Page - 62 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

62 | Anna-Katharina Höpflinger www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 57–64 and bones. While the freshly deceased person is gendered, the collective of the older mortal remains is exhibited in a non-gendered way, communicating the social equal- ity (with regard to age, gender, social standing, wealth etc.) of the mortal remains.15 in contrast to the individually exhibited dead bodies, the skull collections in ossu- ary chapels can visually emphasise a gender equality. The skulls are recognisable as woman, man, boy or girl only for experts or if they are painted with the names of the deceased. Accordingly, specific religious contexts, as I would argue, overcome socially communicated gender concepts. The lifeless body is still gendered if the fo- cus remains upon the individual in a personal manner, but gender becomes irrelevant when the focus is placed more on the collective, as in the case of the ossuaries, where the deceased are thought of as poor souls for whom the living should pray. The idea of the poor souls in purgatory was linked at least until the beginning of the 20th cen- tury to a memento mori demand for the living: They should live their life – so the emic perspective – in a religiously correct way. Gender separations seem to be less impor- tant than the normative guidelines to live a proper religious lives that the masses of bones communicate visually. To summarise this second observation: the argument 15 We can find memento mori slogans referring to this social equality in the ossuaries of alvaschein/Mistail (Ch), Naters (Ch), rickenbach (Ch), Villmergen (Ch) and Wildschönau-Oberau (aT). Fig. 4: The catafalque for the display of the dead bodies stands in front of the non-gendered collection of bones from past generations. Ossuary of Steinen (CH 2014) © Yves Müller.