4th Global Conference
Wednesday 12th July - Friday 14th July 2006
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 10: Death in Social Contexts
Chair: Susan Giles
Institutional Loss: Dialectical Tensions in Coping with Major Loss
Melanie
Finney
Department of
Communication & Theatre,
Director, Conflict Studies Program,
DePauw University,
Greencastle, IN, USA
Multiple deaths occurring at academic institutions present interesting challenges for those trying to help others adjust and cope with such losses. This article addresses the characteristics of higher educational institutions that make them vulnerable to extreme forms of grieving, and that may complicate coping with major traumas. In particular, these factors serve to emphasize the dialectical tensions involved in coping with major loss that are present when multiple deaths occur in university communities. Drawing on the dialogism of social theorist Bahktin, five particular dialectical tensions are outlined: (1) tensions between individuals' needs to remember and institutions' need to move on; (2) tensions regarding the demonstration of private grief and public mourning; (3) tensions between performance of public and private rituals; (4) tensions as individuals move between roles as mourners and consolers; and (5) tensions as individuals struggle to accept pain and move towards growth. This essay considers how institutions must be aware of, and address, the frequently competing needs of the various parties as they encounter these types of losses.
Death and the Wider Shades of Meaning of
'Bad News': Is 'Bad News' Always 'Bad' (for Everyone)?
Paul
Voninski and Cyril
Schafer
Anthropology Department, SUNY/Oswego, Oswego, New York,
USA and Anthropology
Department, University
of Otago, Dunedin, New
Zealand
Bad
news travels fast
--American proverb
Nobody likes the man who brings bad news.
--Sophocles (496
BC - 406 BC)
Prince John: [shouts] I knew it! I knew it would be bad news. Wait,
maybe if you were to tell me the ‘bad’ news in a ‘good’ way,
it wouldn't sound so bad.
--Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)
The use of the term ‘bad news’ in the medical
world has a narrow and very specific application. It refers to
the communication, difficult communication as the medical literature
describes the process, of news of the certain diagnostic knowledge of
an end-of-life trajectory that will result in the death of a patient. The
issue is framed in the medical world and a voluminous number of publications
on the topic as a dreaded and onerous task that is transformative and
generally negative in terms of doctor – patient relationship. There
are programs, models, and numerous publications that coach and advise
medical practitioners on the ‘proper’ means and style to
covey such news and the many ‘inappropriate’ issues, questions,
and communication methods to be avoided. That in brief is the
medical overview and meaning of ‘bad news’; it is information
that both the practitioner does not want to deliver and the patient does
not want to receive. But
is that a full and complete picture of the nature, meaning, and impact
of ‘bad news’ on everyone? Are there individuals or
groups that are more welcoming of ‘bad news’, at least the ‘bad
news’ of others? Is there an ‘upside’ to the
news of someone’s impending death?
In this paper we will review
the literature and cross-cultural examples of those for whom the news
of the death of others is not bad news. There
is an expansive cottage industry of groups and individuals that survive
and thrive economically on the news of the death of others. A
few examples of individuals or groups who ‘live’ off, or
derive some ‘benefit’ from ‘bad’ news, would
be a diverse assemblage including: funeral directors and death industry
staff, some medical personnel (e.g. pathologists, transplant organ coordinators,
transplant surgical staff, etc.), transplant recipients and their attachment
to those who died, patient families in the belief that their relative
was better off dead than alive and suffering, ‘bug chasers’,
newspaper obituary writers and publishers, numerous social scientists
who study the dead and dying, and others. By means of a systematic
and cross-cultural review of those who ‘benefit’ from the ‘bad
news’ of others, we will see that ‘bad news’ is not
always ‘bad’ for all.
Short Story: The Hole Beside Her Lady Zainab
Abir
Hamdar
Departyment of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East,
SOAS, University of London, United Kindom
“The Hole Beside her Lady Zainab” is the title of a short story about an old Lebanese Muslim man who dies but cannot be buried because no earthly hole will accommodate him. Attempting to curb public panic and desperate for a place to put the body, the Sheikh pleads with the dead man’s wife to donate the hole she had purchased for her own death years earlier. The story then goes on to narrate why the wife refuses to let go of her hole, what happens when she insists on her decision and the spiritual and religious manifestations that emerge when the afterlife of a dead man is intricately tied to the decision of a woman who occupies the world of the living.
© Inter-Disciplinary.Net 2006