Cremation in Norway: changes and challenges

In this project I explore the development of modern cremation and cremation events in Norway. I focus on the multiple ontologies of cremation events and the relationships between the living mourners and the dead during the gradual transformation of the social person within Christian, as well as secular traditions in Norway. Modern cremation in Norway brings with it various forms of regulation and challenges for these groups. In the wake of late-modern trend to celebrate the social identity and biography of the deceased there is an increasing individualised secular practice and improvisation connected to the treatment of ashes, relocating or incorporating the dead within the world of the living at individual significant memorial sites with special personal significance. I illustrate how various cosmological, eschatological, soteriological, economic, environmental, as well as socio-political factors regulate and shape the form and content of cremation events and disposal in Norway.