Death, Dying and Loss in the 21st Century
Special Issue of Health Sociology Review
Volume 16 Issue 5 December 2007
96 pages ISBN 978-0-9757422-9-7
Editor:
Allan Kellehear
School of Public Health, La Trobe University, VIC
Some 30 years ago, death was a source of embarrassment, dying was frequently viewed as medical failure, and grief was something you were expected to 'get over' as quickly as possible. The so-called 'taboo' on death has slowly turned upside down.
Today, the hospice and palliative care movement has encouraged openness about dying, television now features death as the new exotica in police shows obsessed with forensic work, and more people visit cemeteries annually than popular tourist sites. The materialist assumptions about death as finality that were expected to spread across the modern scientific world after World War Two are in retreat, beaten back by religious revivalism, the ascent of the New Age, the popular media coverage given to near-death experiences, angels, miracles, or mediums. Death is becoming, well, becoming!
Why have our experiences of mortality changed in the last decade or so? How has death slowly become central to our lives once again? What are the new social inequalities suggested by these changes? Has the old sequestration between life and death given way to new divisions between 'wealthy' death and deaths in poverty; or hospice dying and nursing home dying? Do medical narratives exaggerate death as an experience linked to the body, overlooking its social, moral and political importance?
These are some of the questions addressed in this exciting and very special issue of Health Sociology Review.
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