Medicalized Death and the Reification of Spiritual Bonds: Contemporary Korean Funeral Rites

Abstract

As a critical review and theoretical reflection, this study explores the transformation of funeral rites in contemporary Korean society and analyzes how ‘Filial Piety,’ a core Confucian value, has been reshaped by the mechanisms of medicalization and capitalism. Traditionally, in the Confucian worldview, death was not a biological termination but a religious process of advancing toward immortality through descendants’ ‘remembrance and representation.’ This paper identifies ‘cultural hybridity,’ where contemporary Korean funerals combine various religious traditions such as Christianity and Buddhism with secular forms, as positive evidence that the aspiration for spiritual bonds still persists. On the other hand, it establishes that the primary cause of damaging the public significance of death is not this mixture of rituals but ‘funeral capitalism’ based on market logic and medicalization. The study criticizes the fact that capitalist secularity has replaced the practice of Filial Piety with ‘reified consumption,’ thereby excluding those lacking economic means from the process of death. Conclusively, this study suggests the restoration of ‘spiritual publicness’ based on non-material continuing bonds and communal mourning, rather than material display.

1. Introduction

Is the death of a human being a private realm or a public realm? Insofar as death marks the full stop of an individual’s life, it is undoubtedly an event on a personal dimension. Therefore, one could argue that an individual’s death belongs to the private sphere. However, given that one cannot directly experience one’s own death, it is questionable whether an individual’s death can be defined solely as an event of the private realm. Although the individual does not experience their own death, those around them experience it indirectly, sending off and mourning the deceased through rituals. In this process, the event that concludes a person’s life is transformed into the public sphere. Thus, a human’s death cannot be regarded merely as a private personal event.

However, in contemporary society—particularly in South Korean society, where high-level medical technology and capitalism are combined—this public significance of death faces a serious challenge. Death has been separated from living spaces and the community, reduced to a ‘biological end’ and a ‘medical event’ processed within the controlled space of the hospital. The religious publicness, which formerly strengthened community solidarity and reaffirmed the relationship between the dead and the living, has weakened during the process of rapid industrialization and medicalization; that void is being filled by “conspicuous consumption”—a concept Joon-Mann Kang (2010, p. 100) adopts from Thorstein Veblen—and ‘objectified rituals’ (reified rituals).

This study distances itself from bioethical debates such as decisions on life-sustaining treatment, euthanasia, and physician-assisted suicide. Instead, it seeks to examine the essential layers of the private and public meanings of death from the perspectives of religion and culture. In particular, this study analyzes how ‘Filial Piety’ (효 (孝))—a core Confucian value in Korea—has been distorted as it combines with the modern capitalist medical system. Furthermore, it aims to identify the causes of the phenomenon where death is excluded or marginalized from the public sphere in modern society and to explore religious and cultural alternatives to restore the communal and public significance of death, alongside the lost ‘spiritual bonds’.

Previous studies have well documented the morphological changes in contemporary Korean funerals, such as the transition from home to hospital mortuaries and the rapid increase in cremation. However, they predominantly analyze these transformations through a functionalist lens, affirming them as practical adaptations to urbanization, residential shifts, and hygiene (Lee and Lee 1995; S.-D. Kim 2007; Lee 2003), administrative necessities for efficient land use (Na 2008), or natural cultural evolutions (C.-W. Park 2010b). By framing the hospitalization of death primarily as a spatial or hygienic convenience, previous studies often overlook the isolating effects of ‘medicalization,’ which unintentionally separates the dying from their community. Furthermore, they tend to understate the underlying mechanisms of ‘funeral capitalism,’ where the traditional practice of Filial Piety is commercially appropriated and shifted toward reified, conspicuous consumption. Consequently, these existing perspectives frequently miss the erosion of ‘spiritual bonds’ and the diminishing public significance of human death.

Aligning with the critical perspectives recently raised by S.-D. Kim (2025) and Noh and Kim (2025), this study takes a differentiated stance from these existing functionalist approaches. While Kim identifies that modern funeral etiquettes are often ‘invented traditions’ fabricated for commercial convenience rather than historical continuity (S.-D. Kim 2025), and Noh and Kim analyze the macro-sociological shifts leading to the desocialization and deterritorialization of death (Noh and Kim 2025), this study specifically interrogates how the core moral value of Filial Piety is internally reconfigured into ‘reified consumption’ within the structural nexus of medicalization and funeral capitalism.

With this critical awareness, this study seeks to critically analyze the phenomenon in which traditional ‘Filial Piety’ is commercially appropriated and distorted into reified consumption within funeral rites, as well as the underlying alienation of death and the loss of its public significance. Therefore, to thoroughly examine these overlooked dimensions from an objective yet critical perspective, this study aims to provide a critical review and theoretical reflection on contemporary Korean funeral rites.

2. Theoretical Framework: Death, Eternity, and Community

This chapter theoretically establishes that death is a ‘public and spiritual event’ that transcends the biological extinction of the individual and is sustained by those who remain. To achieve this, this study cross-analyzes the Confucian theory of ‘remembrance and representation’ with Western discourses on ‘continuing bonds’ and ‘community,’ thereby defining the social and religious status of death.

2.1. Death as Remembrance and Representation

The fundamental rationale for defining death as a public event lies in the fact that death is not a mere end but a process of acquiring permanence by being remembered within the community. Seokchoon Lew et al. focus on the way Confucianism addresses the issues of death and immortality. While Max Weber characterized Confucianism merely as a secular ethic of adaptation to the world, Lew et al. argue that a ‘religious hardcore’ exists within the Confucian concept of ‘Filial Piety’, which enables the overcoming of death and the progression toward eternity (Lew et al. 2011, pp. 172–73).

According to them, in Confucianism, biological death is not the termination of human existence. The deceased obtains eternal life within the community through ‘remembrance’ by descendants and ‘representation’ through ancestral rites. In other words, as descendants perform ‘vicarious representation’ by remembering their ancestors and living their lives on their behalf, death escapes the private extinction of the individual and is sublimated into a public and religious event that connects generations (Lew et al. 2011, pp. 175–76).

This Confucian perspective aligns with the relationship between death and community discussed in Western philosophy. Drawing on the discussions of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, Zrinka Božić Blanuša explains that community is established only by sharing the death of the other. Unlike Heidegger, who viewed death as a realm of ‘singularity’ that must be faced strictly alone, they regard the exposure to and sharing of the death of the other as the very origin of community and the foundation of a ‘sacred’ experience (Božić Blanuša 2010). Therefore, through the mechanisms of ‘representation’ and ‘sharing,’ death becomes an essential public event that constitutes a community beyond the private realm.

2.2. Continuing Bonds and Spiritual Well-Being

The publicness of death is secured when the relationship between the dead and the living is not severed but sustained. Dennis Klass and Robert Goss criticize Western modern psychology for setting the goal of grief as ‘breaking bonds’ with the deceased and instead propose the ‘continuing bonds’ model. According to them, in traditional societies, bonds with the dead, such as ancestor worship, went beyond providing mere personal psychological comfort; they performed a powerful public function of maintaining family and community order and confirming the identity of members (Klass and Goss 1999, pp. 547–48, 553).

However, upon entering modern society, these bonds have been reduced from the public sphere and isolated within the private sphere. Suhyeon Kwon, citing the discussion of Samuel Scheffler, warns of the dangers this reduction poses to human value assessment. Scheffler argues that for an individual’s life to have value, there must be a presupposition that humanity (the community) will continue to exist after death, that is, a belief in a “collective afterlife” (Kwon 2018, pp. 129–31, 144). This suggests that an individual’s life unconnected to the world after death (the afterlife or the future of the community) is prone to losing its meaning.

Therefore, positioning death within the public sphere is essential even for personal ‘spiritual well-being.’ As Lew et al. pointed out, the representation of ancestors through Filial Piety in Confucianism grants descendants “religious citizenship,” providing both internal conviction and external recognition simultaneously (Lew et al. 2011, p. 177). This implies that death is not an object to be medically processed but a spiritual task that must be continuously reinterpreted and represented within the community’s memory.

In summary, death is a private event of biological cessation, but at the same time, it is a public and religious event that guarantees the permanence of the community through remembrance, representation, and continuing bonds. However, in contemporary South Korean society, this essential meaning is threatened by medicalization and capitalist distortion. The following chapter will specifically analyze how these distortions occurred within the specific religious and cultural context of Korea.

3. The Religious and Cultural Context of Korea: The Religiosity of Filial Piety and Cultural Hybridity

3.1. The Religious Essence of Filial Piety: Eternal Life Through Remembrance and Representation

From a modern Western perspective, Confucianism has been regarded more as a secular ethical norm or governing ideology rather than a religion. However, to understand the public meaning of death in Korean society, one must not overlook the religious dimension of Confucianism, particularly its core value of ‘Filial Piety’ (효 (孝)). Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid point out that in the Korean Confucian tradition, death is understood not as a severance of the relationship between the living and the dead, but as a process of interaction through continuous rituals (Horlyck and Pettid 2014, as cited in Baker 2016, pp. 277–78).

In this context, Lew et al. criticize Max Weber for characterizing Confucianism merely as an ethic of “secular adaptation” lacking religious soteriology; they argue that a “religious hardcore” exists within Confucianism that addresses the issues of death and eternity (Lew et al. 2011, p. 173).

In the Confucian worldview, human biological death is not an absolute severance of existence. According to Lew et al., Confucianism overcomes the fear of death and guarantees eternal life through the mechanism of ‘Filial Piety.’ Here, Filial Piety transcends the mere moral act of honoring parents and is sublimated into a religious practice wherein descendants ‘remember’ ancestors and ‘represent’ their lives (Lew et al. 2011, p. 175). Chang-Won Park also supports this by emphasizing that Korean death rites reflect a powerful cultural desire to continue the relationship with the deceased beyond simple memorialization (C.-W. Park 2010a, p. 91).

Descendants, as beings who have inherited the life of their ancestors, keep their ancestors alive eternally by remembering them through ancestral rites (제사 (祭祀)) and vicariously realizing the ancestors’ values through their own lives. In other words, the eternal existence of ancestors is confirmed as long as the remembrance and representation by descendants continue (Lew et al. 2011, p. 176).

From this perspective, traditional death in Korea is not a private extinction of an individual but a thoroughly public event maintained by the family and kinship community sharing the duty of ‘representation.’ Lew et al. analyze that fulfilling this duty of Filial Piety endows individuals with “religious citizenship,” which firmly anchors their social and spiritual standing within the kinship network (Lew et al. 2011, p. 177). Therefore, for Koreans, parents’ funerals and ancestral rites are not simple memorial events but sacred tasks that confirm one’s ontological grounds within the community and sustain spiritual bonds with the dead.

3.2. The Dual View of Death in Contemporary Koreans: Cultural Hybridity

The funeral culture of Korean society extends beyond a mere concept of death; while grounded in Confucian Ritual Studies (예학 (禮學)), it amalgamates various religious elements—including Buddhism, folk religion, and Christianity—to form distinctive Korean cultural characteristics. This phenomenon can be explained through the concept of cultural hybridity. Malory Nye, who emphasized hybridity in cultural and religious studies, argues that all cultures are hybrid and all religions are syncretic. Through such cultural hybridity and religious syncretism, all cultures undergo change (Nye 2008, pp. 41–44).

Although traditional Confucian rites have been formally reduced as Korean society underwent modernization and urbanization, the religious mentality inherent in Filial Piety continues by combining with other modern religious forms. Hyundong Song analyzes that while contemporary Korean funeral rites have broken away from traditional forms, they still maintain the essential functions of rituals: social integration and the confirmation of identity (Song 2003, pp. 290–91). In particular, the transformation of death rites that occurred during the process of Protestantism establishing itself as a major religion in Korean society clearly demonstrates this ‘hybridity.’

Changwon Park argues that Korean funeral culture, especially Christian funerals, does not simply follow Western styles, but that “Christian funerary practices show an amalgamation of Confucian and Christian elements” (C.-W. Park 2010a, p. 91). Early Protestant missionaries defined Confucian ancestral rites as idolatry and banned them, yet Korean Christians could not abandon the powerful cultural desire to practice Filial Piety toward their parents. The result was the birth of the Christian ‘Chudoyebe’ (추도예배 (追悼禮拜), Memorial Worship Service), which replaced the Confucian ancestral rites (C.-W. Park 2010a, pp. 145–48). Formally, ‘Chudoyebe’ follows Christian elements such as hymns, prayers, and scripture reading, but its function and timing directly inherit the Confucian Gijesa (기제사 (忌祭祀), death-day ritual) and Charye (차례 (茶禮), ancestral memorial rite). In this sense, Park regards Chudoyebe as a product of the struggle by Korean Christians to balance between ‘religious piety to God’ and ‘filial duty to ancestors’ (C.-W. Park 2010a, p. 178), and argues that Christian death rites represent ‘cultural blending’ in the sense that they combine Confucian and Christian faiths. However, given that traditional Confucian funeral procedures were accommodated into Christian faith to re-create a Christian funeral culture, Christian funerals can be interpreted as being closer to the “Cultural Hybridity” argued by Malory Nye (2008, pp. 41–44).

Lew et al. refer to this phenomenon by stating that “Korean Christians are Confucians in Christian cloaks”; they point out that even if Confucianism as an institutional religion has disappeared, Confucianism as a lifestyle and cultural ethos still operates powerfully. The fact that a significant number of Protestants statistically still participate in ‘Jesa (제사 (祭祀), ancestral rites)’ or its modified forms of rituals suggests that the Korean view of death is composed of multiple layers around the religious mentality of ‘Filial Piety,’ rather than being dominated by a single religious doctrine (Lew et al. 2011, pp. 185–86).

Furthermore, despite the relocation of modern Korean funerals to the medical and commercial space of the ‘hospital funeral hall,’ religious hybridity continues to manifest within them. As Aerina Lee and Namsik Lee have pointed out, since the late twentieth century, the place of dying in Korea has rapidly shifted from the home to the hospital mortuary (Lee and Lee 2002, p. 295). In fact, according to Statistics Korea, as of 2022, the proportion of deaths occurring in medical institutions was overwhelmingly high at 74.8% (Statistics Korea 2023). This suggests, as Hyunchul Kim notes, that the medical institution has become “the most important place regarding death” in Korean society (H.-c. Kim 2011, p. 149).

However, this new space, called the hospital funeral hall, is not a place dominated by religious exclusivity but has transformed into a venue where diverse religious backgrounds coexist. Changwon Park analyzes that contemporary Korean hospital funeral halls reflect the ‘multi-religious social reality’ of Korean society by providing a separate ‘funeral parlor (빈소 (殯所))’ for chief mourners with different religious backgrounds, such as Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism (C.-W. Park 2010a, p. 125; C.-W. Park 2010b, p. 31). Furthermore, the use of distinct religious terminologies for death—such as ‘sochun (소천 (所天))’ for Protestants, ‘sunzong (선종 (善終))’ for Catholics, and ‘ipjok (입적 (入寂))’ for Buddhists—in these public facilities visibly demonstrates how diverse religious identities coexist and compromise within modernized spaces (C.-W. Park 2010b, pp. 31–32). Another example is the practice in Catholic funerals of placing both a Cross and an ‘Ancestral Tablet (shinju 신주 (神主))’ on the altar of the funeral parlor. The Ancestral Tablet is perceived not merely as a memorial object to commemorate the deceased, but as a living entity in which the ancestor’s soul resides (M.-Y. Kim 2009, p. 347). This demonstrates that while contemporary Korean death rituals appear Westernized and hospital-based on the surface, the indigenous ideology of Filial Piety—aimed at maintaining ‘continuing bonds’ with the dead—persists tenaciously beneath the surface, compromising with Christianity and modern facilities.

In sum, within the religious and cultural context of Korea, death is the object of a religious aspiration to acquire eternity through ‘Filial Piety.’ However, this aspiration clashes with rapid medicalization and capitalist changes in modern society, sometimes manifesting in distorted forms. The following chapter will specifically examine how this Confucian concept of Filial Piety has been combined with the modern medical system and the funeral industry, leading to the ‘reification of Filial Piety’ and the ‘commercialization of death.’

4. Loss and Distortion of Publicness: Medicalization and Funeral Capitalism

4.1. Excluded Death: Medicalization and Spatial Segregation

In Korean society, there is a desire for the memory of the dead to persist long among descendants. In traditional concepts, this tends to apply to those who met a “good death.” In the past, it was considered most ideal for those whose death was imminent to wrap up their lives at their own home, surrounded by family, relatives, and neighbors (M. S. Kim 2009, pp. 177–78).

The process by which death is excluded from the public sphere in Korean society is closely linked to the physical relocation of the place of dying. In pre-modern society, death occurred at ‘Home (집 (家)),’ the living space of life, and this was a public event where family and the village community guarded the dying moment and performed rituals together. However, in modern times, the place of death has rapidly shifted to medical institutions. Aerina Lee and Namsik Lee point out that since the 1990s, the place of dying for Koreans has rapidly transitioned from home to the hospital mortuary and funeral hall; they analyze that this spatial shift has isolated death from the space of everyday life (Lee and Lee 2002, pp. 294–95). In this process, as Chang-Won Park observes, “one of the most significant ramifications of these recent changes in funerary practice is that the funeral has increasingly moved from the domestic arena into the public domain. In the past, the funeral was a homely and private affair conducted mainly at home by family members” (C.-W. Park 2010b, p. 31). Consequently, the basic form of the funeral has become thoroughly dependent on funeral-related public institutions such as hospital funeral halls. However, the “homely and private affair” mentioned by Park should be understood not as reducing human death to a merely personal event within the family, but rather as emphasizing the inherent public significance embedded in the intimate community of the family. Consequently, as contemporary funerals become heavily dependent on institutionalized public facilities like hospitals, the family-based communality and its true public meaning are, in effect, paradoxically being diluted.

This ‘hospitalization of death’ accelerated the ‘medicalization of death,’ which reduces death to an object of medical management and treatment. Sheila M. O’Gorman criticizes the fact that within the modern medical system, death is regarded not as a natural process of life but as a medical failure or technical defeat (O’Gorman 1998, p. 1130). At the site of medicalized death, family and community members, who should be practicing ‘Filial Piety,’ are no longer the subjects of the ritual; instead, they are reduced to powerless ‘onlookers’ watching the life-sustaining treatment or body preparation performed by medical professionals.

Furthermore, this segregation interlocks with the operating mechanism of “biopower” pointed out by Michel Foucault (Ha 2022, p. 112), thoroughly leading to the ‘privatization’ of death. Borrowing Foucault’s discussion, Hongkyu Ha analyzes that as modern power concentrates on managing and promoting life, death is dismissed as a limit of power and an uncontrollable realm, thereby being reduced to “the most secret and private point of life” (Ha 2022, p. 112). Death in the controlled space called the hospital erases the place where the community’s social rituals can enter, and by turning death into an administrative and medical event to be hygienically processed, it undermines the social and religious publicness that death possesses.

4.2. Funeral Capitalism and the Reification of Filial Piety: Twisted Religiosity

If medicalization excluded death from the public sphere, that void has been filled by ‘Funeral Capitalism’ based on market logic. Hyundong Song analyzes that while contemporary Korean funeral rites have broken away from traditional forms, they still maintain the functional aspects of rituals: social integration and the confirmation of identity (Song 2003, pp. 290–91). However, he points out that the way these functions are performed has changed, and criticizes contemporary funerals for transforming into secular procedures that confirm the chief mourner’s social prestige rather than focusing on the religious essence of the ritual (Song 2003, pp. 301, 306, 309).

An interesting point is that the industrialization of Korean funerals has not discarded the Confucian value of ‘Filial Piety,’ but has cleverly utilized and transformed it. Lew et al. suggest that the practice of Filial Piety in contemporary Korean society has combined with capitalist economic capability, degenerating into ‘objectified rituals.’ According to them, the religious function of Filial Piety—which traditionally guaranteed eternal life by remembering and ‘representing’ ancestors—remains a valid desire even in modern times (Lew et al. 2011, pp. 177, 188).

However, as the traditional means and time–space for practicing Filial Piety disappeared during the process of modernization, modern people tend to attempt to replace that duty through economic expenditure. Lew et al. analyze this shift, noting that the mode of remembrance and representation has moved away from constrained forms to a mode of “exaltation of the life of one’s children”—that is, a transition to representing ancestors through economic success and the consequent consumption capability (Lew et al. 2011, p. 188). In other words, for modern Koreans, the act of dressing the deceased in expensive burial shrouds and setting up lavish floral altars is not mere vanity; it is a manifestation of distorted religiosity that seeks to complete Filial Piety by ‘representing well’ the ancestors through the medium of capital.

Gilsoo Han terms this phenomenon ‘funeral capitalism,’ criticizing the fact that Korean funeral halls have degenerated into venues for ‘conspicuous consumption’ rather than spaces for mourning and spiritual comfort (Han 2019, pp. 23–24). Funeral Service (상조 (相助)) companies induce the purchase of expensive funeral products by stimulating the guilt felt by the bereaved families that they “have not been able to perform filial piety” sufficiently to their parents (Han 2019, p. 47). Consequently, death has lost its status as a public event where the community shares sorrow and strengthens solidarity, ultimately being reduced to a thoroughly commercial event where even the respect shown to death is hierarchized according to economic ability. This demonstrates that Confucian publicness, upon meeting the capitalist market, has produced the deformed result of the ‘reification of Filial Piety’.

5. Consequences and Alternatives: Restoration of True Public Significance and Healing

5.1. Consequences of Distorted Publicness: Lonely Death and Alienation

As funeral rites in contemporary Korean society degenerate into ‘Reified Filial Piety’ determined by capitalist consumption capability, those lacking economic means are being thoroughly excluded even from the process of death. The most extreme and tragic form of this exclusion is ‘Lonely Death (고독사 (孤獨死))’. Sooyoung Kim et al., through the big data analysis of media reports, point out that in Korean society, lonely death is perceived not merely as dying alone but as ‘social homicide’ and a ‘failed life’ where poverty, family disconnection, and welfare blind spots overlap (Kim et al. 2023, pp. 425–26, 439).

As Lew et al. analyzed, if ‘Filial Piety’ in the Confucian context is a religious act that grants eternal life by ‘representing’ ancestors, the means of this representation in modern commercialized funeral culture is ‘capital.’ Therefore, economic poverty implies the ‘impossibility of performing filial piety,’ which is tantamount to a declaration of ‘spiritual bankruptcy’ in that the deceased cannot be represented within the community’s memory. Kim et al. analyze that when the media reports on lonely deaths, they deal with keywords such as ‘unclaimed connections (무연고 (無緣故)),’ ‘neglected bodies,’ and ‘stench,’ thereby highlighting that these deaths have lost dignity and that their value as human beings has been damaged (Kim et al. 2023, pp. 425, 440). This reveals the cruel underside of modern Korean society, where neither minimal human courtesy nor social survival after death is possible without capital. As funerals have become completely dependent on institutionalized facilities (C.-W. Park 2010b, p. 31), the financial burden on the bereaved has significantly increased.

Gilsoo Han also points out that ‘Dying Alone’ is paradoxically a symptom of contemporary Korean society, where economic affluence and nuclear family formation have progressed. He reports that due to changes in family structure and rising funeral costs, there is an increasing number of cases where families abandon claiming the body due to economic burden, even when there are family members available to claim it (Han 2019, p. 200). Consequently, distorted publicness excludes the poor from death rituals and drives them into absolute extinction where no one remembers them—that is, a ‘double death’ (biological death and social death).

5.2. Theoretical Implications: The Reification of Filial Piety and Funeral Capitalism

This study has explored how the public significance of death in contemporary Korean society is increasingly marginalized by the structural forces of medicalization and commercialization. A central theoretical implication of this research is that this transformation does not merely signify a severance from tradition but rather a structural deformation of the indigenous Confucian value of ‘Filial Piety’ under modern capitalist logic. While the traditional Confucian mechanism of ‘remembrance and representation’ originally functioned to secure spiritual eternity and communal solidarity, this study elucidates how capitalist secularity translates this spiritual mandate into ‘reified consumption.’ Consequently, contemporary funeral halls tend to operate as venues for material display and the commodification of filial duty, overshadowing the non-material ‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead. Furthermore, this ‘reification of Filial Piety’ theoretically highlights the exacerbation of social inequality extending into the realm of death. In a society where economic capability becomes the primary measure for representing filial piety, the deaths of the economically disadvantaged are inadvertently excluded from communal memory, manifesting in socially isolated phenomena such as ‘lonely death.’ This structural exclusion demonstrates that the inherent public significance of human death—specifically, its capacity to foster continuing bonds and community integration—has been severely compromised.

5.3. Alternatives: From Reified Representation to Spiritual Representation

To overcome the commercialized and medicalized death culture and restore true public significance, the meaning of death must be shifted from ‘Reified Representation’ to ‘spiritual and cultural representation.’ Shin (2013, pp. 223–24) argues that death should be restored as a ‘cultural event’ where human beings realize their finitude and complete the meaning of life, rather than being reduced to the cessation of biological functions or an opportunity for capital consumption. To achieve this, this study elaborates on three concrete structural and cultural alternatives: hospice care, small and natural burials, and digital memorialization.

First, to humanize the medicalized environment for terminally ill and dying patients within hospitals, expanding systems that provide spiritual and holistic care, such as hospice and palliative care, is crucial. The overwhelming reliance on medical institutions tends to frame death as a ‘medical failure’ (O’Gorman 1998, p. 1130). Hospice care serves as a structural alternative that allows terminal patients to avoid mechanical, futile life-sustaining treatments. Instead, it enables them to maintain their quality of life and dignity, transitioning the space of death back to a communal environment where they can share spiritual bonds with their families until the very end. This transition will contribute to restoring the characteristics of a “homely and intimate affair” (C.-W. Park 2010b, p. 31), which have been largely overshadowed by medical and commercial institutions.

Second, the restoration of public significance requires divesting the practice of ‘Filial Piety’ from its current reified material forms to resist ‘funeral capitalism.’ As Lew et al. (2011) emphasized, filial piety was traditionally a familial and religious task of granting eternal life through descendants’ ‘representation.’ However, this practice has increasingly shifted toward a material duty, where filial devotion is conspicuously displayed through the size of capital. To counter this, alternative practices such as “small funerals” or eco-friendly “natural burials” (Han 2019) must be actively embraced. These should be understood not merely as cost-cutting measures but as essential practices of ‘non-material Filial Piety,’ focusing on reflecting on the deceased’s life and sharing memories without material display. Furthermore, this endeavor can be further elevated by deeply reflecting on the deceased’s life and their significance as a social being.

Third, in the context of overcoming the physical and economic constraints of capitalized funeral rites, the recently emerging ‘Cyberthanatology’ and digital memorial phenomena are noteworthy as alternative possibilities showing that remembrance and representation are possible without the intervention of capital. According to Elisabeth Beaunoyer and Matthieu J. Guitton, memorialization in digital space offers a new mode of forming ‘continuing bonds’ with the dead beyond physical constraints (Beaunoyer and Guitton 2021, pp. 1–3). This is a modern case suggesting that the Confucian ‘representation’ mentioned by Lew et al. does not necessarily have to be achieved through material display.

However, digital space cannot completely replace the detriments of capitalized funeral rites or fully restore the damaged public significance of death. In a situation where the comfort of a physical community sharing sorrow face-to-face is absent, digital memorialization may remain merely an auxiliary means. The crucial point is not whether the medium is digital or analog, but returning the issue of death to ‘memory and relationship,’ rather than ‘cost’ or ‘procedure’ to be processed.

To bridge this gap, this study proposes an ‘Online-to-Offline community funeral model.’ Digital memorial platforms should serve as ‘repositories of memory’ that transcend the constraints of time and space, yet they must be intimately linked with offline practices such as ‘village funerals’ or ‘public funerals.’ This online-to-offline integration represents a process of ‘re-territorialization,’ reclaiming funeral practices as local communal resources and overcoming the ‘deterritorialization’ of death that emerged during modernization (Noh and Kim 2025, pp. 247–49). For instance, a model where the local community in which the deceased resided directly manages the funeral parlor (Offline) provides a communal foundation to counter the capital-driven funeral market by reconfiguring mutual aid traditions—akin to the historical sangpogye (상포계 (喪布契)), a traditional Korean mutual aid organization formed by village residents to provide collective support and resources for neighbors experiencing bereavement—to fit contemporary urban environments (Yu 2011, pp. 139–48). Concurrently, this model takes on the character of a public funeral that realizes communal mourning by embracing those alienated from kin-centered funeral systems, such as victims of lonely death, under the name of ‘social families’ (J. Park 2019, pp. 1108–9). Consequently, an ‘Online-to-Offline community funeral model,’ which combines digital mourning (Online) with costs covered by local social funds, can serve as a powerful alternative to restore ‘spiritual publicness’ against the capitalist logic that reduces death to a mere act of consumption.

Therefore, the true alternative lies in restoring the subjectivity (agency) of the dying and the bereaved. As Shaun Peter Qureshi et al. pointed out, it is essential to build voluntary solidarity networks where bereaved families can share psychological comfort and practical information, resisting the logic of medicalized systems and capital (Qureshi et al. 2024, p. 8). While digital space can be a tool to aid such solidarity, the ultimate goal should be placed on restoring the religious essence of ‘Filial Piety’ lost in modern society—that is, the solidarity of love and memory beyond death—in a non-commercial way.

6. Conclusions

The death of a human being is a private event and, at the same time, a public event. However, that publicness must not be an ‘ostentatious publicness’ measured by the size of capital, but a ‘spiritual publicness’ that reflects on one’s own finitude through the death of others and confirms the solidarity of the community. Today, the medicalization of death and funeral capitalism experienced by our society starkly reveal the pathology of modern thought that attempts to evaluate even death as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ or ‘good’ and ‘bad’. However, death is an inevitable event that comes to all humans; it is not an object of evaluation but possesses inherent ontological significance in itself.

Therefore, what is needed is not to create another standard called ‘Good Death,’ but to accept death as a natural part of life and restore its inherent place within the family and community. The harmful consequences of the medicalization of death and funeral capitalism that Korean society is undergoing paradoxically ask us what the true meaning of a human being’s death is within the family and community. As a response to this, restoring the public significance of death will be the path to healing the pathological phenomenon of modern society—which reduces, marginalizes, or alienates death into a mere private event—and completing the dignity of human life.