Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants:
The dwelling is also a constitutive part of the relationship between past and present generations, between the living and the dead. Something handed on, or hoped to be handed on, something to be received. When the dead have a foundational role in human life, as is the case with peasants, then the house takes on a cosmological significance. But the house remains eminently material at the same time. There is also that other house, the one where the dead dwell, the graveyard. So, the place of burial is yet another dwelling place in the peasant village, one always of the greatest importance. The word human comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth or ground. We are made from the earth to which we will return. The place of inhumation is, or at least was, as surely as the dwelling house, an indication of the sense of having a place in the world, of taking possession of a place and securing it as one's own.
The dwelling is also a constitutive part of the relationship between past and present generations, between the living and the dead. Something handed on, or hoped to be handed on, something to be received. When the dead have a foundational role in human life, as is the case with peasants, then the house takes on a cosmological significance. But the house remains eminently material at the same time. There is also that other house, the one where the dead dwell, the graveyard. So, the place of burial is yet another dwelling place in the peasant village, one always of the greatest importance. The word human comes from the Latin word humus, meaning earth or ground. We are made from the earth to which we will return. The place of inhumation is, or at least was, as surely as the dwelling house, an indication of the sense of having a place in the world, of taking possession of a place and securing it as one's own.
There is a story by Pirandello in which he refers to a Sicilian baron who refused to let the peasants bury their dead on his land, because he knew that if they did they would come to regard it as their own by natural right - to regard it as their house. The peasants who oppose him, even though the land is in the baron's ownership, in fact regard the land as already theirs, the dead needing to be buried on 'our land,’ so that the living can be near them in order that they may be watched over and cared for. In times not so far in the past, where land was owned the custom was that the dead be buried there and not in a cemetery. At the same time as the living watch over the dead, the dead watch over and care for the living; in Corsican culture the dead elders of the house retain in death the authority they once possessed in life.
