“Bio” Funerals

The end of 20th and beginning of 21st century have seen the birth of various burial technologies and funerary devices claiming to be “environmentally friendly”, such as Promession patented in Sweden in 2001, Resomation invented in Scotland and patented in USA in 2007, the organic urn Urna Bios created in Spain in 1997, and the biodegradable coffins such as Capsula Mundi (invented in Italy in 2002) or Emergence (invented in France in 2012). Together these inventions and their worldwide reception ask to anthropologists new questions about the social legacy of environmental ideologies in the field of burial practices, as much as about representations of dead bodies in nowadays societies. Various issues raised by the mechanical treatment of corpses as much as by their conversion into an “ecological resource”, challenge indeed the very status given to human remains and forced us to pay close attention to the transformation occurring in the collective perception of death.