Mediating and Remediating Death

Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Kjetil Sandvik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317098614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From the ritual object which functions as a substitute for the dead - thus acting as a medium for communicating with the 'other world' - to the representation of death, violence and suffering in media, or the use of online social networks as spaces of commemoration, media of various kinds are central to the communication and performance of death-related socio-cultural practices of individuals, groups and societies. This second volume of the Studies in Death, Materiality and Time series explores the ways in which such practices are subject to 're-mediation'; that is to say, processes by which well-known practices are re-presented in new ways through various media formats. Presenting rich, interdisciplinary new empirical case studies and fieldwork from the US and Europe, Asia, The Middle East, Australasia and Africa, Mediating and Remediating Death shows how different media forms contribute to the shaping and transformation of various forms of death and commemoration, whether in terms of their range and distribution, their relation to users or their roles in creating and maintaining communities. With its broad and multi-faceted focus on how uses of media can redraw the traditional boundaries of death-related practices and create new cultural realities, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in ritual and commemoration practices, the sociology and anthropology of death and dying, and cultural and media studies.

---

PART I
Mediating and Remediating Encounters with Death and Dying

---

Chapter 1
Death in Times of Secularization and Sacralization: The Mediating and Re-Mediating of the Utøya Tragedy in the Norwegian Public Sphere

Anne Kalvig

On 22 July 2011 the Norwegian right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik bombed the governmental headquarters in Oslo and thereafter gunned down teenagers at the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth summer camp in the iconic, tiny island of Utøya; 77 persons were killed, 8 in Oslo and 69 in Utøya. A peaceful country hitherto spared the traumas of violent and intended death on a large scale in post-Second World War times, Norway was shaken and went into deep grief, a grief that will stay with us for a long time still. In this chapter I provide an analysis of the ways in which the death and bereavement of 22 July were mediated and remediated in the Norwegian public sphere, and how the narratives of various media communicated religion and religious issues. I investigate how media served as platform for negotiations of how to relate to the tragedy: a pluralist society dominated by the Lutheran Church, the religious-spiritual meaning or lack of such mediated in the Norwegian public sphere, point to processes of secularization and sacralization and of ontological narratives competing for hegemony in a late modern, pluralist, cultural discourse. The material consists of mediated and remediated (new) ritual practices, speeches, poems, songs and reflections. Thematically, I focus upon the kind of mediations considering the role of Christianity and the Norwegian Church as responses to terror and death, as these were highly dominating. I provide a side-glance to the huge participation in, and mediation of, the so-called rose parades, and ask whether these conveyed religious or spiritual significance as well.

Religion can be understood in a great variety of ways, and can as a category be both obscure and compound. For the purpose of this chapter, I delineate ‘religion’ to mean ‘concepts and practices, in various combinations, referring to a spiritual dimension having relevance for people and their relation to the rest of existence’. Hence I avoid a systematic, functionalist or emotionalist view, in order to open up to a complex reality and a complex, cultural situation, but still pointing to a spiritual dimension of some kind being necessary for the delineating of something as religiously or spiritually relevant. Secularization is, obviously, neither unambiguous, and a coexistence theory on secularization holds for example, that secularization may take place in particular circumstances, while religion in other contexts simultaneously may grow (Woodhead and Heelas 2000: 307). By secularization I mean the various efforts of banishing religion to the private sphere (‘private’ having a rather blurred meaning in our time of constant mediation through for example social media) and the actual and practical, diminished importance or relevance of religion in specific cultural and social areas.¹ By sacralization I understand a different, not necessarily opposite, movement of giving religious or spiritual significance to areas formerly void of, or to a lesser degree held to have, such significance (Gilhus and Mikaelsson 1998; Partridge 2004). Examples of secularization and sacralization in Norwegian context, is less Christian/churchly influence on school curriculum and general politics (secularization), and popular culture and the health care sector invested with religious/spiritual meaning and relevance (sacralization) (Endsjø and Lied 2011; Kalvig 2013).

Media and Religion

The media concept and theory employed in this chapter follow Bolter and Grusin (1999), who state that a medium is ‘that which remediates’, and that it ‘can never operate in isolation, because it must enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media’ (1999: 65). Bolter and Grusin claim all mediation to be remediation, a double logic which can be refined into remediation as the mediation of mediation, as the inseparability of mediation and reality, and remediation as reform, that is to say, with a goal of refashion or rehabilitate other media, as well as reforming reality (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 55–6). Remediation as reform is especially informative in the present context: remediation as a word derives from Latin remederi, ‘to heal, to restore to health’. Although Bolter and Grusin refer to this ‘healing’ in an extensional definition pointing to the (intention of) improvement of one medium by another, later and improved one, or of media reforming society or reality itself, the ‘remedy’ and healing connotations of the concept of remediation in the context of death and bereavement succinctly point to important aspects of meaning. Grusin later (2010) develops the theory of mediation and remediation to include the concept of premediation. The logic of remediation is again presented as twofold, as media trying to erase itself in order to come as close to reality as (im)possible, to give an unmediated mediation of reality, while simultaneously proliferating multiple forms and practices of mediation (Grusin 2010: 1). After 9/11, premediation has been intensified as medial preemption, ‘perpetuating an almost constant, low level of fear or anxiety about another terrorist attack’ (2010: 2). Grusin here employs affect theory, in order to ‘suggest a way in which we can begin to trace out the complex and heterogeneous ways in which individual and collective affect are modulated and distributed throughout our media everyday’ (Grusin 2010: 120).

Whereas Bolter and Grusin develop media theory in general, Hjarvard (2008) in addition gives special attention to the relationship between media and religion. He employs Meyrowitz’s (1997) three metaphors of mediation processes to illustrate how religion is affected by the intervention of media, as channel, as language, and as milieu. Hjarvard claims banal religion to be distributed through media as channel (that is to say, a mixture of religious elements, both folk, alternative and traditional, at the expense of institutional religion transmitted as a coherent system), religious language being transformed into popular cultural language (with traits of individualism, entertainment and consumerism), and the media takeover of (the public sense of) community and belonging, resulting in people turning to media for normative and ontological orientation (instead of finding this in the institutional religion provided by the Church, for example) (Hjarvard 2008: 161–2). These processes together Hjarvard names the medialization of religion (ibid.).

Collating Bolter and Grusin (1999), Grusin (2010) and Hjarvard (2008) in this chapter, I use the findings of Bolter and Grusin to delineate how media operates, and how the flows of information here is at the same time both reflective and self-reflective, resembling cultural mimesis in general and pointing to problems of duplicity – like religion in ‘itself’ does – ‘religion’ being the phenomenon we would like to study, and at the same time a theoretical construct. The media ‘intention’ of erasing itself, in an effort to reach unmediated reality, in some ways resembles religion understood as more potent reality (holiness) than profane reality, reachable only through religion. The ‘affectiveness’ of media is enlightening when it comes to coping with terror, fear, death, bereavement and grief, fields of affect and human life traditionally handled by religion. The premediation of collective affects of anticipation and connectivity, resonates with the Meyrowitz and Hjarvard terminology of the mediation as community and belonging (milieu).

As a qualitative discourse-oriented analysis this chapter draws on a limited selection of material, thought to be representative of significant tendencies, and a more thorough scrutiny into these examples illuminates the complex relations of religion and media in times of death. The present findings and conclusions on how religion was and was not remediated in the aftermath of 22 July can be seen as a contribution to a growing field of 22 July studies, where also sociological and quantitative projects are carried out.² The chapter does not deal with the vast amount of mediated reports after 22 July covering the actual happenings, the failure of the national contingency plans, the biography of the terrorist, the actual and possible networks of political allies of the terrorist, and the trial. The period here counting as ‘aftermath’, is the year following 22 July 2011, with the days and weeks following this date as particularly important.

The Utøya Tragedy

Since it turned out to be a Norwegian, white, Christian male who committed the atrocities of bombing and killing 77 people, and not a Muslim al-Qaeda terrorist, the mediating of the happenings were during a short time span transformed from ‘now it has become our turn to feel the wrath of Muslim extremism and resistance to our partaking in warfare in Afghanistan’ (after the bombing of the departmental quarters in Oslo in the afternoon), to a bewildered ‘it seems to be a blonde policeman gunning down our children at Utøya? What is happening?’ a few hours later, when the teenagers messaged their family and friends via mobiles and smartphones, during the massacre. Breivik had disguised himself as an emergency squad policeman in order to get as close to his targets and victims as possible. After detonating the bomb in central Oslo, he travelled to Utøya with the sole purpose of gunning down unarmed youth, their ‘crime’ being members of the social democratic Labour Party (‘Arbeiderpartiet’, AP, and its youth organization called ‘Arbeidernes Ungdomsfylking’, AUF). In Brevik’s world view, they were representatives of ‘Cultural Marxism’. He shot as many as he could of the several hundred participants, often at very close range, with the boys and girls trapped on the small island.

Since this massive occurrence of death was intended and not at the mercy of nature or the result of an accident, the public mediating of death naturally came to focus on how a person could behave in this way, and have such an ideology that was used to legitimize the killing of innocent youth, and civilians at the attempted large-scale bombing. The cultural imminence of the terrorist made the possibility of a mediated blaming ‘the Other’, namely Muslims and Islam, more tricky. This was nevertheless often done, because Breivik’s own ‘manifest’, a copy-and-paste-kind of voluminous material that he distributed on the Internet and to thousands of email addresses shortly before his killings, is mainly concerned with the ‘Muslim threat’, the curse of ‘multiculturalism’ and feminism’s devastating effect on Western society.³ Breivik represents the islamophobic, right-wing extremist, anti-feminist and anti-pluralism fascists thriving on the Internet and in real life these days.⁴ Since he pointed out all his ‘enemies’ in the manifest, the media to some degree tended to ‘explain’ or contextualize his behaviour by reflecting upon these enemies’ allegedly cultural hegemony, or Breivik’s misunderstood perception hereof.⁵

The Role of Christianity and the Church

The Oslo Cathedral opened its doors in the morning of 23 July, and the following weekend 100,000 people paid visit, amounting to more than 1 million during the following month (in a country with a population of 5 million).⁶ A veritable ‘ocean of flowers’ grew outside the cathedral, as more and more people came to show their grief and compassion the following days and weeks, by laying down flowers, greetings and various items symbolizing both sorrow and hope.

Figure 1.1 Mourners creating an ‘ocean of flowers’ outside Oslo Cathedral (25 July 2011)

Source: Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Licence; photograph by Stig Rune Pedersen.

The Sunday following the Friday of the terror, the Oslo Cathedral held a nationally broadcast memorial service named ‘Service for Grief and Hope’. All the political leaders were present, the royal family, youth from AUF and next of kin of the victims, and thousands of people who couldn’t be seated in the cathedral, were waiting outside. The bishop, Ole Christian Kvarme, started his sermon by citing the poem ‘For the youth’, with the phrases: ‘In the name of Life/ unjust shall fall’ and ‘This is our promise, from brother to brother: we will serve the good, in the world of humans’⁷ and also said: ‘Friday 22nd of July has become our Long Friday. A whole people have lost their sisters, brothers, family and friends. At the same time, there is hope and consolation. Outside the cathedral, there is an ocean of flowers, with lit candles’. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg spoke of the grief and tragedy of each death connected to the terror act, and of the national grief that was now established, with no talk of retaliation or revenge. He stated: ‘Nobody said it more beautiful than the girl from AUF interviewed by CNN: “If one man can show so much hatred, imagine how much love we all can show together”.’⁸ Stoltenberg’s speech was awarded ‘Speech of the year’ prize by the international speech writers’ conference in Copenhagen in November 2011.⁹ The media coverage of the memorial service the following Monday focused on Stoltenberg’s speech, printed in full by several newspapers, with short references from the bishop’s sermon. Photos conveyed the grief of the ones in attendance, especially of the royal family, who wept openly. Photos of people waiting to enter the church, laying down flowers and lighting candles, were also abundantly mediated.

The Norwegian Church Mediated as a Place for Interreligious Dialogue and Peaceful Coexistence

A national memorial concert was also held in the Oslo Cathedral on 30 July. One of the reasons for the Oslo Cathedral being chosen as production site was the fact that the media production bus from the Norwegian Broadcasting System was locked in by the ocean of flowers – through which it obviously couldn’t drive – since the broadcasting of the memorial service the previous Sunday.¹⁰ Of 14 songs performed by various artists in the cathedral, none were psalms, and only two or three could be said to have a (subtle) Christian content. The concert was named ‘My little country’, after one of the songs that were to become a major symbol of grief and solidarity in the posterity of the terror, by singer and composer Ole Paus. The song is a low-voiced ‘hymn’ to Norwegian scenery and ordinary people, written in 1994. At the time of its writing, it was meant to be a speech in the debate on Norwegian membership in the EU. In the present situation, it was turned into a song symbolizing a small nation of people seeking together in times of death and crisis.¹¹ On 22 December 2011, the Oslo Cathedral was the site for yet another memorial service, this time in the form of a ‘candle mass’, which in Lutheran context means a service where commemorative candles are lit in a ‘candle globe’. Songs and texts of this service ranged from Christmas carols and psalms, to worker’s songs and political songs, and the bishop, the royal family, the government, AUF, the Humanist Association and Socialist Choir were all attending, with a Muslim youth from AUF reading text. This ‘candle mass’ was by one of the editors of the largest Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, praised as the triumph of a unifying, national Church, inclusive and open to all other believers and non-believers alike, and not as an institution bringing off a coup of the grief.¹²

Quite a few of the victims of the Utøya massacre were Muslims. The first one to be buried of all the 77 victims was Bano Rashid, an 18-year-old girl. The Rashid family came as Kurdish refugees from Irak to Norway in 1996. Bano was a brilliant student and youth politician, stressing her multicultural identity, and her belief in democracy, feminism and anti-racism. She was buried in a ceremony led by both a Christian vicar, Anne Marit Tronvik, and a Muslim imam, Senaid Kobilica, who is also leader of the Islamic Council in Norway. The Rashid family had asked for a funeral ceremony that was to be partly Christian, partly Muslim, partly Norwegian, and partly Kurdish. Bano’s parents stressed that the answer to the terrorist’s hate was love, and that their daughter was an example of the success of multiculturalism.¹³ Sev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Mediating and Remediating Death
• Part I Mediating and Remediating Encounters with Death and Dying
• Part II Mediating and Remediating Death in Public Spheres
• Part III Mediating and Remediating Practices for Death and Dying
• Index