Death, trauma, and the 'event' (original) (raw)

2021, Death and Events International Perspectives on Events Marking the End of Life

This paper has its point of departure in tensions around the ‘event’ in two distinct, if related literatures. One: the long-standing insistence evident in social scientific studies of death, going back to Hertz and Durkheim, to think of death as a lengthy social process and to do so against a modern, western, medico-legal emphasis on death as a biological event. This is tension made all the more palpable with the development of cadaver organ transplantation that necessitated the deliberate muddying around the notion of death, specifically death as a single event. Two: two related and ongoing debates in trauma studies that both relate to the notion of the event. On one hand is a debate around whether trauma should be regarded always as the result of specific events, or if trauma should be extended to cover consequences of ongoing systematic processes. On the other hand, is a debate around whether trauma should be regarded always as the result of an external event, or if trauma can be linked to fantasies and the memory of events, rather than only the event as such. Underlying different positions in these debates are different assumptions about the human being, the individual, social relations and about death. It is these assumptions that this paper seeks to investigate. It will do so by relating ethnographic material on natural disasters in Iceland and the perceptions of and reactions to those disasters. Here, careful attention will be given to the language used locally to discuss disaster. The disasters have been linked with trauma, and have been represented as singular events that variously must not, or should not, be repeated even as they evoke memories of earlier events. Interrogating them thus is an opportunity to reflect on death, trauma and the event