Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal PDF
Preview Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEATH, DYING AND DISPOSAL Also by Glennys Howarth LAST RITES The Work of the Modem Funeral Director Also edited by Glennys Howarth and Peter C. Jupp THE CHANGING FACE OF DEATH Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal (forthcoming) Contemporary Issues in the Sociology of Death, Dying and Disposal Edited by Glennys Howarth Lecturer in Sociology University of Sussex and Peter C. Jupp Director of the National Funerals College Institute of Community Studies, London ~ Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-24305-1 ISBN 978-1-349-24303-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24303-7 CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF DEATH, DYING AND DISPOSAL Copyright© 1996 by Glennys Howarth and Peter C. Jupp. Foreword copyright© 1996 by Michael Young. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-63862-0 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1996 ISBN 978-0-312-12742-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary issues in the sociology of death, dying, and disposal I edited by Glennys Howarth and Peter C. Jupp. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-12742-8 I. Death-Social aspects. I. Howarth, Glennys. II. Jupp, Peter c. HQ1073.C66 1996 306.9-dc20 95-13446 CIP Contents Foreword by Michael Young vii Notes on the Contributors ix Introduction by Glennys Howarth xiii Part 1 Locating Death in Modern Western Societies I. The View from the West: Reading the Anthropology of Non-western Death Ritual 3 Jennifer Hockey 2 The Social Facts of Death 17 Douglas Davies 3 Change and Continuity in the Funeral Rituals of Sikhs in Britain 30 Sewa Singh Kalsi Part 2 Social Representations of Death 4 Vile Bodies and Mass Media Chantries 47 Jon Davies 5 Dirt, Death, Decay and Dissolution: American Denial and British A voidance 60 Christie Davies 6 Dead Beauty: The Preservation, Memorialization, and Destruction of Beauty in Death 72 Jacque Lynn Foltyn 7 Representations of 'Good' and 'Bad' Death among Deathworkers and the Bereaved 84 Mary Bradbury 8 The Good Death: Attitudes of British Hindus 96 Shirley Firth v vi Contents Part 3 The Role of Health and Death Workers 9 Terminal Care Education for Doctors 111 David Field 10 Nurses' Perceptions of Stress when Working with Dying Patients on a Cancer Ward 124 Jeanne Samson Katz I I Police Coping with Death: Assumptions and Rhetoric 137 Margaret Mitchell Part 4 Social Implications of Legal and Medical Responses to Death and Dying 12 Death and the Disease: Inside the Culture of Childhood Cancer 151 Stephen Ball, Sarah Bignold and Alan Cribb 13 Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide: Are Doctors' Duties when Following Patients' Orders a Bitter Pill to Swallow? 165 Demetra M. Pappas 14 The Donation of Organs for Transplantation: The Donor Families 179 Margaret Robbins 15 Facing Death without Tradition 193 Tony Walter Bibliography 205 Index 217 Foreword Nothing is more obvious about society, especially about modern society, than that attitudes which make it up are subject to a zeitgeist. Nothing is more difficult than to get a grip on, let alone to measure, whatever changes there are in the spirit of the times. It is obvious to any adult not just that technology keeps changing but attitudes do too. People old enough to remember may not be able to put their finger on it but they know that the prevailing mood, both in general and in a host of particulars, is different, say, in the 1990s from what it was in the 1960s. Some of the superficial ities can be pinned down. Clothes are different in ways that can be por trayed; music is different in ways that can be heard; food is different in ways that can be tasted. The temporary culture or sub-cultures of fashion seem to have taken the place of tradition, binding people together not by the re-affirmation of old values but by the multi-faceted requirements of temporary traditions. These requirements are readily obeyed as though they were social impera tives, especially by younger people who would otherwise be the most easily lost in a kind of social chaos. Fashion more than tradition sets the boundaries within which people can strive for freedom, and without which they could be rudderless. Fashion in its broadest sense is to a large extent what holds society together-and this despite, as well as because, no-one can be quite sure what is happening. Control needs a sense of magic behind it to exert itself at all fully. Death is an example, and a strange one. It remains, and probably will always remain, the ultimate mystery. No-one can ever know whether there is a beyond the other side of the gates, and, if so, what sort of beyond it is. It is even difficult (almost by definition) to imagine oneself dead. But this has not prevented quite endless talk about what cannot be talked about. There even seems to be a pattern to it. Some thirty or forty years ago it was fashionable to consider death a matter of taboo - to be hidden away rather than openly discussed. All that has changed and is certainly still changing fast, partly no doubt due to the media. The person at home in the middle of an array of knobs and buttons which control his immediate environment can now, with the aid of other robots, summon up at will the most amazing fantasies. The media have added more and more insistently to an immense fairy-story world of death; it feeds the illusion, for adults as well as children, that no-one needs to die. vii viii Foreword Artists contribute to this illusion, as they have always done, by imagining how to control time, make it stand still, leap forward or turn back, and their reach has been greatly enlarged by the media. The festival of death has become one of our favourite modern games. No Nero or Caligula was served by as many gladiators as a single child in any industrial country. It has been calculated (The Times, 19 October 1971), that by the time an average child in the USA has reached the age of fourteen he or she could be expected to have seen 18 000 people killed on television and we are sure, seen hosts of immortals - as they are called - who are sufficiently immune from death to come through many deaths alive. When all their enemies are slaughtered they re-appear again and again in other equally gripping dramas, and keep re-appearing on the screen of make-believe long after they are themselves reported apparently dead. Social science has followed the same path. However much death may have been taboo in the mid-century, it is certainly not so as it nears its end. The discussion mounts. This book is an excellent illustration. It takes stock from many angles of the issues as they are presented today. Anyone who wishes to catch up with the views of social scientists about the ever enduring subject of death is well-advised to start here. MICHAEL YOUNG Notes on the Contributors Stephen Ball is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Centre for Educational Studies at King's College, London. His interests include edu cation policy, post-structuralism and ethnography. As well as continued work on childhood cancer he is currently engaged in a series of studies of education reforms and marketisation. Sarah Bignold is Research Officer in the Centre for Educational Studies at King's College London. Since 1992 she has worked on projects funded by the Department of Health and Cancer Relief Macmillan Fund into the needs and experiences of families of children with cancer. She is a co ordinator of the Women in Research Group at King's, and a member of the Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group. Mary Bradbury completed an undergraduate degree in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, and then undertook a conversion course in social psychology. She has recently gained a social psychological doctorate at the London School of Economics. In addition to doing further research in the field of death studies, she intends to train as a psychotherapist. Alan Cribb is Lecturer in Ethics and Education in the Centre for Educational Studies at King's College, London. He is interested in the social context of health, particularly in relation to health care ethics and health promotion theory. Christie Davies is Professor of Sociology at the University of Reading. His main research interests lie in the sociology of morality and the sociol ogy of humour. His articles in these areas have appeared in journals such as the American Journal of Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, and the Howard Journal. His work has been translated into Bulgarian, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian and Polish. His most recent book is Ethnic Humor Around the World. Douglas Davies is Professor of Religious Studies within the Department of Theology at the University of Nottingham. He trained both in social anthropology and theology at Durham and Oxford and has particular research interests in the anthropology of death, and in Mormonism. Apart ix
The list of books you might like
