Exiled Bodies and Funeral Homes in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>Within the hidden space of the embalmer's room the most abject of objects comes to rest. Embalming rooms, and the funeral homes that house them, are liminal zones, and the dead and decaying bodies that come to occupy them are, for many outside the funeral service industry, objects and spaces of mystification. Situated within contradictory discourses, the dead body is understood as an object/subject to be revered, whilst at the same time bringing to the living a degree of discomfort and fear. The body's decomposition reminds us that nothing can bring the dead back, thus representing the ultimate human fear - one's inevitable annihilation. It is therefore deemed necessary to remove this destabilising object/subject to a safe and contained space. This thesis opens up and explores such a space: the contemporary funeral home, with particular attention given to the principles and practices of embalming rooms, as these rooms represent possibly the most abject space of the funeral home. In doing so it excavates the historical, social and cultural constructs that have come to underpin contemporary funeral service provision and embalming practices, uncovering the various intrinsic dualisms that operate within the spaces of the funeral home - such as the public/private, contaminated/contained, life/death, inside/outside. The central question of the thesis asks: what can an exploration of the abject spaces and bodies of the funeral home in Aotearoa New Zealand offer to understandings about embodied geographies? For even as many geographers increasingly challenge the marginalisation of certain bodies and the spaces they inhabit, little attention is given to the dead body. Employing primarily the theoretical perspectives of emotional/psycho-geography and feminist geography, the thesis brings a reading of the ways in which death, decaying bodies, and the spaces within which they are separated, marginalised, and othered come to be understood by those within the funeral industry, and thus those who utilise its services. These theoretical approaches also challenge many of the dichotomies that form a major basis for the justification of contemporary funeral practices such as embalming. Through interviews with a variety of key stakeholders in both the traditional and alternative funeral sectors in Aotearoa New Zealand, and close readings of funeral industry texts, it is found that the dead body, embedded within totalising discourses on death, and contained and closeted away in the back rooms of funeral homes, is forced to undergo extensive, invasive practices that sanitise and transform it in order to eradicate any obvious traces that it is now a dead body. In the spaces of the funeral home the material and symbolic manifestations of death are continually regulated, contained, and referred to euphemistically, all the while retaining clear distinctions between what has been constructed as sacred and profane, public and private, clean and unclean. Ultimately, it is the contention of this thesis that the liminal spaces of the funeral home preserve certain knowledges and practices that ensure that the contemporary Westernbased funeral industry retains a monopoly over the bodies of the dead.</p>

Exiled Bodies and Funeral Homes in Aotearoa New Zealand

<p>Within the hidden space of the embalmer's room the most abject of objects comes to rest. Embalming rooms, and the funeral homes that house them, are liminal zones, and the dead and decaying bodies that come to occupy them are, for many outside the funeral service industry, objects and spaces of mystification. Situated within contradictory discourses, the dead body is understood as an object/subject to be revered, whilst at the same time bringing to the living a degree of discomfort and fear. The body's decomposition reminds us that nothing can bring the dead back, thus representing the ultimate human fear - one's inevitable annihilation. It is therefore deemed necessary to remove this destabilising object/subject to a safe and contained space. This thesis opens up and explores such a space: the contemporary funeral home, with particular attention given to the principles and practices of embalming rooms, as these rooms represent possibly the most abject space of the funeral home. In doing so it excavates the historical, social and cultural constructs that have come to underpin contemporary funeral service provision and embalming practices, uncovering the various intrinsic dualisms that operate within the spaces of the funeral home - such as the public/private, contaminated/contained, life/death, inside/outside. The central question of the thesis asks: what can an exploration of the abject spaces and bodies of the funeral home in Aotearoa New Zealand offer to understandings about embodied geographies? For even as many geographers increasingly challenge the marginalisation of certain bodies and the spaces they inhabit, little attention is given to the dead body. Employing primarily the theoretical perspectives of emotional/psycho-geography and feminist geography, the thesis brings a reading of the ways in which death, decaying bodies, and the spaces within which they are separated, marginalised, and othered come to be understood by those within the funeral industry, and thus those who utilise its services. These theoretical approaches also challenge many of the dichotomies that form a major basis for the justification of contemporary funeral practices such as embalming. Through interviews with a variety of key stakeholders in both the traditional and alternative funeral sectors in Aotearoa New Zealand, and close readings of funeral industry texts, it is found that the dead body, embedded within totalising discourses on death, and contained and closeted away in the back rooms of funeral homes, is forced to undergo extensive, invasive practices that sanitise and transform it in order to eradicate any obvious traces that it is now a dead body. In the spaces of the funeral home the material and symbolic manifestations of death are continually regulated, contained, and referred to euphemistically, all the while retaining clear distinctions between what has been constructed as sacred and profane, public and private, clean and unclean. Ultimately, it is the contention of this thesis that the liminal spaces of the funeral home preserve certain knowledges and practices that ensure that the contemporary Westernbased funeral industry retains a monopoly over the bodies of the dead.</p>

Organization and development of the ritual and funeral industry in Moscow

The demand for ritual and funeral services, which substantiates the importance of the development of the ritual and funeral industry for the Moscow is considered. It is noted that the legal basis for the organization of the ritual and funeral industry has ceased to correspond to the pace and level of its development, and a new version of the basic Federal law is currently being developed. Significant shortcomings in the organization of the ritual and funeral industry and the maintenance of burial places that hinder its development are revealed. From the point of view of the assessment of these problems, the main directions of improvement of this industry are determined, including: improvement of legislation, organization of an effective system of market activities, increasing the protection of citizens in the provision of ritual and funeral services.

Media, mortality and necro-technologies: Eulogies for dead media

Working at the intersection of death studies and media studies, this article examines what we can learn from the death of media technologies designed for the deceased, what we refer to as necro-technologies. Media deaths illuminate a tension between the promise of persistence and realities of precariousness embodied in all media. This tension is, however, more visibly strained by the mortality of technologies designed to mediate and memorialise the human dead by making explicit the limitations of digital eternity implied by products in the funeral industry. In this article, we historicise and define necro-technologies within broader discussions of media obsolescence and death. Drawing from our funeral industry fieldwork, we then provide four examples of recently deceased necro-technologies that are presented in the form of eulogies. These eulogies offer a stylised but culturally significant format of remembrance to create an historical record of the deceased and their life. These necro-technologies are the funeral attendance robot CARL, the in-coffin sound system CataCombo, the posthumous messaging service DeadSocial and the digital avatar service Virtual Eternity. We consider what is at stake when technologies designed to enliven the human deceased – often in perpetuity – are themselves subject to mortality. We suggest a number of entangled economic, cultural and technical reasons for the failure of necro-technologies within the specific contexts of the death care industry, which may also help to highlight broader forces of mortality affecting all media technologies. These are described as misplaced commercial imaginaries, cultural reticence and material impermanence. In thinking about the deaths of necro-technologies, and their causes, we propose a new form of death, a ‘material death’ that extends beyond biological, social and memorial forms of human death already established to account for the finitude of media materiality and memory.

Funeral and Mortuary Operators: The Role of Stigma, Incivility, Work Meaningfulness and Work–Family Relation to Explain Occupational Burnout

The funeral and mortuary sector, including funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria, is a largely neglected sector in regard to the study of occupational factors that can affect the quality of working life. The present study aimed at overcoming this gap by investigating job demands and resources that may affect burnout levels. Data were collected through a self-report questionnaire involving funeral industry employees (N = 229) from cemetery, morgues, crematoria and funeral agencies in a Northern Italian region. The survey was cross-sectional and non-randomized. Results reveal that among job demands, stigma consciousness, supervisor incivility and work-to-family negative spillover significantly affect levels of burnout, whereas meaningfulness of work and family-to-work positive spillover may represent relevant resources to counter the onset of burnout. The results of this study contribute to new insights into the psychosocial working conditions that affect occupational wellbeing among the funeral industry sector by also giving insight into how to promote resources to prevent burnout.

Funeral Reform and the Materiality of Death in the Russian Civil War

Based on documents produced by various Soviet institutions in Moscow, Ivanovo-Voznesensk, and Yaroslavl’ in 1917–1922, this paper looks at the transformations of the Soviet funeral industry during the Civil War. After the October Revolution, a series of decrees proclaimed the secularization of funeral practices and attempted to purify them of monetary relations and hierarchy. The funeral ranks, or razryady, were eliminated, and Soviet institutions were obliged to provide equal services for all citizens regardless of their social background. This initiative was part of a larger project of creating a new man with new values by changing everyday practices. Due to administrative difficulties caused by the regime change and wartime challenges, the implementation of the funeral reform was fraught with perturbations at state, local, and family level. In Moscow, these problems led to the fullfledged “funeral crisis” of 1919, when the rise in mortality, serious shortages in supplies, and bureaucratic prevarications resulted in dead bodies being left unburied for prolonged periods of time. In the smaller towns of Ivanovo-Voznesensk and Yaroslavl’, the crisis was less intense, and the funeral industry, while being transformed in accordance with the decrees, could still cope with popular demands. Several factors might explain this difference, including town size and the less rigid attitude of the provincial authorities to the implementation of funeral innovations. The ambitious funeral reform was not entirely successful: this paper argues that the attempts to change this death-related industry did not concern the fundamental norms of dealing with the dead, namely the idea shared by both the Soviet officials and the population that a dead body deserves personal space, privacy, and respect.