Personalisation in Scottish funerals: Individualised ritual or relational process?

Abstract

While there is a wide variation in the ways in which the term personalisation is used in the funeral context, there are a number of common threads. For example, there is a broad consensus that a personalised funeral will feature references to the life and character of the deceased person and such a funeral will probably have been planned by the bereaved family, who may even participate in its conduct. However, academics working with the concept do not always use the term in precisely the same way. This paper suggests that while these ways of considering personalisation are useful, they do not include the complex processes by which a personalised funeral is planned and carried out. Using data from a study exploring Scottish funeral practices as illustration, the article proposes that the sociology ofpersonal life offers tools that may help to unpack the process of planning such a funeral. These tools are the concepts of memorialisation, biography, embeddedness and relationality. Together these concepts may help to explain the process by which a personalised funeral is planned, and the influences that impact upon the people doing the planning.

Keywords:

• personalisation
• Scottish funerals
• relationality
• embeddedness
• memory
• biography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who took part in the research which forms the basis for this paper, without whose generosity this work would have been impossible. The research was carried out as a doctoral study and was funded by a University ofAberdeen Sixth Century Studentship; I would therefore like to thank the University and my supervisors, Professors John Brewer and Andrew Blaikie for their support. I would also like to thank those who attended the session at which this paper was first presented, and whose questions and comments helped in its development. Finally, I would like to thank Mortality's reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes

[1] An earlier version of this paper was presented to the British Sociological Association Conference, Cardiff City Hall, April 2009.

[2] At the end of 2008 the Funeral Planning Authority, which regulates registered providers of funeral plans in the United Kingdom, had over half a million active funeral plans on its books.