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Part I
The study of dying, death, and grief
An overview
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1
Introduction
Candi K. Cann
1 Introduction: a brief overview and the field of thanatology
This book is divided into three major sections and the first section, ‘The Study of Dying, Death and Grief: An Overview,’ contains three ‘state of the field’ chapters, examining the subjects of death studies, brain death, and grief from respective experts in each field. The first chapter, written by George E. Dickinson, offers a succinct summary of the advances made in the study of death and dying over the last century in the United States. Dickinson, the author of the primary death and dying textbook1 utilized in death and dying courses across the country, argues that the study of death and dying is expanding as Americans move towards more acceptance of death, and an increase in services for dying as medical breakthroughs prolong not only life, but dying as well. Dickinson argues that the study of death can be categorized into three different time periods/schema, and explains the cultural and social shifts regarding dying, death and grief through these periods. More contemporarily, Dickinson traces the slowly growing emergence of death acceptance and questions what the future of both death and dying will become in the United States. The second chapter in this section, written by medical anthropologist Donald Joralemon, examines various definitions and ethics surrounding brain death and its religious implications in contemporary United States, in ‘Brain Death and the Politics of Religion.’ Through a comparison with other countries, Joralemon examines traditional definitions of brain death and argues that both the definition of brain death and its accompanying medical procedures should apply evenly across states, while courts should refrain from allowing the emphasis on religious freedom to dominate the determination of best practices in medicine. The last chapter in this section is written by Kenneth J. Doka, the current president of the Association of Death Education and Counseling2 and leading expert in the field of grief. In his chapter ‘Understanding Grief: Theoretical Perspectives,’ Doka outlines the arc of grief theory since Kübler-Ross’ seminal book, tracing the trajectory over forty years and examining three important theories impacting current models of grief – Worden’s task model, Stroebe and Schut’s dual-process model, and Neimeyer’s approach to meaning reconstruction. Doka emphasizes the importance of moving away from therapeutic models that emphasize stage theories of grief, adopting instead models that integrate grief into everyday life and acknowledge loss as valuable to life itself. These three chapters provide valuable insight by three of the top leading scholars in the field of death studies and help the budding thanatologist ‘catch up’ with the important work achieved in this area in the last fifty years. I am honored that Dickinson, Joralemon, and Doka agreed to write for this handbook, as they are all so important to the field of death studies and have been instrumental and influential to my own work as a scholar.
In examining the history of death studies, important gaps are immediately apparent – much of the work in thanatology up to now has been conducted or written in English-speaking countries and remains highly Anglo in both scope and practice. Additionally, little has been translated from other contexts into English, so that death studies primarily serves as a reflection of itself, with little comparative work to situate important studies and theories within a wider context. It is my hope that the next twenty-nine chapters of this edited collection begin to address this deficit. This book serves as only a beginning – an initial compilation of many interesting and important death, disposal, and afterlife traditions around the world – but I do hope this handbook serves as a beginning to a wider view of death practices and beliefs that move beyond the English-speaking world.
2 Death
The second section of the book, ‘Death,’ examines disposal practices around the world, narratives and rhetoric surrounding representations of death, and death as viewed, understood or experienced by children in various cultural settings. Only two of these fourteen chapters are situated in the United States, and this section offers a rich examination of beliefs and practices surrounding death around the world. The first chapter of the section on disposal of the dead around the globe, Chapter 5, ‘Symbolizing Imperial Affiliation in Death: Case Studies from the Inka Empire (AD 1400–1532),’ by Colleen Zori, discusses the ways in which mortuary goods and rituals reflected political affiliation and power under the Inka Empire. Zori examines material culture found in archeological gravesites to uncover the ways in which Inka society often tended to favor the local, or the provincial, over and above the imperial. Marius Rotar’s ‘The Romanian Orthodox Church and Issues of Cremation’ in the sixth chapter similarly discusses identity and corpse disposal as a form of marking (or breaking) social relationships, though his discussion centers around the practice of cremation and religious belief in contemporary Romania. For Rotar, cremation and burial are indicators of not only religious belief, but have serious political implications as well. Death, like life, is a political issue, and how one dies, how the corpse is disposed, and whether or not it is remembered, all reflect one’s social ties and political agency.
Renato Cymbalista and Aline Silva Santos continue this examination of political agency in their study of cremation and memorialization in modern-day Brazil, in Chapter 7’s ‘Reframing Sites of the Dead in Brazil.’ They study the ways in which popular memorialization in Brazil’s first crematory and three LGBT memorials reflect issues of class and agency. Cymbalista and Santos argue that popular memorialization operates as a sort of counter-protest to the state, forcing recognition of certain marginalized populations of the living. Chikako Ozawa-de Silva also writes about marginalized populations, though in Japan, in Chapter 8, ‘Stand By Me: The Fear of Solitary Death and the Need for Social Bonds in Contemporary Japan.’ She argues that the increased solitude of modern life in Japan has created anxiety about dying alone, leading to problems in Japanese society with group suicide. Ozawa-de Silva writes that changing medical practices (such as organ donation, living wills, etc.) partly reflect the cultural move from familial ownership over disposal practices, and dying itself. Priyanka Ramlakhan’s chapter (Chapter 9), ‘Politics of Death and Mortuary Rituals in Trinidadian Hinduism,’ furthers the exploration of the political importance and cultural implications of disposal practices. Ramlakhan argues that Trinidadians gradually included cremation and other aspects of Hindu corpse disposal in reaction to their colonization by the British in a desire for independent political agency. By tracing disposal practices and grieving rituals in Trinidad under colonialism to the present day, Ramlakhan illustrates the importance of death practices as a valuable reflection of personal identity, religious freedom, and political agency.
Chapter 10, Jakob Borrits Sabra and John Troyer’s chapter on ‘The Right to be Dead: Designing Future Cemeteries,’ moves the reader to the future of death disposal, describing a grant project centered on the hybridization of traditional English cemeteries and future death technologies. This chapter asks important questions regarding the disposal of bodies and the data that accompany them. Centering on the management of what Sabra and Troyer describe as ‘death infrastructures,’ the Future Cemetery needs to accommodate a growing global population, a simultaneous land shortage (particularly in regards to accommodating the dead), and the accompanying infrastructure issues these bring. In short, Future Cemeteries need to be self-sustainable and energy-efficient, and somehow reduce land-demands for the disposal of the dead. In response to these criteria, Columbia University’s DeathLAB’s proposal, the Sylvan Constellation, proposed a solution that utilizes the bio-mass of the dead, themselves, to power an ongoing self-sustainable light memorial as a way to both honor and dispose of the dead. From the tombs of the Inka in South America to the Future Cemetery of the United Kingdom, disposal practices reveal political agency, cultural values and norms, social relationships and currency, religious beliefs and their importance, and the role of the individual with the state. As land shortages continue and technology continues to evolve and change, it will be important for death scholars to continue to study different disposal practices.
The following five chapters center around the rhetoric and narrative surrounding conceptions of death and the ways in which death and mourning construct meaning. Moisés Park writes in Chapter 11, ‘Post Mortem (2010): Saint Salvador Allende and Historical Autopsy,’ about the many narratives surrounding the death of former Chilean president Salvador Allende through an analysis that examines a documentary made about the autopsy of Allende’s corpse. Park asks questions regarding the purpose and ultimate aims of an autopsy, and the ways in which the death can become politicized through both medical examination and media interpretations and portrayal. Park suggests that the private nature surrounding death in contemporary culture (as illustrated by Allende’s death) necessitates medical affirmation and intervention regarding the circumstances surrounding death, which then creates a double narrative that inadvertently reinforces the divide between public and private. Steven G. Jug, in Chapter 12’s ‘Mourning Deaths and Constructing Afterlives in the Red Army at War,’ also examines the ways in which cultural contexts influence and shift beliefs regarding death. Jug writes that Russian soldiers in the Soviet Army who regularly experienced combat death often felt they had no agency in how they and their comrades died, and in response to this lack of agency, found solace in seeking revenge against their enemies, writing condolence letters to the families of soldiers who had died, and mourning in scripted soldier funerals. Jug’s observations examine the intersection of gender and its role in establishing cultural norms, within the realm of military culture in the Soviet Union, challenging traditional depictions of masculinities of mourning in the narratives of soldiers regarding death and grief. Continuing the exploration of mourning in narratives, in Chapter 13, ‘Corpses That Preach: Óscar Romero and the Martyred Priests of El Salvador,’ Mandy Rodgers-Gates juxtaposes the death of El Salvador’s Archbishop Óscar Romero with sermons he gave at the funerals of other murdered Salvadorean priests during his lifetime. Rodgers-Gates argues that Romero presented the priests as both victims and victors, and ultimately, Christian martyrs that serve as models for the living in a violent world. For Rodgers-Gates, the importance of re-scripting the violent deaths of these priests offers not only a religious framing of the death, but also a critique of the society in El Salvador, which continues to largely remain silent on these murders.
In contrast to the religious afterlife shaped by a martyrological death, Mathew A. Crawford examines the role of photography in creating imagined visual afterlives for the dead in Chapter 14’s ‘Photographing Human Finitude: Philosophical Reflections on Photographs of Death.’ He investigates the life of Susan Sontag through a series of photographs by Annie Leibowitz and ultimately asserts that photography of the dead is not voyeurism, but an extension of the beauty of photography itself – that in its permanence, it provides a kind of alternate afterlife and response to life’s impermanence. In the modern age and particularly in the United States and United Kingdom, many people have no exposure to death or dying. The dying are often cordoned off in hospitals, which have restricted visitation and times, and when someone dies, their corpse is transferred to the morgue or transported to a funeral home. As a result, the image of dying and death frequently becomes the only interaction which the living have with the dead – the spectacle of death preserved on celluloid, made permanent when the body is spirited away. Conversely, Lacy K. Crocker Papadakis’s chapter (Chapter 15) ‘De Imago to Word: The Exile of the Dead from Parish Symbolism in Reformation England’ excavates the origins of contemporary society’s aversion to images of dying and death, exploring the Protestant church of England’s removal of art forms related to death and dying (particularly the Passion of Christ, Mary, and the saints) and its gradual shift to words rather than art. This shift from visual mediums to word-based mediums in the Protestant church mirrored the exile of death and a shift to rhetoric on the afterlife, which continues to be found today in contemporary Western society.
The last section in ‘Death’ consists of three chapters studying the intersection between youth and death. While there has been some work on the intersection of children and death, it largely remains a taboo subject, and studies are rare, but work on children and death in different cultures is nearly non-existent. In Chapter 16, Ramiro Tau, a Professor of Psychology in Argentina, examines ‘The Comprehension of Death and Afterlife in Children.’ He finds that children in Argentina between the ages of 5 and 10 have a polyphasic understanding regarding the nature of death and can largely distinguish between the death of material matter versus death of a spiritual or metaphysical realm. Tau’s findings demonstrate the cognitive perceptions of children in regards to death and beliefs in the afterlife, and shed light on biological interpretations versus cultural ones. Also interested in the understanding of death in children and the implications of early parental death, Renae Wilkinson’s work in Chapter 17 explores grief among youth who have experienced parental loss, and how these losses have impacted religiosity. In ‘The Effects of Parental Death on Religiosity within an American Context,’ Wilkinson finds that early parental loss causes a positive correlation between grief and religious affiliation, prayer, and religious salience. However, when examined in light of gender, Wilkinson also found that young women who experienced parental loss were more likely to experience higher indicators of religiosity, while young men demonstrated lower indicators. These early findings indicate the need for broader samples regarding not only the study of grief in different stages of life, but in gender as well. Renske Visser’s ‘Ashes to Ashes: Continuing Bonds in Young Adulthood in the Netherlands,’ (Chapter 18) completes the section on youth and death, examining continuing bonds3 theory in relation to cremation and the distribution/disposal of corpses as cremains. First giving a brief history of Dutch cremation practices, Visser further examines different ways of contemporarily dealing with cremains in the Netherlands. Visser identifies two major ones: the practice of keeping the cremains together and placing them in an object such as an urn, and the division amongst various mourners of the ashes into smaller containers, necklaces, and other various instruments. Last, Visser explores more innovative and unusual ways of distributing cremains, such as in memorial tattoos (mixing the ashes with tattoo ink to be inked onto the body in a tattoo). Visser hopes that these new and innovative ways of memorializing with, and disposing of, cremains might reveal a Dutch society ready to embrace continuing bonds theory and the willingness to more openly discuss and think about death and grief.
3 Afterlife
The second half of the book centers on various afterlife constructions around the world, from heavens to hells, ghosts to digital avatars, and everything in between. While traditional afterlives (heavens and hells) are commonly discussed, this section is a valuable contribution to thanatological studies, as it examines unusual afterlives. Michael J. Thate’s chapter, Chapter 19, ‘Exeunt: The Question of Suicide at the Origin of Early Christianity,’ opens this section. This chapter could easily have fit in the section on Death as it deals with dying, and ethical issues regarding suicide, but I placed it in this section on afterlives because suicide and views of self-killing are in part defined by social and religious understandings of what happens when one decides to take one’s life. In other words, the religious stance (here, the Christian view) made reg...
