Reflections from Six Feet Under the Field: Dead Bodies in the Classroom

Ellen Stroud

MY STUDENTS laugh at death. They find it funny how frequently I work dying and dead bodies into our discussions, and are amused by my apparent obsession with body disposal and decay. In my urban environments class, we read about cemeteries and morgues; in my U.S. environmental history survey, we study epidemics and mortality rates; we even work death into my water history course, looking at the problem of corpse disposal after catastrophic floods. My students and I approach these gruesome topics with glee, because they ground us, quite literally, in environmental history. The role of live humans in environmental history is often unclear; dead people, by contrast, are dirt.	1
It is in death that human bodies most clearly become components of their environments—as organic material, as commodities, and as health hazards. Dead bodies are material, organic things as well as people, and as things, they have been a resource for business entrepreneurs, a focus of environmental health concerns, and a subject of political conflicts over the location of burial sites. In figuring out how to tell the environmental history of a dead body, my students and I move closer to figuring out what "environmental history" is and should be.1	2
The undergraduates who sign up for my courses at Oberlin College usually arrive in the classroom quite confident that they already know what environmental history is. Until I begin confusing them, they are sure that environmental history is the history of the environmental movement. Or the history of environmental politics. Or perhaps more broadly, the history of bad things people have done to nature, and the noble few who have tried to make them stop. Maybe, if pressed, my students would include histories of natural things in their definitions: trees, rivers, wolves.	3
Figure 1. Symbols of Birth and Death This photograph was taken in an old Mennonite cemetery in Philadelphia in the summer of 2002. A year later, the baby swing was still hanging from the tree amidst the gravestones, most of which are 150 to 200 years old. Photograph by William H. Stroud, Penguin Photo, Inc.
But environmental history is more than that. At its best, it helps us understand the interactions between the natural and the social worlds, and in so doing, illuminates aspects of political, social, and economic history that we otherwise would not have seen and perhaps would not have thought to look for. How we go about doing that is not always clear, which is why my students get confused on our first day of class, and if I'm lucky, stay that way through midterms. Our central puzzle in class is definitional: What are we studying?	. . .