A grave affair : on the possibilities of loneliness among the dead and the dying : capitalism, hegemony, and the experience of death in western societies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The dead have a lot to say, but in the fast-paced context of ultra-capitalist societies, who has the time to listen? If social sciences and societies have depicted death in the West as denied, the dying as abandoned and the dead as forgotten, then how do we reconcile this dark portrait with the importance of The End in the stories of our lives? One cannot help but wonder: what kind of relationships do westerners truly foster with death? This study proposes a new reading of the practices and beliefs surrounding death in contemporary western societies by questioning the pessimistic death theories of the 20th century. The investigation raises two concerns, namely the possibility of an increased sense of loneliness among the dead and the dying, and the effects of technology and consumer lifestyles on alienating the aging and dying from the living. Drawing on Gramscian and Foucauldian theory on the concept of hegemony, the study combines historical and ethnographic data related to the domination of institutions and industries over death in the urbanized societies of Canada, France, the United States and England. To uncover the deeper hegemonic processes that shape the experience of death in the 21st century, the study goes back in time and retraces the changes that have occurred around death under different regimes. From the Early Middle Ages to the late capitalist era, the reader is brought on a journey across the changing landscape of death by means of 70 annotated illustrations which invite us to reflect on a central question, namely, what makes death a grave affair? Beginning with a sociohistorical analysis of the rise of individualism as linked to the disenchantment of death in the West, followed by an experiential ethnography of silence in one of North America’s largest sepulchral space—Montreal’s Mount Royal and Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemeteries, the journey ends with an investigation of the affairs related to the commodification of death and aging in North America. The results of the study show that the possibilities of loneliness among the dead and the dying are not more significant today than they were in the past. The current landscape of death rather attests to an abundance of intentions which seek to highlight the importance of caring for and commemorating loved ones. What this finding reveals, is that western societies harbour misconceptions that undermine the complexity, richness and continuity of the bonds which keep the living and the dead engaged in a meaningful relationship that, we shall see, affords more possibilities than ends.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".