It has been claimed that one can never look directly at the sun nor at one's own death. And yet, throughout the history of mankind, both have been the enduring themes of myth and religion, science and magic, curiosity and fear. From our late twentieth century vantage point we find that as the sun is understood as being the source of life in the natural order, so death is becoming recognized as the central dynamism underlying the life, vitality, and structure of the social order. Death is the muse of our religions, philosophies, political ideologies, arts and medical technologies. It sells newspapers and insurance policies, invigorates the plots of our television programs, and--judging from our dependency on fossil fuels (84.5% of all U.S. energy consumption in 1995)--even powers our industries. It is the barometer by which we measure the adequacy of social life, such as when we compare cross-cultural death and life expectancy rates to gauge social progress, compare national homicide rates to infer the stability of social structures, or compare death rates of different social groups to ascertain social inequalities. In fact, perhaps the very first evidence of sapien's humanity is based on funerary evidence: the discovery of the remains of a middle-aged Neanderthal, whose deformity and yet relative longevity indicate that he had probably been supported by others, and who was buried in a fetal position and covered with flowers.
As Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf observed in Celebrations of Death, "life becomes transparent against the background of death" (1979:2). In a way analogous to the experimental method of subatomic physicists bombarding and shattering the nuclei of atoms in order to reveal their constituent parts and processes, death similarly reveals the most central social processes and cultural values. Death is a catalyst that, when put into contact with any cultural order, precipitates out the central beliefs and concerns of a people.
Abram Rosenblatt et al. (1989)
found, for example, that when reminded of their mortality, people react more harshly toward
moral transgressors and become more favorably disposed toward those who uphold their
values. In one experiment, twenty-two municipal judges were given a battery of
psychological tests. In the experimental group, eleven judges were told
to write about their own death, including what happens physically and what
emotions are evoked when thinking about it. When asked to set bond for
a prostitute on the basis of a case brief, those who had thought about
their death set an average bond of $455, while the average in the control
group was $50. The authors concluded (Greenberg et al. 1990) that when
awareness of death is increased, in-group solidarity is intensified, out-groups
become more despised, and prejudice and religious extremism
escalate.
On a more psychological level, death exposures can similarly crystallize and invigorate individuals' own life pathways. In his study of patients having had brushes with death, cardiologist Michael Sabom (Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation, 1976) found that for the 43 percent who had near-death experiences, the experience did more to change the depth and direction of their approach to life than had any other life event.
So did you check out your death date (for more refined test go to MSNBC's "How long will you live--really?"or to Northwestern Mutual's Longevity Game)? What thoughts came to mind when you saw it?
Below is an outline of this website. For a glossary of terms click here. One visitor questioned the organization, wondering why "Personal Impacts" comes last. Unlike many of the more psychologically-oriented pages here in cyberspace, the orientation here is sociological. It is here assumed that individuals' death concerns and experiences of dying and grief are strongly structured by their social environments. Indeed, to study the attitudes and fears of individuals divorced from their socio-cultural milieus would be as meaningless as ethologists studying animal behavior in zoos. The logic thus moves from the cultural order--the broad realm of of social reality that shapes our collective cognitions, emotions, and behaviors--to the institutional orders--like religion, politics, and mass media, that more directly filter and mold our experiences and routinize our actions--and finally to the individual order.
Growth House, Inc. is one of the premier sites for quality, evaluated links. You may wish to examine their database with the search engine below:
As developed above, death is a measure of life. For quantitative measures of this assertion, the following are rich resources. You may also want to take advantage of my links to health and AIDS resources. Many of the tables and graphs in this site are derived these and other federal government sources as well as from the General Social Surveys (GSS), which have been conducted almost annually since 1972 by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).
Hopefully you have had an interesting and worthwhile time here. Any ideas or leads that you may have for this page will be most appreciated. Several visitors to this page have asked about where they can take courses (or obtain certification or degrees) in death and dying. Try this site for academic possibilities. For Kearl's 2010 Aalborg, Denmark remarks click here or here. For his 2011 return visit: Death and Social Inequality; Death and the Medical System; Death, Work and Consumerism; and Death and the Media.
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