The following is a two-part article on the 'death-denial' thesis, namely the assumption that modern Western societies seek to deny and conceal the reality of death. The first part of the article gives a chronological overview of Anglophone and French literature on the thesis, focussing on its development and pervasiveness in the disciplines of history and sociology. In the second part of the article, published in a subsequent issue of this journal, we summarise the critiques to the said thesis. We also assess its present state in the social sciences and point to new paths for the future of death studies.
Part I. The Death-Denial Thesis in Social SciencesThis paper discusses the development of the death-denial thesis, namely the assumption that modern Western society denies the reality of death. Our focus is on the evolution of the thesis in the fields of history and sociology. This disciplinary choice has been determined by some important factors. First of all, although we specialise in History and Anthropology, we noticed how pervasive the thesis has been in both our disciplines, and how the concept of death-denial has effectively dominated scholarly explorations of death and death rituals in modern Western societies. Moreover, most sources discussing death denial credit Geoffrey Gorer and Philippe Ariès, who respectively make a sociological and a historical argument about the denial of death in the West, with the formulation of the narrative. As it will become manifest in the paper, the argument that death is being denied in contemporary society implies a historical claim about
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.