Lecture 1: Death and
dying in contemporary
society
Agenda:
a) Investigate State of Death and Dying Today
b) Investigate Historical Perspective
c) Debate / Discuss
d) Video presentation “Crypts, Coffins, and Corpses”
e) Discuss Phenomenological Journaling
1
Development of Current Attitudes to
Death and Dying
• Setting a perspective:
•
•
Illich states: “Image of death determines the prevalent concept of
health”
So what?
Phases and
Stages
“Stage 1: Dance of the Dead”
15th
century
✞
✞
Prior to the 15th century death in hands of god (death is
grim)
During the 15th century move toward becoming part of life
✞
Readiness for societal change
Stage II: Dance of Death
“Dance represents a change from being a transition
into the next world to accent being put on this life”
16th - 17th century
Dance of Death (contd)
✞
The individual faces death alone
✞ Death then, becomes an
adversary, whereas in earlier
medieval times a doctor /healer
would not attempt to prolong life*
✞ Folk and superstitious practices
were employed to ensure a good
death
✞ By end of 17th century corpses
were no longer sacred.
✞ Push toward freedom
Stage III: Bourgeois death
17th -
18th century
•
Industrial revolution creates employment and wealth
•
Those who can afford it, now pay to “keep death away”
•
Health of a nation becomes economic management (an overall policy
of government)
•
Families begin to uphold ethics of good health
•
Middle class employs doctors and society begins to give them the
power to tell when death will strike
Death is an “untimely event” for those who are both “healthy and old”
Stage IV: Clinical Death
•
•
Death is a
product of
disease
certified by
the doctor
Rise of the
scientific
doctor.
19th century
Stage V: Health as a Commodity
COmCOmmCommodity
•
Doctor in a struggle with
death
•
Society deems it to be a
civil rite (prolong life)
•
People eventually lose
their “spiritual capacity to
deal with death
20th century
20th century
Stage VI: Death in Intensive Care
century
middle of 20th
COmCOmmCommodity
20th
century
•
•
•
•
•
•
Critical condition in ICU
Individual is protected against death by modern
medicine
Stage 7 = Social Death
We no longer can set scene for our own death
(death rituals are medicalized)
Death denying culture
Death seen as failure for both doctors and
nurses
Preoccupation with living has repressed any
meaningful preparation and acceptance of death
Lose connection with understanding life
OR...
Are we Returning to...
Stage 8
Holistic concepts?
Understanding death as a rite of
passage?
What does stage 8
look like?
•
A return to holistic care
•
Finding meaning in life and death
•
Taking responsibilities for our death /
dying rituals
Rituals in other
Societies?
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/taboo/4600/Overview#tab-Videos/07780_00
Are we stuck at Level
7 in the West?
•
Looking at the Death, Dying and the Dead in Popular
Culture?
The Crux of Article 2!
•
•
•
•
The West is frequently described as a death-denying society.
Numerous scholars have observed that recent generations of
North Americans lack the firsthand familiarity with death and
dying that our ancestors had.
Meanwhile, our popular media and many of our cultural
mediums appear to have an obsessive fascination with death,
dying, and the dead.
Nowhere is this paradox more apparent than in our popular
culture. Television programming, movies, songs, the print media,
games, jokes, and even recreational activities are fraught with
thanatological content.
The Crux (contd)
• So what do folks think?
The Crux (contd)
Is it that:
We are not a death denying culture?
or
We are a death denying culture, but our insulation from death
causes us to crave some degree of information and insight concerning
death, and we feed that craving through popular-culture depictions of
death and dying.
or
Again we are death denying culture, but through displacement
we socially neutralize our death anxiety?
The act of
neutralization
•
•
Reconceptualizes death into a form that stimulates something other than
primordial terror. These phenomena may be considered fascinating /
entertaining, depending on the social context (i.e., visit to Elvis Presley’s
grave).
Through detachment, (i.e., horror movies, video games) suspend belief about
death. Enjoyment of this type of humor / entertainment per se requires us to
laugh at our own mortality.
•
Ultimately, North American folk may vest interest in popular
culture to dilute our anxiety and desensitize death, so as digest
death making it easier to live and transcend death.
Grave Digger: Dave Matthews
•
Is this death denying,
morbid, or is a sign of
a stage 8?
•
•
Or is just...
Just - Rock -in Roll!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7wSefU2H9Q
Summing Up
•
Looking at the past
and present
Stages in the process of social death in ‘primitive societies’
Initial social status
Living
person
Rituals marking
biological death
Period of transition
Soul in
Limbo
Rituals of mourning
New social status
Dead
ancestor
Rituals of social death
Stages in the process of social death in modern ‘western societies’
Initial social status
Living
person
Hospital
patient
Rituals of admission
hospitalization and /
or institutionalization
Period of transition
New social status
Dead
ancestor
Body and Soul in Limbo
Anticipatory grief
Social death
Biological
death and
rituals of
mourning
Movie Time: Crypts,
Coffins and Corpses
•
•
Take notes
Be prepared to
Discuss
For Next Week...
•
•
Continue to journal
remember: 1 out of the
Oxford book of Death
and the 2nd related to
the reading, lecture
material, felt-sense,
etc.
Reading for this
week...