ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the connections and tensions between birth and death as personal and private, yet also part of the public domain, and how practices, routines, rituals and processes constitute the public and the private and their interconnections and contribute to changes over time. Public can mean state provision versus the market and privatised welfare and healthcare as well as what is visible in publicly viewable spaces and media. We focus in particular on the ways in which rituals and routines bring the public and private together. Public practices in the management of both birth and death include making sense of personal fears and anxieties through routine practices and rituals. Coping mechanisms take different forms and people can appropriate, reject or adapt existing rites and rituals. The public arena and socio-cultural values relate to the private arena and shape what it is possible to do and even how we can think and talk about birth and death. Private, intimate experiences seem to take place within personal spaces, but the practices and routines which shape those spaces intersect with the public arena of culture, policy and social institutions. We explore rituals through multiple dimensions: language, place, practices and material culture to highlight the complex ways in which boundaries between the public and private are drawn, challenged and crossed.