annotated bibliography

December 12, 2016 0

Walter, T. (1994) The Revival of Death. London: Routledge.

Chapter 4: Traditional, Modern and Neo-Modern Death

Traditional - infectious diseases. Modern - cancer, but dying person didn't know about it. Neo-modern - prolonged death, 'living with...cancer / HIV / heart disease.. '. see Lofland (1978).

"the impact of death on society is usually reduced by reducing the social importance of those who die" (Blauner, 1966 in Walter, 1994: 50)."Thus social death of the elderly often occurs before physical death" (Morley, 1971 in Water, 1994: 51).

Social context. Traditional - community. Modern - separate private family and public work, etc. Neo-modern - private made public and global contact, due to, "twin features of postmodernism; advanced communications systems and the celebration of inner experience" (Walter, 1994).

Personhood. Traditional - I belong. If I leave, I don't belong. Modern - I discover my identity through the family. Neo-Modern - I create multiple identities. Americans constantly create identity, whereas English find identity in class, Italians in gender stereotypes (Walter, 1994: 53).

The journey. "A spiritual journey became physical, which in turn is becoming emotional" (Walter, 1994: 57).

CONTRADICTION BETWEEN TYPES (traditional, modern neo-modern).

December 11, 2016 0

Walter, T. (1999) On Bereavement: The culture of grief. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Prologue - with Fiona, covers main concepts

Chapter 7. Guidelines for grief: historical background.

1500-1600 public grief same as contemporary England, but increasing introspection (diary writing, poetry.. )

1700s graveyard poetry flourished. "Draper observes that reason thinks in terms of abstractions and generalisations, emotions in terms of the specific and the particular" (Draper in Walter, 1999: 128). Cult of the cemetery.

Enlightenment grief - condolence. Sympathy. Mimicry of emotions and physical grieving. Adam Smith, 1759.

Victorian grieving (high point 1850-1890) - women did majority of mourning - workers mourned bosses, not vice versa - women lost status with husband - rules on how long to mourn for - female emancipation, decline in female mourning (no long status lost with death - 1890 - "the suffragettes and collapse of Victorian mourning have the same inspiration" (Walter, 131).

Critics of Western way of mourning (see Gorer, 1965) blame loss of ritual and guidelines. Do not want to impose these, so suggest personalised rituals

Thomas Barker The Bride of Death (1838) ((IMAGE))

"By the First World War, stoicism had replaced keening as the dominant response to loss" (Walter, 1999: 132). Lottery whose son died/house was hit. Knowing you were not the only one may have helped. **NOTE** in war, you are very aware that lots of people will die but anyway, lots of people do. It helps to connect to this awareness and know that, "you are not the only one whom fate had touched" (Walter 1999:133).
1800s - grief became feminine, not manly (public school boys) - tears are gendered debate, gendered history (Walter, 1999: 134).
SHIFT IN GAZE (what is looked at in death). Middle ages - soul. Early modern - corpse (humanist doctors & artists - Protestants don't pray for soul - public health, too many bodies) - post-1960s, shifted to bereaved (bereavement literature says emotions are good). (page 135)
Comforters' gaze also shifted, from body (clothing) to emotions.
Mourning dress comeback? Andre Agassi..((IMAGE))
Chapter 10. Viva la difference? The politics of gender.
Palliative care, dying required to speak of feelings: battle against medical establishment (Frank, 1995)? Battle within medical establishment (Arney and Bergen, 1984). In terms of the bereaved's expression of grief, the "main object of attack is not grief's medicalization, but a general culture of containment and control" (Walter, 1999: 160).
Wortman and Silver (1989), modified by Stroebe et al. (1994) say 3 emotional paths through grief:
1. Moving over time from distress to emotional stability. (expressivist clinical lore / contemporary Egypt / rural Greece / Victorian upper class women)
2. Never showing distress. (20th century popular culture / Navaho / Hopi / Balinese)
3. Staying distressed indefinitely. (Hindu widows)
Other researches add: 4. Moving over time from not showing distress, to showing it. (Only in short-term, until after the funeral)
Gender issue. Simonds and Rothman, feminists, "observe that virtually all late twentieth-century consolation books take it as axiomatic that the father's grief is as intense as the mother's, but he rarely shows it" (Walter, 1999: 172). (..see Simonds and Rothman, 1992:185)
Ingrian lamenting (Nenola-Kallio, 1982).
**NOTE: BUT CAN GRIEF EVEN BE QUANTIFIED, WALTER? re: do men grieve as much as women. pages 173-**
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December 5, 2016 0

Hertz 2007 Pacific Mortuary. Robert Hertz's seminal essay and mortuary rites in the Pacific region - Eric VANBRUX

van Gennep & Hertz published in English at the same time. Different - Hertz considered 2nd burial & emotional impact of death.

"Death is fully consummated only when decomposition has ended; only then does the deceased cease to belong to this world so as to enter another life" (1960_ 47).

These Oceanists examine cross-culturally.

Hertz's 1907 was really important, say Davies, Palgi and Abramovitch, and Robben. Parking though things it needs to be taken further. Metcalf & Huntington (1991) do this - symbolism, liminal stage focus. Blcoh and Parry (1982) - fertility. Evans-Pritchard (praises and) criticises. "dichotomy of sacred/profane" + "collective consciousness" need explaining.

The volume Of Relations and the Death by Barraud et al. (1994) "focuses on something given insufficient attention by Hertz, namely the exchanges involved in mortuary ritual." (oceanists)

In addition Hertz's model linking the period of mourning to the procedure of bodily decom-position and ideas about the journey of the soul strongly suggests a patterning of the bereaved's emotions over time" (oceanists: 8).

Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone's fine article 'Parallel journeys in Korafe women's laments (Oro Province, Papua New Guinea)

Metcalf Peter and Richard Huntington, 1991. Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual, Second Edition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Palgi Phyllis and Henry Abramovitch, 1984. Death: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, Annual Review of Anthropology 13, PP. 385-411.

Hertz 2004

In 'our society', death happens in an instance. Not so in 'primitive' societies, as shown by the double burial.

"the body of the deceased, while awaiting the second burial, is temporarily deposited in a burial-place distinct from the final one; it is almost invariably isolated" (198).

" it also imposes on the survivors the duty of keeping the deceased company during this dreaded period, to keep watch by his side and to beat gongs frequently in order to keep malignant spirits at bay. Thus the corpse, afflicted by a special infirmity, is an object of solicitude for the survivors at the same time as an object of fear" (199).

"This state of the soul, both pitiful and dangerous, during this confused period explains the complex attitude of the living in which pity and fear are mixed in variable proportions. They try to provide for the needs of the deceased and to ease his condition; but at the same time they remain on thedefensive and refrain from contacts which they know to be harmful" (199).

relatives of deceased sit in a corner - tabooed, unhelped by 'powers above', life changed. They no longer belong to the community (temporarily).

1. Death is not instantaneous. 2. Death is transition, not destruction.

LINKED: disintegration of body : fate of soul : state of survivors

FINAL BURIAL - soul is no longer isolated, joins ancestors.

"Sometimes the deceased himself is accused: 'What cause did you have, you ingrate, to forsake us?' And he is summoned to return. More often the near relatives are accused of culpable negligence or of witchcraft; the sorcerers must at all costs be discovered and executed; or, finally, curses are directed against the murderous spirits, as by the Naga, for instance, who threaten them with their spears and defy them to appear" (208).

similarity with adulthood - birth - marriage

"...participation in the same social life creates ties which are not to be severed in one day" (210).

"... it is because society, disturbed by the show, must gradually regain its balance; and because the double mental process of disintegration and synthesis that the integration of an individual into a new world supposes, is accomplished in a molecular fasion, as it were, which requires time" (210).

" It seems, in the most typical cases at least, that the transitory period extends indefinitely for these victims of a special malediction and that their death has no end" (211).

Article about Hertz on module
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November 28, 2016 0

Bauman, Z (1992) Mortality, immortality and other life strategies (Living with death, chapter 1). ____: Polity Press Humans are conscious of having a conscious. Knowledge that cannot be believed (14). ‘So death – an unadorned death, death in all its stark, uncompromised bluntness, a death that would induce consciousness to stop – is the ultimate absurdity, while being at the same time the ultimate truth! Death reveals that truth and absurdity are one’(14-15). ‘It is the belief in non-death (misnamed as ‘disbelief in death’) which is ‘given’, self-evident, taken for granted’…’We live as if we were not going to die. By all standards, this is a remarkable achievement, a triumph of will over reason’ (16). The battle cries of modern versions of tribalism – ‘For the Homeland’, ‘For the glory of our Nation’, ‘For our beloved Leader’- are but thinly disguised metaphors for the species way of securing survival through the extinction of its members… (27)’ Love relationship has replaced god. We want transcendence, in a lover, and our ideal selves reflected. Ernest Becker. .

November 26, 2016 0

Chidester, D (2002) Patterns of Transcendence: Religion, Death and Dying Wadsworth: Thomson Learning.

'The earliest records for the history of religions are bones.' Religious belief because 1. red ochre (blood and life) 2. placement of objects (for use in next life) and 3. big effort in burial. (p.1) John 'Lubbock argued that dreams were the basis of belief in another life' (p.2). Students abandoned this (because "primordial stupidity")....

CONTINUE READING, PLEASE
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November 23, 2016 0

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131025-zombie-nation "just like the 1970s, people need a ‘safe place’ to explore their apocalyptic worries...Zombie stories give people the opportunity to witness the end of the world they’ve been secretly wondering about while, at the same time, allowing themselves to sleep at night because the catalyst of that end is fictional” (Barbar, 2014) .

November 22, 2016 0

Aries, Philippe (1981) The Hour of Our Death. London: Allen Lane (preface/conclusion)

Hypothesis, proposed previously by Edgar Morin, 'there was a relationship between man's attitude towards death and his awareness of self, of his degree of existence, or simply of his individuality' (Aries, 1981: 602).

Four psychological themes: awareness of the individual / defense of society against untamed nature / belief in an afterlife / belief in the existence of evil (Aries, 1981: 603)

Five models: the tame death / the death of the self / remote and imminent death / the death of the other / the invisible death (Aries, 1981: 603)

In the tame death the dead sleep. Death is evil.

In the death of the self the dead are active individuals. Biography continued after death. 'This new eschatology caused the word death to be be replaced by trite circumlocutions such as "he gave up the ghost" or "God has his soul." (Aries, 1981: 606). This model differs from the previous in respect to 2 themes - awareness of the individual; belief in the afterlife. Body becomes concealed.

In remote and imminent death (late 1500s...1700s?..the Enlightenment..) the savagery of death returns - the fear of being buried alive. Change of 1 theme - defense of society against untamed nature.

In the death of the other romanticism, following industrialisation and agricultural developments, led to passions without limits or reason. All 4 themes were transformed. Family replaced community/individuality, and privacy (a particular relation with select others) became important. Death was now neither tame nor wild. 'The compromise of beauty was the last obstacle invented to channel an immoderate emotion that had swept away the old barriers' (Aries, 1981: 610). Death ceased to be associated with evil. Evil and nature changed places. The afterlife theme changed - hell went, heaven became a reunion. For the non-religious, the reunion was in dreams, the strength in memory.

In the invisible death the themes continue, though the effect seems opposite. Privacy has become more demanding. The intimacy of final exchanges lost to the lie, the denial. Medical technology has defeated untamed nature, so the community no longer feels responsible for looking after its members' deaths. Solidarity and collectivity has gone. We are now more ashamed than afraid of death. This comes with the decline of evil. Now - defeat (silence or indifference/normalisation). The horrors of the hospital mean death is no longer tame. 'The belief in evil was necessary to the taming of death; the disappearance of the belief has restored death to its savage state' (Aries, 1981: 614).
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November 6, 2016 0

Smith, J. Z. (1998) Religion, Religions, Religious. In Taylor, M. C. (ed) Critical Terms for Religious Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Attempts to define the term, 'religion' began in the 16th century. Since this time, there have been problems, as religion is...

1. A category imposed on people from outside. 2. Thought to be a ubiquitous human phenomenon. 3. Familiarity (to impose). 4. Anthropological, not theological.

Eden understands religion as based upon belief, whereas Cieza focuses more on behaviour.

The reformation / protestantism marked a shift in focus from ritual/customs to belief/piety.

Four categories emerged – Christian, Judaism, Mohametanism, Idolatry – the plural religions “forced a new interest in the singular, generic, religion”. In the latter part of the 17th century, the term natural religion became common.

One branch of study, chiefly anthropological, assumed an innate truth which many religions touched upon. This approach favoured the acknowledgment of similarities and was based in inter-Christian study. A second approach was more historical and looked at things which the different main religions held in common. Comparison highlighted differences. These two simultaneous lines of study led to a blurring of truth and origin.

David Hume argued that religion is not innate, for “scarce any two men” agree.

James H. Leuba's Psychological Study of Religion (1912) lists 50 different definitions of religion.

'The anthropological definition of religion that has gained widespread assent among scholars of religion, who both share and reject its functionalist frame, is that formulated by Melford E. Spiro (1966, 96), “an institution consisting of culturally patterned interaction with culturally postulated superhuman beings.” ' (Smith)

NOTE: The least troublesome definition of religion in my mind is “anything which anyone who calls themselves religious calls religion”. Just as anyone who introduces themselves as an artist can name something art. It may not be popular art or religion. It may be appreciated as such by only one person. People may call it “bad, offensive, insincere” art or “bad, offensive, insincere” religion, but it fits the category, nonetheless. Take for instance the flying spaghetti monster.
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October 31, 2016 0

Rotar, Marius (2013) History of Modern Cremation in Romania. Cambrdge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 1-18 (Translation to English: Ms Monica Losonti and Dr Helen Frisby)

NOT READ
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October 29, 2016 0

Davies, D. J. (1996) The Sacred Crematorium. Mortality, 1 (1): 83-94

Davies looks at how crematoria cultivate a sense of the sacred. He begins by outlining the historical rise of cremation from the late 19th century, explaining the debate of the rite in relation to religiosity. Lindsey Jones' term 'ritual architectural event' is introduced as focusing on three elements, "(i) on the actual built form, (ii) on human beings burdened with expectations and religious opinions and (iii) on the ceremonial occasion which brought buildings and people into an involvement with one another" (Davies, 1996: 84). Looking first at the built form of the crematorium, Davies describes the main chapel, usually furnished with religious and ritualistic symbols, as distinct from the utilitarian workshop area behind the cremator. Davies looks next at the mode of entry and exit in the design of crematoria, noting that in Britain, it was common to have different doors for each, to quickly and orderly move the congregation in time for a new group arriving. Davies summarises the built form as lessening the sacred sense of crematoria, as previously mentioned features imply a transitional space. Turning to Jones' second element, Davies looks at the religious expectations with which people approach the place and how these have changed over time. Whilst people once grew up experiencing churches and chapels, the expected characteristics of crematoria is now more likely to be gleaned from films, television and other media. Only after personally experiencing the crematorium do people attach a sense of the sacred to such spaces. "In other words, the sacred status of crematoria in later 20th century Britain comes more from personal experience than from inherited tradition" (Davies, 1996: 86). Addressing Jones' third element, Davies points out the technical necessities of crematoria which link ritual with function and tie the congregation to the place.

Looking next at Harold W. Turner's theories, Davies asks whether the crematorium is a divine place of the deity or an emotionally neutral place for the congregation. The majority of British crematoria were given a religious dedication when opened. Crematorium architecture tends to reflect church architecture, with alter, stained glass windows and often an organ.

"In this sense an official sacred status is conferred upon them functionally" (Davies, 1996: 89) but still pay local taxes. In Turner's terms, the crematorium is a place of the deity (domus ecclesiae) during the funeral service, as religious personnel often lead the service, and it is the neutral place of the congregation (domus dei) during subsequent memorial visits. Since the 1970s, there has been a growing trend for people to scatter ashes outwith the crematorium area, in a place of special significance, making the crematorium a "means to an end" (Davies, 1996: 92).

"Between the 1890s and the 1990s crematoria underwent a major change of status as they were increasingly invested with a sacred value" (Davies, 1996: 83). The first crematorium opened in Estonia was in Tallinn in 1993 (Loomulik Surm, 2016)."By the 1990s some 70% of British funerals took the form of cremation with the majority conducted by ministers of religion" (Davies, 1996: 83).

NOTE: "Pentrebychan in North Wales and at several Swedish sites, including Asplund’s Stockholm Crematorium, which have been analysed in terms of the relation between spirituality and cemeteries" (Davies, 1996: 93). .

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