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Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I examine the intersection of financial and moral values in the context of commercial care for the dead. I explore how African American funeral directors in New Orleans balance financial foresight and a concern for the wellbeing of others in facilitating mortuary rites of passage.

Paper long abstract:

In response to increased competition within the funeral industry and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, black-owned funeral homes in New Orleans have tried to counter their economic precarity by changing their payment terms. Most have stopped arranging funerals on credit. They also re-financialize the life insurance policies of the deceased through factor companies, which builds up cash flow but also makes funerals more expensive. These financial changes are meant to secure financially stable futures for family-owned businesses. Yet they also create insurmountable economic thresholds for some grieving families and recalibrate moral-economic notions of solidarity and care that have long informed the relationships between black-owned funeral homes and the communities they serve. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018), I explore in this paper how African American funeral directors try to become financially stable while still taking proper care of the dead and the bereaved. By focusing on the ways that funeral directors facilitate mortuary rites of passage, I move away from the dominant scholarly discourse that understands the role of money in American death care in terms of ‘consumer choice’ and marketization. I suggest instead that the moral-economic practice of funeral directing is characterized by prudence, or the skill of deliberating well the things to be done in light of one’s own future concerns, while not losing sight of the well-being of others in the here and now. This paper thus speaks to the entanglement and transformation of financial and moral values in the context of commercial care for the dead.