of incorporating the death into the on-going lives of mourners (Walter 1996; Arnason 2000).
3.2 The research was conducted in three sites from a desire to discover practices in locations which
differed in terms of their histories and social compositions. The locales selected were Edinburgh,
Scotland’s capital city; Inverness, the capital of the Highlands; and Stornoway, the main town on the Isle
of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The predominant method of data gathering was the use of unstructured
interviews. These were conducted with a range of professionals who deal with funerals in the course of
their employment, including ministers and elders from churches, non-religious funeral celebrants,
crematorium and cemetery managers, funeral directors and one gravedigger. In total 56 professionals were
interviewed. Ten interviews were also carried out with bereaved people who had arranged a funeral after the
death of someone to whom they were close. Professionals were approached directly with the request for an
interview, but for reasons of ethics and the sensitivity of the topic, bereaved individuals were contacted
either through a professional gatekeeper or by advertising in the local press and waiting for bereaved
individuals to make contact with the researcher (Lee 1993). In addition to interviews, a small number of
funerals were attended as a participant observer. Scottish funerals tend to be public occasions, so the
researcher dressed in similar fashion to other mourners and took part in the minimal activity required of
such a role. This included, for example, standing and sitting at appropriate moments or joining in the
singing of hymns. A number of written materials such as In Memoriam notices in the local papers and
orders of funeral service were also reviewed.
3.3 Interviews were recorded, with the permission of the interviewee, and recordings were transcribed. In
total there were 81 hours of interviews with professionals, with interviews ranging from three quarters of an
hour to just under three hours. Interviews with bereaved individuals varied from one hour to two and a half
hours, and in total 18 hours of interviews were recorded with bereaved people. The relationships of
bereaved to deceased individual represented by informants were: three widows, three widowers, two
daughters, one niece and one friend. The software package Atlas.ti was used as an aid to data
management, and analysis was carried out using a process of basic coding followed by analytic coding
(Richards 2005).
3.4 The data used in the following sections to describe and discuss specific funerals come from two
interviews with widowed men, one from Stornoway and one from Edinburgh. These two funerals were
selected because they illustrate different aspects of reflexivity at work. They show that reflexive practices
can be found in locales where traditional practice is regarded as the norm, and that tradition can be called
upon in late modern locations where it might be unexpected. The names used for individuals are
pseudonyms.
Stornoway funerals
4.1 Funerals in Stornoway follow a format that people living locally describe as traditional. The funeral
director said, ‘I think my grandfather would recognise the funerals here if he came back today’,
emphasising a view of funerals as traditional. Despite this, however, there have been changes in practice.
Until the 1980s funerals commonly took place in the family home, with the body of the deceased person
staying at home in the interval between death and funeral. The period between a death and a funeral was,
and still is, usually only three days and historically there was a service of religious worship that took place
in the home on each of the evenings between death and burial.
4.2 Today, most Stornoway funerals take place in the church rather than in the family home, and the
deceased individual spends the time between death and the funeral in an anteroom at the church. The
night before the funeral there will be a service in the church, termed a wake, and this is composed of
prayer, Bible readings and the singing of a psalm or hymn. The usual time for a Stornoway funeral is
1.30pm and during the service the coffin remains in the anteroom. A Free Church of Scotland minister
said, ‘a funeral is very simple. You have a singing, a prayer, you have readings, you have another prayer,
another singing, you have a short word from the Bible...and the benediction’. The singing referred to here is
exclusively of psalms, and in many Isle of Lewis churches this singing will be unaccompanied by musical
instruments. The Free Church of Scotland minister also commented that ‘your focal point is not actually
the person who has died, your focal point is God’, while a colleague from the Free Church of Scotland
(Continuing) remarked that ‘there is no eulogy, no narrative about the deceased person...that would be
frowned upon’.
4.3 Bible readings and prayers are lead by elders and ministers, who are all male. At the end of the service
of worship, mourners leave the church with the men in the lead. Outside male mourners carry the coffin,
which the funeral director has placed ready, along the street in the direction of the cemetery to which they
are going. The procession is conducted in such a way that all men who wish to take a turn at carrying the
coffin can do so, and it is expected that the women will watch from the doors of the church.[2] Once
everyone has had his turn at carrying the coffin it is loaded into the hearse for the journey to the cemetery,
where the minister speaks briefly and invited family and friends lower the coffin into the grave. It is not
unusual for mourners to fill the grave and replace the turf before leaving the cemetery.
4.4 Women do not have an active role in this process, but today ‘sometimes you’ll get the family wanting
the ladies to be in the procession’ (funeral director), although they do not carry the coffin. It is also the
case that ‘more and more women are coming to the burial itself’ (Free Church of Scotland minister), but not
all ministers encourage that; ‘women who have not previously been to a graveyard, it tends to become a
gossip house, it tends to become very irreverent’ (hospital chaplain). The historical role of women in
Stornoway as carers of the dying and the dead has been usurped by the hospital and the funeral director,
making their role currently ambiguous. It is perhaps the case that a process of self-reflexivity has started a
period of change as women seek new ways of involving themselves when someone dies.
http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/22.html
31/08/2011