Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Teodorescu, Adriana; Jacobsen, Michael Hviid

doi:10.4324/9780429197024

Cited by 4 publications

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“…Death is a particularly significant part of culture (Strinati 2000;Leming and Dickinson 2002), as the media and popular culture offer it up to us in the most diverse kinds of products: from information and news about the deaths of people in disasters to thrillers and television serials (Kearl 1995;Durkin 2003). Existing in parallel with people's everyday lives, death has lost its taboo status (Jacobsen 2020), and this has also influenced death rituals, funerals, and commemorative rituals for the deceased. It is important in this context to reflect on the functions these rituals have in a modern secularized society.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intersection of the Religious and the Secular: The Cemetery Festival in Latvia

Stašulāne

2021

Religions

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This article addresses the commemoration of the deceased by examining a peculiar Latvian religious tradition—the cemetery festival. Latvian society is moving down the path to secularization. Participation in religious ritual practices could be expected to decrease in a predominately secular society. Nevertheless, the tradition of the cemetery festival practiced in Latvia shows that the relationship between the religious and the secular is much more complex than simply being in opposition to each other. The analysis is based on data obtained by undertaking fieldwork at cemeteries in Latvia. Participant observation and qualitative in-depth interviews were the main research tools used in the fieldwork. Through an analysis of the fieldwork data, this article explains, first, how honoring of the deceased currently takes place in Latvia; second, the factors which have determined the preservation of the cemetery festival tradition despite the forced secularization of the Soviet period and the general secularization encountered today; third, the relationship between religious and secular activities and their transformation at the cemetery festival.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intersection of the Religious and the Secular: The Cemetery Festival in Latvia

Stašulāne

2021

Religions

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Exploring the Immortological Imagination: Advocating for a Sociology of Immortality

Nowaczyk-Basińska,

Kiel

2024

Social Sciences

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The digital age has rekindled popular and academic interest in immortality. While the idea of immortality has long been recognized as fundamental to human societies, unlike death, within the field of sociology, immortality has not yet established itself as a distinct and autonomous field of study. This paper contributes to the recently emerging scholarship promoting a sociology of immortality. Drawing inspiration from C. Wright Mills’s sociological imagination (1959) and building upon significant research in the field of immortality, we offer to use the concept of the immortological imagination as an analytical and conceptual tool for further developing a sociology of immortality. We refer to the immortological imagination as a complementary concept to Penfold-Mounce’s thanatological imagination, seeing both concepts as stemming from two different lineages and academic traditions. After defining the immortological imagination and how it differs from and complements the thanatological imagination, the paper moves to discuss examples in popular culture establishing the potential impacts and influences of the immortological imagination, particularly within the digital context.

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Digital Death and Spectacular Death

Sumiala,

Jacobsen

2024

Social Sciences

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Throughout human history, individuals, communities and societies have always had to confront and tackle the problem of death. Consequently, death remains a topic of social scientific relevance, highlighting the need for its study and for theorising around it. This article analyses the development of the social scientific study of death and dying, taking inspiration from Philippe Ariès’s historical stages to discuss the recent developments in the field, namely the study of digital death. The article begins with a discussion of the visibility of death in modern society in the context of spectacular death. The analysis emphasises its four dimensions: mediatisation, commercialisation, re-ritualisation and the revolution in end-of-life care. The article moves on to discuss the emergence of digital death as the current stage and reflects on its similarities to spectacular death and its transformation of public imaginaries around death in contemporary society. The article concludes with a reflection on future developments in the field, specifically the emergence and study of artificial intelligence (AI) in digitalised death culture.

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Death in Contemporary Popular Culture

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Intersection of the Religious and the Secular: The Cemetery Festival in Latvia

Intersection of the Religious and the Secular: The Cemetery Festival in Latvia

Exploring the Immortological Imagination: Advocating for a Sociology of Immortality

Digital Death and Spectacular Death

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