The coffin question: death and materiality in humanist funerals

ABSTRACT

In this article I explore the attitudes of humanist celebrants in England to the presence of the coffin at the funerals they conduct. For these celebrants, who are members of the British Humanist Association, the coffin is something that can disrupt the integrity of “the immanent frame.” Throughout the course of the article, I relate this concern to questions of materiality and material culture, arguing, in line with a growing number of others in the human sciences, that we cannot understand secular formations without attention to its embodied and material dimensions.

Keywords:

• anthropology of death
• funerals
• secularism
• humanism
• British Humanist Association