Death Studies

This article compares the outcome and predictors of psychosocial distress of parents bereaved by young suicides, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and child accidents. One objective is to explore whether suicide bereavement is more difficult for those left behind than other forms of bereavement. Data have been collected from 140 families, consisting of 232 parents, by the use of the Impact of Event Scale, the General Health Questionnaire, and the Inventory ofTraumatic Grief. Qualitative aspects of bereavement are assessed by in-depth interviews with family members from 40 families.The results show that the similarities between the samples on outcome and predictors are more striking than the differences, which is explained by the common traumatic aspect of unexpected and violent deaths. One and a half years post-loss, 57778% of the survivors scored above the cut-off levels for traumatic grief reactions. Although no significant differences are found between survivors of suicide and accidents, both groups evidence significantly greater subjective distress than the survivors of SIDS. Self-isolation is by far the best predictor of psychosocial distress in all three samples. Rather than focusing on the exceptional position of suicide survivors, it seems important to call attention to sudden and traumatic death in general as a factor to be associated with post-traumatic reactions and complicated mourning.

Online identities survive the deaths of those they represent, leaving friends and families to struggle with the appropriate ways to incorporate these identities into the practices of grief and mourning, raising important questions. How are practices of online memorialization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role of online digital identity post-mortem? How do trajectories of death and dying incorporate both online and offline concerns?

Social relationships benefit not only mental health but also physical health. This review addresses the following questions: (1) What is the overall magnitude of the effect of social relationships on risk for premature death? (2) How generalized is the effect and are there factors known to influence this association? (3) What are the likely pathways by which social relationships influence lon-gevity? The article concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for potential interventions aimed at reducing risk for mortality.

"The proliferation of social network sites has resulted in an
increasing number of profiles representing deceased users.
In this paper, we present the results of a mixed-methods
empirical study of 205,068 comments posted to 1,369
MySpace profiles of  users who have died. Our results
reveal interesting practices surrounding issues of authorship
and audience, temporal patterns in posting, and continued
social networking with the dead. These results suggest that
post-mortem commenting behavior blends memorializing
practices with existing practices and communication
patterns for social network sites. We conclude by outlining
future directions for research and implications for the
understanding and  use of social network sites in light of a
deeper understanding of post-mortem comments."

The main objective of this review was to provide a quantitative and methodologically sound evaluation of existing treatments for bereavement and grief reactions in children and adolescents. Two meta-analyses were conducted: 1 on controlled studies and 1 on uncontrolled studies. The 2 meta-analyses were based on a total of 27 treatment studies published before June 2006. Hedges's g and Cohen's d were used as measures of effect size and a random-effects model was applied. Results yielded small to moderate effect sizes. Interventions for symptomatic or impaired participants tended to show larger effect sizes than interventions for bereaved children and adolescents without symptoms. Promising treatment models were music therapy and trauma=grief-focused school based brief psychotherapy. We thank Dr. Joseph M. Currier for his advice on computational problems concerning effect size calculations.

A massacre took place inside the Sandby borg ringfort, southeast Sweden, at the end of the fifth century. The victims were not buried, but left where they died. In order to understand why the corpses were left unburied, and how they were perceived following the violent event, a theoretical framework is developed and integrated with the results of
osteological analysis. I discuss the contemporary normative treatment of the dead, social response to death and postmortem agency with emphasis on intergroup conflict and ‘bad death’. The treatment of the dead in Sandby borg deviates from known contemporary practices. I am proposing that leaving the bodies unburied might be viewed as an aggressive social action. The corpses exerted postmortem agency to the benefit of the perpetrators, at the expense of the victims and their sympathizers. The gain for the perpetrators was likely political power through redrawing the victim’s biographies, spatial memory and the social and territorial landscape. The denial of a proper death likely led to shame, hindering of regeneration and an eternal state of limbo.

Bereavement increases the risk of ill health, but only a minority of bereaved suffers lasting health impairment. Because only this group is likely to profit from bereavement intervention, early identification is important. Previous research is limited, because of cross sectional designs, small numbers of risk factors, and use of a single measure of bereavement outcome. Our longitudinal study avoids these pitfalls by examining the impact of a large set of potential risk factors on grief, depressive symptoms, emotional loneliness, and positive mood following recent bereavement (3 years maximum). Participants provided information 3 times over 6 months. A multivariate approach was chosen to avoid reporting spurious results due to confounding. As expected, risk factors were differentially related to different outcome measures. For example, being high in anxious attachment and having lost a partner were related to more intense feelings of emotional loneliness, whereas these variables did not predict any of the other outcome variables. By contrast, social support did not influence emotional loneliness but did predict grief, depressive symptoms and positive mood. Implications of these findings are discussed.

The alarming prevalence of suicidal behaviors in Native American communities remains a major concern in the 21st-century United States. Recent reviews have demonstrated that prevention programs and intervention efforts using transactional-ecological models have effectively reduced suicidal behaviors in the American Indian and Alaska Native populations sampled. As a result, this article adopts a transactional-ecological framework for conceptualizing suicidality and identifying points of intervention. Drawing on the most current empirical reports, the epidemiology of Native American suicidal behaviors is reviewed, while situating risk and protective factors within a biopsychosocial framework. Opportunities for intervention are discussed with a focus on the interactions between individuals and their environments, and the antecedent conditions leading to zones of heightened suicide risk.

Grief is a family affair, yet it is commonly viewed as an individual phenomenon. As an international, interdisciplinary team, we explore grief within a family context across theoretical, research, practice, and educational domains. Families are complex and working with this complexity is challenging but necessary for a holistic view of grief. We therefore encourage an increased focus on theorizing, researching, practicing, and educating using innovative approaches to address the complexities of grief within the context of families. Learnings from within each domain will affirm and enhance the development of family-level thinking and approaches.

As part of a larger study, this article describes the local authorities in Norway as providers of help and survivors as recipients of help after the suicide of a young person (<30 years) in 83 families. A questionnaire developed for this study maps the extent of professional community support as reported by parent survivors (N ¼ 128). Additionally, 41 survivors described the quality of the assistance through in-depth interviews. Another questionnaire assesses the provisions and the organization of intervention strategies in local communities. Personnel in 321of Norway' s 481municipalities responded. Although survivors'wishes for ideal support coincide with recommendations by experts in the field, local authorities lack the organization to fulfill such expectations.The discussion highlights issues relating to content, organization, and ideology of the assistance.

T o understand par ents' subjective feeling s, experiences, and under standing connected to the loss of a child over time, the author s chose semi-structured, in-depth interviews as the method of examination in a study of 26 parents who lost a child to sudden inf ant death syndr ome ( SID S) between 1981 and. In addition, par ents were asked to complete diÚ erent inventories to compare their present response s ( 1996) with their responses to the same inventories in [1981][1982][1983][1984]. M ost par ents still viewed the death of their child as aÚ ecting their daily life in important ways. Inventory data show that g ender diÚ erences have diminished 12-15 years af ter the loss, and few par ents are psycholog ically at risk in 1996. T he study clear ly shows the bene t of method triang ulation in providing a total picture of the parent's exper iences.

The practices involved in forensic investigation center on a search for physical clues and traces that may be used to reconstruct past events. The forensic corpse is therefore involved in a materially grounded semiotics, which provides the basis for making claims about the past. Using the examples of forensic pattern matching (such as craniofacial mapping and fingerprints) and forensic entomology, I explore the different life worlds that emerge after a person's death and how they are mobilized by forensic investigators. In this form of inquiry, claims to the real are articulated through the signs that different beingswhether human, insect, or microbe-perceive inhering in the corpse. Such forms of forensic investigation offer a productive site for thinking about the ontological status of fact and of the corpse in the context of posthumanism. Forensic signs stretch across our divided categories of the living and the dead, human and animal, nature and culture, providing alternate ways to conceptualize the relationships at play in such assemblages.

This chapter constructs a framework for understanding depictions of death in literature and illustrates this framework with reference to specific literary works. The framework makes use of ideas from evolutionary psychology, human life history theory, terror management theory, the psychology of meaning, the psychology of fiction, and evolutionary literary theory. The chapter explains why humans create literary depictions of death, describes how imaginative meaning works in literature, characterizes the emotions evoked in literary depictions of death, and characterizes the attitudes toward death adopted by authors and characters. After constructing this theoretical framework, the chapter gives examples of literature that describe the whole span of an individual human life, then critiques three short stories that focus on specific themes in human life history. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” illustrates survival as a motive. Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl” illustrates death in childhood. D. H. Lawrence’s “Odour of Chrysanthemums” illustrates death in an intimate pair bond. A final section describes the state of research in the main fields that have contributed to the theoretical framework and suggests directions for further development.

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing upon past grief research, religion and new media studies, a thematic analysis of 1,046 messages was conducted on three mediated sites (Twitter, TMZ.com, and Facebook). Results suggested that social media served as grieving spaces for people to accept Jackson’s death rather than denying it or expressing anger over his passing. The findings also illustrate how interactive exchanges online helped recycle news and “resurrected” the life of Jackson. Additionally, as fans of deceased celebrities create and disseminate web-based memorials, new social media practices like “Michael Mondays” synchronize tweets within everyday life rhythms and foster practices to hasten the grieving process.

This paper reviews research on deathscapes, particularly by geographers in the last decade, and argues that many of the issues addressed reflect the concerns that have engaged cultural geographers during the same period. In particular, necrogeographical research reveals the relevance of deathscapes to theoretical arguments about the social constructedness of race, class, gender, nation and nature; the ideological underpinnings of landscapes, the contestation of space, the centrality of place and the multiplicity of meanings. This paper therefore highlights how the focus on one particular form of landscape reveals macro-cultural geographical research interests and trends.

The aim of the article is to design a conceptual framework within the theory of psychosocial ego development that will allow for a better understanding and explanation of attitude toward death in the life cycle. The main weaknesses of previous studies on death attitude were examined; Erikson’s concept may help exceed these limitations. The use of the model of hierarchy of defense mechanisms to study death attitude within Erikson’s theory was proposed. The concept of the death complex was mentioned to better conceptualize the problem of attitude toward death as a part of the psychosocial theory. Finally, the evolution of attitude toward death in the consecutive phases of psychosocial development was discussed in the light of the concept of syntonic and dystonic ego features, as well as death complex, defense mechanisms, and psychosexual modes.

Spirituality and religiosity are important aspects of an individual’s psychology, but little is known about this dimension in people suffering from Asperger syndrome, and research on its relationship with work experience is rare. The main objective of this qualitative study is to report how 12 people suffering from Asperger syndrome perceived their current or past jobs, focusing on the role of spirituality and religiosity, fear of death, and relationships with colleagues. Although a larger percentage of participants are of the opinion that death means absolute annihilation, only a few have faith in a transcendental dimension. However, the highest number of questions was recorded for concerns derived from relational difficulties with colleagues, while concerns regarding spirituality and religiosity were substantially negligible.

This study investigated psychometric properties of the Suicide Resilience Inventory-25 (SRI-25) in a diverse sample of 239 college students. Participants completed the SRI-25, Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS), Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire, and the Multidimensional ...

Concern about the grief processes of organ donors' families are reported by medical staffas a reason not to ask for organ donation. Objectives of the current study were to examine the relation between consenting to a post-mortem organ donation procedure and subsequent process of grief in the bereaved. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in a representative time-sample of 95 bereaved who lost a first-degree family member on intensive care wards in 27 Dutch hospitals. In 36 cases an organ donation procedure took place, in 23 cases consent was refused, and in 36 cases no request for organ donation was made to the bereaved.The authors found there were no differences in levels of depression and problems with detachment from the deceased between bereaved (first-degree family members) who participated in an organ donation procedure, those who refused consent, and families who were not approached for post-mortem organ donation. No differences were found in levels of main outcome measures between three donation conditions. However, dissatisfaction with hospital care was associated with depressive and griefsymptoms.The results indicate that consenting to organ donation in itself neither hinders nor furthers the grief process.

What emotions did people in the Middle Ages associate with suicide, and how did they react emotionally to the possibility or act of suicide? Although pre-modern Europe did not have a dedicated word to signify the concept of self-inflicted death, and although there is no evidence of suicide notes until the seventeenth century, we find in a range of medieval texts an interest in the act and attendant emotions of suicide. In this essay, we demonstrate how scholars might discover emotions related to suicide in two genres: English legal records and first-person life narratives. Through close attention to textual detail and recourse to wider cultural implications of emotionally meaningful contexts, we show that even the unlikeliest of texts can provide inroads to emotions related to medieval suicide. With these models we hope to encourage scholars to seek other genres and ways of reading that will help to unlock the silences of the self-murdered.

A cross-sectional design was used to examine age-related differences in suicidal thinking and reasons for living among younger (nˆ82; M ageˆ21) and older (nˆ82; M ageˆ68) adults.Volunteers anonymously completed the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation and the Reasonsfor Living Inventory. Findings indicated that olderadults do not manifest suicidal ideation differently than younger adults. However, there does appear to be some age-related differences in reasons for not committing suicide. Compared to the younger group, the oldergroup reported moral objections and child-related concernsas stronger reasonsfor not committingsuicide. An implicationis that the identificationofspecificreasons that deter individuals from committing suicide may be clinically useful and provide some assistance in suicide prevention efforts.

Cómo citar este artículo / Citation: Va czi, Ma riann. 20 19. «M uerte en la Ca tedral: Ce nizas y ri tos fu nerarios en lo s ca mpos de fútbol». Disparidades. Revista de Antropología 74(2): e020. doi: <https://doi.org/10.3989/dra.2019.02.020>. RESUMEN: Un aspecto principal de los ritos funerarios y las prácticas mortuorias modernas y occidentales ha sido un desplaza-miento de ubicaciones religiosas-institucionales a otras seculares-privadas. Sin embargo, algunas respuestas performativas, como esparcir las cenizas de los aficionados difuntos en estadios deportivos, continúan definiendo la muerte como una relación social emplazada en un sistema cultural de obligaciones simbólicas más amplio. Los esparcidos de cenizas en los estadios son actos de los que se cree que tendrán consecuencias para el futuro de la comunidad. Hay tres factores que convierten los estadios en em-plazamientos pertinentes para la re-ritualización de la muerte: emoción, identidad, e iconicidad. Las intensas experiencias emocio-nales, la tradición familiar, las narrativas colectivas y el poder transformador del espacio liminal permiten a los aficionados imaginar su propia transición de muerto a vivo, y su presencia continua en el orden social.

This comparative study examines the way Israeli Holocaust descendants and Cambodian genocide descendants differentially reconstitute " discontinued " descendant-ancestor relations with the genocide dead they never knew. Empirically examining the way distant bonds " discontinued " in contexts of warfare and mass suffering are restored in everyday life, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarship on genocide legacies, continuing bonds, and person-dead contact. Descendants depict channels of engagement with the dead entailing person-person-dead contact, person-object interaction, and imaginal conversations, constituting copresence and intersubjectivity. Contrary to trauma theory, Holocaust and genocide studies, and the anthropology of absence that reduce relations with the dead to maladaptive identification or the burdensome presence of voided absence, the data points to normalized and empowering relations. Comparative findings contribute to our understanding of the way cross-cultural meaning making differentially conceptualizes the porous border between the living and their ancestors and informs the restoration of (dis)-continued bonds. [continuing bonds, intergenerational transmission of trauma, genocide legacies, memory, death, intercultural variation] Although much has been written about the psychological legacy of trauma survivors and their descendants (Danieli 1998; Kidron 2012), we know little regarding descendants' lived experience of the presence of and relations with those long dead and the mechanisms through which these bonds are constituted and sustained. Recent studies have shown that survivor-descendant empathic interaction and person-object interaction with memento mori constitute the taken-for-granted material, embodied, and emotive copresence of the geno-cide past in the familial domain (Kidron 2009). We may ask whether within this context of the " living memory " (Halbwachs 1980) of genocide in the survivor home, descendants also empathically sense and engage with absent relatives. Do descendants give their absence form, content, and voice? Considering the absence of direct descendant relations with the distant dead and what the literature depicts as the absence of trauma descendant knowledge regarding the genocide and prewar past (Danieli 1998), how might these relations be con-stituted? How do descendants depict this engagement? In keeping with trauma theory, are relations experienced as a personal burden (Wardi 1990), as a psycho-socially distressing form of identification (Kestenberg 1992), or a meaningful and normalized experience of everyday life? Are these relations solely constituted by the deathworlds that ruptured the lives of their forbears? Alternatively, do inherited ancestor-descendant relations mark the

This article considers how migrant deaths -particularly in the borderlands of Europe and the United States -relate to the speed at which migrants travel. It argues that the most dangerous boundaries for migrants, and the most difficult ones to traverse, are those which embody the sharpest divides in energy consumption, divides reflected in the vulnerability of migrants who typically move at relatively slow speeds and have insufficient access to safe modes of travel. Thus, migrant deaths and the boundaries that produce them embody the injustices associated with grossly unequal levels of access to, control over, and consumption of environmental resources.

Human tower building (castells) is a two-hundred-year-old traditional sport in Catalonia (Spain), which has boomed since the democratic Transition (1975) as a national symbol and low-cost intergenerational pastime activity. In 2006, however, a child performer died as a result of a collapse. Catalonia responded with profound grief, and the human tower community embarked on a process of 'overcoming' (superació), whose success was made contingent on the iconic outcome of towers ritually performed throughout a year and a half. Performers produced and deployed cultural meanings of verticality, and operationalized them for bereavement and meaning making. The case inserts the iconicity of body practice in anthropological debates about death in three ways. First, the verticality and body experience of tower building allowed the bereaved community to imagine life, death, transcendence, and 'resurrection', thus establishing continuing bonds and a social afterlife. Second, the structural completion of towers lent itself to stage-and task-oriented interpretations of bereavement, whereby each tower level was a task the community had to execute to proceed to the next stage of bereavement. However, and third, mourning through sport performance also acknowledged the uncertainties of those cultural scripts of bereavement through the performative contingencies of the outcome of tower building.

When thinking about deathscapes and how they are assembled,
current literature often points to the presence of material objects as
ways in which individuals evoke the absence of the dead. These
objects can be both performative and communicative, becoming
a channel of communication. But the literature has so far mostly
neglected the ability of spirits to ‘talk back’ to the living through
objects and bodies, and in doing so influence and have effect on
the latter’s actions. In this paper, I will investigate the ways in which
spirits are seen to have agency in deathscapes. I propose the
concept of material proxies of consociation, denoting objects/
bodies which act as ways for spirits to not just communicate, but
interact with the living. Using two visual ethnographic case studies,
one of the divining blocks and the other of a ritual exhumation,
I will demonstrate that spirits can indeed be seen to be active and
effective agents in the assembling of deathscapes. In doing so, this
paper offers new ways of understanding three things – the role and
importance of spirits in deathscapes, how the absent is made
present, and how the spaces in which living and dead interact are
constructed and shaped.

This paper explores design students’ proposals for a redesign of the interior of a room of silence at the SUS hospital in Malmo, Sweden. Reflection and existential meaning-making are discussed in relation to the material culture of design, and more specifically in relation to four different themes found among the students’ proposals: nature as common symbolic framework and salutary force; lighting creating a visual and spatial ambience for retreat; interactive objects allowing ritualised activities; and the presence and absence of religious symbols. In this paper, we argue that architecture and design more profoundly could support people with varying existential viewpoints when it comes to providing religiously and culturally shared public spaces for dealing with existentially crucial moments. We also argue for an interdisciplinary research approach to healing environments, where existential meaning-making is included in the overall discussion of the design of health care architecture.

The most discussed and analyzed form of deathwork is the dyadic therapist ↔ client relationship, but this far from exhausts the various types of professional work involving the dead. Mediator deathwork is where the professional gleans or constructs information about the dead, edits and polishes it, and publicly presents the edited version in a public rite; this entails a triadic flow of information: the dead → the mediator → public rite. Examples include pathologists, coroners, American funeral directors, funeral celebrants, obituary writers, spiritualist mediums, and museum curators. Other types include barrier deathwork (in which the professional insulates the living from the dead—the dead | the living— as in British funeral directing), and intercessory deathwork in which priests send prayers the other way, from the living to, or on behalf of, the dead: mourner → priest → the dead. The article focuses on mediator deathwork because, though it is the most widespread form of deathwork, it is the least discussed and analyzed.

This study examined patterns of making meaning among 155 parents whose children died from a variety of violent and non-violent causes. Findings indicated 53% of violent loss survivors could not make sense of their loss, as compared to 32% of non-violent loss survivors. Overall, there was overlap in sense-making strategies across different causes of death, with many parents invoking spiritual and religious meanings and the cultivation of empathy for the suffering of others. Nonetheless, violent loss survivors described the imperfection of the world and brevity of life more frequently in their narrative responses than parents who lost a child to natural causes, who in turn were more likely to find benefit in the loss in terms of personal growth. Violent loss survivors-and especially those losing a child to homicide-also reported enhanced appreciation of life more frequently than survivors of non-violent losses, and surviving a child's suicide was specifically associated with a change in priorities in the sample. Findings are discussed