Impossible Grief: Bereavement and Death Practices Around Lives That Don’t Matter (Part II)
Impossible Grief: Bereavement and Death Practices Around Lives That Don’t Matter (Part II)
Wednesday, 9 July 2025: 09:00-10:45
Location: ASJE018 (Annex of the Faculty of Legal, Economic, and Social Sciences)
RC22 Sociology of Religion (host committee) Language: English and Spanish
What does it mean to grief over someone whose death is not confirmed? What does it mean to mourn someone who is considered a public enemy. What stories can be told about a deceased whose life had no significance? And what forms of memorial practices can be organized around lives that society wants to forget? The sociological and anthropological scholarship on death and the end of life has largely attended to the central role funerary practices and grief play in the sustenance of the social bonds between the deceased and the group to which they belonged. Lesser attention has, however, been given to funerary social and cultural practices developed around lives that are less identifiable as belonging to a particular group, or that have been banned from that group. Bodies of migrants that are washed at the shores of Mediterranean, homeless people who anonymously die in the streets of large metropoles, jihadists who have perished in the war or men and women who have disappeared for years are just few examples of lifeforms that are not easily remembered. This panel therefore asks the question: what socio-cultural practices are developed around lives that hold little social and cultural significance or are considered as undesirable? We invite papers that engage with this question at a societal level (by examining social discourses and practices) or at the level of social and cultural practices of mourning and grief.
Session Organizer:
Oral Presentations