Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
Bettersten Wade’s search for her adult son ended when she discovered that an officer had run him over — and without telling her, authorities buried him in a pauper’s field.
This behavior is cowardly and disgusting. There’s no excuse.
Also, I didn’t realize we still had “pauper’s fields.” The repeated use of the word “pauper” in this article makes me really uncomfortable. I’m not from the south, so maybe it’s a regional thing? But that term strikes me as antiquated and dehumanizing.
Just curious what word would you use? Those without wealth or status have always been dehumanized regardless of the terms used for them.
As for right or wrong, pauper’s fields will always be a thing as long as there are poor and indigent people. Have you ever wondered what happens to the homeless when they die? Many end up unified in death. So there is no way to inform family if they ever have any.
I believe that it is much more common to cremate unclaimed deceased then bury them these days. Even still the ashes are not carefully interred, but just spread out on a common site.
That makes sense, and I totally understand the utility of having municipal graves for unclaimed remains. I guess I would just call them that: unclaimed or unrepresented remains. I’m not saying “pauper” is inherently bigoted or anything, it just took me by surprise and struck me as a dehumanizing label that fits better in Medieval England. I don’t think we would call someone a pauper to their face in 2023, so I’m not sure why we’d use it to refer to their remains.
Yeah I prefer the older term “potter’s field” personally.
I don’t disagree with you but honestly I much more have a problem with the need for a place like this than whatever people feel comfortable calling it. Part of me would much prefer an uncomfortable term. It is an uncomfortable practice, a nicer name will not change that.
I don’t think their issue is with the practice, just the term used. It’s like saying “poor people cemetery”, kinda distasteful sounding. They could just call it something else with less stigma attached than the term “pauper”, like calling it a public graveyard. Or just use the older term “potter’s field”.
I actually disagree with the practice not the name. There is a long history of giving nice names to distasteful practices to hide their true nature. In a way distasteful names are at least honest.
I’m not sure what alternatives you think we should have for burying unidentified people. I could see an argument to be made about how poor people shouldn’t have to be relegated to certain types of cemeteries or graves just because they can’t afford “proper” ones. But generally even if you took away cost people usually choose where they want to be buried based on various factors if possible, or their families do for them if they haven’t, so you need to have a system for people whose choice and affiliations are otherwise unknown. The original intent of potter’s fields was for burying strangers and unknown people, and that’s ideally what the practice should be more about rather than a class thing imo. And in that case, it’s more of a necessary practice than anything else, and the dead deserve to be referred to with dignity. It’s not like they’re the ones who chose to be buried there, yet they bear the brunt of the term “pauper”, giving an “uncomfortable name to an uncomfortable practice” is a nice idea and all but the only people who suffer for it are the people being buried there, not the ones doing the burying. So it just seems rather mean and unnecessary. The term isn’t a commentary on the practice, it’s a commentary on the people it’s being practiced on, who arguably deserve to be treated better than that.
People like doing this, but the stigma remains with the thing, not the word. Until attitudes change, changing the word does nothing.
That’s not really how it works in every case. Take slurs for example, the stigma is very much in the word, and referring to people by the terms they prefer to be referred by instead of a slur definitely does more than nothing. There’s a reason why many groups and companies like to rebrand after a particularly devastating scandal, or why certain communities 9r ideologies use alternative terms for themselves, like fascists calling themselves identitarians, and so on. Words can have more influence on how we perceive something than you think.