Why Different Countries Manage Death Differently

The British Journal of Sociology 2012 Volume 63 Issue 1
Why different countries manage death differently:

a comparative analysis of modern urban societies1
bjos_1396
123..145
Tony Walter
Abstract
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 death between different modern western nations. Structural
factors which affect all modern nations include urbanization and the division of
labour leading to the dominance of professionals, migration, rationality and
bureaucracy, information technology and the risk society. How these sociologically
familiar structural features are responded to, however, depends on national histories, institutions and cultures. Historically, key transitional periods to modernity,
different in different nations, necessitated particular institutional responses in
the management of dying and dead bodies. Culturally, key factors include individualism versus collectivism, religion, secularization, boundary regulation, and
expressivism. Global flows of death practices depend significantly on subjugated
nations perceptions of colonialism, neo-colonialism and modernity, which can
lead to a dominant powers death practices being either imitated or rejected.
Keywords: Dying; bereavement; comparative; nation; globalization
One of the core tasks of any society is to manage the deaths of its members, a
task involving both institutional arrangements and cultural resources. To what
extent do we find a convergence of practices as a result of modernity and
globalization? There certainly appears to be some homogeneity in how
modern and increasingly globalized societies manage death, for example, the
medicalizing of dying and mourning, an increasingly globalized funeral industry, and the psychologizing of grief though the latter two struggle to penetrate the Far East. At the same time, some long-standing cultural differences
Walter (Centre for Death and Society, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath) (Corresponding author
email: jaw34@bath.ac.uk)
London School of Economics and Political Science 2012 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2011.01396.x
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continue, such as the gothic fascination with ghosts and old graveyards that
characterizes AngloAmerican but not Mediterranean cultures (Draper 1967;
Goody and Poppi 1994); some innovations, such as the hospice movement, take
root far more easily in some societies (again, AngloAmerican) than others
(Paton and Wicks 1996; Payne et al. 2004); while laws concerning legitimate
killing (capital punishment, abortion, euthanasia), the definition of death, and
organ donation vary considerably by country.
This article outlines a framework for understanding both similarities and
differences in how modern nations organize and ritualize the deaths of their
members. Why the similarities? Why the differences? Ambitiously, I will look
not only at dying, but also at rituals and routines for disposing of the dead
body, and mourning. My argument, in essence, is simple, and perhaps
unsurprising. There are some social, economic and demographic structures
that shape death in all modern countries; how any one country responds to
these structures, however, depends on that nations history, especially how this
unique history has shaped its national institutions and culture. Whether this
will continue to be the case in future, however, remains an open question.
Comparative death studies
Death studies (or thanatology) is an interdisciplinary field, with major contributions from all the social sciences and humanities, not least anthropology,
psychology and (especially in the UK) sociology (Walter 2008). This literature
unfortunately does not help much in the endeavour to identify national differences in death practices. On the one hand, some death studies literature assumes
a modernity that transcends the nation state, ignoring national differences;
death in all modern nations is thus characterized by processes such as medicalization, bureaucratization, secularization, and privatization (Aris 1981;
Blauner 1966; Kellehear 2007; Seale 1998; Walter 1994). On the other hand,
much of the death studies literature takes the nation state for granted as its unit
of analysis.Thus monographs and articles are published on the American way of
death (Farrell 1980; Laderman 1996; Parsons and Lidz 1963),American hospital
dying (Kaufman 2005), burial in America (Sloane 1991), cremation in America
(Prothero 2000), death in England (Jupp and Gittings 1999), mourning in
Britain (Gorer 1965), anatomy in Britain (Richardson 1989), afterlife beliefs in
modern France (Kselman 1993), the funeral industry in France (Trompette
2008) or Japan (Suzuki 2001), death rituals in China (Watson and Rawski 1988),
ancestor worship in Japan (Smith 1974), funerals in South Korea (Park 2010),
the violence of everyday life in Brazil (Scheper-Hughes 1992), death in Australia (Griffin and Tobin 1982), etc, etc. Historical monographs are particularly
prone to relying on sources from only a few places and then generalizing to the
nation (Gittings 1984; McManners 1986), possibly under pressure from their
publishers marketing department.To a greater or lesser extent, all these studies
London School of Economics and Political Science 2012
British Journal of Sociology 63(1)
Why different countries manage death differently 125
leave the reader no wiser as to the extent to which the practices described are
specific to the country concerned; the opportunity for comparative analysis to
illuminate national particularities is not taken.
All this is reminiscent of sociology in general, which since its inception has
been located in a tension or contradiction between a science of particular
nation-states and a science of global or universal processes. (Turner 1990;
Billig 1995; Urry 2000; Wallerstein 1976) It is confusing for teachers and
students that thanatology textbooks emanating from both the USA (Corr
et al. 2008; DeSpelder and Strickland 2005; Fulton and Mettress 1995; Kastenbaum 2007; Kearl 1989; Leming and Dickinson 2006; Moller 1999) and European nations (Clavandier 2009; Howarth 2007a; Schmied 1985; Sozzi 2009)
often do not make clear which sections, paragraphs or even sentences apply to
all modern societies, and which to only their country of origin; apart from the
potential to mislead students, the opportunity for comparative analysis, arguably at the heart of sociology, is missed. The only exceptions come from
Canada (Northcott and Wilson 2008) and Flanders (Bleyen 2005) countries
or regions dominated by larger or culturally more powerful neighbours, from
which textbook authors seek to differentiate their own country.
Explicitly comparative cross-national analysis in death studies are rare
(Davies 1996; Goody and Poppi 1994; Harper 2010; Walter 2005; Wikan 1988).
Implicitly comparative analyses include a cross national study of Anglican
funeral liturgy (Sheppy 2004), and one that places Denmarks lack of death
anxiety within a global context (Zuckerman 2008). Anthropologists can be
more cross-culturally aware than sociologists (Huntington and Metcalf 1979),
though the comparison is rarely between modern societies. American ethnographer Norwood roots Dutch euthanasia talk and practice in an analysis of
Dutch culture and Dutch institutional and economic arrangements, all of
which are explicitly contrasted with the USA (Norwood 2009). Greens
anthropological text on modern American dying includes a number of British
references and discussions, but is not systematically comparative (Green
2008). Since, despite local and international legislation, law remains significantly and explicitly national, research has been conducted on cross-national
differences in the law and practice of legitimate killing capital punishment,
abortion and euthanasia (Davies 1989, 1991; Lewy 2011) and in new laws
(necessitated by medical developments) governing the definition of death and
organ donation (Lock 2002).
With these few exceptions, in social science research the national context in
which deathways operate is everywhere, and yet nowhere; implicitly assumed, yet
rarely analysed.This article, analysing a wide range of social science literature, aims
to remedy that. In the following-section, I set out some features of modernity that
sociologists have argued structure the management of death, before in subsequent
sections looking at historical, institutional and cultural features that I argue create
national variations within the so-called modern way of death.2
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Structure
The social and economic structural features that underlie modern deathways
are well known, namely urbanization, the division of labour, migration, rationality, risk, and information technology (Blauner 1966; Kellehear 2007). These
features characterize the modern world in general and exist independent of
how social actors themselves construe or respond to them, but create challenges to which there can be differing cultural, institutional and individual
responses.
Urbanization and the division of labour

Urbanism goes back several thousand years, leading to increasing
specialization. The concentration of large numbers of people in one place
enables the division of labour and hence a money economy and paid specialists, including specialists to deal with death. First come priests, then apothecaries and doctors, then funeral directors, nurses, social workers, therapists, each
then often fragmenting into sub-specialisms. Death becomes professionalized,
taken out of the hands of first the urban elites and then other social classes,
who all eventually come to rely on professionals to interpret and manage
dying, funerals, and mourning (Kellehear 2007). In modernity, the medical
profession has gained power over other professions, particularly religious professionals, in being granted the authority to manage not only dying, but also the
treatment of grief and to organizing cemeteries and crematoria according to
the requirements not of a religious afterlife but of public health (Aris 1981;
Arney and Bergen 1984; Prior 1989). Death has become increasingly managed
through technical medical expertise rather than through traditional community practices or religious rituals.
The degree to which individuals and families accept medicalization,
however, depends in part on culture: some societies are more deferential to
medical authority and to the family than others, so that, for example in Japan
and Italy the dying individual is expected to leave decisions about care in the
hands of his or her family, who in turn defer to medical advice (Paton and
Wicks 1996). By contrast the hospice movement, developed in the USA and
the UK, promotes the individual autonomy of the dying person, who makes
choices in the light of information provided by the doctor (Walter 1994).
Culture influences how families respond to professionalization and shapes
doctors self-understandings of their professional expertise. And institutional
history determines whether the doctor is employed by the state, the private
sector or a charity, and whether or not health insurance covers the whole
population. Australias palliative care policy returns a degree of control from
the medical establishment to local communities (Kellehear 1999).
Another structural consequence of the division of labour is the segmenting

of everyday social networks, especially in modern cities (Walter 2007). Home
and work are typically separated. For modern urbanites, suburbanites and
exurbanites, in contrast with village dwellers in a traditional rural society, a
persons family, work colleagues, neighbours, and friends may each be part of
separate networks, hardly overlapping, while fleeting economic relationships
in supermarkets or airports are even more detached.When it comes to funerals
and mourning, however, modern societies with these kinds of segmented social
networks have a choice: is the funeral to be implicitly private, which only
extended family and close friends consider attending (as often the case in
England), or to include representatives from a wide range of the deceaseds
networks (as in Japan, Ireland and the USA)? Cultural norms about who
counts as a mourner are important here (Walter 1999), as are traditions put in
place by institutions such as funeral directors. Culture and institutional history
influence the response to social structure.
Migration
Though human populations have migrated since pre-history, the modern world
is typified by the rapid and more or less voluntary movement of large numbers
of people from countryside to city, from less developed to more developed
nation, and from city to city, seeking work and a better life, or escaping an intolerable life (Bauman 2000). Once a better life is found, migration continues
from city to suburbia to exurbia to retirement villa in the sun. Migrants
become disembedded from traditional place and the identity that goes with it
(Giddens 1991), but how they respond to this disembedding is largely cultural.
Migrants to the USA, with its powerful immigrant-based ideology, may be
quicker to leave behind their previous identities and language than migrants to
other societies who may well return home after a few years or in retirement.
But though living bodies can be highly mobile, short of exhumation a buried
body is necessarily static. So migration raises acute questions about funerals
that families have to answer: Bury in the new country? Return the body for
burial in the old country? Cremate and send the ashes back home? Cremate
and divide the ashes between different places? Cremate and wait, to see if the
family stay in the new country? (Jonker 1996; King, Warnes and Williams 2000;
Oliver 2004) Though such decisions are individual, they are made within
cultural traditions. In twentieth-century America, for example, burial not cremation became normative for new immigrants, not least because of the powerful symbolism of resting in the soil of their promised land (Walter 1993).3
Rationality
Modernity is based on and promotes the development of rational systems,
science and technology. Scientific understanding of disease in the nineteenth
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century, along with rational organization, led to the demographic revolution.

Public health, immunization, clean water and sanitation, have radically
lowered the death rate so that the typical death in modern societies is no
longer in childhood from infectious disease but in old age from degenerative
disease. In the later twentieth century, modern drugs and surgery have
extended many lives yet further into old age. As a result, dying in modernity is
typically slow, elderly dying (Brown 2007). Life insurance, based on rational
actuarial prediction, provides economic security for survivors (Parsons and
Lidz 1963). As well as healthcare systems, funeral directing and cemetery and
crematorium management are also increasingly conducted along rational
bureaucratic lines (Trompette 2008). Looking much more widely, modern
organizations in any sphere are typically organized along bureaucratic lines, so
that individual staff can be easily replaced; retirement has the further function
of minimizing the chances of staff dying in post; together, bureaucracy and
retirement greatly reduce the effects of death on economic life (Blauner 1966).
Nevertheless, it has been argued that modern rationality, along with typically
modern goals of control, progress and happiness, are threatened by death,
which ultimately cannot be controlled; hence death becomes unspeakable.
Modern health and social care systems often segregate and isolate the dying
(Elias 1985; Mellor and Shilling 1993), and attempt to contain the wild emotions of the bereaved (Holst-Warhaft 2000). The problem of retaining personhood within such systems is arguably what motivates the death awareness
movement to create more humane ways of dying and grieving (Walter 1994),
though it has been argued that many reform movements are actually initiated
by medical professionals and serve to enhance medical power; the compassionate palliative care doctor gazes not only into my body but also into my very
soul (Arney and Bergen 1984). Rational systems for dying and mourning are,
many death scholars conclude, a mixed blessing.
Rationality does not determine death practices, for choices can still be made.
The extent to which rationality is applied to slow elderly dying is mixed, with
stigma and poorly organized services affecting not only those suffering from
dementia but also many frail elderly people in a number of modern nations
(Kellehear 2007). The extent to which all citizens can access rationally organized healthcare (and most healthcare is consumed in the last years of life)
varies widely between modern societies, an issue that divides public opinion in
the USA. Health inequalities afflict the dying as much as, if not more than, any
other group of the population. Power determines who is, and who is not,
protected from life threatening disease; both elderly dementia sufferers in
North America and persons with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa live exposed to
death, often without the protection of medicine, the state, community or religion (Agamben 1998; Kellehear 2007; Noys 2005).
Not only can medicine, the state, the market, and the community protect
modern people from death, the modern state and rationality can also actively
be used to kill and to brutalize. Bauman has argued that the Holocaust, far
from being an aberration within the modern world, actually required modern
technical rationality for its efficient execution (Bauman 1989). The same is
clearly true of twentieth-century industrialized war, whether the bombardments of World War 1 or the smart bombs deployed by the USA in Iraq, each
reflecting the technologies of their time. Likewise, the industrial revolution in
eighteenth-century England, based on the cotton industry, along with the
emergence of modern democratic ambitions in eighteenth-century America,
relied on the rational organization of the transatlantic slave trade in which
multitudes died at sea, and in which life was valued only because of the slaves
economic value to its owner. Today, as Argentina develops economically, there
remains a culture within both its police and a section of the middle class that
condones the disappearance of the politically or economically inconvenient
(Caviglia 2006; Holst-Warhaft 2000). Certain US states execute some of their
citizens, while China executes considerably more. The evidence does not therefore sustain the thesis that the modern state necessarily protects individuals
from dying.
Risk society
Industrialism entailed a massive increase in harnessing nature, whether
through power stations, public health, or pharmaceuticals. Having tamed
nature, not least through greatly extending the life span, post-industrialism has
become preoccupied with minimizing the risks posed to humans caused by
their conquest of nature (Beck 1992). Such preoccupations include identifying
and reducing global warming, figuring out how to manage extended old age,
and humanizing the soul less impersonal dying often experienced in technically efficient modern hospitals (Arney and Bergen 1984). Seen in terms of risk
society, holistic and humane palliative care is no Anglo-American oddity, but
a sign of where any post-industrial, post-material society is headed.
Information technology
Recent decades have witnessed new communication technologies that have
the potential to modify many features of modern dying and grieving, though
not uniformly across all social groups (Walter et al. 201112). Patients who, in
modernity, may have been isolated, frightened, relying on medical paternalism
(Elias 1985), may now read fellow sufferers blogs or join online support
groups in which they can gain information from and share feelings with fellow
patients, and may possibly share more experiential narratives typically unacknowledged by modernist medicine (Frank 1995). Social networking sites such
as Facebook, in death as in life, bring together a persons diverse social networks, so they are no longer segmented, at least online. Families of American
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or British soldiers currently dying in Afghanistan receive online condolences

from other military families and from civilians they have never met. This
radically unifies the social networks in which people can now mourn and
memorialize, and is generating some research (Kasket 2009; Odom et al. 2010).
How social networking sites change networking by the dying, however, has yet
to be considered.
History and institutions
The unifying story of a modern way of death has been told in numerous articles
and books. We now move on to explore more fully what differentiates modern
nations in their death practices, and here we are on less well mapped terrain.
I look at history, institutions and culture, and key factors within these.
My argument about history is simple: there are key transitional, or even
revolutionary, periods in which each nation and its death practices were
modernized. Examples include the Reformation in sixteenth-century western
Europe; the key political revolution that modernized the state and in which
each nation formulated its historical destiny (e.g. French Revolution, American War of Independence); the overcrowding of urban cemeteries in the
mid-nineteenth century; the development of modern health systems; and those
moments when certain nations emerged from relative isolation and sought to
develop a capitalist economy, notably Japan after 1868 and eastern Europe
after 1989. At such moments, the key question is: who had, or took, power, and
thus shaped the new institutions? This simple idea has precedents (Jupp 2006;
Martin 1978). To give some examples:
a) The echoes of the Reformation are still heard today, for example, in the
acceptability or not of cremation, the design or crematoria, and the
prevalence of words over ritual in funerals in once-Protestant but nowsecular countries (Jupp 2006). Within the Reformation, there were different strands; for example, different Calvinist countries came to
different conclusions about the proper place of burial (Spicer 1997).
b) The key players taking the initiative to respond to the nineteenthcentury burial crisis could be the state (national or local, as in France),
private enterprise (as in the USA), the church (as in Sweden), or some
combination of two or more of these (as in the UK). These players
developed new rational cemeteries, legal and medical procedures for
managing the corpse between death and the funeral, and later either
promoted or resisted cremation (Walter 2005).
c) In the mid-twentieth century, systems were devised to ensure healthcare
for entire populations. State, private, and compulsory insurance systems
developed in different nations, with significant implications for care of
the dying.
d) Todays death practices in different Eastern European countries depend

significantly on churchstate relations before and after 1989. The Soviet
Union promoted cremation (Lane 1981). In Poland from 1945 to 1989
(Catholic) burial became a symbol of Polishness in the face of Russian
domination, but after 1989 cremation developed considerably, without
fear of it being viewed as communist, Russian and hence non-Polish
(Jaworski 2009). In Romania, by contrast, cremation did not develop in
the Communist period because its president, Nicolae Ceausescu, was a
Romanian nationalist and anti-Russian; post-1989, nationalism continues
to be linked to the anti-cremation Romanian Orthodox church and there
has been no great demand for cremation, despite the efforts of a few
social entrepreneurs (Rotar and Bodrean 2009).
This introduces another historical factor: colonialism. This may lead to the
colonizing countrys practices being introduced to the colony. Thus the peculiarly British crematorium design in which at the end of the funeral rite the
coffin is hidden by curtains may be found elsewhere only in certain ex-British
colonies. Or the colonized may resist a practice precisely because the colonizer
wishes to impose it or is associated with it hence the aforementioned resistance to cremation by Poland during the Soviet era, and also by South Korea
during its colonization by Japan in the first half of the twentieth century and
for some decades thereafter (Park 2010).
e) Sacrificial military deaths lie at the heart of modern nationalism (Marvin
and Ingle 1999). Memorials and commemorative rites for the fallen
create a powerful arena for symbolizing national identity (Kearl and
Rinaldi 1983), not surprisingly often taking a form unique to each
country, whether the USAs memorial day (Warner 1959), the UKs
Remembrance Sunday (King 1998; Winter and Sivan 1999), or Japans
Yasakuni shrine (Breen 2004) though after the Great War, France, Italy
and Britain each created a national tomb of the unknown soldier
(Wittman 2011).
So history generates specific institutional arrangements, specific to particular nation states. What about culture?
Culture
Individualism and collectivism
Cross-national surveys identify some modern societies as more individualistic
than others (Hofstede 2001). These tend to be Anglophone societies, with the
USA the most individualistic on a number of measures. This is reflected in a
number of attitudes, values and procedures concerning death, dying and
mourning:
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a) Palliative care promotes individual autonomy and agency, enabling individuals who are dying to make decisions about how to spend their
remaining time, in consultation with family and friends. Similarly, euthanasia extends the right to autonomy in life to the same right in death; if
I have the right to choose how to live, I have the right to choose how and
when to die. Though proponents of palliative care often object to euthanasia, both movements arise within individualistic societies (where they
may find resistance from religious lobbies, for example fundamentalists
in the USA, or bishops in the British House of Lords).
Sharon Kaufman has shown how in American hospitals medical discourse redirects incoherence, anxiety, breakdown, diffuse suffering, and
any other expression of affect that lacks rationality into a discourse of
control and choice. Patients are enjoined to co-plan with medical staff
their final days; yet the very medical system that requires choice, also
severely constrains choice without ever making the constraints explicit
(Kaufman 2005: 17). In her analysis, the postmodern medical discourse of
individual choice is generated by the American medical system, though
arguably to have legitimacy this discourse needs to be located within a
culture that privileges personal autonomy. A medically authoritative
British edited book on advance care planning explicitly presumes the
cultural value of individual autonomy (Thomas and Lobo 2011). Those
from more collectivist cultures, however, may see end of life decisionmaking as a negotiation involving the whole family (Paton and Wicks
1996; Sachedina 2005).
b) Medical and research ethics in Anglophone societies are likewise based
on the informed consent of the individual patient or research subject, an
idea that does not sit well in some other modern societies, such as Italy
(Marzano 2007).
c) In a number of societies, there is widespread demand for funerals to
celebrate the unique life of the deceased (Garces-Foley and Holcomb
2005; Schfer 2007; Vandendorpe 2000). Though this demand is related to
secularization, it is particularly powerful in individualistic societies in
which identity is rooted in the individual more than the group.
d) In individualistic societies, talk about religion is increasingly being
replaced by talk of spirituality. If Durkheimian religion is a badge of
group membership that we absorb with our mothers milk, this fits poorly
with modern individualistic notions of the individuals right to choose. In
Protestant countries, there has been for some centuries a degree of
choice (often more in theory than in practice) as to which denomination
to join, but in the past two decades a discourse of denominational choice
is being replaced by a discourse of spirituality. Spirituality entails the
individual using whatever ideas, beliefs and practices feel right to the
individual, and the authority of religious institutions, especially those of
the world religions, is distrusted (Heelas 2001). This is impacting end-oflife care in more individualistic countries where healthcare chaplaincy is
being transformed into, or at least rebranded as, spiritual care provision
(Garces-Foley 2006).
e) The distinction between grief (what individuals feel) and mourning
(socially expected behaviour) is often made in the Anglophone literature
on grief and is taken for granted by many grief therapists in Britain and
North America. This distinction presumes that individual and society
may easily be separated, an idea not found in more collectivist, patriarchal and family-centred societies. In contrast to these individualizing
trends in many western, and especially Anglophone, societies, a number
of highly modern far Eastern societies, such as Japan and China, along
with many African societies, practice funeral and mourning rituals that
have little, formally, to do with the psychological needs of the bereaved
individual, or even the spiritual needs of the deceased individual on his or
her otherworld journey, and more to do with turning the deceased into a
family ancestor (Smith 1974; Vitebsky 1992). A modern, urban, capitalist
business in communist China may even today consult the companys
ancestral shrine before taking an important business decision. There are
ongoing changes in such practices (Park 2010; Suzuki 1998), but whether
these are in the direction of western individualism is not yet clear. For
example, Japanese elders choosing since the 1990s to scatter rather than
bury ashes in the family grave may reflect not a move to western individualism but an adaptation to a new demographic situation, ensuring
that cross-generational responsibilities between the living and the dead
can continue (Kawano 2010).
The big question is whether individualism is peculiarly Western, with deep
roots in the Italian Renaissance (Burckhardt 1960)? Or is it peculiarly AngloAmerican, with deep roots in Anglo-Saxon historical culture (Macfarlane
1978), giving rise to modernization and economic development in the West
(Weber 1930)? Or is it the other way around affluence makes people more
individualistic (Hofstede 2001)? If Hofstede is right, then whatever national
differences there may currently be in palliative care, informed consent, the
nature of grief, etc, these differences will eventually dissolve in the individualizing effects of affluence.
Religion
Religion affects many practices around dying, funerals and mourning (Obayashi 1992; Parkes, Laungani and Young 1997); teachings about the soul
can have implications for treatment of the corpse (Hertz 1960). World religions that teach resurrection of the body (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) have
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traditionally buried. Within these religions, strands most committed to resurrection (Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Orthodox Judaism) have disapproved of the corpse being violently assaulted through cremation or organ
donation, while those that entertain rather vaguer afterlife beliefs, especially
those concerned with an immortal soul, have not resisted the introduction of
cremation or organ donation (Jupp 2006; Prior 1989). Religions that teach
reincarnation, such as Hinduism, tend to cremate. I have already noted the
long term effects on death practices of religious reform movements such as the
European Reformation of the sixteenth century.
Directly or indirectly related to religion are a range of cultural values.
Legitimating action in terms of core values is an American characteristic
(Bellah et al. 1985). Thus both advocates of and objectors to abortion in the
USA typically argue in moral terms, for example abortion is sinful versus a
womans right to choose, whereas in the UK arguments leading to the 1967
Abortion Act were utilitarian, for example backstreet abortions cause more
harm than legal abortions. Political discourses concerning capital punishment
and euthanasia are similarly differentiated by country (Davies 1991). Personal
narratives by those facing the end of life can also vary nationally, with fate
being frequently invoked in one country, whereas in other countries personal
narratives may be framed more in terms of personal choice or the will of God
(Butler 1963).4
Secularization
Ernest Becker controversially argued that death is inherently terrifying, so
requires creative illusions such as religion to comfort; modernity has lost these
illusions, leading throughout the West to widespread neurosis (Becker 1973).
Becker has been criticized theoretically for attempting to apply the concept of
denial to society (Kellehear 1984) and empirically because there is no evidence
that the worlds most secular society (Denmark) is particularly neurotic or
particularly death denying; in fact the contrary (Zuckerman 2008). Also
Beckers 1970s assumption that modernity inevitably generates secularization
now looks very dated. Just as religion is complex, so is secularization. Sweden
has a national culture that is highly secular, but the Church of Sweden until
2000 the established church of the nation has an institutional place that
positions it to orchestrate mourning after national disaster (Pettersson 1996),
to maintain ownership of most cemeteries and crematoria, and to control the
routine management of the dead body (Bremborg 2006). The USA is the
opposite case: culturally highly religious yet institutionally secular, with
funeral parlours, along with many cemeteries and most crematories, run as
private enterprises. Secularization can be institutional, or cultural (Walter
2005). Islam, however, seems resistant to secularization, even in modern societies (Starkey 2010).
Historically, the timing of secularization in relation to individualization is

important: which came first in any one country? By the 1990s, were individualistic families who wanted a more celebratory funeral resisting the dogmas
and traditions of the church, as in Belgium (Vandendorpe 2000), or resisting
the bureaucratic rationality of the municipal crematorium, as in Britain
(Walter 2005)?
As with individualization, a key question about secularization is whether it
is specific to certain (mostly western European) nations that have a certain
religious/political history (Martin 1978); or whether all affluent societies eventually become secular, once economic insecurity is removed (Norris and Inglehart 2004). In the meantime, levels, types and histories of secularization vary
enormously in modern societies, with major consequences for death practices
in different nations.
Boundary regulation
Norbert Elias argued that civilization has much to do with increasing regulation of the body (Elias 1978), which must include the dead body. Civilized
bodily functions are separated, with for example designated courses within
meals, designated places in which to urinate, and designated places away
from human habitation where animals are to be slaughtered and humans are
to be buried or burnt. But cuisines and toileting arrangements, not to mention
arrangements for viewing or not viewing the dead body and for disinterring or
not disinterring human remains, reveal widespread national and cultural
variations. Though the more civilized body may be a more regulated body, how
it is regulated varies culturally. So, though no modern society still routinely
buries under the church floor, what other, more segregated, arrangements
predominate varies nationally: re-usable graves are common in continental
European cemeteries but not in the UK or the USA, above ground mausolea
are popular in Italy and the USA but not in the UK or Finland. There are clear
cultural rules as to when, where and how the corpse and its container (coffin,
casket) should appear within funeral rites, but these rules vary between, for
example, the USA and UK (Harper 2010). North Americans embrace a distinct culture of cleanliness in life, reflected in frequent showering and deodorizing (Miner 1956), which may be reflected in their processes for preparing the
corpse for public viewing. There is here both a civilizing process, as Elias terms
it, and varied responses to this process.
Mary Douglas has researched how cultures define boundaries and in particular how they categorize objects on the boundary (Douglas 2002); dying and
dead bodies are prime examples, lying on the boundary between life and
death. What is sacred in one culture, may be polluting and offensive in another.
Even over time, the same practice may shift in one century from sacred and
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meaningful, to offensive and disgusting: the requirement that children kiss

their deceased grandmother, for example.
Expressivism
Traditional rituals provide a framework to express how the individual feels, but
many late twentieth-century societies encourage greater informality, along
with a distrust of ritual (Elias 1985; Wouters 2002). These dimensions of
formality/informality and expressiveness/reserve have been used to map both
between-nation and within-nation variations in norms for the proper expression of grief (Walter 1999). However, emotional expressiveness may not only
be generated by specific cultures, but also comprise a post-industrial trend
(Norris and Inglehart 2004). People in industrial societies, like all previous
societies, are pre-occupied with survival, but the unprecedented distribution of
affluence in some post-industrial societies generates more and more postmaterialists who take survival for granted and look instead to subjective
well-being, quality of life and self-expression (Inglehart and Welzel 2005). This
includes quality of death, hence the attempts to raise the profile of the emotional needs of the dying and the mourning no longer are pain relief and
symptom control for the dying, and stoicism for mourners, enough.
Status
Societies vary in the rigidity with which they grant different statuses to and
expect different behaviour from men and women, old and young, rich and
poor, able and disabled, resident and alien. Societies can be more hierarchical,
or more egalitarian. Euthanasia in The Netherlands is prefaced by several
meetings between the household and its family doctor, comprising open collaborative discussions that may be possible only because of the low status
differential in Dutch society between doctors and patients, and between men
and women (Norwood 2009).
Rigid boundaries between status groups are often reflected in funeral and
mourning rites (Taylor 1983), or they may be liminally bracketed or even
reversed in funeral and mourning rites (Walter 1991). Sometimes these group
distinctions are a matter of culture, sometimes of economics. For example, the
strictly gendered division of labour in funerals in some communities can be
due to religion, to ethnicity, or to a local economy (such as coalmining or sea
fishing) that is strictly gendered (Clark 1982b).
Global flows
Modernity not only comprises a set of social and economic structures, it is
also like the nation (Anderson 1991) imagined. In the Meiji period (from
1868), Japan emerged from two centuries of isolation and attempted to modernize (Westney 1987). So emissaries were sent to Europe and the USA to find
out what being modern entailed. Among many other things, they discovered
that a hot topic in intellectual circles was cremation, so after some controversy Japanese modernizers promoted cremation as a way of becoming
modern. What they perhaps failed to realize was that the West was just talking
about cremation, for at that time there were no crematoria and nobody was
being cremated! As a result, Japan moved toward cremation much faster than
the West (Bernstein 2000). I have already given examples of when certain
modern death practices were imagined (correctly) to be those of the colonizer, and were therefore resisted rather than embraced.
This raises the topic of global flows (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone, Lash
and Robertson 1995), in which practices in a globalized world flow increasingly
quickly from one country or region to another, often but not always from more
to less developed, and of which Meiji Japan is but an early and prime case
(Meyer et al. 1997). Some practices and ideas, and here death practices are no
exception, move more easily than others. For example, opt-out arrangements
for organ donation are beginning to replace opt-in arrangements, reflecting the
global spread of libertarian paternalism (Standing 2009) in which the modern
state nudges citizens into behaviours it wants while formally maintaining
choice or at least the appearance of choice (Thaler and Sunstein 2008).
The spread of palliative care also illustrates the flow of ideas and practices.
Palliative care was pioneered in the UK in the 1960s by Cicely Saunders, who
initiated a remarkably successful missionary movement to spread its concepts
globally (Saunders and Kastenbaum 1997); however, since palliative care presumes the notion of personal autonomy, it has struggled to take root in more
collectivist societies. Moreover, since Saunders global strategy entailed bringing medical staff from around the world to work for a few months at her
pioneering hospice in south London, these visitors needed to speak English.
Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kbler-Ross book On Death and
Dying continues to have remarkable global sales in very many translations, so
she has been more influential than Saunders outside the Anglophone world
(Kbler-Ross 1970). Her idea that dying (and by implication, mourning) proceeds in stages has diffused into many unlikely corners of the world, as have
associated ideas clearly rooted in an American culture that privileges unilinearity, predictability and autonomy that mourners work through the
grief process to closure and then move on (Wortman and Silver 1989).
Despite Kbler-Ross later modifying her views, this notion of grief now has
such a foothold in popular culture that it impedes the flow of contrary ideas,
for example that mourners continue a bond with the dead (Klass, Silverman
and Nickman 1996).
Though reformers of modern death practices often romanticize the practices
of non-western and/or pre-industrial societies (Floersch and Longhofer 1997),
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death practices rarely flow from less to more developed countries. Though
Thai, Indonesian, Chinese, Indian or Nepalese ethnic restaurants may thrive in
western Europe or North America, there is little sign of any knowledge, let
alone transfer, of death practices from these countries such as secondary
burial of the bones or open pyre cremations after which families pick out the
bones. Meanwhile, modern western cremation technology is being adopted
globally (Davies and Mates 2005), if with local adaptations (Park 2010). A rare
example of death customs moving from less to more developed societies is
the introduction of tattooing to the West from Polynesia by eighteenth-century
sailors, leading eventually to the now quite prevalent practice in the West of
memorial tattoos (Te Awekotuku 1997). Though the Anglican communion
rarely incorporates indigenous practices into its various national funeral liturgies, Maori elements are incorporated into the Anglican funeral rite in New
Zealand a settler nation whose mainstream Europe-derived culture is
unusual in frequently incorporating indigenous elements (most famously the
hakka before rugby matches) as a way of affirming national identity (Sheppy
2004).
One non-western tradition, the Mexican Day of the Dead, is well known in
the USA and Europe, but not all attempts to hybridize the Mexican Day of the
Dead with modern western cultures have succeeded. One that has is the Dutch
Allerzielen Alom (All Souls), an initiative by artists that over a few years has
come to involve thousands of mourners. Originally resisted by the authorities
for fear of witchcraft and other deviant practices, it came to be accepted, partly
because of the acceptance of art and artists in Dutch popular culture.5 Roadside shrines to those killed on the road or in other tragedies have become
common in many modern countries, their exact form varying from country to
country, and though folklorists categorize roadside shrines as spreading from
Mexico via Texas to many parts of the globe, we do not actually know how the
roadside shrine idea has travelled from one country to the next by motorists
who have seen a shrine? or by global media images? (Everett 2002)
In sum, some death practices flow around the world, typically from modern
to modernizing societies, while the flow of other practices is resisted or not
even contemplated. Both acceptance and resistance depend on history and
culture, on how a nation imagines both itself and the country from which the
practice is believed to originate, and on whether it perceives modernity to be
a universal good or a mode of colonial domination.
Conclusion
I have argued in this article that contemporary death practices are shaped
by a range of sociological factors the division of labour, migration, rationality, inequality, risk, information technology, institutions, individualism/
collectivism, religion, secularization, boundary regulation, expressivism, status

hierarchies, and global flows. These help explain not only regional, class or
ethnic variations in death practices within any national society, they also help
explain both similarities and differences between societies.
So, why do different countries manage death differently? I have argued that the
death practices of all modern societies are profoundly shaped by common social,
economic and demographic structures, but how each society responds to these
common structures depends considerably on 1) historic institutional arrangements,
and 2) culture.This raises the further question whether,despite variability in current
institutional arrangements and culture, these too are subject to forces that will, in
the long run, cause them to converge to a common pattern? My discussions of
individualization, secularization, post-materialism and global flows have already
raised this question will we all, eventually, become secular post-materialist individualists? Almost certainly not. Or to put it more modestly and more sociologically: will all modern societies increasingly come to privilege the individual, the
secular and the post-material? Quite possibly.
Whatever trends may be discerned and whatever the future may hold, I have
argued that current variations in death practices between modern societies are
in large part due to history, institutions and culture. What I am arguing is a
variant of the glocalization thesis (Robertson 1995).There are structural global
forces associated with modernity (rationality, markets, communication
systems), not to mention power and inequality, but how these manifest in any
one place depend heavily on local factors. As in life, so in death: we find global
patterns, and we find both enduring and emerging variations, and these variations are by nation as well as by the more conventional sociological variables
of gender, class, ethnicity and religion.
(Date accepted: November 2011)
Notes
1. My thanks to Joanna Wojtkowiak and
to the Journals anonymous reviewers for
their helpful suggestions.
2. Death studies has analysed some other
inter-group differences, for example ethnic
differences (Braun and Nichols 1997; Field,
Hockey and Small 1997; Irish, Lundquist
and Nelsen 1993; Kalish and Reynolds
1981), urban/rural differences (Clark
1982a), and cultural differences either
within modern nations (Mitchell 1998;
Waddell and McNamara 1997) or between
pre-modern societies (Eisenbruch 1984).
There is little on gender differences (Martin

and Doka 2000; Schut et al. 1997), still less
on social class differences (Howarth 2007b;
Kearl 2009).
3. Since Walters 1993 study, the American cremation rate has risen rapidly; to what
extent this involves first generation immigrants is unclear.
4. See also Natasha Donnellys ongoing
University of Reading doctoral research,
analyzing narratives by those who have
attempted suicide in the US and the UK.
5. See: http://allerzielenalom.nl/.
140
Tony Walter
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The British Journal of Sociology 2012 Volume 63 Issue 1

Why different countries manage death differently:

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 125

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

Urbanization and the division of labour

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 127

Another structural consequence of the division of labour is the segmenting

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

century, along with rational organization, led to the demographic revolution.

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 129

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

or British soldiers currently dying in Afghanistan receive online condolences

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 131

d) Todays death practices in different Eastern European countries depend

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 133

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 135

Historically, the timing of secularization in relation to individualization is

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

meaningful, to offensive and disgusting: the requirement that children kiss

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 137

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Why different countries manage death differently 139

collectivism, religion, secularization, boundary regulation, expressivism, status

There is little on gender differences (Martin

Brown, G. 2007 The Living End: The Future

Why different countries manage death differently 141

Dying, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Jupp, P. 2006 From Dust to Ashes: Cremation

Klass, D., Silverman, P.R. and Nickman, S.L.

Why different countries manage death differently 143

Competence in Palliative Care, Journal of

Sheppy, P. 2004 Death Liturgy and Ritual:

Vandendorpe, F. 2000 Funerals in Belgium:

Why different countries manage death differently 145

British Journal of Sociology 63(1)

Wortman, C.B. and Silver, R.C. 1989 The

London School of Economics and Political Science 2012

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