ABSTRACT
Personalised funerals have emerged as a global post-mortem trend in recent decades. While substantive national and regional variations in these mortuary practices exist, personalised, celebratory rituals are typically correlated with late-modern processes of secularisation and individualisation. These funerals are integrally linked to the biography and personality of the deceased and accentuate informality and mourner participation. Frequently juxtaposed with the traditional religious practices of the past, personalised funerals are described as creative productions that offer mourners a more therapeutic bereavement experience. This shift to new ritualisations of death has been associated with an increasing variety of funeral products and services that underscore personal choice, control and identity. This chapter elucidates some of these mortuary transformations and specifically assesses the current shift to increasingly private responses to death in New Zealand, which problematise some of the simplistic connections between individualism, capitalism and funeral options (Dickinson 2012). By analysing funeral professional discourse, as well as media representations of personalisation, we argue that these discussions of contemporary funerary practices frequently elide the experiences of the bereaved and privilege a discursive construction of society that equates these putative changes with more enlightened (and “healthy”) attitudes to death in the twenty-first century. Bereaved participants in this project, on the other hand, mobilised a competing discourse which recognised not cultural and societal mourning obligations, but privileged authenticity and privacy as key concerns shaping funerary practices. Rather than consuming funereal goods and services as symbolic and experiential products (Sanders 2010: 64) or linking consumption to immortality ideologies (Turley 2005), bereaved participants emphasised a desire to resist post-mortem products and services which they regarded as incompatible with biographical authenticity.
