ABSTRACT
Funeral work is performed by a wide variety of actors, each of whom has different roles and responsibilities in the collaborative processes of caring for the dead and the bereaved. In antebellum America, the decedent’s family was typically responsible for performing most of this work – though the dying, too, were expected to do the work of preparing themselves psychologically and spiritually for a “Good Death.” Additional funeral work was dispersed across a variety of trades, including clergy, carpenters, liverypersons, blacksmiths, surgeons, druggists, and chemists, each of whom performed specific types of funeral work ad hoc (Laderman, 2003; Plater, 1996, pp. 41-49). After the Civil War, growing numbers of entrepreneurial undertakers perceived the social and economic advantages of consolidating funeral work, thereby initiating the process of professionalizing funeral work. Today, funeral professionals play a prominent role in both the literal and figurative removals of the dead from the world of the living in the US, providing goods and services intended to manage both the decomposition of dead bodies, as well as the decomposition of social ties. These two forms of removal roughly correspond to two broad categories of funeral work, which sociologist George Sanders labels “front stage” and “back stage” work (Sanders 2010, p. 56). According to Sanders, this distinction captures “a division of labor in which the front-staff are mostly comprised of salespeople and
bereavement counselors . . . while embalmers work behind the scenes,” preparing dead bodies for their separation from the living (2010, p. 56). Several death studies scholars rightly note that US funeral professionals today seek to de-emphasize their “back stage” work, and to promote their “front stage” work (Sanders, 2010; Schäfer, 2007; Laderman, 2003; Emke, 2002; Prothero, 2001; Cahill, 1995). Indeed, funeral industry marketing executive Dean Lambert (2011, p. 48) urges funeral directors to focus less on the disposition of corpses and more on “new and creative ways to celebrate lives and help people grieve.” Funeral professionals’ preferment of their own “front stage” work feebly disguises the fact that physically working with dead bodies continues to occupy a central place in the funeral professions. Funeral consumers may turn to grief counselors, event planners, and merchants located, as Lambert puts it, “outside the traditional funeral industry” (2011, 48); but as Howarth (1996, p. 15) reminds us, “[m]odern funeral directors acquire control over the funeral service via their custody of the corpse.” Moreover, funeral professionals’ commercial custody of the corpse has been achieved by way of funeral professionals’ control over the technological means of body preparation and disposition. It is well known that embalming technologies played a powerful role in the professionalization of funeral work in the US. Through the appropriation and standardization of embalming, US undertakers transformed the care of the corpse into a technical skill, the practice of which continues to be controlled by professional funeral directors and embalmers. As Lambert acknowledges,
[t]he average consumer neither has the skills nor the desire to perform the technical function for which funeral directors receive training. It is a highly specialized trade, which is a barrier to entry into the realm of embalming and restorative arts.
