“If no one grieves, no one will remember”: Cultural palimpsests and the creation of social ties through rituals

Classic sociological theories hold that rituals offer opportunities for community integration and cohesion. Rituals allow people to come together across many differences and experience similar thoughts and feelings. Death rituals raise existential questions about the purpose of society and generally foster preexisting social ties. This paper examines the efforts of a US community of volunteers who gather to bury unclaimed, or “abandoned,” babies. Drawing on ethnographic research over a two-year period, we advance the concept of cultural palimpsest to capture the process by which a gathering of strangers turns a potentially divisive political issue in to a community forming event. We find that in their efforts to mourn babies to whom they have no connection, these volunteers temporarily foster new social bonds that allow them to work through unresolved grief. Similar processes of ritualistically inverting social meanings occur whenever people gather to turn potentially negative into group forming events.