Death, historically a topic of major social concern, has in recent decades become a phenomenon of even more relevance. Demographic trends portend a much-increased proportion of aged individuals in the U.S. population and an attendant increase in the number of terminal illnesses and death. Technological innovations such as organ transplants and life-support systems enhance the possibility of significantly extending life expectancy, but they also raise serious sociolegal and ethical questions concerning even the very definition of death itself. The corrosion of traditional religious beliefs and values, and the concomitant eschatological scenarios that they generate, renders more traumatic the prospect of death and the final annihilation of self.

Death constitutes crisis for society as well as for individuals and groups. Various patterns of behavior and social processes have been institutionalized as coping and response mechanisms for confronting the crisis of death. Death has social consequences for the larger social enterprise as well as for immediate survivors, and societal perceptions of, and ideological posture toward, death have a major influence on culture and social structure. Death is component to the process of life, in that dying is a social as well as a physiological phenomenon. The particular patterns of death and dying characteristic to a given society engender modal cultural responses, and such institutionalized behavior has familial, economic, educational, religious, and political implications.

Historically, death has been essentially a family matter, in that kin of the deceased handled the details of processing the dead and death. Death, human and animal, is a ubiquitous event in farming cultures and is assimilated into the fabric of social life and accepted as a matter of inevitability and the natural order. In the United States, various events of the 19th century, such as the advent of arterial embalming and increasing industrialization and urbanization, however, shifted the handling of death and the dead out of the home and into the commercial sphere. After death became a commercial commodity, intimate familiarity with it tended to fade and, in time, the United States became a death-denying society, to the extent of making death a taboo and, according to some, a “pornographic” topic, thereby effectively shielding death from public attention. After World War II—and, to some extent, because of the war—death was “rediscovered,” and a new “death awareness” movement surfaced. The public took an interest in death, and books, articles in periodicals, programs on television, and movies all provided material to satisfy public curiosity and dialogue concerning the topic. Best-selling books such as Mitford'sThe American Way of Death (1963) fueled disputatious debate about the ceremonies of death, and cases such as that of Karen Ann Quinlan generated discussion concerning the dilemmas that death sometimes precipitates. The expansion and enhancement of the mass media again brought death into the home, in the form of vivid accounts of homicide, disaster, war, plagues, executions, fatal accidents, and the burdens and trials of prolonged death due to chronic disease attendant to terminal illness. Death as a topic could not be denied or contained, and the body of public information about death grew and evolved into scholarly study and research. Death studies beyond medical studies became constituent to a number of academic disciplines, especially the behavioral sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Other applied fields, including social work, counseling, law, family development, and law enforcement, began to take a more expansive view of the social parameters of death. The literature of many disciplinary subfields began increasingly to focus on death studies and expanded accordingly.

Because the field of death studies is multidisciplinary and subsumes a variety of specialty interests, the literature in this subdiscipline has developed and proliferated in near exponential fashion. Multiple scholarly journals are devoted to the study of death, and extensive lists of new books are published annually in the different constituent specialty areas. The mass of research and theoretical information available has become almost intellectually unmanageable. Beyond the extensive size of the literature that has been generated in this area, there are also the problems of literature overlap, conflicting findings, theoretical and conceptual ambiguity, fugitive literature, overlooked or neglected paradigms, unsubstantiated hypotheses, methodological incongruity, and exploratory redundancy to the [Page xx]point of unproductivity. The corpus of knowledge in the field of death studies has, in effect, become increasingly unwieldy in terms of its parameters. What is needed at this time is an attempt to aggregate, consolidate, integrate, classify, organize, and better delineate and articulate the details of the information contained in the expansive body of literature that has been generated in this field. This, perhaps, can best be accomplished in the form of a concise but comprehensive compendium of the current state of knowledge in thanatology.

In terms of constituent contribution to the body of knowledge in a given field, articles tend to be fragmentary and books are often truncated and ephemeral, whereas reference works offer the advantages of definitive summary, meaningful assessment, and productive synthesis. Reference works offer the further advantage of durability. Some encyclopedic reference works have served as the definitive arbiters in certain disciplines for decades. With the new millennium under way, this would seem to be an opportune and compelling time to stop and take stock of the literature in the field of thanatology, to arrange and synthesize that body of knowledge in a way that will be useful for scholars in the future. A properly developed reference work at this point in time will, in effect, provide direction and momentum to the study of death-related behavior for many years to come.

An appropriate understanding of death and its attendant social processes can enable individuals to confront the prospect of death itself and their own mortality, and helps them to integrate the ongoing process of death more adequately into their total life experience. The primary focus of this reference work is to acquaint the user with the social consequences of death and the behavioral mechanisms, both individual and collective, through which death is experienced. It is my hope that this compendium will provide the user with a more sensitive insight into the social parameters of death and the various ways in which our behavior and our social institutions are affected by death and dying. Additionally, I hope that it will afford the user a refined perspective on the major death-related activities, such as funeralization, bereavement, and disposing of the dead.

Many vocations address death and dying in one fashion or another. In this regard, this reference work should prove to be valuable, as a sensitizing as well as an educational resource, for prelaw and premedical students; for students who intend to pursue careers as clergy, nurses, or counselors; and for practitioners in the fields of medicine, law, law enforcement, social work, and insurance (to name only a few). Scholars and students in the fields of philosophy, management, family development, theology, psychology, sociology, education, and various heath-related fields should also appreciate the utility of this work.

In developing comprehensive reference works, there are two basic strategies. One model of encyclopedia development involves the articulation of 500 to 1,000 basic concepts and intellectual notions, and then the generation of concise entry essays for each topic. Although this approach results in inclusiveness regarding the parameters of the field and breadth of coverage in terms of the array of topics, it also has disadvantages in that the relatively brief expositions presented often display limited perspectives, and sometimes the collected entries provide a fragmented overview of the field.

A second model addresses the task of coverage through the use of a smaller number of entries that take the form of essays that are more comprehensive in context and better integrate sets of individual concepts or topics. Often several basic concepts may be intimately linked or overlapping, and these may be understood most clearly within the framework of a more elaborate context. This purpose can best be served by a handbook such as this one. In the two volumes of this handbook, the contributors address approximately 100 pivotal topics, each of which subsumes and incorporates several more basic concepts and behaviors. The essays generated to discuss these topics direct special attention to the constituent concepts and social patterns within the exploration of the larger topical concern. Each chapter is of journal-article length and addresses its general topic with appropriate detail and elaboration.

The advantage of this literary venue is that, compared with reference works that present extensive lists of topics in fragmented fashion, this model of compendium presents various subtopics and concepts in a more contextually elaborate fashion, demonstrating concept linkages and evolution, and provides enough background to ensure understanding.

This work is, by intent and design, comprehensive and inclusive in content. Topics range from autopsies to vampires, from capital punishment to suicide, from abortion to physician-assisted death, from cryonics to the spiritualism movement. Major sections of these volumes focus on the cultural context of death (social means of transcending death), the various modes (causes) of death, death and social controversy (abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, and suicide), dying as social process, funeralization, body disposition, grief and mourning, the legalities of death, and creative responses to death (art, literature, and music).

This handbook is multidisciplinary; the contributing authors represent a diverse array of disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, social work, sociology, philosophy, theology, medicine, law, family studies, mortuary science, and history. This work is also cross-cultural; it addresses death-related behavior within a number of different religious contexts (including Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Taoist, and Muslim) and also examines such behavior in different countries and cultures (including Belgian funerals, European cemeteries, ancient Egyptian mummies, Japanese death rituals, Chinese cultural views of death, the Native American way of death, bereavement in different cultures, and body disposition in cross-cultural perspective). Various chapters also examine death-related topics in historical perspective, such as the history of the [Page xxi]American cemetery, historical changes in the meaning of death in the Western world, the history of suicide, historical changes in body disposition for members of the military, and the processing of death in the American family prior to the 20th century.

The two volumes of this handbook offer 103 definitive essays covering almost every dimension of death-related behavior. Leading scholars and researchers in the field of thanatology have contributed chapters, and all of the authors represent authoritative expertise in their respective areas of knowledge and practice. The essays included here constitute an insightful and well-informed synthesis of the current state of understanding in the field of death studies. As a definitive exposition, these volumes should help shape, articulate, and direct the development of the corpus of knowledge in this field well into the 21st century. It is my hope that in this regard this handbook will be a signal advancement in the evolution of the social study of death.