The Power of the Dead: A Conversation with Will Hunt

As Halloween gives way to Día de los Muertos, when the veil between the living and the dead feels thinnest, writer and New America Fellow Will Hunt invites us to look beyond ghosts and ghouls, to the deeper ways our ancestors still shape the world around us. 

In his forthcoming book Bones, Hunt explores how human bones, burial grounds, and rituals of remembrance continue to influence contemporary culture and politics. Across Mayan ceremonies in the Yucatán, Native Hawaiian repatriation protests, ancestral shrines in Japan, and beyond, Bones traces how the dead remain active presences—spiritual, emotional, and political—in the lives of the living.

The Fellows program recently spoke with Hunt about what it means to coexist with our ancestors, the ethical complexities of writing about sacred remains, and how traditions like Día de los Muertos can help the modern West rediscover a more intimate, reverent relationship with death.

Your Fellows project and forthcoming book, Bones, explores the power of the ancestral dead—their bodies, bones, and burial grounds—to shape modern culture and politics. What inspired you to explore this topic? 

A few years ago, in a Maya village in the Yucatán, I witnessed a ceremony called Choo Ba’ak. Families gathered at ancestral tombs, lifted out the bones of their dead, brushed them clean, refreshed their shrouds, and laid them back to rest. In the modern Western society that shaped me, such intimacy with the dead was unthinkable. Here, it was indispensable—just as it had been in countless traditional communities across history. Bones is my attempt to reckon with that divide. The book follows the power of ancestors from deep prehistory to the present, and traces how that power has been translated to the modern West, where the dead have been recast, suppressed, and sometimes reawakened.

Many Día de los Muertos altars (called ofrendas) feature personal objects, food, and photos that create a bridge between the past and the present. Has your work uncovered similar “offerings”—ritual or symbolic—that contemporary cultures make to the dead, consciously or not?

There’s a moment in an old BBC documentary on Papua New Guinea, where the host witnesses a tribe performing a ceremonial dance in honor of their ancestors. The tone is elegiac; we’ve caught a rare glimpse of an ancient custom soon to vanish from the modern world. In my research for Bones, I’ve come to see that this conceit—the idea of ancestor veneration as a fading, marginal tradition—is a deception of Eurocentrism. It’s not vanishing, it’s flourishing. Recent surveys—including this 2024 study of East Asia and 2025 survey on belief in influence of ancestral spirits—suggest that more than a billion people worldwide observe some form of ancestor-based religious practice.

One of the pleasures of this project has been the disorienting realization that we in the modern West are the odd ones, precisely because we don’t. There was a moment on an early research trip to Japan when I learned that my interpreter had grown up in a home with a butsudan, an ancestor shrine where her family left daily offerings of rice and sake. I took it as this marvelous coincidence that I’d happened to hire someone with an actual butsudan in her home. But I soon realized that in Japan, ancestor worship is so ubiquitous and commonplace, it would be unusual to find a home without one.

Your work often navigates the tension between scientific excavation and spiritual reverence. How do culturally rooted traditions like Día de los Muertos help us rethink how bones and burial spaces are treated—not just as artifacts, but as continuing presences?

“When you fight for the dead, you’re fighting for the living,” a Hawaiian repatriation activist once told me. He was recalling a protest in the 1990s, when Native Hawaiians rose up against the public display of their ancestors’ bones in a museum in Honolulu. Where he comes from, he said, the dead are an extension of the living community, rather than separate from it. This idea, which has been central to virtually every other society in history, is what we have abandoned in the West, where bones and burial grounds have long been treated as artifacts and specimens. Only in recent years are we beginning to recognize the emotional force of the dead—to see bones as vessels of identity, memory, and love. The more we do, the more we will recognize the meaningful work the dead continue to perform—how they help us confront the past, heal old wounds, and recognize our shared humanity.

“Where he comes from, the dead are an extension of the living community, rather than separate from it.”

When working with ancestral bones, sacred sites, and culturally sensitive material, what ethical frameworks or personal guidelines do you rely on to navigate your research responsibly?

For part of Bones, I tell the story of a Cherokee man who takes on the duty of reburying the bones of tribal ancestors that have been desecrated by looters and archaeologists. Reporting this story—learning not only the contours of an individual life, but the nuances of Cherokee cosmology and the traditional metaphysics of bone—took six years. 

Going to traditional communities as a journalist, I’ve learned, requires its own code, especially for a writer such as myself who often gravitates toward sacred or sensitive subjects. I’ve learned to consult with elders, to listen more than I speak, and above all, I’ve learned to go slowly. I made multiple visits to the Cherokee, spent hours on the phone, read deeply, double-checked that I hadn’t divulged sacred sites. Had I rushed the story at any point, I doubt it would have held together. 

Your first book, Underground, investigates humanity’s ancient and intimate connection to subterranean spaces. What has surprised you the most about exploring these obscure, and sometimes taboo, places and subjects? 

There’s a story about Picasso climbing down into the cave of Lascaux, lifting a torch to the painted horses and bulls racing across the ceiling, and remarking, “12,000 years—nothing has changed.” This entanglement of past and present has been on my mind throughout the reporting of Underground and Bones. Humans have been interacting with bones in complex, meaningful ways for eons—and the same with caves, only longer. 

As cultural symbols, both run deep. The pleasure of collecting and telling stories around these subjects—sacred caves, bone relics, mummies, and so on—is that they always resonate on multiple timelines, revealing the present and the past simultaneously. They have a way of opening onto deep shared roots, revealing unexpected points of convergence between seemingly distant societies and epochs. 

Your essay “Telling the Bees” illuminates ancient rituals connecting death and the natural world. What do these evolving traditions reveal about our enduring relationship with death?

A few years ago, after the death of Queen Elizabeth, I read a news article about the royal beekeeper performing a small ceremony to formally notify the palace beehives of the Queen’s passing. As I’m a backyard beekeeper myself, I was fascinated to learn that the tradition of “telling the bees” about a death in the family runs deep into prehistory. This ubiquity says a lot about the symbolic richness of bees, of course, but more pointedly, I think it reflects the extent to which we experienced death within the greater rhythms of the natural world. The ritual of “telling the bees,” I think, has an especially poignant lesson for the modern West, where death has become an institutional event—something that happens away from nature, behind doors, in sanitized rooms. 

These rituals—whether “telling the bees” or honoring the dead on Día de los Muertos—remind us that how we treat those who have passed on reflects how we live together. In that spirit, who are you writing Bones for? Is there a particular reader—or cultural conversation—you’re hoping to reach or influence?

The last story in Bones concerns Charleston, South Carolina, where in 2013 a construction crew unearthed a burial ground containing the bones of 36 enslaved people. The Thirty-Six, as they became known, exerted a peculiar power on the city: White Charlestonians confronted their entanglements with the slave trade; Black Charlestonians became motivated to restore local cemeteries and launch a genealogical project to restore connections with their dead. 

To become aware of our ancestors is to be reminded that, for better or worse, we are each larger than ourselves. Rather than individuals floating in a vacuum, we are each shaped by the actions of our ancestors, just as our actions will shape our descendants. In the United States—a nation founded by settlers who cut ties with forebears—we would benefit from restoring ancestral bonds. To see the influence of our predecessors is to understand the deep structural forces of our society, the currents of systemic racism and economic inequality, ownership and dispossession, trauma and erasure. Indeed, at a time when our government is discussing plans to censor the unflattering passages of history in our national museum, it’s hard not to feel that we are facing a kind of ancestor crisis.

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