A Funeral Liturgy: Death Rituals as Symbolic Communication

This performative ethnography pulls together ethnography, autoethnography, and interview accounts to explore and exemplify the liturgical and narrative symbolism inherent in funerals. Funerals are the ultimate in final stories. This article looks at funerals as a communicative event and addresses questions of the performative nature of funerals and the meaning and reality constructed by funerals. The author concludes with an argument for seeing funerals as an opportunity to bridge the liminal space between dead and alive and the sacred and the human, and to bring together the past, present, and future of the deceased and their “surviving” loved ones.