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- Convenors:
-
DS Farrer
(University of Exeter)
John Moss (University of Guam)
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- Track:
- Life and Death
- Location:
- Roscoe 2.2
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 6 August, -, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Disjunctions of deathscapes regards what people expect about death and dying as compared to what actually occurs—before, during and after death. A transnational social abrogation of agency through death in care confronts social policy and raises questions of social responsibility, ethics and justice
Long Abstract:
The last two decades witnessed a massive expansion of the death literature, yet the importance of death in social theory was eclipsed by the elucidation of cultural difference. The notion "disjunctions of deathscapes" unites phenomenology with practice, to ask what do people expect about death, as compared to what actually occurs—before, during and after death. "Deathscapes" itself is defined in material terms to reference the paraphernalia of death: graveyards, ossuaries, tombstones, and crematoriums, and now includes death websites. More broadly, "deathscapes" may be defined as a cognitive frame, mentality, or ideology, regarded through agency, practice, religion, rituals and rites de passage. Where in the past people may expect to die at home in the care of their families, nowadays we anticipate death in care homes under the custody of strangers employed by private organizations or the state. This dramatic cross-cultural and historic alteration in the ways of death is global. Papers may explore suicide, euthanasia, mega-death, cancer, murder, burial, rejuvenation, the funeral business, bereavement, grief, loss, supplication, and the aesthetics of death. The purpose of the panel is to engage the various transnational ways, places, and sites in which death currently occurs, and to harness the insights gleaned to a critique of contemporary social policy, theory and practice. At the outset, we must ask: of what is the social body capable to offset suffering in the termination of life? What special problems does death in the transnational world raise, where different nations mandate different rules, customs and practices?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 6 August, 2013, -David Atienza (University of Guam)
Paper short abstract:
I explore the role of post-mortem destiny beliefs and death management among the Chamorros of Guam that may facilitate an individual's decisions to end his or her life.
Paper long abstract:
Suicide in Micronesia is not a recent issue and has been recorded by several anthropological studies, chronicles and reports during the past few centuries. Suicide is a radical action that has to be considered through a multidisciplinary approach in order to guide an appropriate understanding. I explore the role of post-mortem destiny beliefs and death management among the Chamorros of Guam to facilitate an understanding of the decisions taken by individual's to terminate their own life. Traditionally Guam is considered to be a Catholic island, but the Christian Catholicism here possesses its own cultural characteristics due to a historical processes of syncretism, and the tools that were used to evangelize the people of the Marianas. One of the most important elements used by the Jesuits in the first evangelization of the island (1668-1778) was the devotion to the Holy Virgin, and the images associated to Her. Today, the rosary, the novenas, and the devotion to the Virgin Mary plays a fundamental role in death management since the popular tacit belief is that Mary has the power to save the souls from Hell, making Heaven the ultimate destiny for all Chamorro people, which is an unorthodox notion in Catholic terms.
Maribeth Erb (National University of Singapore)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the disjuncture between tourism and the possibility of death while journeying in a distant land. What is the meaning of dying in a strange land? How do people value the death of a stranger?
Paper long abstract:
Dying in a strange land has always been a possibility when travellers set out for long journeys, never certain that they will return. Interest in travelling to dangerous places has grown in recent decades, as witnessed by the travel guides and websites dedicated to an extreme breed of adventurous tourist, and therefore the contemplation of death far away from home is something actively cultivated by some modern travellers. At the same time the active search for tourist victims to threaten death is a powerful tool used by certain parties as a political device. What is the "value" of the tourist death to those who may perpetrate it or have to deal with it? What is the meaning of the death of a stranger if a tourist dies unbidden in a search for meaning to his life? In this paper I will explore some of these questions, using some examples of the way people deal with the death of a stranger from research in a tourist town in eastern Indonesia.
Jean-Marc de Grave (Aix-Marseille Université)
Paper short abstract:
Javanese conceptions dealing with death must be understood alongside current everyday practices dealing with the notion of "loyalty" and concomitant social relationships. Comparatively speaking, such embodied practices and values take Javanese people away from the fear of death.
Paper long abstract:
I will present a set of Javanese practices aiming to socialise death and dead people. These include current practices such as flowering graves on different occasions, visiting deceased relatives, masters or valorous figures, prayer, meditation, meeting with the graveyard's guardian, binds to sacred heirlooms, commemoration of the dead - and Javanese conceptions dealing with the "brief" earth life sojourn. From these descriptions we can infer a broader understanding of everyday Javanese life. One complementary point stands in the apparent contradiction with the central notion of loyalty (kasetyan) in which to commit oneself means to side against somebody on particular confrontational occasions at the risk of one's life. I will argue that the hindsight the Javanese can apply towards what happens to them - particularly as regards death - relies on the special attention they pay towards their relation to others and to the world. The concomitant conception of action induces a conception of life and death which functions according to a particular Javanese rationality. Comparing Javanese practices with conceptions about death in secular modernity, it appears that the focus on individuals, the way of life centred on the nuclear family in which the role of other family members is very reduced, the limited or subordinated character of proximal relations (family, neighbourhood, dead relatives) drives us away from actual practices that induce the kind of sharing necessary to facilitate existence on a different level of social being.
Adam Buben (Leiden University College)
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses questions about death and human nature related to imagined but not unlikely technological advancements in the near future. Specifically, how will highly detailed interactive simulations of deceased personalities affect the way we approach both the deaths of others and our own?
Paper long abstract:
Humans have a long history of trying to overcome death. We hold religious beliefs about the afterlife, plan families, build structures, create works of art and literature, record digital images and video, produce websites of incredible variety, and cryogenically preserve crumbling bodies in the hope of passing on pieces of ourselves to posterity. But I believe that something even more interesting is just around the corner: Interactive Personality Constructs (IPCs). Imagine: through advanced recording, motion-capture, and voice-recognition technology, your mother's appearance, mannerisms, voice, and thoughts on a wide array of topics are collected, and at the touch of an icon (like a smartphone app) you are able to access her moving, speaking image and engage it in conversation. I wonder what such a development would mean for how we relate to the deaths of others. Would it be as difficult and demoralizing to lose someone if there just wasn't as much of that person that we had to miss? Clearly, nothing has been done about replacing a good old-fashioned motherly hug, but you could in theory have a conversation with an IPC that possesses a great many of her traits while sitting at her funeral. I also wonder how it would impact the way we relate to our own deaths. Would it make one's own approaching demise even more isolating and painful if no one else had much reason to be distraught about it? This paper addresses these and other questions related to this imagined but not so far-fetched scenario.
John Moss (University of Guam)
Paper short abstract:
The indigenous people of the island of Guam, the Chamorro, suffer from the highest rates of cancer death on the island. My research explores narratives of this group's experiences of cancer treatment and considers what Chamorro people perceive to be the causes of cancer.
Paper long abstract:
Guam, an island territory of the United States with a substantial military presence, is located in the Western Pacific north of the equator. The indigenous people of Guam, the Chamorro, suffer from the highest rates of cancer death on the island. This research explores narratives of this group's experiences of the cancer treatment on Guam and what the Chamorro perceive to be the causes of cancer. The diagnosis of cancer is prompted by self-assessments or medical encounters, creating sharp disjunctions as the imagined health and future life of the sufferer is transformed into the possibility of imminent death. Most Chamorro informants use Christian discourses concerning "God's Will" to face death, a discourse that is sometimes used when explaining their avoidance of medical care. Families serve as care givers of Chamorros with cancer, a relationship of love, anxiety, financial hardship and pain. Informant's experiences of cancer are significantly determined by the kind of health insurance the sufferer has and the wealth of their family. The major causes of cancer that the Chamorro perceive encompass attitudes about health that lead to infrequent cancer screenings, stress, pesticides, smoking, alcohol use, diet, pollution, military waste and nuclear fallout. This cancer deathscape is tied to the health-care model of the United States, where disease and suffering are mined for profit and where the means-tested benefits of the US welfare state require the Chamorro to sell or transfer ancestral lands and other treasured assets.
Maheshvari Naidu (University of KwaZulu Natal)
Paper short abstract:
Death and dying are proximal and disjunctive tensions for cancer patients. Meanings attached to dying and death form part of an imaginary of life, pain and suffering within a shifting landscape of hope and disillusionment, pain and relief.
Paper long abstract:
The body has been put forward as a "surface" on which commitments of culture are inscribed. This is true even at the point of dying, and at death. While poststructuralist discussions have demonstrated how knowledge of the body and the body itself is constituted in specific cultural and historical circumstances, feminist anthropologists have shown how women's bodies have been appropriated by medicalized discourses and practices that have reconstructed the diseased body. Death and dying are tensions on "body" and "person" that are both proximal and disjunctive in terms of what they mean to cancer patients. As dying does not necessarily precede death nor does death simply result from the process of dying but may be regarded as part of an imaginary of life, pain and suffering within a shifting landscape of hope and disillusionment, pain and relief. This paper uses narrative analysis and works through the ethnographic stories of a sample of 25 women with cancer as they share how cancer and medical discourse inscribe their bodies and their sense of who they are, while also revealing that the way they feel about death is different to the way they feel about dying. The ethnography reveals the construction of a différance that governs the social production of their experience of cancer on their bodies. This meaning is in turn "deferred" through a chain of signified treatments that set up an oppositional relationship between dying and living.
Janet Owen Driggs (Artist/writer)
Paper short abstract:
What more common experience do we have than the experience of death, and what about our right to a "good death"? My father, Peter Owen, his body polluted by asbestos, committed suicide on January 15th.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reveals the experience of another human being rendered disposable by capitalism, but prevented from disposing of his own body by moralistic British legislation. Such legislation appears to uphold the "sanctity" of life, but is merely a shroud for a gruesome truth. Such "unhappy accidents" as industrial illness, environmental depredation, and poverty, will not be prevented by diligence and regulation, for they are prerequisites of profit. The personal engine of my experience with my father's suicide, and the weeks leading up to that quest for help, entailed an investigation of real options - suicide hood, pills, hypothermia—and their ramifications for both Dad and I, which revealed how bound by ludicrous conventions and misplaced "respect" for life our actions are. This paper explores the journey of a dying man who, as he remembered his life, sought ways to end it, as a starting point from which to detail what may be possible and what help is available to those who seek to end their life and the relatives that want to help them.
DS Farrer (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
A disjunction of deathscapes exists between Islamic cultural practice and scientific medical necropsy. Interment before nightfall on the same day as death, together with the belief that the body continues to experience pain after death, prohibits autopsy. How then is the cause of death established?
Paper long abstract:
Islamic cultures inter the cadaver before nightfall on the same day that a person is pronounced dead. Interment before nightfall combined with the belief that the body continues to experience pain and suffering after death, prohibits autopsy. Rare exceptions to this rule that occur, such as the posthumous display of Col. Gaddafi, offer a range of interpretations, from deliberate social disrespect to the appreciation of a new media cultural awareness. In the Malay Islamic deathscape the corpse must be interred before nightfall on the same day as the death. This paper examines the tradition of same-day interment among the Malays of Singapore and Malaysia, reflecting upon the deaths of a Malaysian prince and a Malay artist. In the Malay world interment before nightfall may express fear for the dead, rather than fear of the dead. Questioning the individual's health, life, and demise, medical professionals establish the cause of death via a series of negotiations with the subject's family or other social nexus in a practice resisting necropsy and preempting the questioning of the corpse in the grave by the Angels of Death.
Michael Weiss (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
Grieving can be an existential and transformative experience. This paper addresses questions as to how the process of grieving is integrated in the Japanese butô dance of Ohno Yoshito to realize and perform insights beyond dualistic conceptions.
Paper long abstract:
Practiced as a path of insight through bodymind, dance can passed on as a process to enter non-dualistic understanding. One of such ways is to be found in Japanese butô dance (bu: 'to dance'; -tô: 'step') which was developed during the second half of the 20th century. This paper attempts to reveal a convergence between butô master Ohno Yoshito, his ritual transmission of this art and the dancers who visit his studio. Accompanying dancers toward a transformative search into one's bodymind, the intention of Ohno Yoshito's butô consists in the realization of the non-duality of emptiness (kû). Such a process is of existential character, meaning to touch a person's entirety. Therefore, Ohno Yoshito particularly opens three introspective and interrelated fields with such potential: Experiences of suffering, grief as its emotional answer and developments of empathy. With this in mind, as the dancers practise walking as a revelation of their being, he says: "Each step should contain pain and should be mastered thoroughly; otherwise it cannot be butô."
The non-dualistic realm of "mastering steps of pain" in relation to grief as a healing process is the focus of this paper. Based on Ohno Yoshito's butô transmission and reflections of the dancers, I try to convey in principle how the butô process of "mastering steps of pain" can become a transit experience that leads to an expansion of non-dualistic insight and empathy.
Alessia Costa (Wellcome Connecting Science)
Paper short abstract:
My research examines the social construction of death with reference to organ donation in Japan. By looking at how (brain-)death is defined in Japanese law and examining how such definitions are put into practice, I discuss issues of rights concerning end-of-life medical treatment.
Paper long abstract:
Previous research concerning the Japanese brain-death problem (the redefinition of death according to neurological criteria to allow organ procurement from heart-beating donors) demonstrated how scientific truths are socially constructed. I contribute to further anthropological analysis of the problem by describing what effects such a social construction of scientific facts has in practice. In the first part of the paper, I discuss how uncertainties resulting from advances in medical knowledge are dealt with through legal institutions, by examining the original and reformed versions of the Act on Organ Transplants. Born from the seemingly irreconcilable needs of equating brain-death with human death without redefining human death as brain-death, the law formalized the right for the patient and their next-of-kin to refuse a (brain-)death pronouncement after a clinical diagnosis of brain-death. One of the most significant consequences is that brain-death, which in most foreign countries is equivalent to a death pronouncement and therefore implies the withdrawal of all life-sustainment treatments, in Japan is considered as a terminal condition regarding which patients and their relatives are enabled/required to exercise their right of self-determination. In the last part of the paper, I examine how this problem is worked out in medical practice. How are the brain-death patient's rights conceived with regard to organ donation and in comparison with other terminal conditions? How are the seemingly opposite needs of protecting patients' rights and procuring organs for transplants negotiated? What does this tell us about the way we die when death occours in clinical contexts?
Hannah Rumble
Paper short abstract:
I argue that British natural burial provision enables the bereaved and dying to symbolically and literally take the hitherto rotting corpse and reproduce it as an animate gift to nature, fecundity and future generations creating a mode of intergenerational legacy.
Paper long abstract:
Natural burial began as a very specific burial innovation in England in 1993, but since then has been adopted and fostered by other countries world wide. In this paper however, I shall focus on ethnographic and interview data from natural burial grounds in England collected between 2008 - 2010. This paper argues that people's articulated desire "to be of use," "return to nature" and "give something back" that they offer by way of explaining their choice to have a natural burial (as opposed to cemetery burial or ash scattering), is in fact a form of gift-giving. For natural burial, I argue, enables the bereaved and dying to symbolically and literally take the hitherto rotting corpse and reproduce it as an animate gift to nature, to fecundity and to future generations. In this way a natural burial site becomes a type of intergenerational legacy and this animate gift changes our understanding of "to be dead" and the place of the dead amongst the living.