ABSTRACT
Obituaries serve many purposes: to provide information about a person’s death, especially the arrangements for visitations, religious observances, funeral or memorial, and disposal of the body; to codify the familial line; to summarize a person’s biography and accomplishments; to emphasize important chapters in a person’s life story; and to symbolically give the deceased a unique identity. They serve as cultural reifications of values and social norms, reflections of relational constructions, and offer an opportunity to share communal loss and grief. In this chapter, we include rhetorical analysis of personal and mediated obituaries and discuss the ways in which obituaries reflect cultural, gendered, and classed constructions of both past and present norms.
