Beyond the Body

Death and Social Identity

Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey, Glennys Howarth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415182911
• eBook ISBN: 9781134739516
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Beyond the Body presents a new and sophisticated approach to death, dying and bereavement, and the sociology of the body. The authors challenge existing theories that put the body at the centre of identity. They go 'beyond the body' to highlight the persistence of self-identity even when the body itself has been disposed of or is missing.
Chapters draw together a wide range of empirical data, including cross-cultural case studies and fieldwork to examine both the management of the corpse and the construction of the 'soul' or 'spirit' by focusing on the work of:
*undertakers
*embalmers
*coroners
*clergy
*clairvoyants
*exorcists
*bereavement counsellors.

Chapter 1
‘Vegetables’, ‘vampires’ and other hybrids

This book has been written within the context of developing social theories of the body.¹ These are theories which have acknowledged the centrality of the body in the formation of social identity but have as yet to pay sufficient attention to the dying and dead body. While sociologies have re-mapped the body in social and cultural terms, marginalised, problematic bodies remain a more peripheral focus of theoretical interest. Here we are pressing for an analysis of bodies in crisis which are undergoing radical transformation during crucial phases of the life course—and in particular, for attention to be paid to the formation of identity throughout the process of dying, at the point of, and after death. We argue that these bodies are experienced, interpreted and located in different ways with regard to social and cultural practices which are central to the constitution of self and other.

Central to the arguments advanced in this book is the view that the relationship between the body and the self may not be as straightforward as much of the existing sociological and anthropological work assumes. Not all bodies are synonymous with a self and not all selves have an embodied corporeal presence. For example, some individuals become categorised as ‘just vegetables’, a product of social practices and discourses which, in shaping the self in relation to the body in death, produce forms of social exclusion. On the other hand, the concept of beings such as ‘vampires’ indicate the possibility of a continued social presence for disembodied persons. Both ‘vegetables’ and ‘vampires’ are hybrids in that they confuse the cultural categories of life and death; they represent the dissolution of boundaries which organise key phases of the life course. They also fail to realise the relationship between body and self which is imagined within current social theories of the body; a relationship which is predicated upon the conflation of self and body. With reference to European cultural forms, Stallybrass and White define hybridisation as a ‘mixing of binary opposites…such that there is a heterodox merging of elements usually perceived as incompatible [which] unsettles any fixed binaryism’ (1986:44). Thus, those identified as ‘vegetables’ and ‘vampires’ are perceived as unstable, dangerous and marginal within dominant social and cultural orders.

Throughout this book we attend to these excluded and marginalised social groups, focusing on bodily crises, instabilities and transformations associated with death and impinging in significant ways upon social identities. To this end, we begin by exploring the processes through which some individuals become metaphorically transformed into vegetables. This often arises from a combination of perceived physical ageing and mental confusion, which leads to the exclusion of individuals from social membership or participation. We also examine the continued social presence of disembodied individuals who have died. These are often recognised in exoticised forms—for example, ghosts, ancestors, revenants or vampires— beings which exist, from an orthodox perspective, on the deathly margins of society. Here we set disembodiment alongside embodiment in order to question our ‘common-sense’ assumption that selves necessarily reside within discrete bounded bodies. Unlike ‘vegetables’ which, in their social death (Mulkay, 1993) are regulated—stored away, or warehoused, within institutions (Miller and Gwynne, 1972), the biologically dead cannot necessarily be contained with such ease. They are potentially problematic for members of many societies and ethnographic accounts document the cultural and social strategies through which they may be managed, accessed or relocated. For example, gypsy dead are pinned down in the non-gypsy space of the Christian churchyard for fear that they will otherwise return to haunt their nomadic kin (Okely, 1983). Also, rural Greek dead become the pivot of a sequence of ritual practices which quite literally spiral around the body so that the soul will make an auspicious progression to its allotted place in another world which is profoundly different and indeed opposed to the world of the living. Neglect of these rituals brings the inauspicious return of the dead in the form of the vampire who drains the lifeblood of the living while they are asleep (Du Boulay, 1982). In a similar vein, the focus of much Christian liturgy is the deliverance of the soul of the dead into the hands of God. As we show in chapter 9, some Christian clergy recognise the possibility of problematic or failed passage to a heavenly sphere in that the dead may return to finish their life’s incomplete projects.

Through its subject matter, therefore this volume attends to gaps in a matrix of body/selves which can be divided as follows:

socially and biologically alive: socially and biologically dead
socially dead/biologically alive: socially alive/biologically dead.

The first of the two pairs are privileged, both by the social sciences and indeed within everyday institutional discourses and practices. If we believe that life and death stand in a clear oppositional relationship to one another, then we expect to move across a binary opposition from being socially and biologically alive to being socially and biologically dead. Certain Western social ideals suggest that those who are physically alive are fully incorporated within society, if necessary receiving its support when they can no longer contribute to it. And once dead, while there may be an extended period of respectful remembrance, the deceased cannot and indeed should not be seen to participate in society. Recognised as society’s living members, it is those with living bodies who can be seen to participate in the face-to-face encounters of ‘everyday life’, who represent the privileged focus of the sociological or anthropological gaze.

Here we focus on the socially dead/biologically alive: socially alive/ biologically dead pairing. Both of these are hybrids and as such they evoke fear. To be terminally ill yet not extinguished is a fate dreaded by many and epitomised most poignantly in the individual with advanced Alzheimer’s disease. Their relatives may grieve their loss, or social death, years before their bodies are eventually disposed of. Jonathan Miller, President of the Alzheimer’s Disease Society, depicts Alzheimer’s as a living death:

when I talk to public meetings about it, I talk about it as an uncollected corpse, there is this terrible thing which is walking around, which the undertaker has cruelly forgotten to collect. Oh, I’m frightened of it. Yes, I am frightened.

(1990:230)

However, to remain socially alive after bodily demise can be similarly disruptive. It raises the spectre of the ‘pathologically’ grieving individual who enshrines their dead loved one and refuses to engage with the living. It also hints at ghosts, ancestors and spirits, which, from dominant Western perspectives, are often identified as features of ‘other societies’ or as manifestations of ‘irrationality’. Thus, the notions of the living ‘death’ of dementia and the ‘living’ dead within our loneliness and nightmares, are predicated upon a social self which has become separated off from the physical body. This process is both fragile and dangerous. Not only are self and body differentiated from one another; they are also re-conjugated in illegitimate pairings.

This book is located among these shadowed conjugations: socially dead but biologically alive and socially alive but biologically dead. It asks what we might mean by social death and indeed what the possibility of social life after death might imply. By addressing these questions we problematise the ease with which ‘life’ and ‘death’ come to be differentiated from one another in such a definitive and exclusive a fashion.

Body becoming self

In 1982 Featherstone identified the twentieth century emergence of the ‘performing self’ where ‘appearance, gesture and bodily demeanour become taken as expressions of self’ (1991:189). This and related perspectives on the body were drawn together by Shilling in 1993 when he argued that, ‘in the conditions of high modernity, there is a tendency for the body to become increasingly central to the modern person’s sense of self-identity’ (1993:1). These arguments stress the elision of body and self, highlighting ‘penalties’ exacted upon those whose bodies fail to live up to consumerist imagery, ageing, unkempt or disabled individuals can become socially dispossessed, if not ‘dead’ (Mulkay, 1993).

While social priorities attach themselves to young, healthy, sexually attractive bodies, therefore, it is readily assumed that those with less than perfect bodies have a lesser social presence. During the nineteenth century, self-improvement could be achieved through the development of ‘character’ forming habits. In contrast, twentieth century individuals are entreated by consumerist culture to develop their ‘personalities’, most crucially through the bodily resources of voice control, public speaking, exercise, ‘healthy’ eating, a good complexion, grooming and beauty aids (Featherstone, 1991:188). This re-formulation of self ideal does, however, produce a ‘self’ which ultimately is extinguishable (Mulkay, 1993), with the result that embodied social identity is felt to come under serious threat through processes such as institutional ageing, hospital death and the management of the corpse by funeral directors, coroners and clergy.

For many social anthropologists, the time of death and its attendant ritual are seen as a key episode within the life of any particular society, the time and space within which core social values are represented, often in over-determined forms (see for example, Lévi-Strauss, 1973). Indeed, as Hertz argued in 1907, ‘when a man dies, society loses in him much more than a unit; it is stricken in the very principle of its life, in the faith it has in itself’ (1960:78). Geertz similarly notes that death and its rituals not only reflect social values but also shape them in important ways (Huntington and Metcalf, 1979:5). If, as social theorists contend, the body is a key site within which the self is realised, arguably, it is precisely towards the period of its deterioration and disposal that we should train our eye. For example, it is then that the self as constituted across time begins a radical process of transformation. Diachronically unfolding biographies collapse and condense in parting reconciliations, eulogies, reminiscence, graveside relationships and the gathering and subsequent dispersal of anecdotes, clothing and memorabilia. Holistically and synchronically, fragments of personal identity may be gathered, sifted and recast. That which is left unsaid or unexpressed, those entire identities which prove irrecoverable, constitute disturbing silences which resonate powerfully within a society where the biographical continuity of the individual is afforded high priority (Giddens, 1991:54).

The body in death highlights the passage of time, the inevitability of physical transformation, and thereby acts as a powerful reminder that the self is subject to change. Furthermore, the conceptual frameworks through which this transforming self comes to be understood, are also constituted within dynamic social and cultural relations. Bodies have personal histories, and these are always emergent within longer-term historical processes. Thus Porter points to a complex of ‘religious, moral and value systems’ which change over time to construe various relationships between body, mind and soul; between disorderly bodies and disciplinary regimes; between individual bodies, communities, and the wider body politic (1991). The body is always located within historically specific discourses and practices which formulate and connect the inner and outer body in different ways. With reference to contemporary Western society, Turner notes that through technologies such as photography, the ageing body is recorded and reflected upon. But as there is difficulty in acknowledging the ageing process, there emerges ‘a necessary disjuncture between the inner self and the image of the body’ (1995:250). The ways in which the body in decline and death are conceived in relation to the self are, therefore, shaped in important ways by historically emergent cultural representions.

Theorising the body

In seeking to reconcile the polarities of the body as either a natural, pre-social entity amenable to cultural and social elaboration or the product of discourse, knowable only through discourse, Shilling has described it as ‘an entity which is in the process of becoming’ (1993). He identifies a finishing process which encompasses the changes which the body undergoes over time—for example, the imprint of habitual facial expressions and bodily postures upon flesh and skeleton. The precise nature of these physical changes, of course, reflects social and cultural influences—for example, specific bodily styles, or techniques (Mauss, 1973 [1934]); socially structured material resources such as diet or housing; and the professional practices of medicine. Giddens (1991) argues for a distinctively Western ‘finishing’ of the body which involves more than just adherence to cultural styles or traditional practices such as body decoration. Rather, it is the outcome of a reflexive process whereby the body, as a resource, is made to contribute to the production of a consciously chosen social identity. Though varying in degree from cosmetic surgery to choice of hairstyle, Giddens none the less insists that members of Western societies cannot act outside of an awareness of the diversity of identities which surround them (1991:70–108). This extends into everyday choices and practices. For example, the selection of particular food stuffs from a diverse range of alternative possibilities, rather than the reproduction of an inevitable pattern of consumption.

Shilling’s desire to reconcile naturalistic and constructionist accounts of the body produces an account which requires social constructionists to engage with the body’s materiality (1993:12– 13). And in the realm of social constructionism, we find a division among sociologists which is often recognised in shorthand form as the agency/structure debate. Thus the accounts of theorists such as Goffman (1959), Featherstone and Hepworth (1991) and Giddens (1991) privilege the individual’s agency, their ability to manage the body in particular ways in face-to-face interactions. It is thus, in the view of these theorists, that the individual participates in society. This foregrounding of action, control and agency as a means to frame embodiment reflects one of sociology’s traditional interests—in society as (inter-)action, event and process. The body is therefore a resource to be mobilised or capital to be safeguarded and exploited, albeit within particular sets of constraints, identified variously as biological, social or structural. This reflexive engagement with body projects is, however, an approach which cannot easily account for the embodied experience of those whose bodies have become extremely frail and/or brain function has diminished.

Conversely, debate which draws on a Foucauldian perspective, such as the earlier work of Bryan Turner (1984), offers an account of the body as the product of discourse, an entity which has no a priori existence but rather comes into being through a micro-politics of power targeted at the regulation of the flesh and the production of the docile body. While accounts of the body which take its agency as a starting point may not always provide very satisfactory accounts of the intersection of individual agency with macro-level structures, those which focus on the influence of discourses which are external to the individual provide less insight into the phenomenology of embodied social life. That is to say, they give little space to the grounded, sensual experience of inhabiting a body. This limitation becomes particularly evident when bodies which are old and frail are the focus. When older women and men become subject to discourses surrounding a concept such as ‘social death’, we are left without the necessary theoretical apparatus to discuss the nature of their subjectivities.

The notion of embodiment, or embodied human agency (Giddens, 1991), provides a bridge between materialist and discursive perspectives and here we draw upon Thomas Csordas’ work in this area (1994). His critique of the privileging of representation or discourse highlights problems such as the linked assumption that subjectivity is internally located, a source of representations which are then projected upon an outside world. In its place he sets a model of subjectivity as ‘interpersonal engagement via a “conversational” form within a world constituted by existential concerns’ (1994:9). In other words, he suggests that our subjectivities are inter-subjective, that they are constituted within the existential spaces which link and divide us from one another. Csordas moves on to discuss anthropological critiques of representation which, for example, argue that it subjugates the bodily to the semantic (Jackson, cited in Csordas, 1994:10). Seeking a term which can more adequately capture the existential immediacy which so often escapes work focused on representation, he suggests ‘being-inthe- world’ (ibid.). This, he argues, allows for a focus on ‘temporally/historically informed sensory presence and engagement’ (ibid.). He also critiques a view of language as a form of discourse without which we cannot ‘know’ our own embodied experience. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur, he suggests that ‘language gives access to a world of experience in so far as experience comes to, or is brought to, language’ (ibid.: 11). Language is therefore another modality of being-in-the-world.

The intersubjective self

Throughout this book, we approach human embodiment in relation to forms of human disembodiment. We would argue that to neglect the analysis of bodies in crisis is to participate in the sequestration of death and dying. Rather, we need to problematise a cultural ethos where independence and control are valorised at the expense of intimacy and surrender. The current focus on embodiment, to the exclusion of disembodiment, perhaps reflects the notion that the death of the body means that the individual has ceased to be. Indeed, should an individual become extremely frail or confused prior to biological death, we may even feel that they have already died before the point at which their body finally expires. This easy conflation of individual and body requires interrogation. For instance, it fails to account adequately for the ways in which cultural meanings and social identities are assigned to both the foetus and the corpse, neither of which have the capacity to act independently; it also fails to account for the ways in which meaning and identity can ‘detach’ themselves from the living body. In its place we need to develop an understanding of how, or if, the ‘life’ of someone with dementia or someone who is ‘brain dead’ on a life support system may be constituted, both culturally and socially. We also need to question the elision of embodiment, agency and social identity, and raise questions about its implications for those members of society who have a profoundly vital and influential social presence, yet who lack a living body—be they ancestors, martyrs or dead children; a reference in an archive, a corpse in preparation for disposal; or a ‘voice’ brought into being by a clairvoyant.

Csordas posits embodiment as ‘an indeterminate methodological field defined by perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world’, something which is akin to the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity (1994:12). It is this focus on a shared, dialogic physicality which sits uneasily with a notion of embodied agency expressed in the autonomous, body-based construction of self-identity—through, for example, fitness regimes, patterns of consumption, and sexual practices (for example, Featherstone, [1991] 1995; Grosz and Probyn, 1995). Here, cross-cultural comparisons are useful in highlighting and problematising dominant Western conceptions. From Fiji, Becker provides an example of agency as a collective phenomenon, where ‘bodily experience transcends the individual body, is diffused to other bodies, and is even manifest in the environment’ (1995:127). Theirs is a society in which an abundance of food is highly prized, yet corpulent bodies reflect not the status or competence of the individual, but rather the collectivity’s ability to nurture and care for its members. As Becker notes, ‘the self…while certainly connected to its body, is not its exclusive agent’. For Becker, therefore, like Csordas, embodied experience is ‘contingent on how the self is situated in a relational matrix’ (1994:127). While Becker makes a straightforward comparison between the Western unity of the individualised body/self and the collectivity of Fijian embodiment, she does, however, gloss over the differences which together constitute that Western experience. In effect, her characterisation of the Western experience of embodiment rests upon an assumption that it is produced, universally, by the metaphor of the body as a container (Johnson, cited in Battersby, 1993). Writing from within Western culture, Battersb...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Chapter 1: ‘Vegetables’, ‘vampires’ and other hybrids
• Chapter 2: The dying body
• Chapter 3: Bodies without selves
• Chapter 4: Medicalising the body
• Chapter 5: Narratives of the body I
• Chapter 6: Narratives of the body II
• Chapter 7: Socialising the body
• Chapter 8: Married life after death
• Chapter 9: Ghosts, apparitions and occult phenomena
• Chapter 10: Mediating the dead
• Chapter 11: Beyond the body
• Bibliography