Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement

A Guide to Theory and Practice

Neil Thompson, Gerry R. Cox, Neil Thompson, Gerry R. Cox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138201064
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315453835
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement sets issues of death and dying in a broad and holistic social context. Its three parts explore classical sociology, developments in sociological thought, and the ways that sociological insights can be useful across a broad spectrum of grief-related topics and concerns. Guidance is given in each chapter to help spur readers to examine other topics in thanatology through a sociological lens. Scholars, students, and professionals will come away from the handbook with a nuanced understanding of the social context –cultural differences, power relations, the role of social processes and institutions, and various other sociological factors – that shape grief experiences.

Part One

Sociological Foundations

Introduction

In this first part our focus is on what is generally referred to as “classical sociology.” This term describes the work of both the key sociologists who played a central historical role in founding sociology as a discipline and those who extended the wider “macro-social” focus of the founders, with its emphasis on social structures, processes, and institutions and cultural formations, to incorporate a “micro-social” perspective, with its emphasis on interpersonal and group interactions. Together, these thinkers mapped out the intellectual territory that has now become the domain of sociological study.

Realistically, we cannot cover all the writers who contributed to establishing modern sociology, and so we have had to be selective. No doubt different people will have their own views about who should or should not have been included, but what appears here is our own choice, with the recognition that there is so much more that could have been covered under the heading of “classical” sociology.

For the most part classical sociology paid relatively little attention to death, grief, and bereavement, but the chapters in this part of the book make important links between the key concepts introduced by particular thinkers and the implications of those concepts for people working (or training to work) in the field of death, grief, and bereavement.

The first of the six chapters focuses on the work of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), who was undoubtedly a major figure in the emergence of sociology as an intellectual discipline. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Durkheim did focus on issues directly relevant to death, grief, and bereavement, specifically in relation to suicide. In a lucid and helpful essay, Michael Brennan gives us a clear picture of Durkheim’s conception of suicide as a sociological phenomenon.

The second chapter, by Jodie Croxall and Michael Brennan, provides a helpful overview of how Max Weber (1864–1920), another of the sociological founders, developed ideas and frameworks of understanding that are still of value to this day. In some respects, Weber’s work was in part a riposte to the work of Marx. Both writers were interested in similar themes (social class, for example), but had differing ways of approaching them.

And it is the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his followers that forms the subject matter of Chapter 3. While it is, tragically, the case that a distorted version of his ideas was used as the basis of totalitarian oppression for many years, his work in its undistorted form still has important insights to offer. In this chapter Neil Thompson summarizes some key components of Marx’s work and shows how they can be used to cast light on various aspects of death, grief, and bereavement.

Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters to explore interactionist approaches to sociology. Gerry Cox provides a helpful introduction to the highly influential ideas of George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). When we encounter situations involving death, grief, and bereavement we do not do so in isolation. Such situations are characterized by complex interpersonal interactions, and Mead’s work gives us very useful conceptual tools for making sense of them.

Chapter 5 continues the interactionist theme by offering a clear picture of the “dramaturgical” approach of Erving Goffman (1922–1982). He used the metaphor of drama to make sense of social interactions, seeing individuals as “actors” using “scripts” to act out their lives. This has proved to be an influential approach that has stood the test of time. Gerry Cox shows how these ideas can usefully be applied to death, grief, and bereavement.

For some considerable time it has been common practice to refer to the early sociologists as the “founding fathers” of the discipline. However, this is not an appropriate term, as it marginalizes the role of women in developing a distinctively sociological approach. In the final chapter of Part One June Allan presents a thought-provoking account of how women sociologists played a significant part, but their contribution was not subsequently given the attention and credit it deserves. This chapter is therefore intended to make a contribution to rectifying this injustice.

In these six chapters we have a wealth of ideas and insights that paint an important picture of how some of the key ideas that shaped the discipline of sociology can still give us the basis for a valuable understanding of various aspects of death, grief, and bereavement.

1

Emile Durkheim

Michael Brennan

Introduction

While sociology has until relatively recently tended to neglect death as a social issue, Emile Durkheim was among the first thinkers to consider death as a social problem with social implications. Within the classical tradition of nineteenth-century sociological thinkers, Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) contributed enormously to the establishment of sociology as a modern academic discipline. His work influenced a later generation of twentieth-century sociologists, including Anthony Giddens, whose ideas have been developed in critical dialogue with Durkheim’s; and Talcott Parsons, whose establishment of structural-functionalism owes much to Durkheim’s macro-level focus on “social facts” (Ritzer, 2008, p. 219).

Durkheim also contributed significantly to our understanding of death, especially its social tributaries. That he did so can be seen, first, from his ground-breaking study Suicide, in which he demonstrated that the causes that may lead a person to take his or her own life were social, rather than psychological; and, second, from the attention he directed to death ritual and the purpose it served in helping to reconstitute society following the death of one of its members. The basis for a sociology of death therefore lies in Durkheim’s analysis of funeral rites (Walter, 2008, p. 317). While not without their limitations, Durkheim’s ideas have been foundational to the discipline of sociology (which was fledgling at the time when Durkheim was writing), and have also provided impetus to the sub-specialism of death, dying, and bereavement within sociology (which emerged first in the United States in the 1950s and later in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s).¹

The continued relevance of Durkheim’s ideas as a repository of knowledge that we can usefully continue to mine gives the lie to Alfred North Whitehead’s maxim that “a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost” (1916, p. 413).

Durkheim’s Approach to Sociology

While Durkheim did not coin the term “sociology,” his influence in founding the modern discipline, whose remit has been the systematic study of human societies and their associated social problems, has arguably been greater than that of Auguste Comte, who is credited with coining the term, though less with establishing sociology.² Durkheim’s contribution to shaping sociology in the image of a “positive science” the goal of which is the study of “social facts,” owes much to Comte’s preliminary ideas, in which sociology was envisioned and conceived as a “social physics” – a social scientific corollary of longer-established disciplines such as physics and biology, whose preserve was the objective study of natural phenomena.

Unlike his contemporaries, Karl Marx and Max Weber, who, together with Durkheim, are widely considered as comprising the trinity of sociology’s founding thinkers and who today form part of the discipline’s canon, Durkheim was not a polymath or encyclopedic thinker in the tradition of the Renaissance. Instead, as Giddens argues, “what lends Durkheim’s writings their intellectual power is rather his persistent attack upon a limited number of problems that occupied him throughout his intellectual career” (Giddens, 1978, p. 9). One major intellectual preoccupation of Durkheim’s was his attempt to establish sociology as a rigorous and scientific academic discipline; and to distinguish it from psychology and biology, which also proffered explanations of human behavior, by delineating, as he saw it, the proper subject matter of sociology. The clearest example of this can be found in Durkheim’s methodological blueprint for sociology, The Rules of Sociological Method, published in 1895. In it he entreats us to treat “social facts as things” (Durkheim, 1895/1964, p. 14), by which he argues that certain social phenomena are endowed with the same causal properties as various phenomena existing in the natural world. Accordingly, Durkheim argues that “social facts,” which are characterized by the “coercive” power they exercise over individuals, and which operate externally to the individuals subjected to their force, can and should be the focus of objective, coolly detached sociological analysis.

A guiding thread that runs throughout Durkheim’s work is his insistence on the power of the social – both in the sense that our actions are routinely influenced, often without us fully realizing it, by others; and in the sense that the most plausible explanation of human behavior lies in social, rather than biological or psychological, factors. The first of these can be illustrated when Durkheim writes of the enormous power of social norms in regulating individual behavior:

it is an intrinsic characteristic of these [social] facts, the proof thereof being that it asserts itself as soon as I attempt to resist it … If I do not submit to the conventions of society, if in my dress I do not conform to the customs observed in my country and in my class, the ridicule I provoke, the social isolation in which I am kept, produce, although in attenuated form, the same effects as a punishment in the strict sense of the word.

(Durkheim, 1895/1964, pp. 2–3)

Here Durkheim points to the examples of language and currency to illustrate his argument, noting that, while adopting neither the national currency nor the dominant language of one’s nation is mandatorily enforced, one cannot but adopt such normative practices if one is to satisfactorily exist within a given society. That society is, as Durkheim puts it, a reality sui generis experienced externally in ways that shape our inner experiences can be seen from Durkheim’s insistence that “most of our ideas and tendencies are not developed by ourselves but come to us from without” (1895/1964, p. 4).

Durkheim goes on to describe the “collective effervescence” generated in large-scale assemblies of people in ways that would perhaps today resonate with our experiences of being part of a religious congregation, a participant at a political rally or a fan at a rock concert or sporting event. Durkheim describes the energy of the crowd, which comes to us from without and is experienced within, ensuring a transformation in individual consciousness, as a “social current” analogous to that of the strong undertow found in a river that we are powerless to resist:

Thus the great movements of enthusiasm, indignation, and pity in a crowd do not originate in any one of the particular individual consciousnesses. They come to each one of us from without and carry us away in spite of ourselves.

(Durkheim, 1895/1964, p. 4)

Durkheim’s insistence that human behavior has social determinants is an attempt, on the one the hand, to dampen the increasingly prevailing view of the time, embodied in utilitarianism and classical political economy, of the autonomous individual. On the other hand, in outlining exactly what constitutes a “social fact,” Durkheim uses The Rules of Sociological Method as “a bold sociological manifesto” (Giddens, 1978, p. 16) for establishing the proper field of sociological inquiry:

Here, then, is a category of facts with very distinctive characteristics: it consists of ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual and endowed with a power of coercion by which they control him. These ways of thinking could not be confused with biological phenomena, since they consist of representations and of actions; nor with psychological phenomena, which exist only in the individual consciousness and through it. They constitute, thus, a new variety of phenomena; and it is to them exclusively that the term “social” ought to be applied.

(Durkheim, 1895/1964, p. 3)

Durkheim’s attempt to establish the proper domain of sociology for an academic discipline still in its infancy was emphatically single-minded.

Taken together, his advocacy of human behavior as fundamentally social in origin and sociology as best suited to explaining it was both militant and imperialistic, as can be seen from the following passage, in which Durkheim writes: “every time that a social phenomenon is directly explained by a psychological phenomenon, we may be sure that the explanation is false” (Durkheim, 1895/1964, p. 104). Durkheim’s insistence that any social phenomenon – including religion and suicide – could be explained sociologically was at best controversial and at worst, for some, a form of heresy, earning him allies and adversaries in equal measure. This has led sociological theorist and Durkheim scholar Steven Lukes to write: “To friends he was a prophet and an apostle, but to enemies he was a secular pope” (1992, p. 373). Such antipathy also lies, in part, in Durkheim’s insistence that conventional religion would diminish in significance as modern society developed. Durkheim shared with Marx, Weber, and Comte an assumption that modernization would inevitably bring secularization, but differed in arguing that society would retain a fundamental need for religion, albeit as manifested in various nuanced forms, including chiefly what he called “moral individualism.” By this Durkheim means to say that the pursuit and defense of human rights and human dignity in modern society assumes the status of a shared collective ideal that comes to be valued as sacred (Adloff, 2016, p. 17).

Durkheim’s orientation is resolutely social, a primary focus being the influence of other people and of “society” upon individual behavior. To this end, the chief focus of Durkheim’s analysis is the socially binding norms that serve to regulate human behavior, by which we are constituted to the core as social selves.

Durkheim’s Study of Suicide

In providing the beginning of what Edwin Shneidman (1976) has described as “suicidology,” Durkheim’s study of suicide is probably the one with which most practitioners in grief and bereavement circles are most familiar, if only tangentially.

First published in 1897, Suicide both follows closely on from and makes good on Durkheim’s exhortation to us in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895) to treat “social facts as things.” That it does so helps cement Durkheim’s study as “a theoretical and methodological exemplar” (Edles and Appelrouth, 2005, p. 105); a paradigmatic example of how to link theory and research (Ritzer, 2008, p. 201), or what Robert Merton has described as theory of the “middle range” – namely, theory that is developed at the “meso” level of analysis and used to guide empirical inquiry (Merton, 1968, p. 39). The proper focus of Durkheim’s study is suicide rates and, in particular, the social distribution of suicide. For Durkheim, suicide is thus a social fact; a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Editors and Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Sociological Foundations
• Part Two Sociological Developments
• Part Three Contemporary Issues and Debates
• Afterword: A Reflection on Death, Grief, and Bereavement
• Index