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Modern Death: Taboo or not Taboo?

Tony Walter

There has been a proliferation of literature on death - in the UK mainly journalistic and very recent, in the USA mainly scholarly and covering the past thirty years. This literature has created the conventional wisdom that death is the taboo of the twentieth century. The article asks: (a) is death taboo? if so, in what sense? (b) if it is not taboo, then why the frequent announcements that it is? It is this second question that scholars have not previously attempted to incorporate into their theory.

The strengths and weakness of the taboo thesis are reviewed. Six possible modifications/critiques are offered in an attempt to resolve the difficulties: (1) that there was a taboo, but it is now disintegrating; (2) that death is hidden rather than forbidden; (3) that the taboo is limited largely to the (influential) occupational groups of the media and of medicine; (4) that the loss of a coherent language for discussing death leads to conversational unease; (5) that all societies must both accept and deny death, so pundits are able to pick whatever examples fit their thesis; (6) that it is the modern individual, not modern society, that denies death.

Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 2, 293-310 (1991)
DOI: 10.1177/0038038591025002009
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