The Codes of the Dead: The Semiotics of Funeral Work
Citation: Barley, S. R. (1983/04) The Codes of the Dead: The Semiotics of Funeral Work. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography (Volume 12) (RSS)
DOI (original publisher): 10.1177/0098303983012001001
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1177/0098303983012001001
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1177/0098303983012001001
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): The Codes of the Dead: The Semiotics of Funeral Work
Download: http://jce.sagepub.com.libproxy.mit.edu/content/12/1/3.full.pdf+html
Tagged: Sociology
(RSS) Funeral directorship (RSS), death (RSS), semiotics (RSS), opposition (RSS), commensurability (RSS), metaphor (RSS), metonymy (RSS), codes (RSS), Occupations (RSS)
Summary
Via a single funeral director's perspectives on their work, Barley explores the ways in which funeral directors arrange the realities associated with a funeral to manage the impressions conveyed. Barley's larger agenda (if he can be said to have had one) is to explore how performance (a la Goffman) oriented professions foster/create commensurability through the use of metaphor and metonymy.
Previous Semiotic work focused primarily on linguistic acts as signs, or vehicles for meaning. Barley offers an expanded scope for semiotics, suggesting that the arrangement of the physical realm (e.g. posing a body, applying makeup, hiding embalming scars) has as much if not more effect on interpretations as the language used (or not used).
As he so often does, Barley presents a model of the above in compelling visual form, indicating how funeral directors attempt to create commensurability between apparently incommensurable items (e.g. a dead body and a living body) by managing the realm of the denotative. By closing eyes, hiding scars, applying makeup, turning a corpse's head just so, funeral directors are (according to Barley) trying to create the appearance of a sleeping person so as to invoke notions associated with the living (e.g. naturalness, comfortability) in the realm of the connotative.
Theoretical and Practical Relevance
Aside from the contributions above, Barley shows us that professional performance (and thus occupational credibility) has as much to do with the concealment or elimination of semiotic signs as it does with the manipulation and re-presentation of them. Barley simultaneously published a theory/method piece based on this work in ASQ.
