Quelle place pour les « bébés morts » ? Espaces dédiés dans les cimetières et cérémonies rituelles d’adieu.

Gaëlle Clavandier (1) , Philippe Charrier (1)

1 CMW - Centre Max Weber

This paper intends to restitute the results of an ongoing research. This one tackles the issue of perinatal death from the perspective of taking charge of the bodies and their possible grave. The devices implemented by the public authorities (in particular the municipalities, municipal or intercommunal funeral director, or even crematoriums) aiming to give a social existence to these “babies”. This was translated into the concrete place given to them (for example farewell ceremony, tribute ceremony). This research comes with a continuation of the works on perinatal death but has the distinctive feature of moving the investigation field by focusing less on the hospital environment and the parents support (principally the mothers) than on the management of human remains and the role of the institutions in that respect. It is assumed that these institutions do not only apply the regulatory frameworks but think up new spaces and devices that we propose to describe.

Mots clés: Perinatal death; body; remains; ashes; grave; ceremony; tribute ceremony; public device.

Domaines: Sociologie

Gaëlle Clavandier, Philippe Charrier. Quelle place pour les « bébés morts » ? Espaces dédiés dans les cimetières et cérémonies rituelles d’adieu.. Grégory Delaplace, Frédérique Valentin. Le Funéraire. Mémoire, protocoles, monuments, Editions de Boccard, p.51-60, 2015. ⟨halshs-01344165⟩