Contemporary funeral rituals and involvement of mourning participants

The paper provides some results of the social-anthropologic study concerning contemporary urban funeral rituals. The research uses case-study strategies. The case in focus is a funeral ceremony of the car crash victims in Murmansk region. This collective tragic death of the group of young people had a deep public resonance, which can be explained by a versatile social representation of the funeral participants associated with the “group of the deceased”. The main participants of the funeral were family members, friends, and representatives of the educational institution where the deceased studied. The paper analyzes social roles, relations, behavior, and assessment of ritual actions from the perspective of involved participants. A specific character of the ritual scenario was associated with the type of death, personality, social status of the deceased, and participants’ age. In traditional culture, family members and funeral experts determine representation of the “deceased person” during funeral ceremony. In contemporary funeral ceremony other social relations defined this representation. The funeral scenario reveals the structure of social space that used to exist around a deceased person. In the studied case, friends of the deceased made up the biggest part of the group of mourners. Together with the family members, friends of the deceased became a part of the funeral ritual. A high degree of integration among mourning friends was one of the distinguishing features of this funeral procedure.