Grief, Bereavement, and Mourning in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Although death cannot be measured scientifically, the concept of culture provides the key medium for understanding the final boundary between our existence as living beings and the inevitable end of that existence. Death is a phenomenon of life, but consciousness of mortality is a social, not a biological, reality, because our knowledge about death and its meaning and value is socially constructed.

Most recent writings about grief and mourning are grounded on research conducted with subjects who live in North America and Western Europe. This research uses theories and methods that grew from the same geographical area and historical period. And although reports about mourning and grief come from many cultures, there is no accord among bereavement scholars about what concepts best explain the ways in which individuals and communities respond to death, grief, and mourning in different cultures. Exact definitions of culture are elusive, like the concept itself.

At the most general level, culture is defined as those aspects of human activity that are socially rather than genetically transmitted. Thus, culture consists of patterns of life passed among humans, which apply to every domain in society: religious beliefs, folk practices, language use, worldviews, and artistic expression.

History of the Concept of Culture

The origins of the concept of culture date back to the work of early post-Enlightenment folklorists who used the concept to avoid the uniform theories of human capabilities that were characteristic of the late 18th century. The modern concept of culture was developed later partly in response to racist and biological determinist ideologies of the 19th century, most of which incorporated an evolutionary framework based on social Darwinism. Homo sapiens was viewed as divided into separate subspecies or races, each with an essential characteristic, a system that included a hierarchy of moral worth.

Philosophers maintain that a general problem with the culture concept is that it is often linked with a naive relativism, precluding judgments about the unique cultural practices found around the world. In many cases practices dealing with death that were unsettling to Europeans, such as head hunting and ritual cannibalism, were the focus of disproportionate attention, supporting efforts to justify and document a radically different “other.” The anthropological engagement with [Page 530]mortality dates back to the origins of the discipline, and it is bound up with concerns about the origins of religion. Early theorists focused on small-scale societies where magic, science, and religion were not separate cultural domains. For example, the 19th-century anthropologist Edward Tyler, who worked from an evolutionary paradigm of explanation, viewed the origins of the human society and culture in efforts to explain mortality and, in particular, in the recurrence of dreams and other visions about deceased close kin. Social theorists influential to the development of anthropology, such as Émile Durkheim and, later, Robert Hertz, argued that all societies exert institutional controls to protect and preserve the life of the members, including rules governing appropriate and inappropriate killing.

Many actions that appear to be individual choices, such as suicide or the expression of the emotion during grieving, are actually socially patterned, as studies such as Durkheim's comparative analysis of suicide rates illustrates. Hertz used cross-cultural comparisons of mourning rituals to suggest that the human expression of grief can be understood also as a social fact, peculiar to each society. Scholars focused on the recurrence, throughout the world, of death ceremonies that expressed fertility and rebirth. The emphasis on sexuality, and the connection between sex and death, fit well with interpretations of ritual behavior that emphasized function. Death rituals serve the function of reintegration of society following a death, focusing on reproduction.

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