The coffin question: death and materiality in humanist funerals

notes and references

• The corpse, of course, is not the coffin; the body is not the box. Yet celebrants often spoke of the two interchangeably, in synecdochal relation.
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• In anthropology, various overviews and analyses have been provided by Metcalf and Huntington (1991), Bloch and Parry (1982), and Davies (2002), in addition to dozens of more case-specific studies of death, mortuary rituals, and commemoration, as well as the modern ur-text, Hertz (1960).
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• And yet note the mode of address: second person, as if Dave were the addressee. This might be interpreted as an opening in the immanent frame (see discussion below); I'm not sure it is much of one, although there is not space here to focus on the indexicals of immanence.
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• See https://humanism.org.uk/about/ (accessed January 19, 2012).
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• The survey was conducted online in June 2011. There were 1,164 respondents, out of 3,000 members invited to reply.
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• As Taylor makes clear in his lengthy discussion of the immanent frame, the “closed” option is not the only one—not the only “spin” the immanent frame can have. Within the West, he argues, we all live in the immanent frame. It is “the sensed context in which we develop our beliefs” (2007: 549), and for some (Taylor included) it makes sense “to live it as open to something beyond” (2007: 544).
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• The survey of celebrants was conducted online in September 2011; it was sent to all of them (approximately 270), and I received 195 completed replies.
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• Funerals are the most common by far; of almost 9,000 BHA ceremonies conducted in 2011, over 90 percent were funerals.
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• Verdery is right, and one of the most important aspects of her analysis is the boldness with which she addressed the affectual power of the corpse; it is not just any old thing. But of course this doesn't mean tomato cans are precluded from becoming “heavy symbols.” If it was your great grandfather's tomato can, it might be. And dead birds can certainly be heavy symbols, as the Bororo (or ornithologists) might want to stress.
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• A recent article by Copeman and Reddy (2012) addresses this same concern in the Indian context, where atheist and rationalist movements have deep roots; see also Quack (2012: 294–301) on “disenchanting death” in India.
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• See “NHS Organ Donor Register hits Record 18 million,” June 23, 2011. Available online at http://www.nhsbt.nhs.uk/news/2011/newsrelease230611.html (accessed August 22, 2013).
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• See the work of Tony Walter (1996; 2012) and Margaret Holloway and her colleagues (Holloway et al. 2010; 2013) for some very useful discussions of the more general economic, social, and “spiritual” dynamics of funerals in contemporary England.
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• Here and elsewhere in the article there have been hints of the ways in which humanists address the classic problematic of the regeneration of life. Although there is not space to address it here, there is a strongly developed discourse within the BHA of people “living on” in two ways: first, the memory of others; second, their genetic offspring.
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• A celebrant in the Humanist Society of Scotland (another prominent humanist organization in Britain) told me that in training courses she ran, she always borrowed a coffin from a funeral-director friend. It is important, she told me, to have the real thing there.
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