Biography,Authenticity and Personalised Post-Mortem Practices in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Current thanatology discourse details a new ethos of openness transforming death-related practices, accentuating a shift to personalised rituals, authenticity and expressive grief. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with mourners and funeral professionals, this article explores these putative post-mortem changes and critically assesses the claims and counterclaims concerning funerary arrangements in New Zealand. While underscoring the complexity of mortuary practices, this study explicates the varying notions of authenticity that pervade the funeral discourse. Although funeral professionals emphasised the significance of grief and bereavement processes characterised by a need for honesty and transparency, bereaved participants proffered an alternative interpretation of authenticity that privileged biographical coherence and the need to confer transcendence to the dead. These findings not only emphasise the inadequacies of the aforementioned representations of post-mortem change, but elucidate the context-specific conceptualisations of authenticity and the continuing relationships between the living and the dead in Aotearoa/New Zealand.