The Die-lemma of Death as a Student Conducting Research
Currently, I have been researching death. Namely, death in culture. As part of a program where I comparatively analyze death in Italy and Vietnam, I have read interdisciplinary scholarship and completed the interview series for the Italy portion. Now, what is left is Vietnam, the comparative aspect, as well as a reflection about my progress up to this point. In an essay by Christine Valentine titled “Methodological Reflections Attending and Tending to the Role of the Researcher in the Construction of Bereavement Narratives,” she argues that the subjectivity of the researcher is pertinent to death-related studies (Valentine 2007). She also claims that qualitative interviews and acknowledging the individual aspects of death are essential to developing an ethical framework to understand the concept. When I ask individuals what their views on death are, what I cannot neglect is the personal nature of mortality. We will reach a point in our lives where we can connect death to our personal experience, so the inevitability of encounters with death presents a unique challenge as a researcher.
In terms of facilitating a safe space for an open dialogue, death is a medical and social reality intertwined with subjective perspectives. As a cultural conception, death is at the periphery of contradictions and unifying beliefs and practices. As such, developing a cohesive narrative about death constitutes the knowledge that there are myriad alternatives from that viewpoint. I research death, and I am terrified to die. That simple truth constitutes an inkling as to why I chose to expand my project to mortality, and proliferate the initial study about religious beliefs and ritual practices.
In their “Introduction: researching death, dying and bereavement,” Julie Ellis and Erica Borgstrom define death studies as an interdisciplinary approach to multiple facets about mortality; these topics range from end of life care, funerary practices, death education, and so on (Ellis et al 2017). While studying death can uncover many aspects of the human condition, I also think that it is important to acknowledge the components of the human experience that are elusive and difficult to translate into a scholarly project. These components are the ones that are processed as case studies, that are personalized narratives encapsulated through research findings and scholarship; in this sense, the subjectivity of multiple viewpoints is filtered through a paltable scholarly medium. I ask if academic scholarship allows these stories to stand as their own narratives? Ironically, to me, the purpose of academic projects is to facilitate social and personal disruptions for a more nuanced viewpoint, in which these individual narratives are interconnected as parts of the larger ontological frameworks.
Nevertheless, I believe that individual testimonies, in this setting, are to be integrated as a body of knowledge with scholarship and subjective nuances. With regards to death in culture, Tony Walter, in his essay “Why Different Countries Manage Death Differently: A Comparative analysis of Modern Urban Societies,” he posits that “Culturally, key factors include individualism versus collectivism, religion, secularization, boundary regulation, and expressivism” (Walter 2012). Walter lists the binaries of individualism and collectivism, religion and secularity, and well as regulations and self-expression to present the multiplicity of death as a cultural construct. Historically, mortality shifts within these binaries, insofar as these boundaries are interrogated and oftentimes, taken for granted in comparative analyses. To frame death with secularity and religiosity, for example, entails an approach that accounts for the existence of both aspects in the periphery of the other. Such that studying death is navigating the language and boundaries of culture and society, there is also an element in interacting with the presence of both aspects as differentiated and overlapping the others.
I have a confession; I have personal experience with death. Even if I delineate boundary after boundary, there is no erasure of my experience with terminal illness, or of the funerals that I have attended in my short lifetime. Kate Woodthrope, in her essay “Researching death: Methodological Reflections on the Management of Critical Distance,” posits that ‘critical distance’ between the researcher and death is unrealistic, since maintaining a sense of detachment from the human condition is beyond the realm of studying death in an academic context (Woodthorpe 2011). Interestingly, the presence of critical distance counteracts mortality as an area of focus. Subsequently, my experience with death, while not entirely pertinent to my topic, blurs the disconnection between critical distance and scholarly analysis. What this constitutes for death studies is a taxing topic until mortality is naturalized for me to consider in my everyday life. Contrarily, forms of death are naturalized in the media, by humans, as some methods of death are preferred over others. In Italy, from my studies, it is no secret that deaths at home are preferred over hospital deaths, despite the increase in hospitalization and medicalization. Given that there are trends in attitudes towards dying, death can also be viewed as an aspect of socialization, which underlays social and cultural components within one’s community.
If there is any doubt, I have been thinking about death a lot. Perhaps, there should be more spaces for people to dwell on mortality without the risk of stigmatization, or worrying their friends and families. After all, dialogue about death can stimulate mortality salience, or strengthen one’s worldviews in terms of death, which can counteract anxieties and trepidation about the topic. On the other hand, mortality can become a spiral of fear, so these discussions must be facilitated in an open and educational setting with respect to the personalization of death-related experiences. My understanding of mortality is refracted through my research and internal ruminations, and ironically, it is these factors that amalgamate as a singularity within the plurality of viewpoints.
