1. The corpse, of course, is not the coffin; the body is not the box. Yet celebrants often spoke of the two interchangeably, in synecdochal relation.
2. In anthropology, various overviews and analyses have been provided by Metcalf and Huntington (1991), Bloch and Parry (1982), and Davies (2002), in addition to dozens of more case-specific studies of death, mortuary rituals, and commemoration, as well as the modern ur-text, Hertz (1960).
3. And yet note the mode of address: second person, as if Dave were the addressee. This might be interpreted as an opening in the immanent frame (see discussion below); I'm not sure it is much of one, although there is not space here to focus on the indexicals of immanence.
4. See https://humanism.org.uk/about/ (accessed January 19, 2012).
5. The survey was conducted online in June 2011. There were 1,164 respondents, out of 3,000 members invited to reply.