Social Death

Questioning the life-death boundary

Jana Králová, Tony Walter, Jana Králová, Tony Walter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315467238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Social death occurs when the social existence of a person or group ceases. With an individual, it can occur before or after physical death. Scholars in a wide range of disciplines have applied the concept to very diverse issues – including genocide, slavery, dementia, hospitalisation, and bereavement. Social death relates to social exclusion, social capital, social networks, social roles and social identity, but its theorising is not united – scholars in one field are often unaware of its use in other fields.

This is the first book to bring a range of perspectives together in a pioneering effort to bring to the field conceptual clarity rooted in empirical data. Preceded by an original theoretical discussion of the concept of social death, contributions from the UK, Romania, Sweden, and Israel analyse the fourth age, end of life policies, dying alone at home, suicide, photographs on gravestones, bereavement, and the agency of dead musicians. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

What is social death?

Jana Králová

Department of Social and Policy Sciences, Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath, Bath, UK

Social death is on many occasions used too broadly by academics in several different disciplines, creating ambiguity around its application. Conceptual clarification is needed, not least because of the importance of the empirical topics to which the concept has been applied, such as genocide, slavery and dementia. Analysis of repeatedly occurring structural similarities in diverse studies of social death reveals three underlying notions: a loss of social identity, a loss of social connectedness and losses associated with disintegration of the body. The article concludes firstly, that social death is a multifaceted phenomenon with a single conceptual framework; secondly, that in order to preserve the concept’s theoretical potential it should only be used for the most extreme circumstances whereby most or all of the key facets are severely compromised and/or lost; thirdly, that social death might be usefully seen as the opposite of well-being, so that well-being and social death each clarify the meaning of the other.

Introduction

What is social death? The term has been used by a wide range of scholars from different disciplines, working in different substantive fields, and – this article argues – not entirely consistently. The need for conceptual clarity is highlighted by the increasing, but often varied, use of the term. In the past six years, three substantial academic books (Cacho, 2012; Guenther, 2013; Norwood, 2009) have been published with social death in their title or subtitle. After briefly sketching the history of social science’s use of ‘social death’, the article analyses some key studies using the concept in order to identify its central components.

The term ‘social death’ first entered social science vocabulary with Sudnow’s (1967) study of social processes surrounding death. It was based on observations from two hospitals, where he described how the presumed social value of patients near death determines how they are treated by medical personnel and how much effort is invested into reviving them. He spelled out the differences between clinical, biological and social death. This is conducted through the actions of others whereby they treat the person as already deceased, although still clinically and biologically alive. However, a more commonly cited study that implies a distinction between physical and social death is Glaser and Strauss (1966). They describe how awareness of a person’s dying determines social interaction. They build their understanding of social death on Goffman’s (1961) concept of mortification of self – the series of humiliations undermining a person’s social identity as observed in a mental hospital. Kalish (1968) reconceptualised death as physical, psychological, sociological and social, and distinguished self-perceived social death, where a person believes that they are as good as dead, from other-perceived social death where it is others who think this.

Sweeting and Gilhooly (1991) comprehensively review social death literature in sociology and nursing. Later, they (1997) interviewed caregiving relatives of dementia sufferers, finding discrepancies between the carer’s belief and their behaviour concerning their relative’s social death. Of 95 caregivers, over a third believed and behaved as if their relative were socially dead, while more than another third neither believed nor behaved as if their relative were socially dead. Interestingly, one-fifth believed that their relative was socially dead while themselves behaving otherwise, and only four carers treated their relative as socially dead while believing in their social existence.

In histories of slavery the concept of social death is commonly attributed to Patterson (1982) who does not, however, cite any of the above-mentioned previous studies. Within a context of authority and alienation, he proposes two conceptions of social death – intrusive and extrusive – depending on how the slaves were initially recruited. In the intrusive mode, ‘the slave was ritually incorporated as the permanent enemy on the inside – the “domestic enemy” […]’ (Patterson, 1982, p. 39). In the extrusive mode:

the dominant image of the slave was that of an insider who had fallen, one who ceased to belong and had been expelled from normal participation in the community because of a failure to meet certain minimal legal or socioeconomic norms of behaviour. (Patterson, 1982, p. 41)

His concept of liminal incorporation, derived from Van Gennep (1960) and Turner (1967), suggests that slaves were still part of society although socially dead. He then discusses the slaves’ natal alienation, loss of connection not only with past but also with possible future generations. It is this loss of cross-generational links, of cultural heritage as well as a sense of belonging to a place that became key for later studies of genocide. Hence Claudia Card argues for adding the social death concept to the UN definition of genocide (2010). She quotes Patterson’s (1982) definition of social death that captures the non-existence of a slave outside of their master, their dislocation from community and their natal alienation from the family/tribe they were born to. Additionally, she recognises other forms of social death such as ‘slavery, banishment, disfigurement, illness, even self-chosen isolation’ (2010, p. 237).

Thus the general trend among scholars using the social death concept is to use it when a person/group has experienced extreme and profound loss. Death studies and gerontology concentrate on loss of role, of social identity, of social capital and of social networks; refugee studies examine displacement, social exclusion, loss of citizenship, of economic capital and of access to resources; slavery studies look at interplay of power dynamics and examine the loss of cultural capital and of links across the generations, on which genocide studies also draw. Scholars also consider the withdrawal of legal protection, as with prisoners, and the severe impact of this on their health. The focus of each interdisciplinary substantive field differs depending on its subject matter. This results in social death meaning the loss of one or more of the above named facets. However, people can suffer most of these losses simultaneously, though the extent of their losses differs according to individual circumstances.

For example, consider war refugees. In order to save their lives they are forced to leave their country of origin, losing access to their cultural heritage, cross-generational links, social networks, social as well as economic capital and roles associated with family and employment. Their human rights are endangered, while their stigmatised status entails social exclusion, all of which severely impacts on their mental and physical health. This, however, may be mitigated if at least some of these facets remain, despite the circumstances. Those Jews fleeing to the USA in the 1930s were often integrated into existing Jewish communities and also gained citizenship, depending on their social, economic and cultural capital. This leads us to consider what are the key facets of social death and at what point social death occurs.

In order to clarify the conceptual boundaries of social death, scholars need to agree on a unified conceptual framework and establish the point at which persons/groups will be considered socially dead. This article aims to start this process, at the same time showing where the special issue articles lie within the social death scholarship (the earlier articles discuss social death before physical death, the later ones social death after physical death).

Methods

The empirical investigation of social death is problematic for several reasons: the physical and social inaccessibility of the socially dead; concern about the well-being of those deemed socially dead as well as of the researchers; and the risk of losing other theoretical possibilities for the concept should the research be limited to only one substantive academic area in which the socially dead exist. All of these in turn provide a rationale for theoretical inquiry into the concept of social death.

In their extensive review of literature on conceptual frameworks, Leshem and Trafford (2007) concluded that constructing conceptual frameworks helps academics to reveal theories underpinning research and to capture dynamics between them. It also informs what methods are chosen to conduct any inquiry, thus creating transparency of the research process. I would add that it is possible to access an ethically problematic area of inquiry more easily if one explores it theoretically.

In order to identify and unify social death’s theoretical boundaries, therefore, something beyond a literature review is needed, namely a systematic comparison across disciplines of the concepts on which social death rests. Varying levels of theoretical development across as well as within the relevant disciplines requires applying both inductive and deductive inquiry. Sometimes concepts need to be compared with one another, at other times primary empirical incidents examined across different studies allowing us to establish their similarities, differences and relationships. Out of this will emerge higher order concepts that allow the development of an overarching conceptual framework. This approach to analysis/synthesis has much in common with meta-ethnography:

Meta-ethnography seeks to go beyond single accounts to reveal the analogies between the accounts. It reduces the accounts while preserving the sense of the account through the selection of key metaphors and organizers. The ‘senses’ of different accounts are then translated into one another. The analogies revealed in these translations are the form of the meta-ethnographic synthesis. (Noblit & Hare, 1988, p. 13)

My research has involved a systematic approach: searching for data (Booth, Papaioannou, & Sutton, 2012), analysis (Boeije, 2002), comparison (Fram, 2013) and synthesis (Noblit & Hare, 1988) using recently developed strategies (Atkins et al., 2008). The following databases were searched for the term ‘social death’ using Boolean operators with the following results: Web of Science 120, Social Policy and Practice 5, SCOPUS 125, PsychNet 65, PubMed 32 and IBSS 56 by June 2015. Due to limited resources only the studies from IBSS were analysed and seminal studies derived from a screening of their reference lists were also read.

This article, however, will present only studies relevant to the three identified facets, and begin to sketch social death’s conceptual framework. Its primary features will be a loss of social identity, of social connectedness and those losses associated with the disintegration of the body.

Loss of social identity

For the purposes of the following discussion, I shall take identity to refer to

the way people understand themselves in relation to other persons, to the world around them and to supernatural realms. Identity is a consequence of self-consciousness with particular social networks embedded within a particular language. Throughout life, the relationships which grow between individual men, women and children, as members of families and society, help foster that sense of who they are and of their purpose in the world. (Davies, 2002, p. 4)

The following section will discuss notions of the ‘non-person’ (Goffman, 1961), ‘homo sacer’ (Agamben, 1998) and the ‘ex-human’ (Biehl, 2004), revealing structural similarities and differences in these concepts and using them as a theoretical springboard to explain the loss of social identity that is embedded in the concept of social death.

Goffman’s (1961) essay on the situation of mental hospital patients revealed the processes involved in long-term hospitalisation which result in a person’s institutionalisation. This is achieved through the ongoing process of disculturation, where the person is not only removed from their natural social setting, causing them to lose their social roles, but is also placed in the institution’s degrading environment which initially removes all significant components of the individuals’ identity, forcing them to become a ‘non-person’. ‘[T]he recruit comes into the establishment with a conception of himself made possible by certain stable social arrangements in his home world […]; upon entrance, he is immediately stripped of the support provided by these arrangements’ and then ‘begins a series of abasements, degradations, humiliations, and profanations of self’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 24). Furthermore, the person placed in such an institution would often also acquire a stigma (Goffman, 1963).

A similar notion of absolute loss of a person’s value can be observed in Ancient Roman law, where as a form of punishment the status of ‘homo sacer’ was inflicted upon those who had committed a crime (Agamben, 1998). This entailed indefinite withdrawal of all legal, social and cultural protection, and meant such individuals could be killed at any time by anyone, without the perpetrator being charged. Furthermore, these individuals could never be sacrificed, their death being excluded from any religious context. Therefore, this status leaves a being with what Agamben (1998) calls a ‘bare life’: unprotected by law and exposed to death at any given time.

Agamben (1998) explains that the status of homo sacer is based on the notion of inclusive exclusion: inclusive because it marks the person as an ‘easy target’. It stigmatises it, as if calling out to others, ‘you can hurt me, you can kill me, nobody will care’, or alternatively, ‘when I die, no one will cry’ (Hecht, 1998, p. 145). It marks people out just as yellow stars marked out Jews in the Holocaust, prostitutes are vulnerable to rape, and the enemy’s children, women, elderly and disabled are susceptible to extreme cruelty in war (Card, 2010). This inclusion means turning irreversibly into a ‘non-person’ (Goffman, 1961).

The exclusive notion refers to segregation from the community and its resources. In Ancient Rome this implied unavoidable death and in some contemporary circumstances it still does (Dageid & Duckert, 2008). The homo sacer’s stigma and total lack of protection inexorably exploited their vulnerability, leading to their total social abandonment. In Noys (2005, p. 19) words, ‘the exclusion of the criminal from the community seems to cost them their humanity and leave them as nothing more than bare life, something monstrous that exists between the animal and the human, also referred to as subhuman’. So it is that Agamben’s (1998) inclusive exclusion resembles the stigmatisation followed by exclusion suggested by Goffman (1961), and chimes with Kellehear’s (2007) idea of fear from association with the stigmatised. Furthermore, Patterson’s (1982) intrusive mode of social death suggests a similar dynamic, where slaves were removed from their context of origin and introduced to the master’s household as a ‘non-person’. Even so, there is still a difference between the concepts of ‘non-person’ and ‘homo sacer’: the first appears to be punished unintentionally, whereas the second is an intended punishment.

Biehl’s (2004, p. 476) rich ethnographic description from southern Brazil of Vita, a ‘precarious rehabilitation centre for drug addicts and alcoholics’, reveals how social death may look on the community level. In this community of ‘ex-humans’, th...