Juliette Cazes, the thanatologist who lifts the veil of death

The YouTube channel, like Juliette Cazes’ Twitter account, refers to an imaginary world of ghosts and souls, strange funeral rites and missing tombs, parchments and shadows. Our deep beliefs are awakened, our imagination skips a beat and that’s normal, explains the researcher with a smile: ” Studying death drains the imagination. Personally, I never get bored. This is a subject that I do not find at all sad, on the contrary. “But behind this varnish also hides a background work on funeral rituals and death in general, carried out by a documented, ethical and didactic thanatologist. At 32, she accompanies the videos of his channel Le Bizarreumdevoted to funeral rites and the relationship to death all over the world for the greatest number.

A life turned towards death

Juliette Cazes is not an upstart. Funeral rituals, she rubs shoulders with them for a long time. At four years old, fascinated by Egyptian tombs, she does not say hello to adults, but recites to them the three names of the pyramids of Giza, before fleeing: ” I always found the mummies, the shrunken heads, superb, even if I didn’t understand why they were in museums! For me, it was an opening to another world. I had already understood the concept of death, because my parents never hid it from me. »

Taboo in a certain number of French families, this openness to death comes to him from his maternal family. Originally from Italy, she very early had the habit of being in contact with the deceased. ” From that side, burials are important. Death is present and it is something quite normal. Combing these dead men’s hair, kissing them, is something quite natural. They are always with us, somehow, no matter the creed “, she says.

Naturally, she pursued studies in anthropology and archeology at the University of Lyon 2, while developing her knowledge of funeral rites and the relationship of human beings to death. But the money is running out, as are the prospects. The young woman, who had already been working since she was eighteen to pay for her studies, decided not to pursue the research: “ It was not going to be possible, both in terms of employment and to finance my studies. I was already doing two degrees at the same time, plus student jobs on the side, preferably in museums. »

After a degree in tourism in 2015, she works in scientific expedition and travel logistics, more specifically on active volcanoes. ” There too, it is ultra-niche! It allowed me to travel, to see real volcanoes, it was pretty crazy. And besides, I continued to do my little research in my free time. The young woman takes advantage of these trips to discover new funeral rites and talk to the locals about their relationship to death.

A deadly business

The idea of ​​talking about death to the general public dates from this period. Few of her friends like to talk about it with her, and it’s a way of popularizing as much as shedding knowledge that she can no longer bear to keep to herself. ” Apart from some funeral directors who possibly had blogs, things like that for their professional activity, at the time, when I started, there was absolutely nothing for the general public and above all there was nothing as I wanted to do », explains the researcher.

Five years later, Juliette no longer organizes scientific expeditions. The Covid-19 got the better of its tourist activity. A blessing in disguise: today she devotes herself 100% to her passion. Auto-entrepreneur, her pseudonym The Bizarreum has become a registered trademark framing its activity, to disseminate its knowledge. Contraction of “weird” and “museum”, it is a way of responding to those who told her that she was weird when she spoke about what animated her. Nearly 55,000 subscribers on YouTube, 25,000 on Twitter… The subject fascinates. She released her first book (Funeral!, 2020, Éditions du Trésor) translated into Japanese this year. Two books will follow in 2022 and 2023.

But this success has not been easy. ” I was criticized for not putting enough humor in my videos, I was told about my physique, that’s why I do voiceovers. I want us to focus on the substance, not the form “, she summarizes. A winning choice: she connects conferences, videos, scientific publications as well as interventions in the media. Pushing the logic to the end, she even passes a diploma of funeral counselor in 2020, to better know the field. ” For me, working with the dead, whether in funeral or in the context of science, is not at all something creepy. On the contrary, I imagine what they were like when they were alive and why they were treated like that. »

Ethics at the heart of work

Nevertheless, talking about such a sensitive subject requires precautions. Finding the right balance to talk about death without shocking, first of all: ” I am not a psychologist, but I have to take into account the fear of death when I write, so as not to traumatize people and upset their affect. “. A balance that the popularizer always thinks of when she writes her videos or her Twitter threads.

Besides, Juliette Cazes does not want to force those who are afraid of death to watch her. On the other hand, she encourages them to reflect, to find out where this fear comes from: The fact of getting stuck, perhaps reflects either a misunderstanding of the subject, because there are people who have never been confronted with death, who dread that moment, or an experience that has possibly gone badly. »

Other ethical questions come to cross her when she talks about foreign funeral rites. Evidenced by the text in the introduction of his video on the Aborigines. ” I tried to do my best by taking extracts that had been validated by the populations at the time when they were archived on the web, by masking the faces, because the faces of the dead, we don’t show them not », Explains the thanatologist.

In the same way, she would never show images of celestial funeral or would attend this ritual: It would interfere with people’s privacy. There are a lot of things that I would like to see, of course, in Tibet for example for the celestial funeral, but I say it in my book: it is something problematic for the locals, so I will not go, as I will surely not go to see the mummies of Papua and many others. »

This questioning is also found in a subject that interests him deeply: the question of human mass graves during conflicts. ” How is science doing “to ally” with local beliefs? Can we get out of bodies like that? Is there a problem with beliefs? If we think that the soul is still there, will digging up a body, even if it’s for an international investigation, bother the relatives? asks the researcher.

An example among the many ethical issues on death that she now teaches punctually at the faculty of Nîmes. The popularization of Juliette Cazes, of public utility, resonates strongly today, while the war in ukraine and the coronavirus crisis have put Westerners back in the face of death.

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