Why the sad face? Secularization and the changing function of funerals in Newfoundland
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyse the effects of professionalization (within the funeral services industry) on funeral practices in Newfoundland. A significant contemporary characteristic is a trend toward secularization, which has augmented the funeral services industry's claims to professional status, as funeral professionals take over roles that clergy once played. The findings are based on primary research from several sites: funeral directors, clergy, funeral services students and industry literature. Clergy recognize the shift towards personalization in funeral ritual and the move away from a strictly theological purpose for funerals. Funeral directors and funeral services students are keenly aware of the changes taking place in funeral practices. Some of these are seen in a positive light by professionals, others are taken as indicators of serious, even dangerous, trends in our culture. This concern over the potential loss of funeral ritual results in funeral professionals assuming the role of the protectors of these rituals. Thus, the changes in funeral customs are not simply the result of a de-ritualization process or an increasing discomfort with death, but they mark a shift in the practices used in ritualizing death and in the people who are charged with that responsibility.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".