That which guides the analytic focus of this article is the social treatment given to the dead and forms of burial at the end of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th centuries. How can we read and understand social meanings and attitudes of a determined time from the system of funerary objects and mortuary practices and styles? When subjected to readings, the funerary devices and styles molded on the tombs allow for the translation not only of accommodations and equilibriums, but also tensions and significant changes in affective relations that the living establish with their dead.
funeral architecture; mortuary scenography; mortuary style; forms of sociability in cemeteries