Funeral Ceremony As an Embedded Social Capital

Funeral ceremony is one of the institutionalized social facts in each society. It could be carried out with family, relative and community members in the traditional societies. But in the modernized society, funerals tend to be hold only by family and closer friends. We compared the East Asian funeral ceremonies in Invisible Population: the Place of the Dead in East Asian Megacities (ed. N. Aveline-Dubach, Lexington Books). We found the great changes of funeral customs in Japan, China and South Korea. The undertakers became the new actor of the funeral services and we can’t conduct it without them in the urbanized cities. We can call that tendency as “the commercialization of funeral ceremony”. Now the funeral service can be served only by the professional undertakers.

But in the East Asia the relations and friends are yet important actors. They help the family members for organizing the funerals. So the social networks that the dead and family members have are “the embedded social capital” for the funeral ceremony. We shall compare the properties of the societies from this point of view.

The Center for Social Capital Studies in Senshu University held the researches in East Asian Societies cooperated with the organizations in these countries; Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, South Korea, China, Taiwan and Thailand. We asked the people about social relation, social trust, security, customs and ceremonies. I will show their attitudes about the participations for the funeral ceremonies of relations, friends, neighbors and colleagues.