The Social Construction of Death This page intentionally left blank The Social Construction of Death Interdisciplinary Perspectives Edited by Leen Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Leen van Brussel and Nico Carpentier 2014 Individual chapters © Contributors 2014 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-39190-2 Chapter 12: Except where otherwise noted, this chapter is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ All other chapters: All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-48313-6 ISBN 978-1-137-39191-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137391919 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Dedicated to the memory of David Keith Ashton (1945–2014) Contents List of Illustrations i x Notes on Contributors x Introduction 1 Leen Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier Part I The Social Construction of Death 1 A Discourse-Theoretical Approach to Death and Dying 1 3 Leen Van Brussel 2 Studying Illness and Dying through Constructivist Grounded Theory 34 Linda Liska Belgrave and Kathy Charmaz 3 Feeling Bodies: Analysing the Unspeakability of Death 5 2 John Cromby and Adele Phillips Part II Death in Popular Media 4 Representations of Corpses in Contemporary Television 7 5 Tina Weber 5 Ladies’ Choice? Requested Death in Film 9 2 Fran McInerney 6 The Expertise of Illness: Celebrity Constructions and Public Understandings 114 Daniel Ashton Part III Political and Ethical Dimensions of Death 7 Death, Fantasy, and the Ethics of Mourning 1 37 Jason Glynos 8 Ethics, Killing and Dying: The Discursive Struggle between Ethics of War and Peace Models in the Cypriot Independence War of 1955–1959 1 61 Nico Carpentier vii viii Contents 9 On the Deathly Construction of Society 185 Arnar Árnason Part IV ‘Governing’ Death and the Dead 10 F rom Theft to Donation: Dissection, Organ Donation and Collective Memory 2 05 Glennys Howarth 11 D igital Objects of the Dead: Negotiating Electronic Remains 221 Margaret Gibson 12 ‘ This In-Between’: How Families Talk about Death in Relation to Severe Brain Injury and Disorders of Consciousness 2 39 Celia Kitzinger and Jenny Kitzinger OPEN T his chapter is available open access under a CC BY license via palgraveconnect.com Afterword: The Social Construction of Death: Reflections from a Quantitative Public Health Researcher 2 59 Joachim Cohen Index 271 List of Illustrations Figures 7.1 Pathways of loss 1 47 7.2 American, British and German cemeteries in Normandy, France 152 8.1 British anti-EOKA leaflet 175 9.1 Memorial crosses by Suðurlandsvegur, Iceland 193 9.2 Road deaths, front cover of DV newspaper 196 Tables 5.1 List of English-language films containing a requested death theme made between 1960 and 2010 96 5.2 List of English-language films containing a mercy killing theme made between 1974 and 2001 104 13.1 An ideal-typical description of the differences between the social constructionist and (post)positivist research traditions in thanatology 264 ix Notes on Contributors Arnar Árnason i s Senior Lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out ethnographic fieldwork in North East England, Japan, Scotland and Iceland and writes on the politics of death and grief. Daniel A shton is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Industries, Bath Spa University. In 2010–2012 he co-led (with Dr Rebecca Feasey) the ‘Celebrity, Risk and the Media’ project that investigated public understandings of the ‘Jade Effect’. Research find- ings have been shared through presentations at national and inter- national conferences and seminars, and published in the journal Journalism . Linda Liska Belgrave is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Graduate Program in the Department of Sociology at the University of Miami. Her research interests include medical sociology, particu- larly overlapping with gerontology, social psychology, social justice, and grounded theory. She has pursued research on elders’ experience of well-being, the daily lives of African American caregivers of family with Alzheimer’s disease, the conceptualisation of successful ageing, and academic freedom. Nico C arpentier is Associate Professor at the Communication Studies Department of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB – Free University of Brussels) and Lecturer at Charles University in Prague. He is also an executive board member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and he was vice-president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) from 2008 to 2012. Kathy Charmaz is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Faculty Writing Program at Sonoma State University. She has written The Social Reality of Death and two award-winning books, Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time; and Constructing Grounded Theory, which has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Portuguese. Her current work concerns medical sociology, social psychology, and writing for publication . x