Grief and Mourning: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (1/16 lecture notes)

Grief and Mourning: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

-An introduction to issues in the study of death across cultures.

The distinction between ‘grief’ and ‘mourning’: Is it supported*?

·      grief is a subjective state, a set of feelings that arise spontaneously after a significant death

·      mourning is a set of rituals or behaviors prescribed by culture's tradition.

*In this distinction, thought, or cognitive meaning, is largely absent from both grief and mourning because the former is mostly feelings and the latter mostly action. 

This distinction between grief and mourning does not hold up to cross-cultural scrutiny.

·      INDIVIDUALITY: The concept of grief is an artifact of modernity. Grief as a real subjective state grows from a culture that prizes and cultivates individual experience.

·      There is no equivalent to the term grief in some other languages

o   in some cultures, as in Japan, the concept of emotions that are only in the individual seems foreign. For the Japanese, individual identity is a function of social harmony. Emotions are part of family or community membership, sensed among the members so as to create a harmonized atmosphere.

o   The term mourning does have a Japanese equivalent, mo, which refers both to the ritual responses to death and the emotions—commonly defined in the West as "grief"—that attend them. 

o   Hitan, the Japanese word that comes closest to the English word grief, means "sadness and sorrow," but the word does not imply that the emotions were brought about by death or loss. Hitan cannot be used in a way that refers to a self-evident inner reality. " Kanojyo-ha hitan ni sizundeiru. " (She grief to sinking.) An qualifier like "to sink" is needed because in Japanese Hitan cannot be a complete state on its own.

o   With no Japanese word available, writers introducing Western psychological ideas have transliterate grief as guri-fu. 

o   How the English concepts of grief and mourning are translated in other languages and to look at how different words may change the way people might think about grief? (language and culture)

Is grief universal? (instinctual)

·      In every culture people cry or seem to want to cry after a death that is significant to them.

o   Attachment theory: Instinctual response programmed into our genetic inheritance, much as nest building or migration is hard-wired into birds. The response is aroused by the perception of specific situations (i.e., harm, threat, success or failure, and breeding opportunities). Culture, of course, influences how people appraise situations, yet similar perceptions of events trigger similar instinctual responses. A significant death, then, might be regarded as a universal trigger of grieving emotions, although which death is significant enough spark such a response depends on the value system of a particular culture. Universal instincts, then, might provide the basis for concepts that could explain behavior in all cultures.

o   Humans are attached to individuals all through their lives. When they die, individuals experience separation and loss, and so must reorganize their attachments to match the new reality.

o   But attachment alone is not a sufficient basis for cross-cultural comparison.

§  First, there is little cross-cultural research on attachment

§  The theory does not consider that as people mature their attachments become broader--As the child matures, each level of social membership or identity is also an attachment (e.g., clan, village, tribe, nation, religious tradition). At each level, separation becomes a less plausible explanation for grief because attachments to individual people become interwoven with social systems and cultural meanings that cannot be reduced to biological inheritance.

§  In the individualistic culture of the modern West, with its eroding attachments to larger social systems, primary social relationships are limited largely to monogamy and the nuclear family.

o   Death may arouse instinctual responses other than those that are labeled "grief" in cultures.

§  Some deaths in Western culture, for example, arouse a trauma response. It may be that the trauma response is as universal as the separation response in attachment.

§  In traditional Chinese culture, for example, death presents the problem of pollution. One of the purposes of funeral rituals was to protect men from pollution while women took the pollution on themselves, thereby purifying the deceased for the next life.

§  Powerlessness, separation, loss, and sometimes trauma …etc.

What is the symbolic meaning of death?

·      Death is used to understand other realities in human ‘life’.

o   For traditional Chinese women, for example, death was like marriage.

o   In the West the concept of grief is applied to other separations and losses, such as divorce, and to other traumas, such as home invasion.

·      When a significant person dies, the issue of meaning is central for the survivors:

o   What does this death mean?

o   What does this life mean?

o   What did this person mean to me and to this community? An individual seeks to make sense of his or her experience using cognitive or mental models that are supplied by that individual's culture.

·      Constuctivist model: the purpose of grief is the construction of durable biographies—individual and social narratives—of the dead person and of the survivors that enable the living to integrate the dead into their lives.

o   If something like an important death does not make sense, it is "nonsense." Both individuals and societies want to keep seeing the world the same way, but sometimes death forces one to see the world differently. When an individual sees the world differently, he or she constructs a new narrative, a new biography of themselves and of the person who has died.

o   People make sense of their world through social interaction. When something important happens in individuals' lives, they do not just think about it; they talk about it with others.

o   Grief and mourning do not just happen inside a person; they happen in the interactions between people.

o   In most cultures over human history, myth and ritual provide the intersubjective space in which one can construct the meaning of the deceased's life, death, and influence over the survivors' lives.

o   Differences in mourning behavior might be attributable to structural differences in societies.

§  In small, closely knit societies from mourning is different than in large, more loosely knit societies in which primary membership is in the nuclear family.

·      In small networks such as a rural village, members identify with people outside the nuclear family. When someone dies, people find substitutes for the deceased in their immediate social environment. Death disrupts the social structure of small networks, so mourning rites focus on rehabilitating the damaged role system by reallocating roles.

o   For example, when the elder dies, someone must be moved into the role of elder.

·      In more complex, loosely knit networks, such as in an industrialized city, most individual deaths do not significantly affect the larger social system, so grief loses any larger social meaning and becomes a matter of individual family and psychic readjustment.

o   Contemporary Western culture evinces a relative freedom of the individual from the constraints of cultural narrative. The price individuals pay for such freedom is a sense of inner loneliness that sociologists call "anomie." (Durkheim)

·      Grief becomes problematic when there is an incongruence of narratives within a level (e.g., an individual who is unable either to accept or reject contradictory stories).

·      Grief also becomes problematic when narratives at different levels of the hierarchy are incongruent (e.g., when individual's thoughts and emotions are incongruent with the family's understanding of what thoughts and expressions of emotion are acceptable).

·      A community's grief becomes problematic to itself when there are contradictory or incongruent narratives, such as when there is a disagreement about whether the high school students who kill themselves after they have killed other students should be memorialized along with those whom they killed.

·      A community's grief becomes problematic to other communities when the narratives are incongruent; for example, a gang's revenge narrative can be in conflict with the larger culture's narrative of the "rule of law" in which only the state can define and punish wrongful death.

How does society police grief?

·      It controls and instructs the bereaved about how to think, feel, and behave. All societies have rules about how the emotions of grief are to be displayed and handled.

o   In some cultures, for example, those who grieve should talk to the dead,

o   In other cultures the name of the dead should never be spoken.

o   Those who do not conform to the social expectations are labeled aberrant.

§  Anthropologist Unni Wikan, compared the rules in Egypt and Bali, both Islamic cultures. She found that in that in Bali, women were strongly discouraged from crying, while in Egypt women were considered abnormal if they did not incapacitate themselves in demonstrative weeping. (we will see that “culture” is a much stronger force than “religion” when it comes to death rituals)

§  In traditional China, women wailed laments but men sat silently. (gender distinctions are common).

§  They are often merely the directives for public performances that may or may not really express the mourners' private thoughts and feelings.

What are the roles played by the dead in individual lives and cultural systems?  

·      Persistent communion with the dead is a recurring behavioral pattern, far more common than an outright severing of all bonds across cultures.

·      Comparisons can be made between the changes in the relationship of the living and the dead during the mourning period.

·      Emile Durkheim: collective representations play a major role in developing social solidarity and identity in tribes, ethnic groups, and nations.

o   Grief and the rituals of mourning install the dead into collective memory as well as into the individual memories of those who knew them.

o   Grief then takes on a political meaning because one of the functions of all cultural narratives is to uphold the legitimacy of those who hold economic and political power.

§  In Chinese ancestor rituals, the dead remain part of the family, defining the values by which the family lives and creating the shared identity of the living members of the family (fits with their religious and kinship beliefs about their ancestors).

What will the cross-cultural study of grief show us?

·      At the biological level, the instincts aroused by a significant death;

·      At the linguistic level, the meanings and usage of the words that refer to what people call grief and mourning in the West.

·      At the level of social structure, the interchange between individuals and culture, grief and the resolution of grief happens in a series of nested cultural narratives—family, clan, tribe, community, subcultural, nation, religious tradition, and so on.

This semester we will look at all these levels of significance using the classic analyses of Metcalf and Huntington, as the basis for our wide-ranging analysis.