8th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal

12-15 September 2007, Bath, UK

Keynote speakers

Wednesday 12 September

18:00, Arts Lecture Theatre, University of Bath

Allan Kellehear BA, PhD (UNSW)
Professor of Sociology, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath

'The science of death'

The research literature about ‘brain death’ is characterised by biomedical, bioethical and legal writing. This has led to overlooking wider but no less pertinent social, historical and cultural understandings about death. By ignoring the work of other social and clinical colleagues in the study of dying, the literature on the determination of death has become unnecessarily abstract and socially disconnected from parallel concerns about death and dying. These circumstances foster incomplete suggestions and narrow discussions about the nature of death as well as an ongoing misunderstanding of general public and health care staff responses to brain death criteria. I outline these problems through a review of the key literature on the determination of death.

Allan was born and educated in Sydney, Australia, and holds a PhD in sociology from the University of New South Wales. From 1998 to 2006 he was Professor of Palliative Care and Director, Palliative Care Unit, School of Public Health, La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. During that time he also served as the 2003-04 Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo, Japan. He joined the department at Bath in the autumn of 2006; teaches in the MSc program in Death & Society and is co-editor with Dr Glennys Howarth of Mortality - the international journal of interdisciplinary studies in death and dying.

Thursday 13 September

11.00, County Suite, Hilton Hotel, Bath

Hikaru Suzuki PhD MBA
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Singapore Management University

From WWII to the present, there has been a dramatic transformation in Japanese funerals.  Rituals based on community networks have been taken over by the funeral industry, who commercialised the funeral rituals into comprehensive services.  Shifting from funeral rituals to industry-prepared funeral ceremonies meant three underlying parallel transformations: 1) knowledge transfer, 2) change in the community collective solidarity, and 3) standardisation of funerals.

Firstly, the Japanese funeral industry gained funeral knowledge from community elders who used to lead and guide rituals.  As Japan propelled itself towards modernisation, community youth migrated to cities while community knowledge was buried with the passing of elders.  It was this knowledge that Japanese funeral industry inherited and appropriated as knowledge capital for their marketing.  Secondly, funerals used to reinforce community cohesiveness and strengthen moral bonds.  When there was a death in a community, all community members participated in the ritual process, e.g. women prepared mourning costumes and food, while men attended to preparing funeral altar and other decorations, and digging of the grave.  Funeral rituals, like weddings, were an occasion on which a community drew a clear distinction between ordinary and unordinary days.  It was considered a period of sacredness, impurity and danger involving the entire community.  The development of a funeral industry, however, gradually attenuated the notion of impurity and danger along with the sense of sacredness that permeated and bonded a community.  Lastly, the growth of the funeral industry led not only to their control of funeral knowledge but also to their services becoming the funeral tradition and standard of practice for all Japanese people.  The period from the ‘60s to the early ‘90s saw funeral standardisation by the Japanese funeral industry.  Funeral practices in community rituals that varied greatly depending on the region were gradually homogenised into practices and standard services set by funeral industry. 

By the mid ‘90s however, the Japanese funeral industry faced dissatisfied customers who disliked the prescribed set of funeral practices that had become the new tradition.  This phenomenon went hand in hand with the results of post-modernisation and globalisation affecting Japan.  Japanese people began to express their views of, and needs from funeral practices, rejecting the funeral industry and their set services.  One can see the development of this movement by the massive amount of literature published since the mid ‘90s on how to carry out a funeral to one’s liking or how to prepare one’s own funeral and death.  Consumer culture has been the dominant force in the transformation of funeral ceremonies ever since.  Similar to the shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism in the West, the Japanese funeral industry and its services are continuously moving towards ‘flexible specialisation’, that is to say, there is a trend to seek more flexibility, authenticity, and uniqueness to satisfy consumer taste.

Dr Hikaru Suzuki is an assistant professor of anthropology at Singapore Management University. She graduated with a BA in Chinese History from Beijing University, receiving a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University and an MBA in Marketing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan (Stanford, 2000). Her fieldwork research has included placements with Sun Ray Inc, a provider of Japanese Ceremonial Services in Japan, and she has written numerous articles on Japanese funerals and their rituals.

Friday 14 September

11.00, County Suite, Hilton Hotel, Bath

Eugénie Mukanoheli
BED (Language Teaching)
MA Counselling and Guidance for Colleges and Community Agencies
Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, Rwanda

"Facilitating Bereavement Recovery and Restoring Dignity to the 1994 Genocide Victims in Rwanda"

This presentation will examine the genocide that devastated Rwanda in 1994. During this period, around one million people were savagely slaughtered by the national army, the militia, their neighbours, and even their family members in some cases. In such circumstances, the victims' dead bodies were left scattered across the countryside. Many of the corpses were carelessly thrown into mass graves, pit latrines and drainage ditches. The dignity which is customarily paid to a dead person, which is expressed in the local language Kinyarwanda as "gushyingura" (meaning putting aside carefully), was denied to them. In addition, during that tumultuous period when the targets of the militia were constantly threatened and struggling for their uncertain survival, the survivors were unable to mourn and grieve for their family members or friends. A large number of them did not even know where or under what conditions the killings had occurred. Therefore, the genocide survivors not only suffer from the circumstances surrounding the loss of their loved ones, but their bereavement process is further complicated by the dehumanising conditions in which they died.

Since 1995, the genocide survivors' association called IBUKA which means REMEMBER, in collaboration with the help of the Rwandan Government has been trying to identify important genocide sites throughout the country. IBUKA aims to dig proper graves so that the remains of the victims can be kept and visited, as a way of honouring the deceased based on the local funeral customs. Thus, each year, during the genocide commemoration week (April 7-14), which is also called the national mourning week in the local language, burials are organised at the national level, thus allowing the genocide survivors to mourn and grieve for their loved ones. This process seems to facilitate the survivors' bereavement recovery while alleviating some of the complicated grief reactions as expressed by several participants: "One feels a bit relieved after accomplishing what should have been done at the time of death."

Just after the 1994 genocide in her country, Rwanda, Eugenie Mukanoheli worked in the UNICEF Kigali Office Trauma Recovery Programme that was set up to address the psychological needs of a large number of children who had been orphaned or separated from their families. It was while working in this programme that she developed a great interest in Counselling, which in turn led to an MA from New York University in 2002. Since then, Eugenie Mukanoheli has worked at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) as a lecturer in the KIST Language Centre and as a student counsellor. The majority of her clients at KIST are genocide survivors that she tries to help regain a positive perspective for the future.

Saturday 15 September

11.00, County Suite, Hilton Hotel, Bath

Sandra M. Gilbert
Professor of English
University of California, Davis

"Modern Death, Millennial Mourning: The Challenge of Twenty-first Century Grief."

Sandra M. Gilbert is the author of seven collections of poetry and a prose work, Death’s Door: Modern Dying and The Ways We Grieve, which was published in 2006. Gilbert has also published a memoir and an anthology of elegies along with a number of critical works and essays in journals. With Susan Gubar, a professor of English at Indiana University, Gilbert has co-authored The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-century Literary Imagination.

A former president of the Modern Language Association, Gilbert has taught in the past at Princeton, Indiana, and Stanford universities, as well as Cal. State, Hayward, and Williams College. She has been a recipient of Guggenheim, Rockefeller, NEH, and Soros Foundation fellowships, and she has held residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Bellagio, and Bogliasco. With Susan Gubar, she was named a Ms. “Woman of the Year” in 1986 and (also with Gubar) one of USA Today’s “People Who Made a Difference” in 1985. In 1988 she was awarded a D. Litt. by Wesleyan University, and in 1990, she was (with Karl Shapiro) a co-recipient of the International Poetry Forum’s Charity Randall Award. More recently, she has won a Patterson Prize (for Ghost Volcano), an American Book Award (for Kissing the Bread), the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (from the Italian-American Foundation), the Premio Lerici Pea awarded by the Liguri nel Mondo association, and several awards from Poetry Magazine. In 2004 she was awarded the degree of Doctor Philosophiae Honoris Causa by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

You can read more about Sandra Gilbert and her work on her website, www.sandramgilbert.com

General info

Keynote speakers

Programme

Ethics statement

Booking

Accommodation and conference rates

Arts and Social programme

The City of Bath

Sponsorship (pdf)