#thanatology — Public Fediverse posts

#AcaWriMo post accountability post 13 (Nov. 17-18)
In the 24.3 and 24.4 isssues of the journal /Mortality/, Marin Robert and Laura Tradii published a two part article "Do We Deny #Death? I. A Genealogy of #DeathDenial" and "Do We Deny Death? II. Critiques of the Death-Denial Thesis."

The first part offers a helpful overview of history and sociology scholarship on death denial in Western culture, highlighting the rise of this theory in the early to mid C20th with thinkers like Freud. Notably, they argue that the death-denial theory requires a kind of nostalgia for past relationships with death, a contrast between the present death industry as impersonalizing and commodifying and the past paradigm of death at home as intimate and personal.

At the end of Part I and throughout Part II, Robert and Tradii argue that death and the dead are actually very present in contemporary popular culture. While I can agree with this, I continue to think that US culture is very bad at coping with the deaths and the dead that we encounter. I would agree that we collectively are not denying death, but we are also not collectively responding to it. There is a sort of individualism in the lack of communal mourning and grief rituals beyond the immediate funeral and burial services.

#academodon #thanatology #AmWriting

#AcaWriMo post accountability post 13 (Nov. 17-18)
In the 24.3 and 24.4 isssues of the journal /Mortality/, Marin Robert and Laura Tradii published a two part article "Do We Deny #Death? I. A Genealogy of #DeathDenial" and "Do We Deny Death? II. Critiques of the Death-Denial Thesis."

The first part offers a helpful overview of history and sociology scholarship on death denial in Western culture, highlighting the rise of this theory in the early to mid C20th with thinkers like Freud. Notably, they argue that the death-denial theory requires a kind of nostalgia for past relationships with death, a contrast between the present death industry as impersonalizing and commodifying and the past paradigm of death at home as intimate and personal.

At the end of Part I and throughout Part II, Robert and Tradii argue that death and the dead are actually very present in contemporary popular culture. While I can agree with this, I continue to think that US culture is very bad at coping with the deaths and the dead that we encounter. I would agree that we collectively are not denying death, but we are also not collectively responding to it. There is a sort of individualism in the lack of communal mourning and grief rituals beyond the immediate funeral and burial services.

#academodon #thanatology #AmWriting

#AcaWriMo accountability post 12 (16 Nov.).

In her monograph /Virtual #Afterlives: Grieving the Death in the C21st/, Candi K. Cann explores the present uses of #VirtualSpaces for #mourning and #grief in the contemporary US, with some comparative attention to other world cultures. The brief argument Cann presents in her preface suggests "that [in the US] memorialization has increased so much because death itself is disappearing" (para. 3).

Her introduction contextualizes these present practices as the culmination of several historo-cultural processes in the US over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War are key drivers. The first created the conditions of specialization of labor and population density in cities that contributed to the rise of the funeral home and mortuary industries (para. 2). The latter created the conditions for embalming to become a standard practice for all bodies (para. 3).

Cann then goes on to offer an extended discussion of #BereavementLeave policies, highlighting that the US has no federal laws or mandates that govern what companies offer to their employees. The federal government's #bereavement policies for their own employees are among the most generous in the US, but they have not trickled out into the private sector.

These policies influence both for whom we are able to grieve by enumerating particular relationships and degrees of kinship and for how long by limiting the time off (with or without pay) and requiring evidence in the form of a death certificate or obituary.

[side note]: One thing Cann doesn't mention is that it takes time to get a death certificate. In the case of my late husband, it was about a week after the funeral, so about 10 days after the death. Had anyone needed it for bereavement leave, it would not have been available to them.

Back to Cann--These limitations on the practices of #mourning and the processing of grief have a created a situation in which US society does not have a common framework for mourning, in contrast to the mid C19th when mourning clothes, armbands, ribbons identified the grieving and people withdrew from social life and work for an expected period of time.

Published in 2014, this book does not, of course, address our current pandemic or geopolitical situations, but I think it highlights the lack of memorialization we're seeing of the COVID dead, the climate change dead, and the armed conflict dead.

#academodon #DeathStudies #Thanatology
https://academic.oup.com/kentucky-scholarship-online/book/20771

#AcaWriMo accountability post 12 (16 Nov.).

In her monograph /Virtual #Afterlives: Grieving the Death in the C21st/, Candi K. Cann explores the present uses of #VirtualSpaces for #mourning and #grief in the contemporary US, with some comparative attention to other world cultures. The brief argument Cann presents in her preface suggests "that [in the US] memorialization has increased so much because death itself is disappearing" (para. 3).

Her introduction contextualizes these present practices as the culmination of several historo-cultural processes in the US over the last 150 years. The Industrial Revolution and the American Civil War are key drivers. The first created the conditions of specialization of labor and population density in cities that contributed to the rise of the funeral home and mortuary industries (para. 2). The latter created the conditions for embalming to become a standard practice for all bodies (para. 3).

Cann then goes on to offer an extended discussion of #BereavementLeave policies, highlighting that the US has no federal laws or mandates that govern what companies offer to their employees. The federal government's #bereavement policies for their own employees are among the most generous in the US, but they have not trickled out into the private sector.

These policies influence both for whom we are able to grieve by enumerating particular relationships and degrees of kinship and for how long by limiting the time off (with or without pay) and requiring evidence in the form of a death certificate or obituary.

[side note]: One thing Cann doesn't mention is that it takes time to get a death certificate. In the case of my late husband, it was about a week after the funeral, so about 10 days after the death. Had anyone needed it for bereavement leave, it would not have been available to them.

Back to Cann--These limitations on the practices of #mourning and the processing of grief have a created a situation in which US society does not have a common framework for mourning, in contrast to the mid C19th when mourning clothes, armbands, ribbons identified the grieving and people withdrew from social life and work for an expected period of time.

Published in 2014, this book does not, of course, address our current pandemic or geopolitical situations, but I think it highlights the lack of memorialization we're seeing of the COVID dead, the climate change dead, and the armed conflict dead.

#academodon #DeathStudies #Thanatology
https://academic.oup.com/kentucky-scholarship-online/book/20771