Right Place, Right Behaviour: Deathscapes as a Moral Space in the Context of Alternative Spirituality in Slovakia

The paper addresses spiritual ideas and practices associated with the dead in the urban environment in Slovakia, a country with a predominantly Christian population, in relation to the transformation of cultural and religious worldviews which took place there in the 1990s. I consider how individuals who experienced the change of the political regime as adults and adopted new spiritual ideas reflect on the transformation of their worldviews, in particular in relation to the dead. I focus on the role of the space where the living and the dead act and communicate. In interpreting their accounts, I employ Mary Douglas’ ideas about cosmology as a moral order, combining them with the approach to the study of human cognition known as distributed cognition. I also use the term deathscape, understood as the material expression in the landscape of practices relating to death. I argue that my interlocutors’ experiences with the dead reflect their individualities as well as their specific life trajectories, but despite their diversities, they all share a moral dimension manifested through spatiality. In this, the idea of the universal energy characteristic of alternative spiritual currents is essential, as it unites the living and the dead in one community. This allows the reciprocal interaction of the two worlds and produces a feeling of the continual presence of the dead in the lives of the living. Thus, all accounts point to the same idea: the dead are part of society.