Zombie Tourism, Cliff Walks, and Skydiving

Abstract

At the outset, the volume quotes Michel de Montaigne, who suggests that death has many ways to surprise us. As a co-editor of this book, how did death surprise you?I would say two things for me were surprising as we dug into this project. Writing from our European and North American perspectives, Jonathan Skinner and I were struck by the depth and resilience of what has come to be called "Western death denial." This psycho-social phenomenon became rmly embedded in European, and especially American, society mostly in the twentieth century. Many people in so-called Western societies do not want to confront their own deaths, but at the same time, we revel in the deaths of others in our entertainment. This phenomenon was spurred on by the medicalization of death, the industrialization and capitalization of funerals, and practices like embalming (which is, of course, a way to make a body look as life-like as possible). Meanwhile, pop culture has become more and more grisly, and even descends into what Kathleen Adams in her chapter on "zombie tourism" in what the volume calls a "pornography of the macabre."The second thing that surprised me, looking out from our vantage point of the UK/US onto the practices and beliefs of the rest of the world, is the sheer variety of human experiences with death.It is clear, too, when examining the cross-cultural literature on death and dying, that death is very much a uid social process rather than a biological event. In the introductory chapter, you share a vignette about your own rst skydiving experience as a time when leisure and the risk of death overlapped in your own life. At the end, you query, "Was this fun, or was this what dying feels like?" Upon re ection, which is it?