Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons

Abstract

Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on interactionist sociology to present major themes from a qualitative study of family deaths in urban Senegal, theoretically framed through the duality of meanings-in-context. Such themes included family and community as support and motivation; religious beliefs and practices as frameworks for solace and (regulatory) meaning; and material circumstances as these are intrinsically bound up with emotions. Although we identify the experience of (embodied, emotional) pain as a common response across Minority and Majority worlds, we also explore significant divergencies, varying according to localized contexts and broader power dynamics.

Relational rights and interdependent wellbeing: Exploring the experiences of an ethnic minority girl with the Norwegian Child Welfare service

“…This is aligned with notions of childhood and care predominant in certain socio-cultural contexts in Africa, as described earlier, where children, families, and communities have reciprocal rights and responsibilities as part of intergenerational expectations. Family members rely on each other for daily survival, emotional and practical support, opportunities to succeed in life, and to manage times of crisis, conveying an understanding of “family” as a collective unit (McCarthy et al, 2020).…”

“…In addition, we proposed relational rights as a valuable concept to increase social workers’ ability to understand diverse family relations and ways of upbringing, and, in some instances, to better comprehend the lifeworlds of ethnic minority families in Norway. However, in this lies a risk of viewing certain “cultures” as fixed, monolithic entities, in which divergences are highlighted as categorical “differences” (McCarthy et al, 2020). This fails to account for the fluidity and intersectionality of such patterns and ignores what is common across diverse contexts.…”

Do we need to decolonise bereavement studies?

“…What does 'grief ' look like, and is it really appropriate to frame 'bereavement' in terms of internal emotions such as 'grief '? Perhaps emotions and the materiality of life are inextricably bound up together (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2020). What do people regard as a hopeful outcome of death and bereavement -perhaps death offers a welcome release from a terrible life of exploitation and hardship (Fletcher, 2021)?…”

Editorial

“…As Valentine points out, meaning-making provides both a research approach and a topic for investigation. Additionally, the meaning of 'meaning' may also differ between academic disciplines and approaches (Ribbens McCarthy, 2006), being used by sociologists in terms of 'sense-making' as an inevitable feature of social life (Ribbens McCarthy et al, 2018), and by others more therapeutically in terms of creating a meaningful, 'reconstructed narrative' after a bereavement (Neimeyer, 2001).…”