Between commerce and care: intimate personalization, authenticity, and the ambivalences of outsourcing funeral work

The paper considers the way commercialization is negotiated in important consumption rituals such as funerals by mourners. Focusing on Italy, we start by providing data about funeral participation, and propose that there is a tension between affective and commercial personalization which informs all stages of the social management of death and the encounter between the mourners and the funeral industry. We look at how the organization and purchase of funeral services is managed by mourners, explore the wake and the way the dead body is handled between families and industry, and finally concentrate on the funeral ceremony with particular attention to how emotions are marshaled, and personalization introduced. We conclude by discussing the ways in which funerals may be considered by mourners as successful and argue that positive experiences rests on valuations of authenticity associated with affective personalization and therefore reveals the ambivalence of the commercialization of funeral rituals.