Death in the Ethnographic Present
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375343 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Renato Rosaldo (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1988 |
| Volume | 9 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 425 |
| Publication date | 1988-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1772697 |
| OpenAlex | W2320024327 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 9 |
| References cited | 6 |
My central question is: How should ethnographies talk about death and bereavement? Ethnographic discourse on death tends to ignore the cultural practices and lived experiences characterized by improvisation, subjectivity, and particularity. Instead it concentrates on formality, externality, and generality. Aside from being inhumane, the result is superficial social analysis. My hope is that a diagnosis of the problem will lead to better studies in the future. Ethnographic representations of death can be characterized by formality, externality, and generality. Formality refers to the practice of describing human events as if they were normal, highly codified, and always repeated in precisely the same manner. Such accounts eliminate significant variations in timing and tempo, sources of disturbance and particular struggles or goals. Externality refers to the distance at which ethnographers write. This distance presumably confers objectivity but it also objectifies by producing descriptions that fail to consider the subjectivity of the people described. Generality refers to the way many accounts stress not particular agonies of grief but general recipes for mourning rituals. Perhaps the notion of shared culture leads analysts to suppose they should explore only identical forms throughout a group. Following their discipline's norms of writing, ethnographers tend to flatten their accounts, distancing themselves from the tears and agony, as they seek out the lowest common denominators that make all funerals not different from one another but the same. Yet the emotional
Ethnography · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Cross-Cultural and Social Analysis · History · Social and Cultural Dynamics
Signifying Bereavement
Violence, solace, and ritual
Furtive breath, or how your zz plant won’t free us
Developing a scale to measure social dynamics in funeral ceremonies
Death, Emotions, and Social Change among the Austronesian-Speaking Bunun of Taiwan
Commemorating the deadly other side of externalized borders through “migrant-martyrs”, sacrifices and politizations of (irregular) migration on the international migrants' day in Mali
Entre psychologie des rites et anthropologie de la perte
Coping with Death
Moralizing emotion
| Unique citing works | 9 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 1995 - 2025 (31) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 9 |