Last rites buried by the numbers

Death, argues the eminent sociologist and theologian Douglas Davies in this thoughtful and at times provocative book, provides a unique window on social change. Nothing challenges a person's belief systems and rituals quite like the realisation of one's (always potentially imminent) mortality. If this is a difficult subject for many people, it is more so for politicians, evident in the Government's nervousness about legislating on the re-use of graves (which is common in many other parts of Europe) as perhaps the only solution to the crisis facing historic and contemporary cemeteries in Britain.

Apprehensions about death and bodily disposal today are shaped less by religious beliefs than by brute demographics. A number of traditional rites and thresholds have been displaced or sundered. The family mausoleum or shared grave is no longer found in an age of high divorce rates and an assumed preference for individual cremation. The trauma of early parental death has been displaced by the trauma of parental separation; indeed, more and more elderly people are having to cope with looking after even older surviving parents. I recently visited an elderly relative in a nursing home where both a mother and one of her ageing children were residing.

Traditional rites of passage are being stretched or disordered, so perhaps it is no wonder that modern societies are in an eschatological fix. Gone, too, for many is the "sure and certain hope of resurrection". Contemporary forms of liberal Christianity and Judaism have increasingly dispensed with a belief in the afterlife, which causes Davies to speculate whether hope - that irreducible attribute of human culture - is indeed hardwired into the human psyche.

It is in such explorations that the author reveals himself to be a sensitive and humane guide, in a book that ought to fascinate anyone interested in the existential conundrum of human mortality. The rationality of cremation in the 20th century - with the UK having one of the highest rates in the world - is now being questioned for providing insufficient ritual to create a public culture of architecture, memory and place. The private disposal of cremated remains - whether by scattering them on football pitches or downland paths, or by dividing them up between the family to bury in gardens - leaves no historical traces. Davies believes that natural burial does at least subscribe to a new public value system - ecology - which is shaping up to be a new version of redemptive universalist belief.

Worse than death, in modern societies, is the waiting for death that an extended ageing process brings. In the most pessimistic section of the book, Davies yokes together the ideas of Marc Augé, a French anthropologist, on the "non-places" of modernity, whose defining characteristics now fit most old people's homes, with Francis Fukuyama's speculations on the world's biotechnologically determined post-human future. Davies conjures up a picture of increasing misery among a growing number of the dependent elderly who want to die but cannot. Research published by the UK Government actuary's department in March 2005 found that most Britons now underestimate their own longevity.

The normative sociological view that Davies espouses greatly aids the structural coherence of the "brief history" format, in which this book is one of a series. The major weakness of this approach is that it does not investigate what is happening at the margins of contemporary funerary culture. The differences in European burial rites and practices to be found in a second-generation Kurdish family living in Stockholm, for example, and those of an environmental activist in rural Wales, might now be as great as those between continents or historical eras.

Ken Worpole's most recent book is Last Landscapes: The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West .