THE MARKET OF DEATH

Abstract

This paper aims to understand what the contemporary funeral rituals reveal about the ways used by people to deal with death and dying nowadays. From that central concept, new reflections ramify about the relation-ship between men and time and being finite. It's made evident that the modern ways of dealing with death and dying involve flagrant marketing, pathological, medical and speculative processes. The fast growing presence of tanatoaesthetics in funerary services points out not only some make-up techniques of the dead, but also the existence of make-up strategies of death. That conceal is marked by the progressive reduction of the space that our modern society assign to the mourning and the suffering, categories that each day are more often compared to pathologies.

Keywords:
death; commodification; mourning