Introduction
On 6 February 2014, a giraffe named Marius hit the headlines all over the world. One-and-a-half-year-old Marius was living at the Copenhagen Zoo and was about to be euthanized due to overpopulation of giraffes and potential inbreeding. A few days later, the news declared that he was now dead and was about to be dissected and later fed to the lions, all in public view. Children were crying, and a general uproar followed. Chinese, Portuguese, and Canadian papers, among others, reported on the event. Displaying the killing of Mariusâa personalized, healthy, young animalâcreated an almost global debate: When is the killing of animals legitimate? Is the killing of one giraffe different from the billions of animals sacrificed in factory farming? But soon the debate shifted from concerns about the moment of the stunning, to involving the life of a zoo animal. What is a good life for encaged wild animals? Is it morally justified to keep them in captivity just for human pleasure? The mediated debate regarding the killing of a giraffe exemplifies a manifest cultural trait regarding how societies in general deal with death. As is often the case, death reminds us of, and points to, life itself.
While the vast majority of us will come to experience various kinds of losses during our lifetime, people encounter death indirectly all the timeâthrough objects that once belonged to dead relatives, from media reports, and from art, literature, film, and other cultural sources. And so the contours of death regularly present themselves to us in our ongoing lives, when we walk through a dark alley, see a black plastic bag with unidentified contents by the roadside, or return home and find a family member sound asleep. Death intrudes on our everyday experiences and practices, and as philosophy has long reminded us, it is more than anything an inescapable feature of the human condition (Becker, 1973; Hegel, 1977; Heidegger, 2010). As the âonly certainty in life,â death serves as a reminder of the finiteness of human life (Van Brussel & Carpentier, 2014: 2). Rather than two separate moments or stages of existence, life and death are thus entangled in an interdependent process of becoming in which the term âlivingâ would not mean much without its binary.
Sociology has long been aware of the fact that this interdependence profoundly informs nearly all social life (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Bauman, 1992). Death is deeply embedded in the social fabric of what we experience, on an everyday basis, as âlife.â As Jean Baudrillard (1993) once showed, the ways in which society relates to and manages death are fundamental to how societies and the relationships between its social beings are structured. The story about Marius demonstrates how various textual and material sources of knowledgeâthe institution of the zoo, newspaper accounts, global media, and narratives on incest, vulnerability, and oppression of animalsâgive shape to such meaning-making processes. The historical, material, and cultural context is originally implicated in the ways in which death presents itself in any given society and in the individual experience of death and dying as it arises in the latter. Norbert Elias pointed out that peopleâs experience of death depends on culture: âIt is variable and group-specific; no matter how natural and immutable it seems to the members of each particular society, it has been learnedâ (2001 [1985]: 4â5).
In accordance with this, the present volume takes a cultural-sociological perspective on death. We ask how our knowledge about death and dying emerges through concrete personal experience, but also how it draws on culturally shared narratives, social institutions, and material conditions. Death becomes real and life becomes mortal through the actions framed by economy, media, art, scientific knowledge, law, societal institutions, and so on. The book investigates the relationships between cultural repertoires and broader material conditions and events, be it in the form of ferocious attacks perpetrated by strangers, lethal outbreaks of mysterious infections, or the peaceful end of long lives. In this sense, it is the cultural production of death in discursive and material practice that lies at the forefront of the studies presented here. However, the volume also rests on the assumption that death is never simply reducible to some particular culturally determined meaning (Bauman, 1992). As we argue below, there is always something improper about it, something that escapes our grasp. The exit from life resists being singled out from life itself, appropriated, or contained. Rather, it is everywhere, not least in everyday life situations.
The title of this book is Death Matters. This probing concept has several connotations and functions for the volume as a whole. Foremost, it draws attention to the âmore-than-culturalâ processes of meaning-making and action. In this volume, death matter is the node where bodies, artifacts, identities, infrastructures, emotions, knowledge, capital, and places intersect. It refers to the stuff of mortal life. As a consequence and as stated above, death comes to matter everywhere. It matters to how we understand ourselves and organize our social lives. It matters to knowledge, experience, and practice in particular time-spaces. The meaning-making process may also travel temporally and spatially; for example, when the image of three-year-old Alan spread all over the world, creating mourning and collective action, or, when Mariusâ corpse within the Copenhagen zoo caused a moral conflict far beyond this confined place. As will be further developed below, death matters as the manifestation that is constitutive of everyday life.
Following from this, the book has two broad objectives. First, it seeks to understand how death features and intrudes on contemporary culture by studying the role of death in current forms of everyday life. This implies that the objects of study are not necessarily clear-cut âdeath practices,â that is, practices surrounding dying, burial, and memorialization. Instead, we argue that meanings that emerge in areas of social life quite distant from such practices can be just as important in our attempts to account for the more general role of death in a particular society.
Second, the anthology offers a cultural-sociological perspective, focusing particularly on how subjectivity and materiality in everyday life shape experiences or notions of death and dying. We thus provide a deeper understanding of how death comes to matter in contemporary society by targeting how it intersects with subjectivity and materiality. Marius, because he was turned into a subject, deserved to be mourned and remembered. As dead matter, he, because of this, presented a dilemmaâwhich subjectivities warrant a ceremony of some kind and which can simply be used for food? In line with this, the chapters in this anthology analyze how specific processes produce certain versions of not only death and mortality but also of life itself. In this sense, we argue that it is essential to address how death, in specific spatial and temporal contexts, relates to and raises questions about agency, boundary work, and vulnerability.
In the following, we develop these arguments, situating the volume in classical as well as contemporary work in death studies and the cultural sociology of death. We then end the introduction by presenting the three parts of the bookâPlaces of absence-presence, Disease/bodies, and Persons and non-personsâand the studies included in them.
Death Matters Everywhere, Every DayâŚ
Communal constructions and functions of mortality are demonstrated by all of the historical, cultural, and material variations in how death comes to matter in society: from zombies to sea burials, crime noir to ghost exorcisms, hospices to black metal and Goth fashion (e.g. Foltyn, 2008; Penfold-Mounce, 2015). Yet, death is never restricted to matters directly associated with death. Hence, Thomas Laqueur has pointed out that death is omnipresent in human culture: âLike gravity or the air we breathe, it is always there, a part of being human that is so basic that it cannot be dissected out from the rest of life as we know itâ (2015: XIV). In line with this idea, this volume argues that death ought to be considered as part of our ongoing everyday life, and not in terms of some deviation or exception to this life. Being mortal is a fundamental condition of human experience and filters through the lived experience of individuals as well as broader cultural everyday practices.
In this everyday experience, we argue that death often appearsâas it tends to do most of the time for most of us who live in countries with low mortality ratesâalmost out of the corner of our eye. Death itches in our experience, âscratching at some inner doorâ (Yalom, 2008: 9), and it is often precisely by entering death from such an indirect angl...