#AcaWriMo post accountability post 13 (Nov. 17-18)
In the 24.3 and 24.4 isssues of the journal /Mortality/, Marin Robert and Laura Tradii published a two part article "Do We Deny #Death? I. A Genealogy of #DeathDenial" and "Do We Deny Death? II. Critiques of the Death-Denial Thesis."
The first part offers a helpful overview of history and sociology scholarship on death denial in Western culture, highlighting the rise of this theory in the early to mid C20th with thinkers like Freud. Notably, they argue that the death-denial theory requires a kind of nostalgia for past relationships with death, a contrast between the present death industry as impersonalizing and commodifying and the past paradigm of death at home as intimate and personal.
At the end of Part I and throughout Part II, Robert and Tradii argue that death and the dead are actually very present in contemporary popular culture. While I can agree with this, I continue to think that US culture is very bad at coping with the deaths and the dead that we encounter. I would agree that we collectively are not denying death, but we are also not collectively responding to it. There is a sort of individualism in the lack of communal mourning and grief rituals beyond the immediate funeral and burial services.
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