In cremation the body of the deceased is burned in a special oven. Most of the body is vaporized during the cremation process, leaving only a few pounds of bone fragments. Often these fragments are processed (ground) into a fine powder, which has led to cremated remains being called ashes. In recent times, cremation has become an increasingly popular option in the western world. 

There is far greater flexibility in dealing with the remains in cremation as opposed to the traditional burial. Some of the options include scattering the ashes on the ground or in a body of water, or keeping the ashes at home. Ashes can also be buried either underground or in a columbium niche.

The identity of the deceased is immediately evident in the corpse and can readily evoke emotion. Ashes tend to be a more distanced, less personal representation of the deceased. Issues relating to the body itself are reasons people give for opposing as well as for favoring cremation. Those who oppose cremation voice concerns over cremation's destruction of the body. Since most religious ideologies no longer express a belief in physical resurrection, or do not view cremation as incompatible with resurrection uneasiness with incinerating the corpse results, in part, from the value placed on human dignity and respect for the dead.

In Western cultures, fire is associated with predominately negative, even punitive, images (witch burning, Holocaust cremations, obliterating enemies), rather than the positive associations of purification and freedom which predominate in Eastern cultures. In this Western cultural milieu, those who strongly identify the corpse with the living person perceive cremation as cruel, destructive, and disrespectful. Some people who support cremation do not want the body decomposing in the earth. Their disgust with the mental images of decay, and literal images when exhumation is necessary or inadvertent, are associated with a lack of dignity and respect. Other people in western countries, most often highly educated, perceive the rapid disposal of the corpse by fire as liberating the self rather than destroying the self.. They are more likely than the less educated to identify their self with their mind than with their body .

 "The most sickening aspect of death is the socially created
ritual surrounding it. My body is no beauty but my companion and my servant. I therefore loathe the thought of its purposeless destruction by autopsy, or worse still, at the hands of the ghouls known as morticians. I strongly endorse immediate cremation.  Funerals are the height of hypocrisy. I believe it cruel to put one's survivors through such a ritual"
(Shneidman 1971).