Three: Understanding death and dying

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Death, dying and bereavement have been the subject of considerable interest to scholars since the middle of the twentieth century, despite the message that we are a ‘death-denying’ society. These attempts to understand how death is handled in societies and its impact on individuals and communities become ever more complex as one dominant approach supersedes another, or new refinements in relation to particular categories of bereavement are suggested. Despite differences in emphasis and divides in opinion, at the heart of these developments lies the widely accepted assumption that dying and bereavement are experiences which are both individually and socially mediated. Thus, as societies change, it is likely that dying and bereavement will be experienced differently by individuals, yet the psychological phenomena of attachment and loss may remain essentially unchanged. In fact, we still know remarkably little about the interaction between the individual subjective experience of loss and the particular social system to which that individual belongs.

A number of disciplines have contributed to this theorising and each makes its own contribution at the same time as it has something to say about the whole picture. So, for example, in the early part of the twentieth century, it was social anthropology which turned its attention to the rituals and symbols which societies construct to manage death, first through the examination of primitive societies but then shifting focus to search for the patterns in modern society. The degree to which social ritual is present or absent around death has been taken up by sociologists as a key indicator of whether or not death is denied, hidden or open in a given society.

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