Death in the Modern World

313 Pages·2020·1.331 MB·English

by  Tony Walter

DEATH
IN THE
MODERN
WORLD
Tony Walter
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DEATH
IN THE
MODERN
WORLD
Tony Walter
SAGE Publications Ltd © Tony Walter 2020
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CONTENTS
About the author vi
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Death’s Jigsaw viii
PART I MODERNITY 1
1 Longevity 3
2 Medicine 21
3 Commodification 39
4 Communication 58
5 Death denial? 76
PART II RISK 85
6 Security and insecurity 89
7 The physical world 104
PART III CULTURE 121
8 Individual and group 125
9 Family 141
10 Religion 158
PART IV NATION 179
11 Modernizing the nation 183
12 War 200
13 Policy and politics 219
PART V GLOBALIZATION 235
14 Global flows 237
15 Death’s futures 258
References 268
Index 290
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Walter is Emeritus Professor of Death Studies at the University of Bath,
UK. His research into death and society has included end-of-life care, social
networks and care, funeral practice, bereavement, spiritualism, belief in reincar-
nation, the idea that the dead become angels, mass media and social media, pil-
grimage, and the use of human remains in exhibitions. He has lectured around
the world, and has also trained clergy and funeral celebrants. His 17 books
include Funerals (1990), Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (1993), The Revival of Death
(1994), The Eclipse of Eternity (1996), On Bereavement (1999), and What Death
Means Now (2017). Before 1994, he was freelance, writing books and articles on
religion, landscape, social security reform, and basic income.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It would be impossible to acknowledge everyone who over thirty years has in
one way or another influenced this book. Of course, none of them are respon-
sible for the result.
Among the many who have stimulated and extended my sociological imagina-
tion, I am particularly indebted to David Clark, Grace Davie, Christie Davies,
François Gauthier, Allan Kellehear, Linda Woodhead, Michael Young, and
Shahaduz Zaman. I have also greatly benefitted from belonging to the University
of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society, not least its mind-stretching seminars and
conferences and its academic visitors from around the world. The University
library’s extensive holdings and ever helpful staff have also been invaluable.
Further afield, I have been sustained by regular meetings with kindred scholars in
Alba Iulia (Romania), Dumfries (Scotland), Nijmegen (the Netherlands), Sigtuna
(Sweden), Zurich and Fribourg (Switzerland); and I have valued feedback on
public lectures given in Denmark, Germany, Romania, Japan and New Zealand
where I outlined the framework which eventually became this book.
Many international students and kind hosts around the world have opened my
eyes to how others ‘do death’, including Kumiko Hori and Hiroshi Yamazaki
(Japan), See Mieng Tan (Singapore), Ruth McManus (New Zealand), Kingston
Kajese and Jenny Hunt (Zimbabwe), and Renske Visser (the Netherlands).
Practitioners in several countries have taken time to show me around their hos-
pice, funeral parlour, crematorium, temple, or shrine. Friends and colleagues
with no specialist knowledge have gone out of their way to help in one way or
another; Maya van Trier (Belgium), Jan Otto Andersson (Finland), Bruce and Val
Ayres-Wearne (Australia), Stephen Nickless, and Peter Cressey (UK) are just a
few who come to mind. Thank you also to my Sociology students for permission
to quote from their class memos.
And so to the book itself. Thank you to Joanna Wojtkowiak who back in 2009
suggested I write the book. SAGE’s nine – yes nine – anonymous reviewers
offered constructive comments on the original proposal, many of which I have
incorporated, and the following have given helpful feedback on various chapters:
Candi Cann, Chao Fang, Cynthia Goh, John Harris, Ida Marie Høeg, Christoph
Jedan, Annika Jonsson, Anne Kjaersgaard, Rebekah Lee, and Nina Parish.
Finally, my sincere thanks to Mandy Robertson for providing a place and the
time in which to write.
If I have forgotten anyone, please accept my apologies. And if the book has
got anything wrong, which – given its breadth – is entirely possible, the responsibility
is mine alone.
INTRODUCTION:
DEATH’S JIGSAW
Death comes to all humans, but how death is managed, symbolized and experi-
enced varies widely, not only between individuals but also between groups. What
.
then shapes how a society manages death, dying and bereavement today? Are all
modern countries similar? How important are culture, the physical environment,
national histories, national laws and institutions, and globalization? This is the first
book to look at how all these different factors shape death and dying in the modern
world – in other words, the first book to attempt to complete the entire jigsaw.
Many writers contrast death in the modern world with previous eras. There
is a heroic narrative of modern medicine and sanitation banishing infectious
disease and radically increasing human longevity. And there is another narrative
of increased psycho-social risk, as medicalization and professionalization detach
dying and bereaved people from the community and religion that are nostalgically
supposed to have supported them in past times. I do not peddle either narrative.
I argue that what is distinctive about modern dying and grieving, and there is
much that is distinctive, interacts with culture, environment, economic (in)security,
and national history and institutions to create considerable variety.
Thirty years ago, as I was writing the book that comprised my first venture
into this field (Walter, 1990), I felt my writing was slipping and sliding around.
One paragraph was certainly true of England, but probably not Scotland or
Northern Ireland; the next paragraph might be true of all English speaking
societies; the next of all advanced industrial societies throughout the world; the
next of northern western European countries but not of Eastern Europe,
Mediterranean Europe or the USA, and certainly not of Japan or China; and so
on, and so on. But it was not an academic book for which precision was essential,
so I carried on writing regardless.
The unresolved issue of national differences in death practices has intrigued
me ever since. When in the mid-1990s I began to teach the sociology of death
at bachelors and then masters level and looked around for suitable textbooks,
I found that most of them – especially those written by authors from powerful
countries like the USA or once powerful countries like the UK – mix up
modernity and their own national culture and institutions.1 Worse still, I got the
impression these authors did not even know they were mixing things up. Bryan
Turner (1990: 343) has observed this in other areas of sociology: ‘Since its formal
inception in the first half of the nineteenth century, sociology has been, generally
implicitly, located in a tension or contradiction between a science of particular
nation-states and a science of global or universal processes.’ Since comparing one
group (such as a nation) and sub-group (such as men and women, or social
INTRODUCTION: DEATH’S JIGSAW ix
classes) with another is the essence of sociological analysis, these death-related
textbooks were not going to help my students understand whether various
deathways were due to modernity, to national histories, to culture, to power
relationships, or to what. So the present book is particularly concerned to identify
national differences – even at a time when some consider the nation state to be
withering in the face of globalization and transnational institutions.
So much depends on time and place – on when and where you were born.
There are about 56 million deaths a year across the world, and most of these are
in ‘developing’ societies (Clark et al., 2017). In terms of place, this book focuses
on the minority of global deaths that occur in ‘developed’ countries – which is
not to say that the rest of the world never appears in the periphery of my lens.
In terms of time, my focus is the present day – how the present is shaped by the
past, and how economy, society, history, geography, and culture interact in
complex ways to shape people’s experiences of dying and grief. People’s economic
position is central to my analysis, which draws more on the concept of economic
insecurity (Inglehart, 1981; Standing, 2011) than on traditional concepts of social
class. Examples come from many countries, though (reflecting my own reading,
travels and contacts) not equally. I write more, for example, about the USA and
the UK than any other countries; more about China than India, Japan than
Korea, the Netherlands than France, Denmark than Norway, Serbia than
Bulgaria.
Unlike many books on death and society, this one does not have chapters
devoted to dying, to funerals, to burial and cremation, or to bereavement.
Instead, each chapter discusses a key factor (such as money, communication
technologies, economic in/security, risk, the family, religion, war) that shapes the
organization and experience of dying and loss; I then invite you the reader to
work out how each factor operates in your own country or society, and so to
understand how your own society manages death. My aim is not to tell you
about your own society but to provide sociological tools to help you understand
it – each chapter ends with a question or questions inviting you to do just this.
Please note that the book’s division of chapters into social factors rather than
aspects of death means that some substantive topics – such as hospice, compas-
sionate community, funerals, or grief – appear in more than one chapter.
I hope you will find this an interesting journey. You may have heard of the
Mexican Day of the Dead, or of Irish wakes, or you may know that euthanasia
is permitted in certain countries. But apart from a few such practices, many
people who are very aware of national differences in, say, cuisine may be totally
unaware of the very many differences, big and little, in how modern nations
handle death and dying. I don’t believe this is because people don’t want to think
about death. I have taught health care and other practitioners who are passionate
about their work with the dying and bereaved, yet whose eyes pop out of their
heads when fellow students from elsewhere describe their country’s deathways.