Tony Walter

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Bath

This article analyzes how potentially conflicting frames of grief and family operate in a number of English funerals. The data come from the 2010 Mass-Observation directive “Going to Funerals” which asked its panel of correspondents to write about the most recent funeral they attended. In their writings, grief is displayed through conventional conc...

The discourse of a climate and ecological emergency (CEE), especially as articulated in 2019 by Extinction Rebellion, impinges on two major features of western death mentalities. First, in order to motivate action, CEE discourse induces mortality awareness, death anxiety and grief, and thus furthers the de-sequestration of death and grief. Second,...

Cemeteries, painting and poetry regularly use nature to offer solace for grief in northern Europe’s historically Protestant and secular cultures, but rarely in southern Europe’s Catholic cultures. To explain this difference, the chapter examines two hypotheses. The first argues that the comfort that northern European mourners find in nature is root...

Despite increasing attention given to dementia by international governments and policy makers, the focus of end of life care has been on the dying trajectory of malignant disease. People with severe dementia have complex physical and psychological needs, yet the disease is not always recognised as terminal. Advance Care Planning involving people wi...

The article analyses how potentially conflicting frames of grief and family operate in a number of English funerals. The data come from the 2010 Mass-Observation directive “Going to Funerals” which asked its panel of correspondents to write about the most recent funeral they had attended. In their writings, grief is displayed through conventional u...

The sociological idea that modern societies sequestrate the dead is interrogated through Robert Hertz’s anthropological lens in which the position of body, spirit and mourners mirror one another. Focusing on Britain, two discursive systems are thus identified. In ‘the separated dead’, ‘letting go’ characterised not only the mourner but also practic...

Though death is universal, how we respond to it depends on when and where we live. Dying and grieving continually evolve: new preparations for dying, new kinds of funerals, new ways of handling grief and new ways to memorialise are developing all the time. Bringing 25 years of research and teaching in the sociology of death and dying to this import...

The article asks whether disasters that destroy life but leave the material infrastructure relatively intact tend to prompt communal coping focussing on loss, while disasters that destroy significant material infrastructure tend to prompt coping through restoration / re-building. After comparing memorials to New Zealand's Christchurch earthquake an...

This book presents some parts of Tony Walter's researches about Death and Dying from 2000 to 2016. I ,as an death scholar, translated these papers with his consultation. Walter wrote a preface for this translation and explained that:" Death comes to every human being, but what humans die from and how they deal with death has changed over time and...

Where do people feel closest to those they have lost? This article explores how continuing bonds with a deceased person can be rooted in a particular place or places. Some conceptual resources are sketched, namely continuing bonds, place attachment, ancestral places, home, reminder theory, and loss of place. We use these concepts to analyse intervi...

The article outlines four ways that religions interact with a society’s dominant practices for dying, funerals, grief and mourning. Examples are given of religious promotion of practices that may eventually become normative for society; of religious opposition to a society’s death practices; of subsequent accommodation, whether by mourners or their...

Despite the focus given to end of life care by policy makers and governments, there has been a tendency to ignore the complex and psychological needs of a person with dementia. Advance care planning involving people with dementia and their families can provide opportunities to discuss and initiate timely palliative care. Decision making is not one...

Funerals may be defined as the ritual or ceremonial disposal of a body; the two essential components are therefore a body and a ceremony/ritual. The UK funeral industry’s structure revolves around those who manage the body rather than the ceremony. This structure, in which the client contracts with a funeral director who subcontracts the funeral ce...

Funerals led by a celebrant not representing a faith community are rapidly increasing in England. This article argues that these ‘life-centred’ funerals have an implicit theology; like Christian funerals, but in different ways, they invite judgement, myth and hope. How should churches respond to this competition? Imitation is problematic, because t...

A number of recent events inside and outside of the heritage sector have triggered a lively and largely constructive debate about the excavation, display, and conservation of human remains in the UK (see Jenkins 2008, 2010; Moshenska 2009; Sayer 2009, 2010a; Parker Pearson et al. 2011; Giesen 2013). Two events have been of particular significance:...

Some 21st-century mourners describe the deceased as becoming an angel. Using published research, along with opportunist and anecdotal sources, the following questions are explored: who becomes an angel? Who addresses them as angels? What do once-human angels do? What are they? Where and when are they encountered? And in what sense are they believed...

Aims: Overdoses contribute disproportionately to drug-related deaths (DRDs) in the UK, yet little is known about the experiences and needs of those who are bereaved by such deaths, and how their experiences and needs might differ from other bereavements associated with substance use. Methods: An interview study with 32 adults in England and Scotlan...

Background Deaths associated with alcohol and/or drugs belong to a category of ‘special’ deaths due to three characteristics: traumatic circumstances of the death, stigma directed to both the bereaved and the deceased, and resulting disenfranchised grief experienced by the bereaved. These factors can impede those who are bereaved in this way from b...

Bereavement following a drug- or alcohol-related death has been largely neglected in research and service provision, despite its global prevalence and potentially devastating consequences for those concerned. Whilst researchers have drawn attention to the suffering experienced by families worldwide in coping with a member’s substance misuse, this a...

Social processes that influence contemporary dying and grieving include secularization, medicalization, professionalization, and sequestration. Sociological research on awareness and trajectories of dying has influenced health care systems toward more open communication styles at the end of life, intended in part to delay the onset of social death...

While anthropological studies in non-Western societies show how funerals protect the community from the threat of death, sociological studies of British funerals have so far focused on meanings for the private family. The article reports on results from a Mass Observation directive – the first British study to focus specifically on the entire funer...

How to promote compassionate care within public services is a concern in several countries; specifically, some British healthcare scandals highlight poor care for service users who may readily be stigmatised as ‘other’. The article therefore aims to understand better the relationship between stigma and compassion. As people bereaved by a drug- or a...

End of life care in England has recently been framed by two very different discourses. One (connected to advance care planning) promotes personal choice, the other promotes compassionate care; both are prominent in professional, policy and media settings. The article outlines the history of who promoted each discourse from 2008 to early 2015, when,...

This article argues as follows: (i) The presence of the dead within a society depends in part on available communication technologies, specifically speech, stone, sculpture, writing, printing, photography and phonography (including the mass media), and most recently the internet. (ii) Each communication technology affords possibilities for the dead...

In Western societies, women are consistently shown to have stronger religious beliefs and engage in religious participation and devotion more frequently than men. Sociologist and psychologists have explored several possible explanations for these differences, including women's higher levels of family involvement, lower rates of labor force particip...

How does online mourning differ from offline mourning? Throughout history, demographic, social and technological changes have altered mourners' social relationships with both the living and the dead, and hence their experiences of grief. Online technologies comprise the latest chapter in this story; earlier chapters include family/community mournin...

In current environmental discourse, disposal does not remove and destroy waste but rather transforms it into something useful or harmful and/or re-locates it. This article shows how this operates when the ‘waste’ comprises human remains, specifically how innovative ‘dispersal’ practices are now challenging the ‘disposal’ discourse of nineteenth-cen...

This article reflects on two indirect ways in which death arguably intersects with organizations. Some analysts use the term ‘organizational death’ as a metaphor that, unlike euphemism, serves to highlight rather than hide the human suffering entailed in organizational change. Some analysts have applied to organizations Becker's idea that repressio...

With unprecedented numbers of people living longer and with higher expectations of how they will live out their last years, the management of end-of-life (EOL) services is being brought into sharper focus. Current models of EOL care have originated from the hospice and palliative care movement whose expertise, developed largely with cancer patients...

Reference: BMJ Support Palliat Care 2013;3:383-388 doi:10.1136/bmjspcare-2012-000359 Abstract: Specialist palliative care, within hospices in particular, has historically led and set the standard for caring for patients at end of life. The focus of this care has been mostly for patients with cancer. More recently, health and social care services ha...

Though death and loss are recognized as significant themes in fine and popular arts forms, we know virtually nothing about how people who themselves are dying or bereaved use the arts – unless they are practising artists or under therapeutic supervision. This article first reviews how established artists have used death/loss themes in their work, a...

The sociology of death, dying and bereavement tends to take as its implicit frame either the nation state or a homogenous modernity. Between-nation differences in the management of death and dying are either ignored or untheorized. This article seeks to identify the factors that can explain both similarities and differences in the management of dea...

Two aspects of the concept of disenfranchised grief are examined: its binary assumption that grief is either enfranchised or disenfranchised; and its emancipatory agenda that grief should not be socially regulated. Focusing on the mourner's relationship to the deceased, we argue that social norms about the legitimacy of bereavement are not binary (...

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implica...

How may communities be mobilised to help someone dying at home? This conceptual article outlines the thinking behind an innovative compassionate community project being developed at Weston-super-Mare, UK. In this project, a health professional mentors the dying person and their carer to identify and match: (a) the tasks that need to be done and (b)...

The presence of angels in contemporary Western popular cultures has been noted, but not their presence in contemporary mourning. This study analyses online tributes for Jade Goody, a young British celebrity who died of cervical cancer in 2009; though a few of these tributes mention souls, many more refer to angels. Some refer to traditional Christi...

The article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implica...

In this paper, we describe the barriers to digital participation experienced by those at the end of life, propose a framework in which to set these barriers, and discuss research directions in addressing them.

In contemporary western societies, dying usually occurs in old age, out of sight in hospitals and institutions; how then do lay people learn what dying is like? Since the 1970s, one source of information in Anglophone societies has come from individuals who have chosen to publicise their dying of cancer. This article examines the most high profile...

All groups have a culture. This article is intended to help the bereavement practitioner better understand the support needs of clients from other cultures. It sets out and explains a simple checklist of questions designed to explore cultural practices and attitudes to grief and bereavement. The questions cover the obligations mourners feel towards...

Drawing largely on already published literature, this article examines the hypothesis, derived from Frank, that the current proliferation of first-person accounts of grief represents an attempt by mourners to recover their voice in the face of grief's medicalisation. The extent of medicine's colonisation of grief is found to be limited. Though some...

In modern Britain mourning has been largely a private affair. However, since the 1970s the proliferation of public spontaneous shrines and informal memorials challenge mourning’s conventional boundaries, making it far more visible in public space. This chapter looks at the taken-for-granted phenomenon of burying the dead in the public space of chur...

The article analyses the scale of, and reactions to, print media coverage of the dying from cancer in 2009 of young British media celebrity Jade Goody. Some sociologists have argued that death is sequestrated, with the dying body particularly hidden and problematic; hence the sociological significance of the intense and high profile coverage of Jad...

The professions in the West are undergoing unprecedented calls for greater accountability and efficiency in service delivery. This article links these changes to recent developments in institutional theory that emphasize shifting salience of technical over symbolic organizational environments. The analysis of the adaptations to these changes in Fre...

The division of labor, together with modern transport systems and certain cultural practices, enables the separation of home and work. This creates a setting for mourning very different from pre-urban societies. Three bereavement theories (reminder theory, dual process oscillation theory, and the importance of groups in the construction of continui...

Drawing on participant observation in spiritualist churches, along with interviews with bereavement counsellors, the article establishes that a minority of mourners in England occasionally visit spiritualist churches or consult mediums. The messages received are typically benign and innocuous, assuring the mourner that the deceased is all right and...

Informed consent needs to be practised within a culture of openness if it is to enhance public trust in medical procedures around death. Openness should entail patients not just receiving information from doctors, but also having the right to see certain medical procedures. This article proposes in particular that it would be desirable for the publ...

Death is not a single concept. When I've been writing about funeral rituals, the mourning for Princess Diana, roadside shrines, the reporting of death in the news media, afterlife beliefs, or the contemporary interest in reincarnation, friends and acquaintances have been intrigued and have often given me, unasked, their own experiences and opinions...

There are continuing claims that in our society death is a taboo subject, and that bereaved people have lost touch with mourning rituals. This view seems to be challenged by the extensive mourning rituals on Merseyside in the fortnight in April 1989 following the Hillsborough tragedy, and by the simultaneous media debates about what would constitut...

The understanding of death, dying and bereavement in relation to society is indebted to a number of disciplines – anthropology, history, psychology and sociology are surveyed. Theories and methods used by sociologists of death, dying and bereavement are briefly outlined, followed by a number of key debates and challenges: denial, taboo and sequestr...

How do people respond to the grief of parents over the death of their infant child? This article documents the experience of one of the authors, an American married to a Russian whose child died in England. Responses to this death by friends, colleagues and family in the USA, England, and two cities in Russia varied considerably in terms of depth a...

Research into complicated grief assumes that it is a psychological disorder of the grieving individual. This article suggests seven other things that complicated grief may also be: a normalizing construct of psychiatric medicine, an operational requirement of bereavement agencies, a concept by which society as a whole and families can discipline mo...

Why do funeral practices vary between modern Western countries? In the mid-nineteenth century, managing the rapidly expanding number of corpses had to be controlled and rationalized, but this control could be exercised by business, the municipality, or the church, leading to three pure types of funeral organization (commercial, municipal, religious...

The most discussed and analyzed form of deathwork is the dyadic therapist--client relationship, but this far from exhausts the various types of professional work involving the dead. Mediator deathwork is where the professional gleans or constructs information about the dead, edits and polishes it, and publicly presents the edited version in a publi...

Despite their personal and social significance, life-course transition rituals (marking, for example, birth, marriage, death) have received scant attention in discourse analysis. Yet radical changes in them, including a growth in secular ceremonies, can provide insight into contemporary discourse and society. This article considers the case of fune...

Plastination provides a new method, governed by medical technique rather than religious ritual, by which human remains may be transformed from unstable/wet to stable/dry. In the Körperwelten/Body Worlds exhibition, the public pay to view plastinated bodies, and are invited to donate their bodies for plastination after death. This article addresses...

If studying anatomy in medical school promotes clinical detachment, how do lay people respond to the crash course in anatomy they receive on visiting the Körperwelten / Body Worlds exhibition? If late modernity's celebration of the living body makes the dead body problematic, how do visitors respond to the aestheticised dead bodies on display? Thro...

Dominated by religion in the past and by medicine in the present: the idea of what constitutes a good death has changed in different cultures and societies throughout history, perhaps nowhere more so than in our globalised, Western cultures. After a period of individualisation, shared experiences with fellow sufferers now seem to be increasing in p...

This article presents the results of a survey asking British hospice chaplains to describe hospice involvement in post-mortem, funeral and memorial rituals. The findings are followed by discussion and comment from the author, who takes a sociologist's perspective on the issues raised. It was found that many hospices provided rites for the family, b...