Sacks and the city: Secondary burials in Naples and New York

The following essay tries to compare two quite distinct ways to integrate human remains meaningfully into a city's auto-representation by tentatively applying the concept of 'secondary burial,' as Robert Hertz described it in his famous essay from 1916. It, therefore, roughly reconstructs this concept and places it in relation to time and space; it then gives an account of the Neapolitan cult of the anonymous dead and how it is linked to ideas of the good life of the city, while in a third step, it tries to ask if something similar can be said about the way a decisively modern (although in part segmentary) society deals with the death of people who equally belong to a marginal group. Drawing the conclusion, the essay highlights a few aspects which could be of importance in the context of 'urban ethics.'