Everything written and everything known about grief through study and personal experience is saturated with cultural perspectives, concepts, and beliefs. No knowledge about grief is culture free. Many of us who study grief are immersed in a single culture, and so it is not difficult for us to assume that our culture (our language, concepts, culturally based views of human nature, and culturally saturated lived experience) defines what is true about all humans. As good scholars and practitioners we try to develop research, theory, and practical knowledge about what we presume is true of all people but, because we are embedded in the realities of the culture we know best, we may well be oblivious to the cultural saturation of our knowledge and the many ways that such saturation makes us ill fit to understand, or even pay attention to, the grieving of people from cultures different from our own.On the other hand, even as the bereavement field, like other fields devoted to understanding human beings, continues to develop a substantial literature that is oblivious to culture (an argument made by Currer, 2001), it also is developing a substantial literature about the connections of culture and grief (see, e.g.,
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