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Editorial
Allan Kellehear
Professor of Palliative Care
School of Public Health
La Trobe University
Melbourne
Article Text
I am very pleased to introduce HSR readers to this special issue on death and dying. Seven excellent papers appear in this issue examining a range of contemporary issues and questions from bereavement and the (mis)management of dying to the role of the body or death denial in policy formulation or media representation.
I am especially pleased to see in this issue a preponderance of Australian contributors. Like many other countries, the field of death and dying began by being dominated by medical and psychological perspectives in these topic areas. Now, social approaches to theory development, criticism or empirical studies are establishing a significant place alongside these other views. This is clearly happening in Australia now no less than in other countries that have longer sociological traditions in the study of death, most notably the United Kingdom and the USA.
It is also worth noting that although hospice and palliative care has experienced rapid rise and development in the last 30 years the interest in the study of death and dying from these colleagues remain modest. It remains true that the most significant number of empirical studies of death and dying as well as theoretical contributions continue to come from the social sciences and not, rather disappointingly, from palliative care researchers.
Palliative care remains focused on a health services agenda of research that continually promotes a concern with the body, its symptoms and management, and the problem of service design and delivery. Studies of carers remain greater than studies of people at the very centre of the service: the dying and bereaved.
In sociology, research questions about death and dying have been closely identified with health - as they still are - but the current range of articles in this issue does remind readers, who may usually research outside these topics, that sociological concerns about death are inclusive of questions and theories beyond health.
The current articles demonstrate a concern for social movements, stratification, media and technology, policy-making, and the sociology of the body, religion and culture. Death and dying are linked to many concerns within the world of health and medicine but they also explore pressing questions and concerns in epistemology, the sociology of knowledge, or the politics of identity. The history of political power and authority in Late Modernity, the politics of embodiment, or even the career politics of studying death and dying as an academic, are all discussed in this issue.
There is much to do in this still very new field of the social sciences. There is a pressing need for more studies of death, dying and loss in poverty, remembering that demographically speaking, most death and dying occurs in developing countries and not our own affluent, cancer-obsessed nations. More studies are needed on the impact of total institutions on aging and dying, particularly in nursing homes. New forms of the medicalisation of death, such as the rise of brain death criteria and politics of organ donation, require greater social science curiosity and scrutiny.
More studies of dying and bereavement, from the point of view of the experiencer rather than their carers, remain an important though challenging need if our understanding about human mortality is to free itself from the current restricted epistemology and views of professionals.
There is much to do in this exciting, under-researched, but vitally important field. After all, as theorists from Freud and Malinowski to Bauman and Elias have argued, an understanding of how we die is often the sharpest reflection of our current politics of life.
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