Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
<p>This thesis explores the so-called death awareness or death positivity movement and the way in which issues surrounding mortality, the dying process, and treatment of dead bodies are made to be matters of care. Presenting current Western institutionalised frameworks for handling death and d...
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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2023
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| _version_ | 1826315173697159168 |
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| author | Kuitunen, E |
| author2 | Daniels, I |
| author_facet | Daniels, I Kuitunen, E |
| author_sort | Kuitunen, E |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | <p>This thesis explores the so-called death awareness or death positivity movement and the way in which issues surrounding mortality, the dying process, and treatment of dead bodies are made to be matters of care. Presenting current Western institutionalised frameworks for handling death and dying as insufficient or harmful, the activism I follow is concerned with issues of accessibility, environment, and enriching customs of ritual or memorialisation.</p>
<p>Through twelve months of fieldwork across the UK as well as extended online ethnography, I present participants as comprising heterogenous affective communities and publics that perform ethical dispositions and orientations towards a generalised sense of inauthentic or disengaged (post)modernity, or its death care complex. While death awareness is a primarily Anglo-American endeavour, in my multisited, multimedia work I propose “west” is largely virtual and identificatory, insofar as it relies on totalising narratives of lost systems of meaning or sociality. A frequently cited motif in death awareness work is the power of conversational events to remove death denial and as such, a question I engage with is one of the origin of such a belief, and the experienced efficacy or desired outcomes of these interventions. My fieldsites include Death Cafés, conferences, pop-ups and plays staged as part of Death Awareness Week Festival for community outreach.</p>
<p>I discuss critiques of neoliberal therapeutic discourse or emotional individualism in relation to achieving “good death” and the relationship between death awareness and emergent spiritualities, as novel methods of gathering around death speak to reassessed bonds to the dead, or to nature. I have chosen care as a theoretical lens as it not only relates to the stewardship or maintenance of the dead and dying in medical or funerary contexts, but because of its affective charge of being concerned or complicit. The problem is not merely “who will care for these people” and “what kind of care is good enough to make death better”, but “how can I make others care as I do?”</p>
<p>Taking my cue from work on caring in more-than-human ontologies from interdisciplinary posthumanist thinkers including Puig de la Bellacasa and Haraway, I propose a neologism to accompany rhizomes, tentacles or frictions in the intellectual tradition of affect theory in <em>fathoming</em>. With its etymology in the measurement of outreached arms or embraces, I posit that when “words fall short” around death, efforts or complaints surrounding it exemplify fathoming as a particular kind of poesis and reach.</p> |
| first_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:20:48Z |
| format | Thesis |
| id | oxford-uuid:d62c1782-4faa-4565-9bc8-005d46ca56e3 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-12-09T03:20:48Z |
| publishDate | 2023 |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:d62c1782-4faa-4565-9bc8-005d46ca56e32024-11-11T08:33:12ZDying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West Thesishttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_db06uuid:d62c1782-4faa-4565-9bc8-005d46ca56e3Community organizationDeath care industryEnglishHyrax Deposit2023Kuitunen, EDaniels, I<p>This thesis explores the so-called death awareness or death positivity movement and the way in which issues surrounding mortality, the dying process, and treatment of dead bodies are made to be matters of care. Presenting current Western institutionalised frameworks for handling death and dying as insufficient or harmful, the activism I follow is concerned with issues of accessibility, environment, and enriching customs of ritual or memorialisation.</p> <p>Through twelve months of fieldwork across the UK as well as extended online ethnography, I present participants as comprising heterogenous affective communities and publics that perform ethical dispositions and orientations towards a generalised sense of inauthentic or disengaged (post)modernity, or its death care complex. While death awareness is a primarily Anglo-American endeavour, in my multisited, multimedia work I propose “west” is largely virtual and identificatory, insofar as it relies on totalising narratives of lost systems of meaning or sociality. A frequently cited motif in death awareness work is the power of conversational events to remove death denial and as such, a question I engage with is one of the origin of such a belief, and the experienced efficacy or desired outcomes of these interventions. My fieldsites include Death Cafés, conferences, pop-ups and plays staged as part of Death Awareness Week Festival for community outreach.</p> <p>I discuss critiques of neoliberal therapeutic discourse or emotional individualism in relation to achieving “good death” and the relationship between death awareness and emergent spiritualities, as novel methods of gathering around death speak to reassessed bonds to the dead, or to nature. I have chosen care as a theoretical lens as it not only relates to the stewardship or maintenance of the dead and dying in medical or funerary contexts, but because of its affective charge of being concerned or complicit. The problem is not merely “who will care for these people” and “what kind of care is good enough to make death better”, but “how can I make others care as I do?”</p> <p>Taking my cue from work on caring in more-than-human ontologies from interdisciplinary posthumanist thinkers including Puig de la Bellacasa and Haraway, I propose a neologism to accompany rhizomes, tentacles or frictions in the intellectual tradition of affect theory in <em>fathoming</em>. With its etymology in the measurement of outreached arms or embraces, I posit that when “words fall short” around death, efforts or complaints surrounding it exemplify fathoming as a particular kind of poesis and reach.</p> |
| spellingShingle | Community organization Death care industry Kuitunen, E Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West |
| title | Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
|
| title_full | Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
|
| title_fullStr | Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
|
| title_full_unstemmed | Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
|
| title_short | Dying matters: an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible West
|
| title_sort | dying matters an ethnography of the death awareness movement in the ostensible west |
| topic | Community organization Death care industry |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT kuitunene dyingmattersanethnographyofthedeathawarenessmovementintheostensiblewest |