Reflection 3

At the moment, I am trying to put together an outline or storyboard of my ethnography. I think my story will be the "true meaning" of being a funeral director. I want to disprove the idea that being a funeral director is "gross" or "morbid. Though being in the presence of death is a part of being a funeral director, it is not everything. A funeral home is a business and the funeral director is a businessman (or woman). A funeral director has to create a name for himself, he has to advertise, and he has to compete. He is a counselor, an artist, and a nessesity.

My main secondary source is Thomas Lynch's novel, The Undertaking. He is not only a famous funeral director, he is also a poet. He has some pretty amazing and insightful things to say about the funeral business even though I may not like him very much. I also want to get creative with the history of the funeral business starting with the origins of the American funeral, then the old-fashioned home embalmings, and finally present day funerals. Chris Branson gave me some information about the history of Carlisle Funeral Chapel and I have pictures of the old funeral "office" before funeral homes become popular.

I want to do my ethnography as a webpage so it can be multimodal. My plan is to make the sight look like an obituary and have links do different parts of my story. I want one the the links to go to a page about an actual death that occured in Mooresville recently. I talked about it in a previous blog; the murder of Milton Lindgren. Other links will have the history of the funeral business with an interest in Carlisle Funeral Chapel, a page about Southern Illinois Univesity (where Sam goes to school), a page about what a funeral director looks like, and the stories of Sam Perry and Chris Branson.

Video Interview

This weekend, I did a video interview with Sam. It was very casual and was intended just to be a practice run but I think it was pretty good. I'll post it here when I get it edited. This was my first time using this particular camera so I didn't really know what I was doing. Sam was a good sport. 

I didn't script the questions so my grammar isn't the best. We were just at our parents' house and the fireplace was going. I had him sit in front of the fireplace and just asked him a few questions. The fireplace was neat but irrelevant to my project. I wish that we had gone to the cemetery but it was very cold and raining.