Death consumes us – dispatches from the “death professors”

ABSTRACT

This special issue on consumption and death marks another point on an upward trajectory of the mainstreaming of death and death-related consumption and marketing research. Death, like sex, is all around us; marketing and consumption is interwoven into the services we choose, the products we prefer, and the relationships we revere. This introduction provides a brief overview of consumption and death research, and summarizes the papers included in the special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Death
• bereavement
• dispossession
• abjection
• dark tourism
• gift giving
• ruinophilia
• funeral
• identity
• consumer culture
• bodies

“I open at the close.” Harry Potter. (J.K. Rowling 2007)

As innovators in the area of consumption and death research, Jeff and I are often asked “why do you study death?” and “isn’t it depressing?” or “that’s so morbid!” Yet, these reactions are indicative of both how taboo death still is, across many cultures, nationalities, and classes, and how vital this work is to our field. We admire the early pioneers of death research, several of whom are represented in this special issue, for their willingness to overcome their own discomfort with the topic in order to move it to the forefront of our discipline. We’d also like to thank Sidney Levy for his early and frequent contributions to this discourse and for sharing his very personal and poignant stories with us during our first death roundtable. He continues to be an inspiration to us all!

Dispatches from the special issue editors

From Susan:

One way to find out if the topic you are interested in is considered taboo or controversial is to announce it to a group of fellow academics at a conference cocktail party. The reaction ranges from disinterest to distaste. Of course, this reaction fueled my passion for this work even more. There is nothing more fruitful for an academic than unchartered territory.

My interest in death research began when I was asked to consult with the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts (http://fcaemass.org/) about the environmental problems of traditional burial practices. We discussed strategies to persuade people to consider sustainable burials and forego what is perceived as an uncomfortable consumption decision. Two hurdles were exposed: people’s pre-conceived notion that they had no choice and were required by law to be embalmed and put in a polyurethane casket; and people’s discomfort with their own mortality prevents them from proactively engaging in funeral preparation decisions. Perceived lack of an alternative and a natural revulsion of discussing it proved too formidable barriers for the nontraditional burial market, which continues to struggle for market share.

In the spirit of Paris café society, those of us interested in death met in a small, out of the way room at the 2012 Association of Consumer Research (ACR) Conference. The excitement about the possibilities was palpable and I knew we were on to something. Death went beyond rituals (Bonsu and Belk 2003) and bereavement (O’Donohoe and Turley 2006; Turley and O’Donohoe 2012) to include what I considered to be endless avenues of study. This topical diversity is evident in my edited book (Dobscha 2016) where authors from fields that ranged from chemistry to sex studies made meaningful contributions to this emerging discourse.

This special section was another step to further strengthen the literature on death and consumption. The papers included in this section display the potential for this research stream to grow and flourish. While Jeff Podoshen rightly points to the dark side of death and the absolute need to conduct research on those forces that seek to destroy freedoms and liberties, I would also point to those topics related to death practices, such as green burials; new, controversial, or contradictory modern funeral rituals; the impact of the mind/body dualism that permeates modern thought; the use of death to sell products; estate and financial planning; and product deaths.

In that circle of academics at the cocktail party, I realized that death research is crucial to our understanding more fully of the consumer experience. Death resides at the intersection of culture, individual preferences, group norms, and religious dogma. That’s one hell of a fascinating intersection!

From Jeff:

With my latest foray into the study of abjection (Podoshen et al. 2017) I am generally avoided at cocktail parties. But discussing abjection and ultraviolent consumption at the 2017 Consumer Culture Theory Conference (CCT) in Disneyland was a novel experience. Special thanks to Susan to paving the way for this uncomfortable but important work.

Academically I began my interest in death by delving into Holocaust tourism and its related consumption manifestations (Podoshen 2006; Podoshen and Hunt 2011). From there I could have taken the more traditional remembrance route to further study about death and distressing events or I could have taken a darker turn (Stone 2006, 2011, 2012). Simultaneously, the research on dark tourism began to appear in tourism-specific journals as researchers started to examine tourism behaviors that were more closely related to actual death. Like many in the realm of CCT, I became heavily influenced by Eco and Baudrilliard and simulation which sent me to Norway (Podoshen 2013) to examine these concepts in the context of more recent violence and death where these activities were not really heard of on a regular basis. The result was uncovering a vast, yet largely underground pattern of consumption that centered on death, abjection (Drummond and Krszjzaniek 2016) and ultra-violence that was actually celebrated and viewed as liberating. In this respect, Dobscha et al. (2012) and Dobscha (2016) provide a bridge to the harsh realities and futures of tangible death. Past death is incredibly close to today’s lived realities in our violent globalized world filled with pain, suffering and unimaginable horrors that we all claimed would occur “never again” after the liberation of the Concentration Camps.

While there was the Special Session at ACR a number of years back and the book that came out in 2016, and, of course, Levy’s (2015) work on death in these very pages, we came to realize that death was in no way “done.” In fact, we had not even scratched the surface. In this respect, this special issue is not the end of an era in research, it is merely the opening. And while many in the consumption studies community still cringe at the mention of death-oriented work and the harsh experiences of being faced with abjection (Podoshen et al. 2017), and increasing violence in our music and art (Wallin, Podoshen, and Venkatesh forthcoming) there is no foreseeable move away from this if consumption scholars want to keep relevancy in the age of ISIS, North Korea, quickly disseminated hate via social media (Venkatesh et al. 2016) and the continuing, bloody battles in the major continents that quickly invade our laptops, televisions and mobile phone screens as well as our concert halls and public spaces.

Overview of the issue

What follows is a brief synopsis of the five papers included in this issue.

Stephanie Anderson, Kathy Hamilton, and Andrea Tonner write about a phenomenon that has been gaining a great deal of steam in the social media realm and the tourism community, that is, ruinophilia. This fascination with the death of physical buildings is one that has been gaining increased notoriety in light of the vast ruinous conditions that the world has been experiencing from Aleppo to Pakistan, from Detroit to Los Angeles, for vastly different reasons we have witnessed a wealth of destruction. What’s left behind, however, are images and memories, and as we learn, the increased propensity to own and view these.

Courtney Nations, Stacey Menzel Baker, and Eric Krszjzaniek pull back the formaldehyde curtain to illuminate on the grief process and the abjection faced by loved ones when they come into contact with a lifeless body. They posit a three-stage process that grieving individuals go through which allows for an understanding of the fluidity of identity.

Jenna Drenten, Kristy McManus, and Lauren Labrecque examine how gifting relationships are affected by death and how consumption decisions extend beyond the life of a loved one. Their research yields a restorative perspective and that individuals use gift giving at graves as a way to maintain intimate relationships with those they lost.

Stephanie O’Donohoe and Darach Turley explore service encounters amongst bereaved consumers in the United States. They explain how death service providers have unique challenges related to empathy and related variables in the sense that they have to fulfill both the needs and desires of the deceased as well as the living.

Closing the issue, Valeria Guillard shares with us the issues surrounding the management of objects from deceased loved ones and elucidates the process by which next of kin engage in dispossession.

Reviewers for this special issue

Finally, we would like to profusely thank our reviewers who provided important and supportive guidance to the authors in this special issue:

Aaron Ahuvia, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA

Stephanie Anderson, University of Glasgow, UK

Peter Bloch, University of Missouri, USA

Matthias Bode, Royal University for Women, Bahrain

Tonya Bradford, University of California, Irvine, USA

Margo Buchanan-Oliver, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Jenna Drenten, Loyola University of Chicago, USA

Toni Eagar, Australian National University, Australia

Amanda Earley, University of Leicester, UK

Terry Gabel, Monmouth University, USA

Jim Gentry, University of Nebraska, USA

Chris Hackley, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Kathy Hamilton, University of Strathclyde, UK

Jenny Huberman, University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA

Kostis Kourelis, Franklin & Marshall College, USA

Brent McKenzie, University of Guelph, Canada

Risto Moisio, California State University, Long Beach, USA

Courtney Nations, University of North Florida, USA

Philip Olson, Virginia Tech, USA

Stephen O’Sullivan, University College Cork, Ireland

Maria Piacentini, Lancaster University, UK

Scott Radford, University of Calgary, Canada

John Schouten, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada

John Sherry, University of Notre Dame, USA

Katherine Sredl, Loyola University of Chicago, USA

Laurel Steinfield, Bentley University, USA

Isabelle Szmigin, University of Birmingham, UK

Gulnur Tumbat, San Francisco State University, USA

Darach Turley, Dublin City University, Ireland

Ekant Veer, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.