ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will consider the place and development of funerary rites in Sweden and also discuss attitudes towards death in late modern society. This will be done in conversation with Douglas Davies’ reasoning on Death, Ritual and Belief (1997) and his more recent studies on the new spirituality, which is part of what he calls a second wave of secularization in Britain. This is what we in Uppsala have called a new visibility of religion, part of a new social and religious plurality that has created a need for a negotiation of values connected to identity and belief (Bäckström 2014). In relation to earlier studies, primarily those undertaken in Sweden, I will argue that rites and places of quality function both in traditional and new ways as arenas between the private and the public and that rites performed at the end of life bind together the private life of the individual with a collective and regulated public society in a particular manner. In the Nordic countries the majority churches still function as stewards of a collective memory made explicit in relation to death, burials and crises. At the same time, it is possible to see that personally shaped rites are developed within the frameworks of burial services. A growing emphasis on the personal aspects of the rite can be regarded as an adjustment to late modern values focussing on the body and personal identity. This emphasis can also be interpreted as indicating a need for secular institutions to pay greater attention to a religiosity that is increasingly defined as spirituality.
