Modern Death as Taboo - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes, Study notes of Social Work

Download Modern Death as Taboo - Studying Social Life - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Social Work in PDF only on Docsity! Lecture 15 Modern death as taboo? Studying Social Life 1 Modern death – like birth - is underlain by the rise of bureaucracy, institutionalization and increasing medical intervention. One way in which we might begin to interpret this is by considering both the place of death within contemporary society and the processes through which dying and death are managed. HOCKEY suggests that the boundary between life and death operates in relation to where we die, when we die, who controls our dying, what happens to our social identity, and how we talk about our own deaths. For GORER, wring as far back as 1955, this compartmentalisation reflects changes in the scale and nature of death itself. With increased life expectancy and a decline in the significance of organised Christian religion attitudes have shifted markedly: in the nineteenth century death was romanticised, by the twentieth it had become a subject for embarrassment and denial. While natural death now happens mostly to older people, violent deaths are fantasised in horror movies and thrillers with the result that a 'pornographic' appreciation has arisen - one that glorifies death but cannot comprehend the realities of loss. This negative appraisal is consistent with ARIES’ long-term historical thesis, which, as with his arguments about the invention of childhood, draws on visual and documentary evidence to suggest the socially constructed character of our changing perceptions. In terms of boundaries, he considers shifts both in the control of the dying process and the place of death. The prevailing TAMED death (controlled by the dying person and happening at home) of the pre-industrial period was supplanted by the ROMANTIC Victorian death (a great event confirming the meaning of an individual's life through pomp and ceremony, mausoleums and a complex funeral etiquette), only to shift again in the post-1945 era to MODERN death (where we die clinically in institutions, isolated from the rest of society in a process that is feared but largely hidden). Based on his examination of reactions to the death of mostly young men in huge numbers in the First World War and of responses to the Holocaust and the use of the atomic bomb during the Second, CANNADINE draws a different conclusion, at least concerning modern death, arguing that we need to recognise the differences between public and private expressions of grief, open public mourning suggesting a recognition that was absent in the private aspects of mourning, which arguably indicated suppression and denial. However, WALTER contends that to regard our attitudes to death as a combination of romantic loss and secular denial is simplistic. Taboos undoubtedly exist, and ritual formality may be declining, but personal expressiveness may be showing signs of a renaissance. Or do key occupational groups, particularly medics whose mission is to keep people alive, find death particularly difficult to handle? Perhaps, far from being a uniquely modern phenomenon, our particular attitudes reflect a general and universal attempt, found in all societies, both to deny and accept the problem of death? Where the individual’s death has become a personal one requiring no rituals to affirm the broader culture, one-to-one counselling and therapy may have replaced the role of ceremony. docsity.com