Entre les vivants et les morts, les pompes funèbres aux portes du marché

Article repris dans Problèmes économiques, n°2.695, janvier 2001, Paris, La Documentation Française et dans « Echo des recherches », Sciences Humaines, avril 2001.National audienceIn the 1970s, a funeral market emerged in France as the communal monopolies dating from a 1904 law were eroded. Studying this emerging marketplace sheds light on a merchandising process in this branch of the economy. This process has unfolded against the backdrop of a change in geography (the places where people die) and a change in the symbolic relation to death. It has entailed: designing funeral services in place of rituals; reworking the ‘mediations' that institute economic transactions between market segments of living clients, on the one hand, and, on the other, businesses of different sizes that provide various products and services; working out new arrangements for winning clients (products, services, package deals, etc.); and developing new business qualifications. Deeply anchored in the realm of symbols, the funeral business must handle two anthropological aspects of exchanges (the market and symbolic ones) that are structurally antagonistic but that its economic organisation cannot abolish. This inquiry focuses on how symbolic issues limit the activities of these businesses, in particular by forcing them to reconcile competition over prices (the very basis of the marketing dimension) and discretion about prices (itself required by the symbolic prohibition against reducing clients to mere customers.)En étudiant la création d'un marché des pompes funèbres1 en France, né de la suppression des monopoles communaux, les auteurs nous donnent à voir un processus de marchandisation : construction d'une prestation en lieu et place des rituels, recomposition des médiations qui instituent l'échange économique, construction de nouveaux dispositifs et compétences d'échange. Profondément ancré dans la sphère du symbolique, le secteur doit cependant conjuguer deux registres anthropologiques de l'échange, marchand et symbolique, structurellement antagonistes, que ne peut abolir son organisation économique. Les auteurs s'interrogent sur la façon dont l'enjeu symbolique conditionne l'activité des acteurs économique