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Abstract
The main aim of this paper is theoretical: to suggest ways in which Bloch and Parry's theory of mortuary rites as an occasion for the creation of the social order, can be linked to certain Foucauldian insights into government, and the combination used to analyse certain mortuary rites in contemporary Western societies. This paper will take as an example some of the practices and ideas encountered among bereavement counsellors in Britain during fieldwork in the mid- to late-1990s. The analysis will touch on the notion of personhood implicated in bereavement counsellors' understanding of grief. The paper suggests that bereavement counselling can be understood as a process through which the client is encouraged to reconstitute themselves as an autonomous being. The paper concludes by attempting to link this analysis of bereavement counselling as a process of subjectification to Bloch and Parry's (Citation1982) general theory of mortuary rites.
Acknowledgements
This paper has taken an exceptionally long time to put together. All the while the list of people to whom I am indebted grows. First of all thanks are due to all those at Cruse and elsewhere who have given of their time to aid my research. Liz Bondi, Michael Carrithers, Hulda Sveinsdóttir, Liz Hallam, Jenny Hockey, Tim Ingold, Julia Lawton, Jo Lee, Bob Simpson, Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson, and Tony Walter have, at one point or another, read versions of the paper. Their comments were invaluable. Thanks are also due to the editors and anonymous referees of Mortality for their very helpful input. Research and writing was been made possible with financial help from Durham University, The Ministry of Education Japan, and the Research Council of Iceland.
Notes
[1] I use “x” to refer to notions, phrases commonly used by the people I worked with.
[2] My interest here is not, then, to try to illuminate grief as such, or the experiences bereaved people have of grief. My focus extends only to the ways in which these experiences are constructed and understood by bereavement counsellors, many of whom have of course suffered bereavement themselves.
[3] While I only make references and claims to bereavement counselling, it could be suggested that some of the purported purpose of counselling has started to manifest itself in other activities that would generally be understood more clearly as a mortuary rite, funerals for example (see Hockey, Citation1992; Walter, Citation1999).
[4] When referring to traditional societies in what follows, I simply mean societies subject to traditional authority in Weber's sense.
[5]“Lack of concentration” itself is a phrase that evokes a picture of too widely spread thinness.
[6] I use the terms emotion and feeling interchangeably in line with their uses amongst the counsellors I worked with.
[7] In a later edition of Worden's book the fourth task is significantly changed. During the time of fieldwork only the earlier edition was available. Many of the counsellors I worked with described it as their “Bible.”
[8] On death and emotions more generally in British society (see for example Davies, Citation1997, pp. 46 – 48; Walter, Citation1999).
[9] This at least is the case in a society where direct communication between the living and the dead is rather frowned upon (see Vitebsky, Citation1993).
[10] This phrase I have of course borrowed from Strathern (Citation1988, Chapter 9).
[11] For a bereavement counsellor's take on Roger (see McLaren, Citation1998).
[12] This is not to suggest that the distinction between the West and rest is unproblematic but simply to note that death has been studied in different ways depending on where it the world it is located.