Abstract
The Netherlands is known as one of the most secularized countries in the world. The processes of secularization and individualization put the traditional religious rituals increasingly out of favour, resulting in a quest for new rituals. Especially in the inevitable death rites experimentation and innovation is taking place, facilitated by the consumer-oriented undertaking business, and leading to expressions of a more personalized religiosity in materialized form. This research program, drawing on ritual studies and material culture studies, investigates new ritualizations of death in the Netherlands to gain insight into the ways average people who no longer adhere to specific world religions nevertheless practice religion in a different sort of way. In studying their actual practices of reinventing death rites (Grimes 2000), we ask about the relation of actions to material objects and to beliefs: What do changes in actions with material objects say about changes in people's beliefs? We want to know how artifacts, including human remains and a deceased person's intimate possessions, are made ritually meaningful in innovative ways. We are thus interested in the production of the 'ordinarily sacred' (Sexson 1992) in death-related behavior and signifying practices. Whereas one can avoid nearly all other ritualised moments, death is consistently the most difficult to leave symbolically undefined and meaningless.