Author: Dr. Holly Walters, a cultural anthropologist at Wellesley College, United States. Her ethnographic work focuses on religion, pilgrimage, and politics in the Nepal Himalayas. Her research also addresses material culture, divine personhood, and ritual practice throughout South Asia. Drawing on theoretical frameworks in religion, psychological, and linguistic anthropology, her current work focuses on the roles of sacred landscapes and digital/online religious revival in the relationships between Hindus, Buddhists, and Bonpos who venerate sacred ammonite fossils, called Shaligrams. Her recent published work on this topic is a book titled Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Holly is a regular contributor to TFS. You can follow Holly on her blog, Peregrination and on Twitter at @Manigarm.

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No one wanted my father in life. No one seems to want him in death either.

Like many children of alcoholic parents, I had a complicated relationship with my dad. On the one hand, he was a dedicated elementary school teacher who spent his entire career working with fifth and sixth graders. He loved old classic comedies like Laurel and Hardy, the Little Rascals, and the Marx Brothers, and was the first person to introduce me to the lifelong joy of Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Minnesota’s late-night public access cable in the early 1990s.

On the other hand, he was violent. Hours-long screaming at my mother would sometimes keep my brother and I up at night. The few times he hit her landed him in an Al-Anon (Alcoholics Anonymous) recovery center for a few months when I was three. But by the time I was about ten years old, he’d learned to focus his abuse to primarily verbal and emotional cruelty. Neglect and dismissal were also potent weapons in his arsenal because they got the point across without the potential damage to his reputation should our local police become involved.

So, when he died at the age of 75, from alcoholism-related dementia and liver failure, there wasn’t even a funeral. His then wife (he and my mother had been divorced for over two decades at this point) simply cremated him and sent everyone on our side of the family a photo of the plain wooden box he now resides in. The sum total of my inheritance from him, if one could call it that, was a small cardboard carton packed with various bits of paraphernalia that no one in his third wife’s family had any attachment to. A small coin collection, a photo album of my grandparents and great-grandparents from the 1950s and 60s, and a wood carving of a balding Norwegian man that was labeled as having been whittled by his mother’s grandfather, Tjostov Scheimo.

And then, a few months later, came another bequest. This time, via text message. No one wanted my father’s ashes. Certainly not his recent widow, who was already dating and looking to move on with a new partner. Certainly not my mother, who has been happily rid of him since 1998. And certainly not my brother, who had washed his hands of my father after having been ignored by him for years because he had not lived up to the classically masculine expectations of a first-born son. Furthermore, both of his parents (my paternal grandparents) have long since passed and his two siblings, a sister in Arizona and a brother in the Netherlands, were so far removed from the entire saga that they wanted nothing to do with the whole affair.

That left me. The daughter he didn’t exactly want either.

I mean this literally. It was my mother who wanted a second child and decided when that was to happen by throwing away her birth control pills and letting God and Nature take their respective courses. I’m told that this wasn’t exactly met with great enthusiasm. But at the time though, my father was too drunk to care all that much about a new baby and let my then-five-year-old brother name me Holly after his favorite TV character on Land of the Lost. Considering that my mother had planned to name me Katherine Rhiannon though, I suppose I ought to thank him for that one. If somewhat indirectly.

To my own surprise, I said yes. I would take his ashes. Though, this would mean that my father would be coming to visit me in Boston for the very first time via the care and generosity of the United States Postal Service. But what was I going to do with him then? This thing, this object, that simultaneously is, was, and used to be my father.

Object Persons

In a bit of cosmic irony, object-person ethnography happens to be a specialty of mine. In my first book, on sacred ammonite fossils of the Nepal Himalayas, I trace specific kinds of ritual stones as they become persons in their own right. Shaligrams, as they are called, are direct divine manifestations of various Hindu and Buddhist deities but they are also considered kin to the people and communities who care for them (Walters 2020 and 2022). This happens because Shaligram stones undergo the same processes that build kinship relations (birth, death, food sharing, tending to the sick, etc.) as humans do. So, in short, they become divine object-persons with lives and families of their own. Thus, my ethnographic subjects throughout the work are not only the ritual practitioners per se, but the deity-stones themselves.

But what about a box of ashes? What lay inside certainly used to be a person, but one who had now been reduced to an object. A person-object, if you will. Though, as historian Thomas Laqueur’s discussion in his book The Work of the Dead reminded me, it wouldn’t do to follow the advice of the Greek philosopher Diogenes and toss the whole thing over a wall for the “beasts to scavenge.” No culture, not even mine, is indifferent to human remains. Kin or foe, valorized or denied, dehumanized or objectified, we still have to come to some decision about what to do with what remains. And so, I am obliged, once more, to find a place for him in my life.

This, of course, got me thinking about the cremation box from an anthropological point of view (possibly as a coping mechanism, possibly just because it’s a habit) and I realized that object-ethnography wasn’t helping me to truly grapple with my thoughts as I had hoped it would. Arjun Appadurai’s The Social Life of Things was somewhat helpful; focusing more on how the aspects of economic exchange and the social circulation of objects reveals the ways in which people attribute value to things as well as how things give value to social relationships. But the urn wasn’t exactly a commodity, so a lot of the theory didn’t fit.

Most other object-ethnographers though tend to view object-ethnography through the lens of art curation more than they do economics. In this approach, material culture is understood as principally utilitarian in nature but for which its cultural context is important. The people (or “cultural groups” as they call them. See Moffett et. al. 2001) who produce such objects may be historical or they may still be within an existing society, but either way, ethnographic objects in these cases are still just things to be collected for the information they may hold about the people who made them. I’m sure my father’s ashes could do that for someone else eventually, some future archaeologist perhaps, but that’s not really something they could do for me.

But then, by chance, I happened across a chapter of the book The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings and Parerga by Johannes Grave called “Objects of Ethnography.” And, again, while this particular volume was primarily concerned with the meaning of art and artifacts, I noted this line:

Perhaps we should speak not of the ethnographic object but of the ethnographic fragment. Like the ruin, the ethnographic fragment is informed by the poetics of detachment. Detachment refers not only to the physical act of producing fragments but also to the detached attitude that makes the fragmentation and its appreciation possible.

pg. 18

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, after all, I guess. But the “poetics of detachment” resonated with me in a few ways. The detachments we had experienced while I was growing up. The detachments that came later when he remarried and stopped counting my brother and I among his number of children. The detachments that came when I got the phone call that he had passed away and all I did was nod, thank the voice on the other end, and then hang up to continue my conversation with the house painter. In that way, my familiar father has always been a stranger to me. And our life together, however brief, had only ever really been about disconnection. A slow, decades-long project of cutting the ties that culture and society had bound us up with at the start.

Now, there’s just one more connection to go. The object-relationship.

The Eulogy

During his “celebration of life” party the following summer, naturally I didn’t say a word of this. Among his recent widow’s family, church friends, and a few of my maternal uncles who felt obliged to attend, the event turned out to be more of an ersatz family reunion than a memorial. Hence, I thought it best to avoid speaking ill of the dead.

Instead, I told a story of pleasant memories. More specifically, the memories that I was sure other people would have had of my father: like fishing and playing in a band. And rightly so! All the while I was a kid, summer fishing trips to the local lakes and listening to the amplified boom of old-time rock and roll chords on the guitar defined the hazy days of my and my brother’s childhoods. Barring that, I expected relatives and neighbors would recall the iconic big red van he used to drive (when the 1983 Z-28 Camaro was safely packed away in the garage), his love of all things computer-related (Texas Instruments and Commodore 64 back then), or his more than thirty years as Mr. Harsdorf, the small-town school teacher.

The story that got the most attention I think, was the one that recalled a time when I was about 7 or 8 when my dad first showed me a reel of black and white Little Rascals episodes he’d saved from his own childhood; which was close to the time he let me listen to Axel’s Treehouse “A Night Before Christmas” (a 1938 parody of the famous poem). After that, I waxed on about Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton, and Victor Borge; soon to be combined with what I could remember of “Camp Grenada” (1963), “They’re Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haa” (1966), and the movies made by my all-time favorite comedian, Mel Brooks. Laughing, I explained how I still watch Young Frankenstein, Space Balls, and Blazing Saddles at least once a year. And, not to be missed, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Laugh-In, The Carol Burnett Show, and the old Saturday Night Live. All things that I loved because of him.

In the end then, it still came down to debt. So, maybe Appadurai was more relevant than I thought. Because I ended my eulogy with the statement that what I owed most to my dad was my sense of humor. A dry, irreverent, and sometimes impertinent attitude that has been both a way of navigating the world for me as well as a survival strategy that some people find surprising, while others find it subversive or even insolent. Either way, times might get tough, but I always have The Pink Panther to get me through as well as a near-encyclopedic recall of every ribald line Monty Python ever aired.

But, while everything I said while conversing with old friends and relatives was true, it was, without a doubt, just for them. It was for the living and the mourning. For the remembering. And not for the box of ashes with the scuffed-up maple finish that also happened to be in attendance. I had long ago promised that I would never speak to him again. Even during his memorial, I made good on that pledge.

Sweeping Up

Unfortunately, there’s no definitive end to this conundrum. No one wanted my father in life, and still, no one wants him in death. He’s currently being passed around between my former stepmother, my mother’s brothers, and a few cousins who come and go; all trying to decide on “what will be best.” They tell me that he’s supposed to make his way here eventually and, to be honest, I have no doubt that’s true. He’ll show up unexpectedly just as he always does.

I wonder what will be left of him by then.

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Bibliography

Appadurai, A. The Social Life of Things. 1986. Cambridge University Press.

Greenberg, J. and Mitchell, S. Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory. 1983. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Grave, J. Holm, C. Kobi, V. and van Eck, C. (eds.). The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings and Parerga. 2018. Sandstein Verlag.

Moffett, D., S. Hornbeck, and S. Mellor. 2001. Ethnographic objects. In Conservation resources for art and antiques. Washington Conservation Guild. 62-66.

Walters, H. Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas. 2020. Amsterdam University Press.

Walters, H. Cornerstones: Shaligrams as Kin. 2022. Journal of Religion. Vol. 102, No. 1. University of Chicago Press.