Sociology of Death and Dying

INTRODUCTION 5
CHAPTER 1: WHAT IN CREMATION IS GOING ON? 7
CHAPTER 2: THE ORIGIN AND PRACTICE OF CREMATION 15
CHAPTER 3: THE HISTORIC JUDEO–CHRISTIAN VIEW ON CREMATION 27
CHAPTER 4: THE REASONS FOR CREMATION EXAMINED 39
CHAPTER 5: IS CREMATION A PROPER PRACTICE? 63
CHAPTER 6: WHAT ABOUT EMBALMING? 73
CHAPTER 7: WHAT ABOUT ORGAN DONATION? 82
CHAPTER 8: WHAT IS CYRONIC SUSPENSION? 87
CHAPTER 9: CANNIBALISM: ARE YOU SERIOUS? 93
CHAPTER 10: ANSWERS TO COMMON QUESTIONS 98
APPENDIX 1: CREMATION STATISTICS IN THE UNITED STATES 108
APPENDIX 2: VARIOUS RELIGIONS ON CREMATION 112
ANNOTATED SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 115
BIBLIOGRAPHY 117
GLOSSARY 128

http://www.amazon.com/Cremation-Going-Christian-Mortem-Decisions-ebook/dp/B00P24PNM4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1433031797&sr=1-1

Esta investigación busca comprender la percepción de los trabajadores de los ce-menterios sobre la muerte. El problema se ha abordado desde un enfoque teórico que combina la sociología de la religión durkheimiana y la teoría de modernización weberiana. El método se basó en historias de vida, dado su potencial para capturar los cambios en las creencias de los sepultureros desde que se convierten en empleados del cementerio. El trabajo de campo tuvo lugar en el cementerio Parque del Sendero de Temuco y en el Cementerio Municipal de Padre Las Casas (Chile). El enfoque empleado resultó clave, evidenciándose que los trabajadores han racionalizado parcialmente la muerte, y que tal racionalización depende de qué tan racionalizada esté la muerte en su lugar de trabajo. Palabras clave: Muerte, cementerio, modernidad, racionalización.

Her canlının yaşam döngüsünün son durağı olan ölüm, biyolojik olduğu kadar toplumsal, kültürel ve tarihsel bir olgudur. Ölüm olgusuna yüklenen anlamların zaman içerisinde ve toplumdan topluma farklılık göstermesi onu sosyoloji disiplininin araştırma nesnesi haline getirir. Ne var ki Türkiye’de ölüm sosyolojisi henüz fazla dokunulmamış bir alan olup, ölüm üzerine yapılan sosyolojik çalışmalar sayıca azdır. Bu makale ölümün geleneksel ve modern toplumlarda nasıl inşa edildiğini ve bu bağlamda iyi bir ölümün toplumsal olarak nasıl anlamlandırıldığını inceleyerek,
alan yazına katkı sunmayı hedeflemektedir. Bu amaçla önce, sosyolojideki üç temel yaklaşım olan yapısalcı, yorumsamacı ve çatışmacı yaklaşımlar ile feminist ve post-modern yaklaşımların ölümü nasıl ele aldıkları ve ölümün hangi sosyolojik özelliklerine vurgu yaptıkları ortaya konmuştur. İkinci olarak, modern toplumlarda ölümün geleneksel toplumlardan nasıl farklılaştığı; geleneksel toplumlarda yaşamın olağan bir parçası olarak görülen ölümün, modern toplumlarda akılcılaşma, kurumsallaşma ve tıbbileşme ile nasıl yaşamdan dışlanmış olduğu ve ötekileştiği tartışılmıştır.
Hastanın ve hastalığın kurumsallaşmasının ve tıbbın egemenliğine girmesinin, ölümün de kurumsallaşmasına ve toplumdan soyutlanıp uzaklaştırılmasına sebep olduğuna dair tartışma da bu çerçevede sunulmuştur. Son olarak gelenekselden modern topluma geçerken anlamı değişen ölüm olgusunun ve iyi bir ölümün ne olduğuna dair anlamlarda yarattığı değişimin üzerinde durulmuştur. Buna göre geleneksel toplumlarda ahlaki değerlerle tanımlanan iyi ölümün modern toplumlarda, acısız ve ağrısız, bilinçli, ölmekte olan kişinin sevdikleri çevresindeyken gerçekleşen bir ölüm olarak tanımlandığı görülmüştür.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

Les soins palliatifs et l’accompagnement des mourants s’inscrivent dans le mouvement plus large d’individualisation de la mort. Centrée sur la notion d’autonomie, la mort idéale se veut aujourd’hui discrète, inconsciente et hygiénique. Impensable sans une importante expertise médicale qui permet de soulager la douleur physique, de contrôler chimiquement l’angoisse et la peur, de neutraliser les odeurs et les traces de l’agonie, cet idéal suppose une tension constante entre contrôle et dépendance. Emblématique de ce que le sociologue Nikolas Rose nomme la biocitoyenneté, soit une forme de citoyenneté centrée sur une politisation de la santé individuelle et sur l’émergence de revendications identitaires reliées à des questions d’ordre biomédical, le mouvement en faveur des soins palliatifs s’inscrit en fait dans le processus global de pharmaceuticalisation caractérisant les sociétés occidentales contemporaines. Partant d’un questionnement sociologique sur l’usage croissant de la sédation profonde dans la gestion biomédicale de la fin de vie, cet article propose d’analyser le phénomène du contrôle médicamenteux de la souffrance sous l’angle de la pharmaceuticalisation. Au-delà de la thèse du déni de la mort et du refus de la douleur, il s’agira plutôt de comprendre que la sédation profonde est indissociable d’une volonté de contrôle et d’optimisation de soi propre à la biocitoyenneté. Loin d’un simple refus de la douleur, la norme de la sédation profonde indique plutôt que la douleur « improductive », c’est-à-dire celle qui ne s’inscrit pas dans une logique thérapeutique, méliorative ou expérimentale, tant à devenir socialement intolérable. La sédation profonde apparaît ainsi à la fois comme la limite et l’expression ultime de la biocitoyenneté.

Abstract: This paper approaches death as an interpretive phenomenon. Drawing on an ethnographic study, it examines key representations of death within hospice/palliative care. Close attention is paid to the normative implications of representations such as the natural death, the cycle of life, birth, growth and personal journeys. Specifically, this paper examines the capacity of these representations to overcome the limitations of dominant, medicalized interpretations of death. In this context, it is argued that hospice/palliative care may be usefully understood as an interpretive intervention, challenging the way society thinks about death and offering alternate forms of interpretation. This paper concludes with a reflection on whether or not hospice/palliative care goes far enough in this regard. It suggests that the optimism characterizing hospice/palliative care may perpetuate the broader culture of mastery in which the systematic avoidance of death is embedded.
Banerjee, A. (2005). “Speaking of Death: Representations of Death in Palliative Care.” InterCulture. Volume 2. Available on line: http://iph.fsu.edu/interculture/vol2.html

A hermeneutic engagement with Maithili folk songs allows this book to hinge upon the notions of living and dying in the contemporary world despite the admission that medicine, insurance, market, and media may condition human experiences. Amidst the binaries of union and separation, rigid religion and fluid faith, popular and folk, modernity and tradition, central to this book is the pluralism of cultural script(s) and their philosophical musings on living and dying, folk philosophy, cultural subversion as well as reconciliation. Predominantly sung by women, the folksongs of Mithila are woven around calendar of events, rites of the passage, and everyday life situations. The cultural scape of sound and sight thus conjures a fusion of epistemology and ontology, knowledge and existential being, the classical- Sanskritic-textual and the folksubaltern- oral. Straddling the particular context of Maithili folksongs and the generic aspects of folk world view, steering across Hinduism, tradition and modernity, and folklore in the age of mechanical reproduction, this book contributes to the sociology and social anthropology of, inter alia, folklore, religion, gender and mythology. Moreover, this makes for a contribution into sociology and social anthropology of death in South Asia.

There should be a correlation between the growing need of defining death in one’s own terms and keeping death away from the public space, which is considered to be one of the main traits of our society. We are witnessing not only the reducing of the public relevance of death, but also the blocking of the access of any kind of shared knowledge on death and dying that could make other’s experience more significant (in the sense of producing and reproducing anticipated or already recognized meanings) for the community as a whole.
In our opinion, private death should be mostly referred as a label for any form of discontinuity in meaning, regulation, location and form with the traditional manners of handling death, mourning and burial, presumably public and presumably shared and largely accepted as “reliable”. Three years ago, the Swedish Church made unintentional allusion to such contrast by writing that all burials not taking place in the church could increase the “risk” for privatization of death.

Caregiver suffering and burnout amongst professionals in palliative care settings are increasingly discussed phenomena in the media and the specialized journals alike. However, we still lack anthropological understandings of the ways this distress is related to the dynamics, practices and representations of palliative care institutions. This article, based on a 2011-2012 fieldwork conducted in one of the 27 independent hospices of the province of Quebec, aims to contribute to the question in showing how the ways the staff conceive their roles in caring for the dying. We aim to explore how the suffering is related to the nature of these roles and to the institutional framework, the Good Death. Within the institution that was the focus of this research, caregivers must carry out the double-task of protecting themselves psychologically (finding the appropriate distance) and negotiating the institutional and ideological pressure to embody the palliative mission. If the non-monetary rewards or sources of satisfaction related to the exercise of the profession are not sufficient – or simply missing for logistical reasons, temporal reasons or others – it is very likely that end-of-life work will become an unbearable burden for certain caregivers and will lead to resignations.

We believe that personal death stories are always in the process of mainstreaming; their subjectivity and authenticity are – paradoxically – getting closer to the singularity of objectivity. Such death and dying narratives, although inherently subjective and often non-religious, seem to be a crucial „substantivizer”, a  „solidifier” of the dispersed sacred, a „coagulation factor” preventing an over-exaggerated fluidisation of contemporary spiritual models, patterns and trends.
All testimonies directly and indirectly concerned with death and dying cannot be denied or contradicted and, quite often, cannot be forgotten. They all contain, in a nutshell, a human plan, a generalize-able scheme of existential behaviour, which, by reaching others’ hearts and minds, attracts sympathy and invites to identification.

RESUMEN Frente a los grandes rituales colectivos y el sentido trascendente que le otorgaban las comunidades tradicionales, la Modernidad habría reducido la muerte al silencio y convertido el morir en un proceso solitario e institucionalizado. No obstante, en las últimas décadas un nuevo modelo de la muerte podría estar emergiendo en nuestras sociedades: el modelo neo-moderno, pues no cuestiona el papel central del sistema sanitario en la gestión de la muerte, pero trata de corregir los huecos que este no ha satisfecho. La muerte, así, volvería paulatinamente al espacio público, pero de forma fragmentaria y descentralizada, como un conjunto de prácticas y discursos dispersos que tendrían en común un renovado interés en hablar de la muerte y el morir. En este artículo me propongo comprobar la posible presencia del modelo neo-moderno de la muerte en una serie de productos y prácticas culturales muy diferentes. Discutiré si, en efecto, todas ellas tienen un hilo común en el modelo neo-moderno o si, como afirman otros autores, son más bien producto de la tendencia a la hipertransparencia mediática y la búsqueda de sensaciones fuertes propios de la sociedad consumista. Asimismo, examino algunas críticas formuladas al modelo y sus contradicciones internas. Concluyo tratando de anticipar tendencias futuras en el modo de morir a la luz de la evidencia presentada.

Cette thèse interroge la médicalisation de la fin de vie, phénomène massif survenu en France au début du XIXe siècle, comme dans d’autres nations européennes et américaines. Elle étudie ce fait social à partir d’une double démarche sociohistorique et ethnographique. Je montre que loin de s’être accomplie paisiblement, cette délégation médicale a d’emblée soulevé de fortes oppositions dans des contextes historiques tour à tour favorables et défavorables à sa légitimation. Si les critiques adressées ont été particulièrement vives à partir du milieu du XIXe siècle, la médicalisation de la fin de vie suscite plusieurs crises publiques, qui ne sont pas sans conséquences. Elles entraînent ce que je nomme des « épreuves historiques de délégation », qui ont de profonds effets sur l’organisation de la médecine. Il s’agit notamment de l’intégration des familles dans les services, du développement de soins relationnels à l’égard des mourants, et de la légitimation de nouveaux praticiens favorables à leur subjectivation. L’enquête ethnographique éclaire ensuite les tensions que génère cette nouvelle vie morale dans les services hospitaliers à partir d’une démarche immersive de longue durée dans un CHU d’Ile-de-France. La thèse aboutit alors à trois résultats centraux : d’abord, elle montre que la délégation médicale de la fin de vie n’aurait pu s’étendre sans intégrer la critique publique qui lui a été adressée, en particulier dans les années 1970 en France. Si cette critique n’a pas stoppé le mouvement de médicalisation de la fin de vie, objectif qu’elle ne visait pas toujours, et si, a fortiori, elle a échoué à le faire régresser, elle a néanmoins transformé le travail médical et ses conditions d’exercice en profondeur vers un processus de démocratisation sanitaire. En second lieu, cette rupture, qui n’aurait pu advenir en raison des changements morphologiques majeurs, ainsi que la mobilisation active de familles, de médias, du Clergé, de membres de la profession médicale et d'intellectuels des sciences sociales, aboutit de manière apriori paradoxale à ce qu’une nouvelle critique, celle d’un manque de spécialisation médicale pour gérer correctement les états de souffrances des mourants, soit débattue publiquement, en plus de celle de l’inhumaine objectivation des mourants et des morts par la médecine. Enfin, la thèse montre qu’il y a là un nouvel état d’organisation de la médecine dont il faut pouvoir tenir compte, car il contribue à ce que s’affrontent toujours davantage deux idéologies – en termes d’accès à des soins médicaux et de formalisation des droits individuels de la personne – dont l'effet est de rendre la médecine plus réflexive sur elle-même.

This is part 4 of 6 of the dossier What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology, queer studies, and the medical/health humanities and tackle questions such as: how can queer death studies deconstruct the health-illness binary? How can we rethink the experience of cancer from the perspective of queer death studies? How can this discipline help us focus on "peripheral" deaths like fetal death and pregnancy loss? The present article includes the following contributions:-Kirey-Sitnikova Y., Bridging queer death studies with public health science;-Böcker J., Queering fetal death and pregnancy loss;-Werner A., Re/orienting to death: queer phenomenology, terminal cancer, and anticipatory regimes;-Tzouva P., Towards a queer death: breaking free of cancerland;-Clay S., A queer account of self-care: autopoiesis through auto-annihilation.

How did I learn to understand that there can never ever be any acceptable alternative to immortality and living indefinitely forever young?

Is there any better way to learn and permanently remember the understanding that any possibly imaginable alternative to reverse all adverse effects of aging and happily live indefinitely forever young, healthy and energetic would have the same long-term negative consequences as intentionally committing suicide than I have described in this authentic experience report?

When I was only 6 years old, I went through an emotional trauma, from which I am still suffering today and that has led me to come here and be the only one working in the EIT building during Christmas break. On October 2nd, 1980, only one day before my daddy’s birthday, my aunt Frieda, who I liked a lot because she paid lots of attention to my long stories and actually took them serious, suffered from a sudden heart attack. My daddy succeeded to bring her back to life with CPR and my mom called the emergency doctor in the mean time. The doctor was a quiet man from Romania. He had short back hear and looked like being around 30 years old. His voice was very quiet and emotionally detached when he asked my grandma about the age of my aunt. My grandma replied: "She is 83 years old." And then something happened, which I never expected, i.e. the doctor went on in his empathy-lacking quiet voice to say the few German words, which I still remember as if my aunt had died yesterday. He said “Ich denke, wir hoeren auf.” In English this means, “I think, we are going to quit.” He meant going to quit any efforts and even medical interventions at our disposal to bring my aunt Frieda back to live and to make sure she’ll stay alive. When the doctor said this, it was spooky quiet, as if a ghost would kill my aunt. I felt like screaming into the face of the doctor, YOU MUST DO YOUR JOB AS EMERGENCY DOCTOR, TO DO EVERYTHING IN YOUR POWER TO MINIMIZE MY AUNT’S RISK TO DIE FROM THIS PARTIAL HEART ATTACK REGARDLESS OF HER AGE!!!! But I was only six. I was scared and confused. It was my first real encounter with death. I helplessly looked at my parents and looked at my grandma. I wanted them to demand from the doctor not to use my aunt Frieda’s advanced age against her. Although I was only six years old I strongly felt that no medical provider has the moral right and should be punished harshly when using his patient’s age as a shallow absolutely unjustified excuse for refusing to save their lives. But it was so quiet this time, which I recall must have been around 7.30 p.m. on October the 2nd, 1980, when my aunt laid diagonally across the carpet on the floor of the children’s room. Neither my mom nor my daddy nor my grandma nor my 2 younger siblings opened their mouth.

Although I was furious beyond anyone’s imagination, the fact that my otherwise very confident parents and even my grandma, who was best friends with my dying aunt, i.e. all three adults in the room, who’d I expect to fight for my life if I ever needed urgent medical care, and who’d otherwise readily expressed their opposition to anything they did not agree with or considered unfair, did not even attempt to pressure the doctor on a mental, emotional emphatic, moral, medical or legal level, to take his job seriously regardless how he personally felt about my aunt’s advanced age. When something totally unexpected like this happens, i.e. in case of such kind of second degree murder due to medical neglect and intentionally withholding readily available medical interventions without any apparent rational reason for not even trying to save my aunts life, when we still had a chance, I became speechless. I felt like screaming to my parents to not allow the doctor to let my aunt die, after my daddy had brought her back to life already. My daddy is very good in CPR. He’ll fight for everyone’s life as if it was his own. My daddy waited for the doctor’s instructions on how to proceed after restoring my aunts consciousness to the point where she had her eyes opened and could hear every single word, which was spoken by anyone in the children’s room. When all this happened I stood about 4 feet away from my aunt. I was afraid to move any closer because I was worried of accidentally bump into something I could not see but which would kill here. Now something happened that I can never forget. My daddy got up from the carpet and stopped CPR! I felt like screaming “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!” “WHYYYYYYYYYY???” “DON’T!!!!!!” “KEEP BREATHING MORE AIR IN HER MOUTH!!!!! Don’t listen to this evil doctor. He has no respect for life! He does not deserve to be an emergency doctor!!! What if she were his aunt???? She is conscious and will most likely fully come back to life if you’ll just give her enough time to get over this medical crisis!!!! Actually, she was already over the hump because apparently her heart was beeping already independently and all my daddy was still doing, was breathing air in my aunt’s mouth. I wanted my mom to call another doctor. I wanted him to be a German doctor, who treats our aunt as if she was his aunt. I felt that this Rumanian doctor had no empathy for Germans because when my entire family looked up to him for help, he indirectly killed by neglect.

Even if is negative medical intuition should turn out to be true and all of our medical interventions were doomed to fail this evening, I felt he should at least try anyways or else there would have been no point in the doctor making the trip to our home. Then he could have stayed in his killer-hospital. At least that way he would not have had the opportunity to encourage my daddy from reviving my aunt with CPR. When I was six, my daddy was still very powerful. He would have kept performing CPR for hours to save my aunt’s life, if this disguised killer-doctor, would not have instructed him to stop and let her die, just because he felt no old people deserve resources intensive medical care, unless they are his own relatives. Would he let his aunt or grandmother dies like that if he had good chances to prevent or at least postpone death? This I felt would have certainly give my aunt enough time to get over the fear, which is an inherent feature of anyone surviving a heart attack, especially when the doctor is instructing my daddy to stop keeping her alive. I felt like being in a madhouse. I could not speak. My otherwise very attentive parents and grandmother did not seem to be aware that I felt so much emotional pain with such a mental intensity that I almost felt as if I was the one dying instead of my aunt. This god dam Rumanian doctor! Why did he have to be on duty when my aunt needed dedicated professional medical help to get over her heart attack? Why did the hospital not send a German doctor with a strong voice, who’d be much more assertive in his speech and actions to instruct my parents to do everything in their power to save my aunt’s life? Why did my aunt deserve such an indecisive foreign doctor, who lacks the kind of strong loud confidence inducing voice, patients and their relatives need in their struggle of succeeding in overcoming any medical crisis? Why did this stupid hospital send us this absolutely useless and even counterproductive foreign physician, who refused to even say a single word when my parents and grandma looked up to him and expected rational life-saving medical advice? What was he thinking when he condemned my aunt with the only very ambiguous sentence, I still remember verbatim from this cursed Rumanian doctor, “I think we are going to quit.”? Was he asking my parents, whether they’d approve his proposal to quit saving my aunt’s life? Did he order my daddy to quit CPR and let my aunt die? This doctor showed lack of leadership when everyone is expecting him to take charge of the medical crisis at hand and to maximize the odds for the best possible medical outcome.

I remember not being able to feel anything that evening. My aunt laid dead diagonally across the carpet in the children’s room when I started to understand that everyone expects me to go to sleep as usual. I hid under my blanket and wanted to die. I cried so hard. What if I had a heart attack? Would my parents and grandma follow the medical advice of the doctor, if he told them that he thinks, we should quit saving my life? Luckily, I only was 6 and no doctor would even dream about using my age as an excuse for letting me die. But, what about 80 years from now? From then onward, I wanted to become strong, innovative, energetic and knowledge to defeat death before it would inevitably kill me only about 80 years later. That is why I came to America.

My chapter (23) focuses on continuing bonds between the living and the dead on Facebook.

In the 20 years after the term was introduced into bereavement studies, continuing bonds went from being dismissed and pathologized to being a fully recognized and accepted phenomenon in bereavement scholarship and practice. Indeed, continuing bonds can now be seen not just as a phenomenon in grief but as a way of characterizing and expanding on grief itself. The concept of continuing bonds allows us to enrich therapeutic techniques that help the bereaved, to expand our ability to understand bereavement in other cultures both, to focus the philosophic questions in bereavement studies, to transfer what we learn about bereavement to how we study other significant losses, as well as to begin to include a wider range of academic disciplines in the study of grief. Contributors in Continuing Bonds in Bereavement: New Directions for Research and Practice provide a comprehensive overview of developments in the two decades after its inception. Clinically-based contributors show psychological counseling can be more effective when continuing bonds are included. Other chapters report on grief in different cultural settings, open the discussion about the truth and reality of our interactions with the dead, and show how new cultural developments like social media change the ways we relate to those who have died. " The predecessor of this book (Klass, Silverman & Nickman, 1996) persuasively argued that the natural course of bereavement involves not relinquishing bonds with the dead, but rather retaining them. In a remarkably short time this " new look " in the study of grief has emerged as a major challenger to the dominant paradigm, generating a sizable body of research and practice substantiating, extending, and applying its insights in both scholarly and practical contexts of support and therapy. Just how revolutionary the continuing bonds model has been in reorienting scholarship and practice in the field of bereavement studies is clearly documented in this intriguing successor volume edited by Dennis Klass and Edith Maria Steffen. Amply sampling the breadth and depth of contemporary contributions to the field, various chapters demonstrate how the ongoing relationship with the deceased is woven into the fabric of leading models of grief, including Two-Track, posttraumatic growth, narrative, attachment and meaning reconstruction approaches. Similarly, historical and cultural scholarship documents the pervasive role of relations between the living and dead in sustaining social, political and religious systems of meaning and power, and the investment that cultural stakeholders have in regulating their expression. Complementing these more macro perspectives on the phenomenon, other contributions provide penetrating close-ups of the unique significance of continuing bonds for such populations as parents mourning children, college students using social

Modern medicine and conscious cuisine have become complex disciplines reflecting upon their own status and upon human condition in late modernity, raising hermeneutic, philosophical and ethical questions. Just like a complex religious tradition requiring more and more theological knowledge not just some rudimentary reflection on some taken for granted religious “truths”, medical and nutritional knowledge becomes a systematic attempt to control death by both elaborated reflection and standardized practice.
Medicine and conscious diet become no less engaged in saving human souls than any traditional religion. As nutritionists, these preachers of immortality, love to say, the food we eat may be the most powerful form of medicine or the slowest poison. Both medicine and food kill or heal.
The terrifying expression “risk factor” is therefore sacred and feared; the fatal indicators make modern people nervous about everything they eat, drink and breathe. The smoking, the sedentary life, the excess of refined carbs, salt, and alcohol are enumerations that one cultivates with dread and reverence. Every modern individual hopes that, by keeping herself informed about the updated lists of risk factors, her body would be, at the long last, spared. Permanent adaptation, medical and nutritional knowledge, and daily reflection are required, but, sooner or later, one will no more be able to keep up.
Medicine gets more complicated, and so is our death. Your terrible illness is your terrible fault and your terrible sin. And your death is your punish for eating sluggishly. Your lifestyle mainly consists in finding ways to avoid getting caught. You’re ill, therefore you’re guilty.

This paper examines one of the most painful but seldom-discussed aspects of death in times of contagion: the silence, isolation, and loneliness that surrounds death and bereavement. Starting with the premise that funeral and mourning rituals play a major role in helping heal the social and psychological wounds of loss and grief (Geertz, 1973; Caccamo, 1988), and acknowledging that not all deaths are mourned equally (Butler, 2004), we study the case of COVID-19 deaths and grief in Iran in order to shed light on how the biological, social, and political "risks of contagion" combine to render mourning and grief lonely and silent. The risk of biological contagion necessitates curtailing public gatherings while social stigma and political suppression impose censor and silence. Therefore, our research is conceptually guided by Mary Douglas's (1966) work on the socio-cultural and political constructions of "contagion". In our recent history, these constructions have come into play during the so-called war on terror wherein some "precarious lives" have been rendered "ungrieveable" (Butler 2004) and in the context of early deaths from HIV/AIDS which led to "disenfranchised grief" (Doka, 1989). Building on these concepts, we plan to carry out a study of COVID-19 funerals and mourning in Iran by conducting interviews with survivors and reviewing policy and procedure documents for handling COVID-19 burials in order to examine the impact of socio-political and biological contagion on the production of disenfranchised and silenced grief. But Iran is also a place of creative everyday resistance (Bayat, 2013). We will examine how survivors responded to the political and public health restrictions, and what innovations were made to lessen the psychological impact of burial and bereavement in isolation.

Significant changes towards an intimate death take place in the Czech Republic regarding perinatal loss. However, these practices are often initiated by individual actors or civic initiatives. This “intimate presence” of perinatal loss including last rites stands in sharp contrast to absence of structural, institutional changes brought about by politicians or professional organizations towards better hospital or social management of death, bereavement and body disposal. Tensions of expert knowledge and power of biomedical authoritative knowledge form the setting for opposition or negligence coming from the hospital management, birth registers or funeral homes. The article draws on a qualitative sociological inquiry into practices of perinatal loss in the Czech Republic. The fieldwork data entail in-depth interviews with key actors and document analysis inspired by feminist research approach to reproductive loss. The aim is to show and help understand the frictions between emerging more intimate practices of grief, bereavement and last rites related to perinatal loss in the context of Post-Socialist and late-modern paternalised healthcare, medicalisation of life-events and concealment of death. The complexity of Post-Socialist absent or faded away institutionalised humanity regarding death and emerging practices challenging the status quo in perinatal loss treatment open up fruitful field for analytical inquiry.

The aim of this article is to highlight a number of significant connections between the feeling of loneliness and the personal ways of negotiating the meanings of death in modernity. I believe that, in the process of aging, the awareness of a nearer death may constrain modern people to rely more on the weak, fragmented or broken religious symbolic resources to be found at their hand. However, in the following pages I
will only expose a number of principle problems in connection with the above premise.

Social Studies of Death in Iran: Death and Dying in Iranian culture
The editor received full financial support from Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery for the publication of the book
Editor: Hajar Ghorbani
Publication: Anthropology
Location: Tehran, Iran
Language: Persian
Contents:
Introduction
Authors Biography
Death an Interdisciplinary Study
Chapter1
Social History of Death in Iran- Saeed Tavoosi Masroor
Death and Organizing its Space- Arash Heidari
Urban Cemeteries: Past and Present- Kaveh Mansoori
Chapter 2
Reversing the Meaning of Death- Reza Mahoozi
Religion, Death, and City- Mohammadreza Pouyafar
Death in the Pandemic- Reza Taslimitehrani
Death, Inheritance, and Equality- Mojtaba Vaezi and Hojjat Jaleh
Chapter 3
Disease, Aging, and Death in the Present Society- Nasser Fakouhi
Euthanasia in the Age of Capitalism
Body and Death After the Post Revolution- Fatemeh Sayyarpour
The Last Station- Gholam Hossein Motamedi
Hospitals and the Meaning of Death- Mohammad Zeinali-Onari
Chapter 4
A New Meaning of Martyrdom- Eric Butel
Martyr, Martyrdom and the Nation-State- Hajar Ghorbani
Death in the Post Revolutionary Calendar- Zohreh Soroush Far
The Secret of Graves- Alireza Kamari
Unification of Graves of the Iran-Iraq war martyrs- Mohsenhesam Mazaheri
Chapter 5
Death in Persian Paintings- Mohammadreza Moridi
Themes of Death in Contemporary Iranian Photo-Related Art-Practices-  Agnes Rameder
Other Houses- Naser Fakouhi and Mehrdad Oskui
Glazing of a Cemetery- Mehdi Yazdani Khorram
Chapter5
A cemetery is not a silent space- Mohammad Reza Haeri
The Other Place: The Cemetery of Tehran- Sepideh Parsa Pajouh
Death and the Iranian Modernity- Zohreh Bayatrizi and Hajar Ghorbani
Tehran's Behesht-e Zahra a Live Society- Jabbar Rahmani
The Risk of Management, The Risk of Death- Zohreh Bayatrizi and Hajar Ghorbani

Dr Kellehear stated that "dying is a social, psychological, and spiritual experience with a medical dimension and not the reverse" (2016). Critically explore this statement.

In his keynote speech at the Princess Alice Hospice Annual General Meeting Allan Kellehear clarified the importance of the social, psychological and spiritual elements entwined within the process of dying, and the need for these elements to be seriously considered before that of the medical dimension. As the natural inclination in the West is to die within the hospital setting, this essay will start by exploring the reasons why, and ways in which this option has become the norm. The essay will continue by comparing the modern advancements of science and law, with traditional practices originally centred around the family and religious belief. A discussion will then ensue to consider the importance of the aforementioned elements upon the approach to death, also compare the medical gaze with alternative practices that allow for such considerations, and explore the barriers in place that prevent alternative opportunities being experienced. An affirmative decision as to whether the ideology posited by Kellehear is founded, will conclude the essay.

Suicide is a socio-cultural phenomenon. Reports about suicide from different cultures and eras
support the opinion that suicide can be a cultivated and normatively recognized act. International
educated and scientific use of the term suicide produces, conveys and suggests a narrowing of
reflection. A medical deficit viewpoint has been established, and corresponding theories
constructed and ‘verified’ to justify the paternalistic interaction with suicidal people. The suicidal
person is discriminated and isolated on multiple levels in the suicide development process.
Psychological autopsy studies are driven by deficit- and illness-based approaches and are designed
and conducted on a low methodological level.
When suicidal actions are recognized as normal actions, or even interpreted as morally sound,
medical, political, religious and other guardians of morality and the ruling order oppose such
understanding and demand sovereignty of interpretation. The conflicts in the suicide field result
from diverging values and interests, whereby open, controversial and empirically-based public
discussions are generally avoided. There is a lack of reference in psychiatric and suicidology texts
to the fact that ‘free will’, ‘free choice’ or ‘free mind’ in modern society are not restricted
primarily by mental illness, but by socio-economic disadvantage and economic and political
decisions that lead, among other things, to mental disorders. Cultivation of suicide is not in
contradiction with prevention of suicide.

It is well documented that one in five pregnancies end in miscarriage and yet it is often not discussed openly. Do people simply ‘get over’ these troubling times, or is the female body, especially when it comes to gynaecological issues too taboo? Talk of blood clots, foetuses, physical and emotional pain might make for difficult conversation, but still a woman alone with her body and mind, has no choice, but to live through it (even if she has a fully supportive partner). In documenting reality, a tragic twin miscarriage at 12 weeks; it seems hope is one way out of despair. A personal narrative around dashed dreams, pain and grief, embedded in pockets of hope, the author attempts to understand and come to terms with the immediate experiences of a miscarriage. Are the immediate experiences too short to document, or too painful to recount? In thinking through intangible dalliances with Tarot cards as hooks of hope and reciting the Lord’s Prayer in the darkest moments; a sociology of hope might be able to answer some questions in how the human being lives through tragedy.

The increasing prevalence of suicide in the Philippines necessitates the utilization of various disciplines to understand the phenomenon. This article attempts to contribute to this endeavor from a Sociological perspective. The paper starts with a review of the wealth of theories that Sociology has to offer in explaining suicide from centuries past to the present, covering pre-Durkheimian theories all the way to Durkheim's contemporaries and those coming from the Interpretivist paradigm. The paper then proceeds to propose a new framework with which to explain the phenomenon borne from the synthesis of two theories not of suicide but rather of criminology: Agnew's General Strain theory and Hirschi's Social bonds theory.