Civic Merit As a Symbolic Boundary Affecting the Distribution of Monumental Value
Selected artefacts are conserved as if they were to be maintained “for eternity”. Eternity is here a normative horizon which frames action on the selected artefacts, placing them in the category of “remarkable” artefacts belonging to a local-national “funerary heritage”. This also has an effect on the artefacts that are excluded from this category, treated as if they were vowed to disappear, thus on the normative horizon of erasure.
The notion of merit acts here as a symbolic border (Lamont et al., 2015) that allows for these distinctions to be made and to evolve depending on the context and actors implicated in evaluation processes. Their “merit” does not solely depend on an aesthetic-architectural evaluation, but also refers to the social status of the persons related to their history. This can be the artists that have produced them or the families they were made for. The figures of “benefactors of the Nation” or of “local notables” emerge in the two countries as two different figures which are central to the distribution of merit. Objects related to their memory are treated as “indivisible”, a religious category used in secularized contexts to justify (Boltanski and Thevenot, 1991) the exceptional treatments they undergo (study, conservation, valorization).
This presentation will discuss how this symbolic boundary participates in the (re)production of status hierarchies and their effects on social and monumental time (Herzfeld, 1991) as analyzed through a corpus of official documents and interviews on the requalification/disqualification procedures which establish these different treatments in the two cemeteries.