Funeral Industry

The funeral industry comprises professional establishments associated with the provision of funeral ceremonies, held in connection with the wake, burial, cremation, and memorial rites of the dead. This definition includes those related activities required to facilitate the funeral ceremony, including, but not limited to, the transportation of the deceased, the registration of death, makeup of the corpse, embalming, preparation for the wake, the production of obituaries, and equipping the bereaved with commodities required in the funeral ceremony. As such, funeral homes, funeral parlors, funeral companies, corporations, conglomerates, and crematories are included under the umbrella term funeral industry. Funeral directors, funeral conductors, cremators, embalmers, and the staff who work in these organizations are the professionals who comprise the funeral industry.

The phenomenon of the funeral industry is neither universal nor homogenous across cultures. The form of the funeral industry depends on the management and control of the dead and the bereaved during the death ritual, within cultural variance. Furthermore, the funeral industry incorporates both commercial and nonprofit organizations, as long as these establishments and those who work in them are specialized in the treatment of the corpse or assist the bereaved with prefuneral, funeral, and/or postfuneral ceremonies. The following discussion of the funeral industry serves to illustrate its past, present, and future through an examination of its emergence, development, and outlook, with reference to some common criticisms.

Emergence of the Funeral Industry

The funeral industry is a product of modernization, urbanization, rationalization, and specialization. In industrialized societies such as Europe, North America, and Japan during the 19th century, the increasing urban population led to high urban death rates. The problem of disposal of this large number of corpses was commonly addressed by the development and promotion of cemeteries outside of cities, reusing cemetery spaces, and by promoting cremation. In all cases, swift disposal of the dead became important for both health and social-cultural reasons. The development of the funeral industry occurred in parallel with the increased importance given to maintaining public health by safely disposing corpses.

A second factor in the emergence of the funeral industry is the attenuation of community ties. Prior to industrialization and urbanization, death was managed by family and community members. When death occurred, the family took care of their loved ones and performed the ritual traditions. The community helped in transporting, digging, and burying or cremating the deceased, as well as providing a coffin and other paraphernalia. Local priests were called upon for religious services, assisted by community members. Communities owned local cemeteries or graves where the dead reposed. Death and funeral performances were an essential communal responsibility that maintained communal solidarity. However, as urbanization progressed, such communal ties weakened as the youth moved to the cities and left their elders behind. As a result, much of the community funeral knowledge was lost.

The specialization of work and the control of knowledge by the funeral industry were outcomes of this attenuation of communal ties. Prior to the emergence of the funeral industry, there were undertakers in urban areas who assisted the bereaved in various tasks such as providing a coffin, digging the grave, and providing the paraphernalia and upholstery for funeral rituals. These were not funeral specialists but nurses, craftsmen, carpenters, cabinet makers, construction workers, liverymen, or carriers, who occasionally extended their routine work skills to a part of the death ritual. The transformation from undertaking/undertaker to a funeral industry can be marked by their full transition to providing specialized services catering for the dead and bereaved, where community members could not provide the required services or where family members willingly relinquished their responsibilities. Major specialized tasks offered by the funeral industry were prefuneral and funeral services such as embalming, applying makeup and encoffining the corpse, registering the death, preparing for the wake, writing obituaries, equipping the bereaved with commodities for funerals, transporting the deceased and family, and providing postfuneral memorial services such as cremation or burial.

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