings and what kind of interlocutors the latter are encouraged to become by the former” (2024, p. 24 [my translation from French]). Without going so far as to attribute a subjectivity to the dead, this anthropologist wants to emphasize their active component, which expresses itself in various forms, particularly that of ghosts: “I propose not to exclude a priori the possibility that the dead can exist, as beings and as agents—in fact, as subjects—beyond the desires of the living to establish them as such” (2024, p. 28 [my translation from French]). As with Norlock (2016), however, the dead cannot exist autonomously: they are always dependent on the living and the dispositives within which they are instituted. The dead do, nevertheless, offer resistance. They can overflow the frameworks that contain them. In this case, they need to be “educated”, to use Delaplace’s expression. What I wish to emphasize with the references mobilized so far, is the contemporary convergence between a psychological approach centered on the relevance of “continuing bonds”, a philosophical argument defending the real signification of the relationships that the living maintain with the dead, and an anthropological posture that states—albeit in a conditional or even residual manner—a capacity for action on the part of the latter, at least some of them. This convergence is emblematically reflected in the work of Vinciane Despret (2015, 2023), who for several years has been interested in the effect of the dead, in their action. Here, agency is situated neither in the subjectivity of the mourner nor in the deceased entity as such, but in the actions and interactions between the living. In short, Despret is interested in the way in which the dead make the living do things, as developed in her work published in 2023 and entitled Les morts à l’œuvre [The Dead in Action; my translation from French]. In it, Despret analyzes the processes involved in the creation of artistic works commissioned by French and Belgian collectives who mobilize in the name of a deceased person, for example, to honor what that person might have become. It is a way of concretizing, through the intermediary of the living, aspirations expressed but interrupted too © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 12 quickly, or too soon. This is how some of the dead “insist”, to quote Despret, a term that here explicitly denotes a certain idea of the agency of the dead. This “insistence” translates into the mobilization of a plurality of individuals who attempt to bring about the imagined future of a dead person: “[…] it is undeniable that, for everyone involved in these stories, the dead still have their say, and their share of the work to do. By delegation, of course, but they are present because they are well represented” (Despret, 2023, p. 21 [my translation from French]). The unaccomplished achievements of some of the dead have thus become the task of those who survive them, as in the case of a brother of the deceased who loved fishing: “I don’t know what the right moment will be, but I know I’ll go fishing for him, whereas without him I won’t” (Despret, 2023, p. 56-57 [my translation from French]). In other words, the dead “push” the living to act and help shape the latter’s own accomplishments. And what about the body? While the place of the dead body is addressed in Delaplace, it disappears in Despret . 3 With the latter, the remains of the deceased are detached, or at least not thematized, from the entity that the deceased has become for the mourners, and which makes the living act. The agency of the dead therefore seems reduced to its symbolic and relational components; in other words, it does without bodies. However, it is possible to turn to another set of works to understand that the materiality of the deceased may just as well be the primary locus of this agency. Crossland (2017), for example, has analyzed the tendencies of forensic anthropology to consider human remains as “agentive”. From this perspective, a dead body ”speaks”, “testifies” or “bears witness”. With its ambiguous ontological status between “subject” and “object”, the dead body provides a productive site for thinking about how agency works in relation to people and things. Particularly in moments when the corpse is found outside of its proper place in the tomb, it seems to harbor some kind of problematic animacy that may be expressed as hauntings, dreams, or, as I show here, in ways that are channeled through a language of science and evidence (2017, p. 181). Delaplace (2024) refers in particular to the classic works of the anthropology of death, notably those of Robert 3 Hertz (1905-1906), which highlight the importance of the interweaving between the trajectories of the remains of the deceased, that of the entity they become – in this case, ancestralization – and that of mourning communities in comparing the funerary practices of different societies and continents; he also draws on his own ethnographic work conducted in Mongolia. While this articulation remains central to many funeral and mourning practices, it cannot always be deployed effectively, and therefore covers only part of the relationship between the living and the dead. © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 13 Here we find again the idea of both Delaplace and Despret that the dead overflow the contexts that ordinarily frame them, thus justifying the interest in mobilizing the notion of agency.! For Crossland, who bases her reflections on various theoretical and empirical works in forensic archaeology and anthropology, particularly in relation to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the rhetorical figure of the “speaking corpse” is very useful for establishing a certain legitimacy, or even scientific authority. Many forensic anthropologists claim that the bodies of the deceased never lie; that they convey the truth of the facts to be deciphered. In other words, it is a matter of having the dead speak as if they were speaking for themselves. As Crossland points out, the researcher occupies the position of an expert who restricts himself to deciphering things, while concealing the interpretative aspect that this deciphering entails. But this part cannot be completely erased because if the body has to speak, it always does so for a specific reason: to identify a violent act, for example. Basically, the active component of dead bodies—even if it appears metaphorically in scientific discourse—is merely the starting point or fulcrum for the establishment of facts which, like the administration of evidence to denounce a crime, always require a broader context: This is to move away from a view of agency as inhering only in the living, and instead to view it as a collaborative semiotic project that is also shaped and constrained by the dead. The goals of prosecution and justice cannot be carried out without them. The image of the testifying corpse recognizes these agentive dimensions (Crossland, 2017, p. 188). In this case, it is the body, rather than the entity that survives it, that becomes the vehicle and pivot of an active capacity that is actualized not only in relations between the living, but also in relations between the living and the dead. As Crossland again points out, to move away from a folk understanding of the agency of the dead and to fully engage with the ability of the dead to intervene in the lives of the living needs a theory of agency that is fundamentally relational, while also able to recognize the ways in which that relationality can be hewn and circumscribed (2017, p. 188). While these trends can be observed in forensic scientific discourse, they can also be found to a large extent in the empirical descriptions of anthropologists who have long been interested in the political uses of dead bodies. The work of Verdery (1999) is a perfect example, even if the term agency is not explicitly used. With a particular focus on the reburials of emblematic figures, especially patriotic and religious ones, in Eastern © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 14 European countries after the fall of the socialist regimes, Verdery shows how much “a body’s materiality can be critical to its symbolic efficacy” (1999, p. 27). By demanding the re-interment of certain dead, some of whom died centuries ago, a community engages in a power struggle between groups or factions that will make them speak for themselves. As Verdery suggests, these deaths “are thus excellent means for accumulating something essential to political transformations: symbolic capital. […] Dead bodies, in short, can be a site of political profit” (1999, p. 33). In so doing, the living confront moral, religious, nationalistic or patriotic arguments, attempting to endorse and articulate them with the personality of the deceased, which is at the same time revisited, sometimes thoroughly. Dead bodies—not only when they are in their whole form, but also when they are fragmented or even distributed in different places—become the pivot of a political performativity based on attempts to crystalize the personality or even the identity of the deceased, which in turn serve to promote and affirm a new moral order in a given society. As Verdery puts it, “[…] my argument throughout this book concerns how we might think of legitimation in less rationalistic and more suitably “cosmic” terms, showing it as rich, complex, and disputatious processes of political meaning-creation—that is, as politics animated” (1999, p. 52). In my opinion, this political performativity linked to the use of dead bodies can be compared to the generic concept of the agency of the dead mentioned in the former sections. Outline of a relational grammar between the living and the dead Contemporary reflections on the relationship between the living and the dead suggest that a certain capacity for action on the part of the former deserves to be taken into account in the study of these relationships from an anthropological point of view. Thus, it is no longer possible to associate the dead with fictitious dialogues of the entre-soi or with mere delusion; but neither is it necessary to assert that the dead have an existence of their own. In other words, the notion of agency is used to apprehend one or other facet of the relationship between the living and the dead, and to define its specificity. This remains possible wherever this part of agency is located, in the entity it represents or in the materiality of the human remains that underlie it, or even at the articulation of the two. For this agentive part is always conditioned by the actions and interactions between living individuals. That said, there is one aspect that remains little addressed in these different approaches: the direction of agency, as mentioned earlier with Klugman’s example, and its importance on the action of the individuals. Indeed, between the living and the dead—and it © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 15 decisions”. He also visits her grave regularly; however, these become less frequent with time. The relationship with the deceased then takes on a more relational dimension, and no longer needs to be so clearly articulated with the materiality of the body over time. In other words, the people interviewed keep the memory of the deceased alive in their domestic and intimate spaces, relying in particular on memory supports such as objects or clothes that once belonged to the deceased. Here, the agentive part of the deceased remains weakly present and little mobilized, especially for individuals whose social networks tend to shrink with advancing age; this part seems above all to be triggered in this inner relationship that the bereaved person maintains with the departed and, more rarely, with the people who have known and shared an affectionate bond with him or her. In these “ordinary” bereavement situations, intermediaries specializing in the management of relations between the living and the dead are usually not solicited, as long as they have been taken care of by the funeral directors and are given a final resting place. ! Conclusion!: Relations to the dead and anthropology of grief From these short illustrations, drawn from different fieldwork settings, the following two comments might finally be suggested: in many situations, a work of “demomeration” takes place, as previously alluded to with Delaplace (2024), so that relationships with the dead become distended and sometimes disappear or are simply no longer maintained (Varjakoski, 2019). In this case, the agentive part of the dead is not particularly important, as it is part of an “ordinary” form of the mourning experience; it arises occasionally, in the relationships that mourners may have with the deceased via personal memories, various material supports and objects, and through inner dialogues or interactions with people who also knew the deceased or shared emotional ties with him or her. In some cases, however, links are maintained well beyond affinity circles and “overflow” the usual institutional frameworks, so that the intervention of actors specialized in managing the agentive part of relations between the living and the dead is required. This agentive part becomes an issue that is then expressed in a more sustained way and with greater intensity. This is particularly apparent when the finality of these relationships emerges or imposes itself on a bereaved person or within a given collective. This purpose may vary according to the circumstances of the death or the location of the remains: to make reparation for a death perceived as unjust or violent; to identify a deceased person in order to return them to their loved ones and organize a funeral that has been prevented for a shorter or longer period of time; to give a place and meaning to the © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 22 ashes that are kept at home; to make contact with the spirit of a dead person in order to understand a grieving experience, etc. Depending on the interpretation of the relational purpose between the living and the dead, the actors mobilized will also vary. Moreover, the latter go through clearly differentiated channels of training or initiation, which highlights the way in which relations between the living and the dead are likely to be distributed and activated in a given socio-cultural space. Secondly, the further in time one moves away from the moment of death and the funeral, the more the agentive part that can be observed in relations between the living and the dead is likely to fragment between, on the one hand, the materiality of human remains and, on the other, the entity that these deceased have become. Perhaps this is what allows certain individuals to specialize and intervene at very specific times and according to very specific needs in these relationships between the living and the dead. From this perspective, these individuals can be distinguished not only according to the pivot of the agency of the dead, but also according to the direction of this agency, as I suggested schematically earlier. Or they could combine their skills. In conclusion, the establishment—albeit still provisional and experimental—of such a relational grammar between the living and the dead, articulated to the notion of agency in relation with the actors who epitomize it, might contribute to an anthropology of bereavement that combines the material and immaterial dimensions of death, in a more or less long-term temporal perspective. This approach also makes it possible to enlarge psychological conceptions, notably those of “continuing bonds”, which almost exclusively apprehend the experience of grief from the point of view of the person’s interiority. This approach also takes into account the sociological and cultural elements that mark the individual experience of mourning in its various forms. While this anthropology of bereavement is certainly still in the making, it is already widely perceptible in the numerous research studies that today refer to the notion of agency of the dead – even in the broadest sense – in their empirical work. AI disclaimer The author declares that no generative artificial intelligence was used in the preparation of this manuscript. © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 23 References Berthod, M.-A. (2005). La vie des morts dans le regard des anthropologues. Anthropos. Revue Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Linguistique, 100(2), 521-536. https://mort-anthropologie.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/La-vie-des-morts-Berthod.pdf Berthod, M.-A. (2007a). Mort et vif. Penser le statut paradoxal des défunts. In Chappaz S., Monsutti A., & Schinz O. (Eds.), Entre ordre et subversion. Logiques, alternatives, écarts, paradoxes. (pp. 189-201). Karthala. https://mort-anthropologie.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Mort-et-vif-Berthod.pdf Berthod, M.-A. (2007b). Doutes, croyances et divination. Une étude anthropologique de l’expérience divinatoire en Suisse romande. Antipodes. https://doi.org/10.4000/ assr.18743 Berthod, M.-A. (2007c). Deviner, diagnostiquer, prédire: La désarmante incertitude des devins. In Rossi I. (Ed.), Prévoir et prédire la maladie. De la divination au pronostic (pp. 61-78).!Aux Lieux d’Etre. https://mort-anthropologie.com/wp-content/uploads/ 2018/06/La-désarmante-incertitude-des-devins-Berthod.pdf Berthod, M.-A. (2015). L’indiscipline conceptuelle des rites: Enjeux interprétatifs en thanatologie. In Jeffrey D. & Cardita A. (Eds.), La fabrication des rites (pp. 29-48). Presses de l’Université Laval.! Bocquentin, F., Kacki, S., Buquet-Marcon, C., Schotsmans, E.,! Goudiaby, H., &!Noûs, C. (2022). Appréhender la frontière entre vivants et morts dans l’archéo-anthropologie. Bulletins et mémoires de la société d’anthropologie de Paris, 34(1), 4-7. https:// doi.org/10.4000/bmsap.9878! Charrier, P., & Clavandier, G. (2019). Ephemeral materiality: a place for lifeless infants in cemeteries.!Mortality,!24(2), 193–211. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13576275.2019.1585785 Clavandier, G. (2022). From technical measures to moral obligations: The management and fate of fragmented human remains following disasters. The case of a plane crash in France in 2015. Death Studies, 47(6), 655-665. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/07481187.2022.2131050 Crossland, Z. (2017). The Agency of the Dead. In Enfield, N. J. & Kockelman, P. (Eds.), Distributed Agency (pp. 181-190). Oxford University Press. Cuchet, G., Laubry, N., & Lauwers, M. (Eds.) (2023). Transitions funéraires en Occident. Une histoire des relations entre morts et vivants de l’Antiquité à nos jours. École française de Rome.! De Certeau, M. (2016). La possession de Loudun. Payot.! Davies, D. (2002). Death, Ritual and Belief. Continuum.! Délano, A., & Nienass, B. (2016). Introduction: Borders and the Politics of Mourning. Social Research, 83(2), XIX-XXXI. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2016.0028 Delaplace, G. (2024). La voix des fantômes. Quand débordent les morts. Seuil. © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 24 Despret, V. (2015). Au bonheur des morts. La Découverte. Despret, V. (2023). Les morts à l’œuvre. La Découverte. Engelke, M. (2019). The Anthropology of Death Revisited. Annual Review of Anthropology, 48, 29-44. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011420 Godelier, M. (dir.) (2014). La mort et ses au-delà. CNRS éditions. Hertz, R. (1905-1906). Contribution à une étude sur la représentation collective de la mort. L’Année sociologique, 10, 48-137.!https://anthropomada.com/bibliotheque/ HERTZ-Robert.pdf Kanerva, K., & Koski, K. (2019). Beings of many kinds – introduction for the theme issue “undead”. Thanatos, 8(1), 1-28. https://journal.fi/thanatos/issue/view/10527 Klugman, C. (2006). Dead men talking!: Evidence of post death contact and continuing bonds. Omega, 53(3), 249-262. https://doi.org/10.2190/40UP-PKC5-D4RV-E1QV Kobelinsky, C., Furri, F., & Noûs, C. (2021). The place of the dead in the Mediterranean. A Sicilian experience. Migration Letters, 18(6), 711-719. https://migrationletters.- com/index.php/ml/article/view/1243/1290 Laqueur, T. (2018). The work of the dead. A cultural history of mortal remains. Princeton University Press.! Maddrell, A. (2013). Living with the deceased: Absence, presence and absence-presence. Cultural geographies, 20(4), 501-522. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013482806 ! Mathijssen, B. (2017) The ambiguity of human ashes: Exploring encounters with cremated remains in the Netherlands. Death Studies, 41(1), 34-41. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/07481187.2016.1257882 Mencej, M. (2021). The Dead, the war, and ethnic identity: Ghost narratives in post-war Srebrenica. Folklore, 132, 412-433. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/0015587X.2021.1905380 Neimeyer, R. A. (2001). Meaning reconstruction and the experience of loss. American Psychological Association. Norlock, K. J. (2017). Real (and) imaginal relationships with the dead. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 51, 341-356. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-016-9573-6 Palgi, P., & Abramovitch, H. (1984). Death: A cross-cultural perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology, 13, 385-417. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2155675?origin=JSTORpdf Pillonel, A., & Berthod, M.-A. (submitted). The comfort of standardisation in the face of funeral pluralism. The oldest-old individual organising funerals in a public funeral centre. Rothaupt, J., & Becker, K. (2007). A Literature review of Western bereavement theory: From decathecting to continuing bonds. The Family Journal: Counseling and Therapy for Couples and Families, 15(1), 6-15. https://doi.org/10.1177/1066480706294031 ! © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 25 Saona, M. (2022). Carrying L’Intrus: The transport-station of an organ-transplant. Psychoanalysis, culture and society, 27, 546-562. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-022-00325w Varjakoski, H. (2019). Death, loved ones and relationality: Continuities and discontinuities. Mortality, 24(4), 418-430. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2018.1563056 ! Verdery, K. (1999). The political lives of dead bodies. Reburial and postsocialist change. Columbia University Press.! Povzetek Odnos med živimi in mrtvimi je bil predmet številnih raziskav, ki kažejo na raznovrstnost razvoja tega odnosa skozi čas in v različnih družbeno-kulturnih kontekstih. Naj gre za materialnost ostankov pokojnih ali za entitete, v katere so se sčasoma spremenili (kot so duhovi ali druge prikazni) – ti odnosi se razvijajo v različne smeri, odvisno od namena, ki ga zasledujejo živi. Ta članek obravnava tvornostno vlogo mrtvih, ki je osnova teh odnosov in spodbuja žive, da delujejo v eni ali drugi smeri. V ta namen najprej preuči, na kakšen način se pojem tvornosti uporablja v nekaterih teoretičnih in empiričnih pristopih. Nato nakazuje eksperimentalno slovnico odnosov med živimi in mrtvimi; slovnico, ki omogoča prepoznavanje in umeščanje bolj ali manj specializiranih posrednikov, ki učinkujejo na ta tvornostni del mrtvih. KLJUČNE BESEDE: smrt, entitete, trupla, relacijska tvornost, antropologija CORRESPONDENCE: Marc-Antoine Berthod, Faculty of Social Work Lausanne, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), Chemin des Abeilles 14, 1010 Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: mar[email protected] © Slovene Anthropological Society 2025 26