Death and Social Structure

United Nations : Demographic Yearbook, 1961, 13th edition. New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1961, Table 15. A very similar age distribution results when a cohort of 100,000 born in 1929 is tabulated in terms of the proportions who die in each age period. See Dublin Louis I. and Lotka Alfted J. : Length of Life. New York: Ronald, 1936, p. 12. The outlook for the future is suggested by a more recent life table for females in Canada. Of 100,000 babies born in the later 1950s, only 15% will die before the age 60. Seventy percent will be 70 years old or more at death; 42% will die past 80. See United Nations : Demographic Yearbook, pp. 622–676.

Many early anthropologists, including Malinowski, attributed human funerary customs to an alleged instinctive aversion to the corpse. This remains a widespread, if not a universal, human relation. See the extended discussion of the early theories in Goody, footnote 2, pp. 20–30; and for some exceptions to the general rule, Habenstein Robert W. : The social organization of death. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1968.

Lifton Robert J. : Psychological effects of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima: The theme of death. Daedalus 92: 462–497, 1963. Among other things, the dead body is too stark a reminder of man's mortal condition. Although man is the one species that knows he will eventually die, most people in most societies cannot live too successfully when constantly reminded of this truth. On the other hand, the exposure to the corpse has positive consequences for psychic functioning, as it contributes to the acceptance of the reality of a death on the part of the survivors. A study of deaths in military action during World War II found that the bereaved kin had particularly great difficulty in believing in and accepting the reality of their loss because they did not see the body and witness its disposal. Eliot T. D. : Or the shadow of death. Ann. Am. Political Soc. Sci. 229: 87–99, 1943.

Statistics on the settings of death are not readily available. Robert Fulton reports that 53% of all deaths in the United States take place in hospitals, but he does not give any source for this figure. See Fulton : Death and Identity. New York: Wiley, 1965, pp. 81–82. Two recent English studies are also suggestive. In the case of the deaths of 72 working class husbands, primarily in the middle years, 46 died in the hospital, 22 at home and 4 at work or in the street. See Marris Peter : Widows and Their Families. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958, p. 146. Of 359 Britishers who had experienced a recent bereavement, 50% report that the death took place in a hospital, 44% at home, and 6% elsewhere. See Gorer Geoffrey : Death, Grief, and Mourning. London: Cresset, 1965, p. 149.

Max Weber : Essays in Sociology (translated and edited by Gerth H. H. and Mills Wright C. ), New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, pp. 196–198. See also Weber Max : General Economic History (translated by Knight Frank H. ), Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1950.

Leroy Bowman reports that aversion to the corpse made this preparation an unpleasant task. Although sometimes farmed out to experienced relatives or neighbors, the task was still considered the family's responsibility. See Bowman : The American Funeral: A Study in Guilt, Extravagance and Sublimity. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1959, p. 71.

Kephart William K. : Status after death. Am. Sociol. Rev. 15: 635–643, 1930.

Sudnow David N. : Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying in the County Hospital. Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1965. Sudnow also indicated comparative materials from a more well-to-do Jewish sponsored hospital where he did additional fieldwork, but most of his statements are based on the county institution. Glaser Barney G. and Strauss Anselm L. : Awareness of Dying. Chicago: Aldine, 1965.

See Sudnow , footnote 28, pp. 107, 109. This is even fewer than would be expected by the age composition of mortality, because children's and teaching hospitals in the city were likely to care for many terminally ill children and younger adults.

See Sudnow , footnote 28, pp. 49, 50.

Owen J. K. : Modern Concepts of Hospital Administration. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1962, p. 304; cited in Sudnow , footnote 28, p. 80. Such practice attests to the accuracy of Edgar Morin's rather melodramatic statement: “Man hides his death as he hides his sex, as he hides his excrements.” See Morin E. : L'Homme et La Mort dans L'Histoire. Paris: Correa, 1951, p. 331.

See Sudnow , footnote 28, pp. 20–40, 49–50.

See Sudnow , footnote 28, p. 114.

See Glaser and Strauss , footnote 28, pp. 142–143, 151–152.

On the doctor's attitudes toward death and the dying, see Kasper August M. : The doctor and death. In Feifel H. (ed.) The Meaning of Death. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959, pp. 259–270. Many writers have commented on the tendency of relatives to avoid the subject of death with the terminally ill; see, for example, Feifel Herman : Attitudes toward death in some normal and mentally ill populations. In The Meaning of Death, pp. 114–132.

The most favorable situation for reducing isolation and meaninglessness would seem to be “where personnel and patient both are aware that he is dying, and where they act on this awareness relatively openly.” This atmosphere, which Glaser and Strauss term an “open awareness context,” did not typically predominate in the hospitals they studied. More common were one of three other awareness contexts they distinguished: “the situation where the patient does not recognize his impending death even though everyone else does” (closed awareness); “the situation where the patient suspects what the others know and therefore attempts to confirm or invalidate his suspicion” (suspected awareness); and “the situation where each party defines the patient as dying, but each pretends that the other has not done so” (mutual pretense awareness). See Glaser and Strauss , footnote 8, p. 11.

See Glaser and Strauss , footnote 8, p. 129. Some patients, however, put up a struggle to control the pace and style of their dying, and some prefer to leave the hospital and end their days at home for this reason (see Glaser and Strauss , in footnote 8, pp. 95, 181–183). For a classic and moving account of a cancer victim who struggled to achieve control over the conditions of his death, see Wertenbaker Lael T. : Death of a Man. New York: Random House, 1957.

Borkenau Franz : The concept of death. Twentieth Century 157: 313–329, 1955, reprinted in Death and Identity, pp. 42–56 (see footnote 24).

The need to redefine the status of the departed is intensified because of tendencies to act toward him as if he were alive. There is a status discongruity inherent in the often abrupt change from a more or less responsive person to an inactive responding one. This confusion makes it difficult for the living to shift their mode in interaction toward the neomort. Glaser and Strauss report that relatives in the hospital often speak to the newly deceased and caress him as if he were alive; they act as if he knows what they are saying and doing. Nurses who had become emotionally involved with the patient sometimes back away from postmortem care because of “mystic illusion” that the deceased is still sentient. See Glaser and Strauss , footnote 28, pp. 113–114. We are all familiar with the expression of “doing the right thing” for the deceased, probably the most common conscious motivation underlying the bereaved's funeral preparations. This whole situation is sensitively depicted in Jules Romain's novel, The Death of a Nobody, New York: Knopf, 1944.

Arnold Van Gennep : The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960 (first published in 1909). See also Warner W. L. : The Living and the Dead. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, especially chapter 9; and Habenstein, footnote 22, for a discussion of funerals as “dramas of disposal.”

Edmund Volkart: Bereavement and mental health. In Leighton A. H. Calusen J. A. , and Wilson R. N. (eds.) Explorations in Social Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1957. pp. 281–307. Volkart suggests that bereavement is a greater crisis in modern American society than in similar cultures because our family system develops selves in which people relate to others as persons rather than in terms of roles (see pp. 293–295).

In a study of bereavement reactions in England, Geoffrey Gorer found that 30 of a group of 80 persons who had lost a close relative were mourning in a style he characterized as unlimited. He attributes the inability to get over one's grief “to the absence of any ritual, either individual or social, lay or religious, to guide them and the people they come in contact with.” The study also attests to the virtual disappearance of traditional mourning conventions. See Gorer , footnote 24, pp. 78–83.

See Marris , footnote 24, pp. 39–40.

Hoffman Frederick J. : The Mortal No: Death and the Modern Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964, especially part 11. In a second paper on Hiroshima, Robert J. Lifton also notes the tendency for the threat of mass death to undermine the meaning systems of society, and the absence of a clear sense of appropriate death in modern cultures. See On death and death symbolism: The Hiroshima disaster. Psychiatry 27: 191–210, 1964. Gorer has argued that our culture's repression of death as a natural event is the cause of the obsessive focus on fantasies of violence that are so prominent in the mass media. See Gorer Geoffrey : The pornography of death. In Stein M. , and Vidich A. (eds.) Identify and Anxiety. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press, 1960, pp. 402–407, also reprinted in Gorer's Death, Grief, and Mourning.

The inappropriateness inherent in the automobile accident, in which a man dies outside a communal and religious setting, is poignantly captured in the verse and chorus of the country and western song “Wreck on the Highway,” popularized by Roy Acuff: “Who did you say it was, brother?/Who was it fell by the way?/When whiskey and blood run together,/Did you hear anyone pray?”

Chorus: “I didn't hear nobody pray, dear brother,/I didn't hear nobody pray./I heard the crash on the highway,/But I didn't hear nobody pray.”