From Mystery to Spectacle. Essays on Death in Serbia from the 19th-21st Century (original) (raw)

It has been ten years since I have stepped in the field of thanatological researches. Primarily incited by certain events in my personal life and then by classical thanatological studies, I have started to leaf through pages about death which were written by history of civilization. Immense and endless “book of death” obliged me to make my own system, to summarize my own experience, to tame and reconcile my own feelings of limited duration and perceptible eternity. However, in order to avoid creating a book of autobiographical and confessional notes, or at least to avoid reducing this manuscript solely to that, I tried to let my intellectual and emotional experience through the sieve of the culture to which I belong. This is, after all, a task of a researcher, particularly obvious in topics which concern essential questions of human existence. Death and dying are certainly such topics. Furthermore, these topics inevitably and explicitly turn researcher into interpreter whose goal is to establish balance between personal and general/common, individual and collective, historical and meta-historical levels of interpretation. Obviously, the title of this book was inspired by title of Philippe Aries influential study:”Essays on History of Death at the West” (“Essais sur l`histoire de la mort en Occident”). Approaches applied in this book encouraged me to design my study as a collection of more or less independent texts which were created during last decade and in which my attempt was to summarize what was the most important about death and dying in Serbian culture. Therefore, this book could be conditionally divided into two thematic parts: research results about ritual behaviors and attitudes towards death of common people, and analyses of different historical and cultural circumstances which influenced these comprehension and praxes. The other group of essays brings analyses of manifestations of death phenomenon in public spaces. These investigations revealed strong influences of cultural, political and religious ideas and ideologies on shaping public, collective image of death. However, they also point at the reverse Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle 8 process – how thesaurus of symbols contained in “eternal mystery” determines content and messages of political praxes. The basic texture of this manuscript rests on the fundamental hypotheses of classical thanato-anthropological researches, i.e. on ambivalent, synchronic and diachronic models which can be found there. One model represents modern societies as ones in which facts of suppressing speech on death in private sphere on one side and invasion of death and dying images in public space on the other are confronted. The other model is based on the idea that understanding of death follows fairly one-way evolutionary path between tradition and modernity. However, a careful reader will notice that interpretative level of results constantly escapes compact structuring: silence about death in modern and neo-modern (term suggested by Walter) society is not an absolute category, while relation between tradition and modernity appears as multivalent, multi-way and full of deep mutual overlapping. Interviews that were conducted during the research, acquaintances, conversations and familiarity with colleges which I met at conferences on thanatology, as well as ever-growing pile of death studies literature, inspired me to write essays in relatively “free style”, which seemed to me to be the best way for making my own cognitions readable and accessible to a wider readership. Nevertheless, readers have in their hands a book about death and dying. Leafing through it, they can travel from rural to urban spaces, from traditional to contemporary ritual forms and ideological frames, from private to public discourses, from everyday life to political spheres, from mystery to spectacle and vice versa. This book will not help us solve the mystery of death, but it may improve our understanding of some forms it takes in contemporary society.