ABSTRACT
In our modern American commercial society , canny consumers take for granted the techniques of advertising and marketing and their innovations in print, radio, and television. They are expected as part of making any sizable purchase, such as an automobile or an appliance. However, when they are applied to advertising a casket, such techniques still tend to give us pause. Though modern Americans grant that the purchase of a casket is a necessary burial expense, we may still be appalled at the crass materialism of strategies that govern their marketing and advertising. Some contemporary sociologists and historians would have us believe that this is a twentieth-century phenomenon, that the coffin was imbued with religious significance until recently, when commercial interests gutted its symbolic nature. In fact, from the beginning, burial in America was a very commercial affair, with the casket as the most central element, and the process by which coffins were transformed from mere container to a commodity is intertwined with the story of the changing burial and funeral practices in America. While the origins of coffins lie in religion—the Christian belief in the Resurrection—the coffin was established early on as a commercial item whose production, appearance, and use were dictated by fashion only. A variety of cultural systems incorporated and structured American burial practices, causing the transformation of coffins into commodities in the ritual of burial.
