Death and identity: Graves and funerals as cultural communication

A multicultural Swedish grave quarter and three immigrant funerals are used as vantage points to elucidate how funerals and graveyards are employed as communicative symbolic actions for construction of ethnic and cultural identity. The theoretical perspective draws on ritual studies (Driver, 1991; Durkheim, 1915/1965; Myerhoff, 1984; van Gennep 1960), Goffman's (1967) notion of self-presentation, and studies of ethnicity (Barth 1971; 1994). The study focuses on situations in which ethnicity is actualised and brought to the fore as essential traits of individual or collective identity. Comparison between immigrant ritual practices and mainstream Swedish practices indicate that death rituals can be employed to enhance, subsume, or to fuse social boundaries. In the latter case, the rituals play a part in constructing new social groups. The study further elucidates how multicultural cemeteries reflect and construct a new multicultural Sweden.