Prevailing discourses condemn funerals as a costly distress purchase where funeral directors have greedily preyed upon funeral arrangers' grief laden vulnerability. They explain funerals as distress purchases and so debt as the outcome of irrational decisions made while emotionally overwhelmed. These discourses ignore how people might use funeral purchases in dealing with the experience of death as they obscure rather than explain the emotionally infused decision-making that incurs funeral debt. This paper aims to shed light on this aspect of funeral purchases through a New Zealand-based empirical investigation of how intense feelings connect with decision-making associated with funeral cost and debt. The examination highlights that arranging a funeral, rather than being a hurried, ill-informed, choicelimited, emotionally overwhelming distress purchase, is a complex socio-emotional process that crystallises multiple affects into the culturally sanctioned emotion of responsibility, itself mobilised on class lines embedded in existing societal attitudes to debt and socio-economic structures.
Is death “taboo” or “tapu”? Why do these two versions of the same word evoke such different cultural responses to issues of death and the dead? In this paper, we explore Western anthropological interpretations of the “death taboo”, its relationship to Māori understanding of tapu, and how the transformation of tapu into “taboo” influences engagement with human remains. We maintain that such an anthropological approach—incorporating historical, archaeological and biological anthropological perspectives—can further contribute to a number of cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary debates. We further argue that this will expand and elucidate cross-cultural understandings of responses to death by siting them within specific historical-cultural contexts and locations.
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