The Living and the Dead: Funeral Work in New York City Kristin Leavelle Murphy
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The Living and the Dead: Funeral Work in New York City Kristin Leavelle Murphy Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 ©2018 Kristin Leavelle Murphy All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Living and the Dead: Funeral Work in New York City Kristin Leavelle Murphy Status and stigma are fundamental to understanding the organization of social groups, including the forces that create and perpetuate inequality along multiple axes - race, ethnicity, and class, among others. One of the challenges in the discipline of sociology is that these deeply enmeshed processes are studied separately, rather than in relation to each other. This dissertation bridges the study of status and stigma through ethnographic examination of the affective, situational, and contextual interplay of status and stigma processes in urban spaces that are both exceptional and ubiquitous: the neighborhood funeral home. To study these processes, I observed and participated in the day-to- day activities of three New York City funeral homes over four years. The project contributes to three areas: ethnographic design, the literature on status and stigma processes, and to urban and cultural sociology. Whereas most ethnographic projects focus on a single subject – a community, a workplace, a profession - in isolation or a multi-sited framework, this project has different approach. The three focal funeral homes were selected based on a process rather than a population – all are located in neighborhoods in the midst of dramatic demographic transitions. To better understand and contextualize these micro interactions, I collected data and participated in activities at other levels of the funeral industry: national, state, and local. I attended funeral directors trainings and conventions, including with the largest national association, the historically black funeral directors association, and New York State’s convention. For other perspectives on New York City, I interviewed over forty funeral directors and allied professionals throughout the five boroughs. This project strives to avoid static and categorical explanations for status and stigma processes, the binaries of black and white, elite and poor, and explores life both in the middle and at the intersection. Using this multi-site design, it contributes to the research on neighborhood change and demographic transition as I distinguish between experiences common to the general process of neighborhood change while isolating those that emerge from the variation in changes specific to particular processes. This project is not only one of the most in-depth studies of the funeral industry, it also more broadly contributes to our understanding of the dynamic relationship of status and stigma, and the process and business of the monetization of cultural practices. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE 33 CHAPTER TWO 64 CHAPTER THREE 108 CHAPTER FOUR 156 REFERENCES 197 APPENDIX 204 i INTRODUCTION: Status and Stigma Why status and stigma? Because they’re studied separately but they’re part of a same phenomenon. Sometimes status and stigma are recognized as related but distinct concepts. Other times they’re conflated, used almost interchangeably. Most often, the terms are used loosely, without clear specification. I didn’t set out to disentangle the concepts of status and stigma. I set out to learn about funeral directors. But trying to write about funeral directors-how they talk, how they operate in the world-brought me into what I hope will be a fruitful exploration of their interplay.1 Why does this matter in terms of funeral directors? With respect to understanding their world, a lot of the questions that are interesting involve the relationships between funeral directors and outsiders. This ranged from perceptions of their work through outsiders’ eyes, the impact of these perceptions on their own presentation, as individuals, and of their work-to who the outsiders are, and how that effects the work. These are the questions which motivated the original design of this project, which was to study city funeral homes in their neighborhoods-be it a neighborhood of insiders or outsiders. The stigma side of funeral directing is more obvious, more frequently discussed. Most funeral directors mentioned it during the course of an interview. Stigma figures prominently in the popular media caricatures of funeral directors, not surprisingly. But where the stigma of funeral directing really comes through is in the academic literature. The seemingly obsessive, single minded focus of 1 Here are the basic dimensions of the problem: 1. There is a lot of research on status. There is a lot of research on stigma. 2. They are related concepts. 3. The research rarely intersects-and when it does, it’s from one ‘side’ and sloppy in reference to the other. 4. The work on status is deep and sprawling. The research on stigma tends to be more recent and narrowly focused. It is also more actively contested. (I’m not suggesting that status is ‘settled,’ but that stigma is particularly busy.) 5. Mostly the stigma people are busy in the labs- refining measures/ effects of stigma 6. There’s a pretty wide gap between inside and outside the lab. 1 the stigmatization of funeral directing in academic literature confused me and pushed me back to the status of funeral directing. The status side of funeral directing is more complicated. What we mean by and how we understand status is more nebulous, difficult to pin down, but always there. The sheer range of perceptions funeral directors had-embodied, performed, seemed to believe - about their own status in terms of their work, their role in a community, their importance or insignificance, their visibility or invisibility - would surprise someone who only read academic articles. Making sense of funeral directors requires making sense, somehow, of status and status claims, as distinct from stigma and stigmatizing projects. Funeral directors are not a hidden population nor are they a neglected subject of academic research. They’re part of the American imagination, entertainment, and popular media from major television series (Six Feet Under, The Adams Family) to graphic novels (Fun Home) to supporting roles in popular and academic literature. The roles, tropes, stereotypes, funeral directors play varies: there’s the creepy guy, the power broker (i.e. – Street Corner Society), the slick suited money-maker. They’ve been called ‘body delivery men” and “exploiters of human tragedy.” Everyone has a story of a funeral home or a funeral director. Funeral directors occupy a funny place – they are both ubiquitous and slightly mysterious; stigmatized by some, admired by others. They elicit a range of contradictory responses. Avery, a funeral director at the South Bronx field site, was asked to stop serving food at church events because it made people uncomfortable. On the other hand, she also said she was seen with respect because she wore a suit all the time. Many funeral directors say people refuse to shake their hands, 2 are uncomfortable with any physical contact (because they handle the dead). At the Canarsie, Brooklyn field site, Steve Sebbeto said a parent at his daughter’s fancy private school asked him about waste management when he learned he was a funeral director. Why? Because there is a stereotype that funeral directing and waste management (in certain Brooklyn neighborhoods) are both “owned” by organized crime. There are all sorts of strategies for studying status, different ways to operationalize it, to hone in on what we conceptually mean when we think about status. The key concept that organizes this work is social distance. And it necessarily follows that for there to be some kind of concept of distance, that some kind of measurement (whether imagined to be objective) or purely subjective underlies it. At the end of the day, I’ll focus on observed behaviors, which one could imagine is the mechanism by which subjective measures are encoded into “objective” profiles. Social distance as a sociological data point is not new. Variations and derivations of the original Bogardus scale - developed in the 1950s to study ethnic and racial tensions - have often been used in studies of occupational status. In addition to the subjective scale measures, sociologists have measured social distance as observed behavior-who do people actually interact with-a tradition going all the way back to W. LLoyd Warner’s Social Class in America (Harvard, 1949)-‘evaluated participation’ and ‘index of status characteristics.’ But more recently, and explicitly, with respect to social distance, is Bearman on Doormen (Chicago, 2009).2 2 For the record, occupational prestige has a long history in sociology as a composite of status, power, quality of work, education, and income (Treiman 1977). Prestige scores capture societal perceptions of the differential evaluations or rankings of occupations (Dunkerley 1975) and have been found to be highly reliable across respondents, locales, and time (Fossum & Moore, 1975; Sawinski & Domanski, 1991). Despite this, there is still an extended debate about ‘what prestige scales actually measure.’ (e.g. Grusky & Sorensen 1998; Grusky 1992; Goldthorpe and Hope 1972). Are they a measure of occupational desirability, prestige (in the sense of social honor), status, income? The least rabbit hole of the answers is: prestige scores capture 3 An idea put forward here is that social distance, which serves either as a type of self-protection or as a sign of respect-means that social distance could be used as a measure not only for status processes, but also for stigma processes. Others have worked in this vein as well; most compellingly is Lucas and Phelan (2012) whose lab based work considers the interweaving of status, stigma, and what will turn out to be critical for funeral directors, skill. In the case here, embalming skill is the most salient feature of the status/stigma interweaving process, since contact with the dead body is necessarily considered polluting.