Picture me dead. Moral choices reimagined

Extract

Shortly before her death, my grandmother expressed a strongly felt sentiment not to lie in the family tomb next to her sister-in-law. It was not quite clear what was to be done with the bones of the woman who by then had occupied the space next to her brother, my grandfather, for some five years. My mother resolved the issue by depositing the urn with my grandmother's ashes on the other side of my grandfather's coffin, stating matter-of-factly, ‘We are not about to toss the aunt out, and we will certainly not build a new tomb.’ Acting in a relational web of moral obligations and duties as a good daughter, my mother also proceeded as a rational modern individual in the universe of limited choices in Eastern Europe. Cremation replaced interment, therefore ‘lying next to’ was no longer an issue in a literal sense. At the same time, the filial duty of a proper burial in the family tomb was conducted with all the necessary ritual, wide kin in attendance. This incident came to my mind when reading about the archaeological dilemma of mortuary analysis described in Voutsaki's essay: to what extent do burials express the will, agency and station in life of the deceased as opposed to those of the wider kin relations responsible for burying them? Do the actions that archaeologists interpret on the basis of burials derive from choices by individual, cognizant agents, or do they represent a moral world in which adherence to certain practices defines a ‘good person’? I wish to address two issues from this presentation, one more philosophical and the other directly addressing the archaeological record of the Mycenaeans. First, I will consider whether the shift from agency to personhood (and back) proposed in this essay solves interpretive problems created by the recent embrace of agency. Second, I am intrigued by the question that Voutsaki poses about why images appear in this period, as it seems to me that a potential answer may lie in her detailed exposition of moral theory if one looks carefully, or extends it slightly beyond the intended meaning.