Do we deny death? II. Critiques of the death-denial thesis

Abstract

The first part of this article, published in an earlier issue of this journal, provided an overview of how the death-denial thesis took shape and spread in the social sciences between the 1930s and 1980s. By ‘death-denial thesis’ we refer to the assumption according to which Western societies seek to deny the reality of death. In this second part of the article, we turn our attention to the most extensive critiques addressed to the said thesis. We attempt to assess the present state of the narrative and to outline how its apparent obsolescence today opens new avenues of exploration for death studies.

Keywords:

• Death denial
• death taboo
• history of death
• sociology of death
• death studies

Notes

1. See for instance: Jay Ruby (1999). The author nonetheless agrees, to an extent, with the idea of a public denial of death in 19th-century United States.

2. Ivan Cenzi (2016) adequately pointed out in a recent article that ‘Regarding the Western taboo about death, much has been written on how its “social removal” happened approximately in conjunction with WWI and the institution of great modern hospitals; still it would be more correct to talk about a removal and medicalisation of the corpse. The subject of death, in fact, has been widely addressed throughout the Twentieth Century: a century which was heavily imbued with funeral meditations, on the account of its history of unprecedented violence. What has vanished from our daily lives is rather the presence of the dead bodies and, most of all, putrefaction’.