Personalisation in Scottish funerals: Individualised ritual or relational process?

While there is a wide variation in the ways in which the term personalisation is used in the funeral context, there are a number of common threads. For example, there is a broad consensus that a personalised funeral will feature references to the life and character of the deceased person and such a funeral will probably have been planned by the bereaved family, who may even participate in its conduct. However, academics working with the concept do not always use the term in precisely the same way. This paper suggests that while these ways of considering personalisation are useful, they do not include the complex processes by which a personalised funeral is planned and carried out. Using data from a study exploring Scottish funeral practices as illustration, the article proposes that the sociology ofpersonal life offers tools that may help to unpack the process of planning such a funeral. These tools are the concepts of memorialisation, biography, embeddedness and relationality. Together these concepts may help to explain the process by which a personalised funeral is planned, and the influences that impact upon the people doing the planning.