Death in Different Societies

¶ … social science viewpoint toward death can be valuable both for society and for individuals. In most societies, death plays a major role in how lives are shaped. Certainly, the way that death is handled in society can differ, and governs attitudes that society has towards death. Social sciences can help us to understand a little bit more about how societies deal with death, and we can understand the role that death plays in our lives. The author in particular notes that more or how we live and die is connected to our societal views about death, and illustrates this with example of the shift away from death as a religious experience that occurred in the 19th century, and how this change was coincidental to other changes in how we lived our lives and how we defined our lives.

The social sciences can also be valuable to help us understand our own views on death. At the beginning of the chapter the author asks the rhetorical question about why we should interrupt our lives to think about death. The reality is that this will happen regardless -- we will lose people and will one day fact death ourselves. Having a better sense of how people deal with death can help us when the time comes that we must face these issues ourselves. This means that the social sciences can help any individual prepare for dealing with these issues by understanding how others deal with them.

Journal 5

There are a few different reasons why many minority groups have had little to no access to hospice care. One is that hospice care is to some extent seen as a luxury, something for which a premium economic price is paid. That limits access to groups that have less financial wealth. But there are other factors that might be even more important. One is that other cultures may have a different relationship with death, one that is significantly less compatible with hospice care than our own culture. We see hospice care as a means of giving comfort as we move towards death, because this fits with our society's understanding of death as a cold and lonely experience, one that goes in hand with suffering, pain, loneliness and emptiness. If other societies do not experience death the same way, then the people in those societies may well not even think to seek out hospice care. Hospice care is, after all, an extension of Western European tradition.

The author also notes that modern hospice care has a set of implicit standards that do not adequately take into account cultural preferences or unique individual preferences. Anybody with an interest in dying as themselves, of who they are and where they come from, would not likely want to end their life in a hospice where their individual humanity is ignored or actively reduced. While in the situation where hospice care's cost shuts people out this is mostly a bias factor, a hospice system that actively mutes the uniqueness of the individual is one that is simply incompatible with many people. Those from other cultures in particular will, whether this is intended or not, not feel comfortable submitting to a system that refuses to recognize their needs.

Arguably, the hospice care mandates from the book are those that meet the needs of the people who run and staff hospice facilities, rather than the needs of the person dying. The lack of a patient-centric approach might clash quite strongly with the values of other cultures, where the aged are valued more than in Western culture.

Unit 4 Assignment

The U.S. approach to death and dying is mainly a medical approach. Kastenbaum notes that death is essentially seen as a breaking down of the physical machine. There is not a lot of thought given to the other aspects of death. In part, this is because of a strong ethnocentrism, yet the outcome is the same when one wishes to consider all the different cultures -- medical practitioners focus on the medical and leave everything else up to the patient and his/her family. But the end result is the same -- death is seen mainly as a medical phenomenon.

It is not always this way in other cultures. Kastenbaum in Chapter 5 discusses the Native American experience, where death is seen as a journey to the other side, and family members play an important role in this journey. In this approach, there is an acceptance that the physical body is dying, but the spiritual person is starting a journey, a new stage, by exiting that body. This approach thus sees death from a different lens, one of transition, rather than one of finality. This is quite different from the experience Kastenbaum describes in Chapter 4, where many patients slip into death, alone, in a medical facility. In many non-Western societies an important part of dying is not to die alone in such conditions.