Thanatology

I picked up an interesting book called Thanatology: A Liberal Arts Approach, Edited by Mary Ann Morgan, B.N., M.Ed., and John D. Morgan Ph.D from King’s College in Ontario. I read one of the beginning sections called “Living Our Dying”, which was written by John Morgan, the editor. It definitely was written from a slightly skewed religious standpoint, with God being mentioned too many times in a factual sense. However, it was full of good insights into death and culture, and I will list a few ideas I found provacative in the work:

Page 3: death versus dying: Morgan explains death as a ‘biological fact’, the actual ‘cessation of biological functions’. He contrasts it with dying, which he describes as ‘primarily a cultural activity’, citing the exception of people who die without warning, he sees dying as something we do, and refers to it in a performative way as ‘the last act of drama’ (p14). An interesting notion, and on a gut level there seems to be an element of truth to this.

He then goes on to talk about a “Death System”, which is an interesting word choice from a personal standpoint, since alot of my previous work is about the technological systems that sustain and disseminate American culture. Presenting death as a cultural system is a good way to describe the link in these two contents. There is definitely a search in these ideas for a certain kind of thing that ‘we all live by’ (or die by?).

Page 5: Here there is a summary of a French historian by the name of Phillipe Aries’ four periods of death. I will not go into two much detail, except to say that this is an interesting, but in some ways too conflated, recounting of the different ways death has been dealt with culturally ….. Gotta go to class more to come on this post.