ABSTRACT
If dying has been medicalized, death, or at least the disposal of the dead and the ceremonials which surround this process, has been commodified. In North America there are about 30,000 commercial funeral homes, cemeteries and crematoria plus a host of companies for the manufacture of everything from caskets, vaults, urns and monuments to hearses, casket lifts and embalming fluid.1 Funerals, costing around $7,000 for the normal package, are usually pre-financed, which further brings into play a range of banks, insurance, legal and trust companies. Taken together, this network of enterprises constitutes what its managers call ‘the death-care industry’. The immaterial terms in which funeral and cemetery directors describe their function (‘We sell service not merchandise’) are not wholly false. Physical disposition and the materials necessary serve as the vehicle for a luxuriant sign production; in which role the industry has subordinated the churches that once presided over all the rituals of the life course, and has itself come to exercise a virtual monopoly over the organized symbology of death.
