The pervasive dead

Abstract

The sociological idea that modern societies sequestrate the dead is interrogated through Robert Hertz's anthropological lens in which the position of body, spirit and mourners mirror one another. Focusing on Britain, two discursive systems are thus identified. In 'the separated dead' , 'letting go' characterised not only the mourner but also practices that separated the deceased's body and spirit from the living. This is now being challenged by a new body/spirit/mourner system -'the pervasive dead' -in which bonds continue, the online dead can appear at any time, human remains sustain the everyday environment, and the dead become angels caring for the living. These elements have not hitherto been analysed together as contrasting body/spirit/mourner discursive systems.The dominant sociological theory of death in contemporary society, classically articulated by Mellor and Shilling (1993), is that death is sequestrated -the organisation and experience of death have become increasingly private, separated from mainstream society. The sequestration thesis resonates with historian Ariès ' (1981) notion that twentieth-century death and dying are forbidden or hidden, and with critiques -whether sophisticated or crude -of a 'death denying society ' (Becker, 1973) in which death is 'taboo ' (Gorer, 1955). Authors employing these concepts often lump together death, awareness of mortality, dying, the dead and the bereaved -all are marginalised by modern western societies. These different facets of death, however, are almost as broad as life itself, so key distinctions can easily get lost. This article focuses on the post-death period and the dead -specifically the ordinary dead encountered by British mourners, their families and friends, not the spectacular death represented in mass media that is 'at a safe distance, but hardly ever experienced upfront' (Jacobsen, 2016).The article is one of several (Cann, 2014b;Howarth, 2007;Maddrell, 2016;Mitchell, 2007;Petersson, 2010; Walter, Hourizi, Moncur, & Pitsillides, 2011-2012) that question sequestration theory by suggesting that twenty-first-century western societies are witnessing a new integration of the dead into everyday life. What distinguishes the present article is that it interrogates the empirical evidence for sequestration through a simple but key insight from anthropologist Robert Hertz (1907Hertz ( /1960. In a classic essay written 110 years ago about Indonesian burial rites, Hertz argued that the mourner's social and psychological state does not exist in isolation from the state of the deceased's body and spirit. 1 In life, a person is constituted by body, spirit and social relationships, and these continue to be symbolically integrated after death in a triangular body-spirit-mourner system of practice and meaning. Hertz's insight has been applied by anthropologists to mourning in a wide range of traditional and even modern societies (Danforth, 1982;Metcalf & Huntington, 1991). Here, I apply it to contemporary Britain, taking care to analyse the three main ...

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