The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies

Death and Consumption

MAAIKE GOTTFRIED

DePaul University, USA

DOI: 10.1002/9781118989463.wbeccs259

Death and consumption intersect at the practical need to dispose of a human corpse and the oft-accompanying ritual. In the modern capitalist West this universal and basic human responsibility has become a multibillion-dollar industry whose main actors and transactions are sanctioned and regulated by state governments and federal agencies.

Before the Second Industrial Revolution (1860s–1920s), those charged with handling this responsibility were largely unpaid female relatives of the deceased and the craftsmen they employed to supply elements deemed essential for the ritual that took place in the homes of the bereaved. Scientific and technological advances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hastened and legitimated the move of corpse disposal from the domestic sphere to that of the professional and the commercial. The rise of modern hospitals saw increasing numbers of people dying outside the home for the first time in history. Embalming became popular and increasingly more scientific after the bodies of fallen soldiers were chemically preserved during the American Civil War (1861–65) in order to withstand transport to their families. Soon embalmers offered their services with the promise of both increased public safety by preventing corpse decay and thus the spread of disease, and the emotional relief of seeing a loved one in a state of seeming somnolence before ...