Bereavement in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Universals in Human Grief

What is basically human in bereavement? All over the world, most people who experience the death of someone close or important are, in ways that others can recognize, upset about the death, and that upset state may go on for quite a while—perhaps for years, or even for a lifetime. But when it comes to the specifics of characterizing that state of being, it is striking how diverse emotional expressions are across cultures. It is even difficult to describe that diversity of emotional expression in the English language, because people who speak other languages use vocabularies of grief that do not necessarily translate well into English terminology.

Even if in superficial translation a particular feeling in the language of another culture seems to translate into English, the context may make the superficially similar feeling quite different. For example, bereaved people in the United States may say they feel a mixture of anger and fear, anger perhaps about when or how the death occurred and fear about the future. In some cultures, people may say they feel a mixture of anger and fear, but the grounds for those feelings, the ways those feelings pervade their daily life, and the implications of those feelings for action may be quite foreign to what people in the United States would experience. Consider societies where many or even all deaths are understood as caused by sorcery or some other act of malevolence at a distance (for one illustration, see Counts and Counts 1991, writing of the Kaliai of Papua New Guinea).

It is also common across cultures that what is grieved after a death is not just the specific loss of a person but much else—more than can be listed here, but almost certainly other losses (including economic ones) accompanying the death, unpleasant things in the past of the person who died, unfinished business in relationship to the person who died, the grief of others, one's own personal failings, and one's own mortality (see, e.g., Boehnlein 1987, writing about the many losses of bereaved Cambodian refugees). Moreover, much of this might have a distinctive content that differs from culture to culture. For instance, the losses grieved by a young Bumbita Arapesh man whose father has died might include mentorship at becoming an effective man, help obtaining a wife, the strength that a young man can draw from his father, and the opportunity to show his father the kind of work he can do (Leavitt 1995).

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