Tài liệu Representations of Death doc

[...]... of a male coucheur This professionalization of death was to have profound repercussions on our experience of bereavement In these shifts we can see how death was removed from the domain of the family Increasingly women were being excluded from the social organization of death The use of male professionals did not stop with the laying-out of the dead; contemporary funerals of the time became so complicated... (1989), in his analysis of the role of the doctor in the nineteenth century, suggests that, rather than viewing disease and death as acts of God, doctors came to see disease as a natural cause of death It therefore became acceptable for them to ‘manage’ the death bed Dying in a druginduced unconscious state was seen as an ideal This stands in contrast to the image of the good death of earlier centuries... surrounds death In this book, I explore the ways in which we talk about death in terms of it being a good or bad, natural or unnatural event Using the social psychological theory of social representations, I identified three existing representations of the ‘good death These representations work as powerful social norms, presenting the survivors with ‘acceptable’ ways of talking about death Deaths were... cancer it would often be an attack of pneumonia that would kill them As the science of medicine became established the promise of increased longevity or, at the very least, of reduced pain made the presence of a doctor at the point of death more common The administration of opiates meant that it was possible to die in a relatively painfree state So, providing the patients could afford the doctor and the... the psychological traditions of social psychology the study of culture and of society has been unfashionable for The study of death 19 years Without an understanding of, and sympathy for, culture, the study of death remains one-dimensional The only option available is to research individual behavioural responses to death, i.e to study the grief reaction The theory of social representations also belongs... secular activity that was dominated by a new class of professionals Priests, who used to play a central role in the drama of dying, were being usurped by the doctor The doctor became the person ‘to step in between the individual and their death (Hockey 1990: 71) The influence of the medical sciences on our death rites did not stop at the moment of death This new science needed bodies for research purposes... and marble memorial stones, alongside the playing of an Elvis song in a committal service The study of death can be approached in many ways We can describe the process of dying, reveal the inequalities in demographic patterns of mortality, discuss the ethical debates raging around the point of death, attempt to describe the feelings of the 6 The study of death bereaved, examine the institutions that deal... of death 7 psychological literature on death and dying I was to be disappointed Social psychology has been surprisingly quiet on the subject of death Some explanation for this can be found in the discipline’s history, which is briefly described at the end of this chapter Social history Social representations theory has an appreciation not only of culture but also of history To unravel our current representations. .. loath to constrain these explanatory models of our world – these ways of seeing and thinking – through the use of operational definitions However, the lack of clear definitions of ‘social representations has been criticized (Hewstone 1985; Potter and Litton 1985; Purkhardt 1991) This lack of definition has allowed a range of interpretations of the meaning of ‘social’ and ‘representation’ Certain problems... diffusion of social representations theory into the English speaking world has, until recently, been slow Fortunately, some fine empirical studies have made it across the channel, such as Herzlich’s (1973) study of the social representations of health and illness among town and country folk, Chombart de Lauwe’s (1984) study of the social representations of childhood and Jodelet’s (1991) study of representations . models of grief. Representations of Death makes use of the social psychological theory of social representations and draws upon fascinating and often poignant. currently training at the Institute of Psycho-analysis, London. Representations of Death List of photographs ix Foreword by Professor Robert Farr xi Preface