Begravningar i dagens Sverige - den personliga traditionen

Sammanfattning: The purpose of this essay is to study what people in Sweden today request regarding funerals. I want to investigate what people request and which of these requests can be met and which cannot. The material used are fifteen interviews I made with funeral officiants. Ten of those were with priests from The Church of Sweden, one with a vicar from the Catholic Church, one with a minister from a Serbian Orthodox Church, one with a reverend from the Missionary Church and two interviews were made with civil officiants. Further two interviews were made to clar-ify specific practical aspects regarding what needs to be done when, in the chain of events surrounding a death. These two interviews were made with the Chairman of the Swedish Fu-neral Association (SBF) and to a manager at a crematorium. The method used was qualitative interviews. The natures of the interviews were free with just some initial general questions and then I followed the informant in her or his story about what she or he noticed regarding requests when people have to plan a funeral. The theories used to analyze this material are: the theory of disembedment, - reflexivity, - fragmentation, - secularization, - religion privatized, - rational choice, - professionalization and finally the theory of ritual. The results and conclusions are that most of the requirements can be met, there are very few that cannot. Issues that were very frequently raised were those about the individual choices in the ceremony, such as music for instance. In general people expect the religious element in a funeral sometimes regardless whether it is a religious or a civil funeral.