Funeral Business Research Articles

Организация похоронного дела в осажденном Смоленске по данным архива Смоленской приказной палаты 1609–1611 гг.

This article is devoted to the funeral business in the besieged city of Smolensk during the period 1609–1611. The author concludes that new results in the study of Smolensk defense can only be reconstructed and examined by using the preserved documents of the Smolensk Prikaznaia Izba.

Editing Corpses in Evelyn Waugh’s Hollywood

The origins of Evelyn Waugh's novel The Loved One (1948) are well known. Having traveled (reluctantly) to Hollywood in February 1947 to discuss film version of his novel Brideshead Revisited with studio executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, found himself simultaneously disgusted and fascinated with American film industry as well as nearby Forest Lawn Memorial Park, cemetery that, with its gaudy memorials and piped-in music, struck him as more like an amusement park than hallowed ground. subsequently published two articles, one (Why Hollywood is Term of Disparagement) an excoriating critique of Hollywood studio system, other ('Half in Love with Easeful Death': An Examination of Californian Burial Customs) mock-anthropological profile of Forest Lawn. He fictionalized both subjects in The Loved One, his blackly comic Hollywood novel about an undertaking business called Whispering Glades and neighboring crematorium for pets known as Happier Hunting Ground. Death and Hollywood film industry constitute twin poles of Waughs novel and are related to each other in ways that I'd like to consider here at greater length than has yet been done. Critics of novel have typically considered one of these two aspects at time or else have only passingly theorized relationship between them. In his reading of The Loved One, Frederick L. Beaty suggests that Waugh obliquely indicates what he believes to be essential similarity between mortuary dream and products of filmdom, and acknowledges that American industry shares a close philosophical connection with Hollywood of moviemakers, which is also portrayed as dream factory where mere shadows of reality are passed off as genuine article (172). Beaty stops here, however, and never returns to pursue further relationship between cinematic and mortuary. Similarly, Christopher Ames has placed The Loved One within tradition of British novels about Hollywood and death, arguing that Hollywood has figured as cultural dumping ground (409) for works of British high culture such as Shakespearean drama. (1) Walter Wells has argued more surprisingly that The Loved One is, at bottom, not concerned with Hollywood at all, nor is it really concerned with funeral business. According to Wells, the studios and cemetery took direct assaults in [Waugh's] earlier articles. The novel has broader target The Loved One explicitly makes Hollywood metaphor for fate of western civilization in mid-twentieth century (181-82). Other readings of novel such as Naomi Milthorpe's similarly discuss novel's thematization of in terms of general attack on post-war American culture, where the perfectability of dead body has removed fact of death (211) from view. It's that notion of removal from view that I would like to pick up on here in thinking about relationship between Hollywood and corpse. Although Waugh's attacks on American culture in The Loved One extend beyond parameters of Hollywood, which is treated as locus of nearly everything about American culture that found objectionable, Hollywood and cemetery nevertheless serve as specific, carefully chosen objects of attention in The Loved One and should not be treated as arbitrary or convenient metaphors. They are twin targets of Waugh's trenchant statement about bodies that postwar American culture idealizes (those of Hollywood star) and bodies it most wants to disavow (those of corpse), and about ways in which those bodies are fashioned, (re) constructed, exhibited, and visually consumed. The ideological meaning of Hollywood cinema remains inextricably bound up in and mirrored by burial rites of nearby Forest Lawn/Whispering Glades. And it is into this so-called necropolis that stranger comes--someone who looks at both American cinema and cemetery in all wrong ways. …

Difficulties in the ^|^ldquo;Legitimazation^|^rdquo; of Businesses Connected Commercially with Death

This paper examines the vocabulary of “legitimation” in the funeral business. I examine two movements that have occurred in post-war Japan. Both movements were related to funeral simplification. In the course of opposing funeral simplification, the funeral business experienced difficulty in asserting its legitimacy vis a vis the actors in each movement. In this paper, I indicate the relationship between the vocabulary used to explain the legitimacy of the funeral business to the actors in each movement and its effect in achieving social recognition.

Exiting in a State of Grace: can death be sustainable?

By August 2007, Deborah Cairns and Fran Reilly had been in business just a year and their alternative, family-directed funeral business had already won a regional sustainable business award. Based in Auckland, New Zealand, State of Grace offered clients socially and environmentally friendly alternatives including involving families where possible in keeping the deceased at home without embalming, and the use of natural products including eco-caskets. Deborah and Fran appreciated there were plenty of challenges in providing more socially responsible, natural alternatives to traditional funerals and current modes of burial and cremation. Now their fledgling business is gaining momentum, the two women were trying to find the balance between how much and how fast to grow the business, and at the same time meet their family commitments and stay true to their sustainability values. There is an underlying issue surrounding their prioritisation of whom and what needed sustaining most.

Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (review)

Reviewed by Cecily Hunter University of Melbourne Pat Jalland. Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. Reprint. Sydney, Australia: University of New South Wales Press, 2006. viii + 409 pp. Ill. $39.95 (paperbound, 0-86840-905-7). The "death awareness" movement that appeared in the United States in the 1970s had its counterpart in Australia, where it also was stimulated by the publication of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's book On Death and Dying in 1969. Kübler-Ross developed a psychological model of death and dying based on the experiences of terminally ill patients, to counter the neglect of these patients within conventional medical care. A seminar held at Melbourne's St. Vincent's Hospital in 1971 marked the beginning of the Australian movement to foster more open and informed responses to death and grief both in the hospitals and in the general community (pp. 204–5). The "death awareness" movement gathered momentum during the 1970s, leading, Pat Jalland claims, to a shift in Australian society away from the culture of death avoidance that became apparent in the years following the end of the Great War—a culture characterized by social and psychological responses to death where thoughts and feelings about death were avoided, ritual was minimized, and the expression of sorrow was confined to the private lives of the bereaved. Jalland's concern in this study of death and dying in twentieth-century Australia is to explain the culture of death avoidance as an outcome of Australia's involvement in two world wars and the development of twentieth-century medical practice. Silence, as Jalland notes, is characteristic of a culture of death avoidance, which makes the historian's task of tracing the emergence of this culture more difficult. However, the statistics she quotes to demonstrate the extent of Australia's involvement in the Great War suggest that this episode would have had far-reaching consequences for the personal lives of individuals and for society in general. One in five of the Australians who volunteered to fight for King and Empire was buried in foreign soil; 60,000 of them were killed within a space of four years, and the final resting place of around 25,000 remained unknown to families and friends. It has been estimated that bereavement touched every second Australian family. Jalland fleshes out this statistical picture to good effect, using diaries, letters, and oral testimony to show how, in coming to terms with their loss, bereaved men and women tended to minimize their own privations out of respect for those suffered by the men on active service. Individuals tended to feel that an open display of [End Page 900] their personal grief was out of place when so many were bereaved. The silencing of grief was further encouraged by soldiers' letters, which presented the stoicism of the battlefield response to death as a model for civilians. Newspaper "In Memoriam" notices displayed a diminishing reliance on religion for support in bereavement, and a growing resort to memory to make sense of intolerable loss. Jalland claims that the repression of grief and the diminishing reliance on religion, already evident in late nineteenth-century responses to death and loss, was accelerated by Australia's participation in the Great War and then reinforced during the Second World War. She skilfully employs a range of resources to demonstrate the characteristics of this change at the level of the individual and in the broader society. Her achievement is weakened, however, when she attempts to define the change more precisely in a discussion of public responses to two tragic events of the interwar period: a colliery disaster in New South Wales, and the Black Friday bushfires in Victoria. The responses to these events, as demonstrated in newspaper reports and the recollections of those who experienced the bushfires firsthand, emphasize stoicism and practical assistance; they display, Jalland notes, none...

Customer Channeling Arrangements in Market Organization : Competition Dynamics in the Funeral Business in France

The problematic of how supply and demand meet on a particular market is at the core of the economic sociology project, which for several years has produced detailed analyses of how judgments of the quality of products and service providers are constructed prior to the exchange relation. Observation of how funeral business services come to be purchased and analysis of competition dynamics on local funeral service markets bring to light certain alternative ways of organizing the marketplace encounter. The article describes the devices used to capture this market, particularly the socio-technical arrangements for channeling customers toward a single service provider. It shows the degree to which provider activity, relations among competitors, and the market regulation game in this sector are structured by the production of an economy of customer capture.

BOOK REVIEWS

Australian Economic History ReviewVolume 46, Issue 3 p. 283-298 BOOK REVIEWS First published: 20 October 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8446.2006.00182.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, Scott Lithgow: Déjà Vu All Over Again! The Rise and Fall of a Shipbuilding Company. St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005. xi + 364 pp. ISBN: 0 9738934 0 0. Softback US$15.00. Reviewed by Tony ArnoldUniversity of Leicester Gordon Jackson, The British Whaling Trade. St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005. xvi + 293 pp. ISBN: 0 9730073 9 7. Paperback US$15. Reviewed by Tony BarrowThe Open University Adrian Jarvis, In Troubled Times: the Port of Liverpool, 1905–1938. St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2003. viii + 232 pp. ISBN: 0 9730073 6 2. Paperback US$15.00. Reviewed by Gordon BoyceQueensland University of Technology Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia. Melbourne: Scribe, 2005. 298 pp. ISBN: 1 920769 46 3. Paperback A$32.95. Reviewed by Stephen ConstantineLancaster University Takatoshi Ito and Andrew K. Rose, International Trade in East Asia (NBER East Asia Seminar on Economics, Volume 14). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 392 pp. ISBN: 0 226 37896 9. Cloth US$80. Reviewed by Gary HawkeVictoria University of Wellington Graeme Hunt, Centenary: One Hundred Years of State Insurance. Auckland: IAG New Zealand Ltd, 2005. 238 pp. ISBN: O 473 10097 5. Paperback $NZ29.95. Reviewed by Frank HolmesVictoria University of Wellington L. Sharon Davidson and Stephen Salisbury, Australia’s First Bank: 50 Years from the Wales to Westpac. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005. 407 pp. ISBN: 0 86840 791 7. Paperback $49.95. Reviewed by Frank HolmesVictoria University of Wellington Bruce Pennay, Making a City in the Country – The Albury-Wodonga National Growth Centre Project 1973–2003. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2005. xi + 387 pp. ISBN 0 86840 944 8. Paperback $49.95. Reviewed by Twan HuybersUniversity of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy Patricia Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006. viii + 409pp. ISBN: 0 86840 905 7. Paperback. $39.95. Reviewed by Fergus KingAnglican Diocese of Newcastle Massimo M. Augello and Marco E.L. Guidi (eds), Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age (1848–1920). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2005. xviii + 315 pp. ISBN: 0 7546 3965 7. Hardback £55. Reviewed by Warren J. SamuelsMichigan State University Volume46, Issue3November 2006Pages 283-298 RelatedInformation

Money and Death: Funeral Business in Asante, Ghana

AbstractThis article examines the current commercialisation and expansion of Asante funeral celebrations in Ghana. Funerals have always been the main public social events in Asante, but the growing funeral business significantly alters the way death is celebrated. The article takes as a point of departure a view of death as a field of strategic interaction, providing the ritual context for the creation of remembrance and identities, the elaboration of differences, the competition for status and power, and the negotiation of culture and social bonds and values. Within the framing narrative of respect for the dead and guiding the spirit to the next world, funerals are much about life. The article describes how, in shaping death, people deal with money to negotiate values of life and relations between the living, and shows that, contrary to both popular belief and critique on global commercialisation, in Asante the money economy and the social significance of the funeral tradition do not contravene, but rather reinforce each other. The funeral celebration is not wiped away by monetisation, nor is it a kind of last defence against it. Indeed, it is exactly through money and commodification that funeral celebrations are expanding, social ties forged, and cultural performances stimulated, albeit in new ways. In Asante funerals, people appropriate practices of consumption and commercial enterprise as well as indigenous traditions and exchange patterns in a process of ‘cultural bricolage’, and develop new, local styles of celebrating death, in which money has come to play a central role as social glue and as an expression of lifestyles, cultural values and ideals. It is argued that we cannot understand ‘traditional ritual’ unless we move beyond the rather rigid opposition between tradition and modernity still prevalent in ritual studies to acknowledge the open, flexible nature of tradition that makes it so vibrant in modern African life.

Money and Death: Funeral Business in Asante, Ghana

Money and Death: Funeral Business in Asante, Ghana

Entre les vivants et les morts : les pompes funèbres aux portes du marché

In the 1970s, a funeral market emerged in France as the communal monopolies dating from a 1904 law were eroded. Studying this emerging marketplace sheds light on a merchandising process in this branch of the economy. This process has unfolded against the backdrop of a change in geography (the places where people die) and a change in the symbolic relation to death. It has entailed: designing funeral services in place of rituals; reworking the ‘mediations’ that institute economic transactions between market segments of living clients, on the one hand, and, on the other, businesses of different sizes that provide various products and services; working out new arrangements for winning clients (products, services, package deals, etc.); and developing new business qualifications. Deeply anchored in the realm of symbols, the funeral business must handle two anthropological aspects of exchanges (the market and symbolic ones) that are structurally antagonistic but that its economic organisation cannot abolish. This inquiry focuses on how symbolic issues limit the activities of these businesses, in particular by forcing them to reconcile competition over prices (the very basis of the marketing dimension) and discretion about prices (itself required by the symbolic prohibition against reducing clients to mere customers.)