Built into every society is the concept of the cycle of life, starting with birth, ending with death, and continuity in the afterlife. Since pre-industrial times, grief rituals were an essential part of letting grief out and controlling it. However, everything changed in the 18 th and 19 th centuries with the rise of the dignified modern consciousness, particularly in America, Europe, and Australia (Ghosh, 2015). Prior to that, funerals and grief rituals were handled close to home. For instance, in much of the larger Western world, deathbed rituals were highly respected and implemented. However, as medical knowledge and technology developed and the World Wars happened, death came to be feared. The industrial, technological, and information revolutions only served to exacerbate the situation further. Furthermore, control over the funeral industry by medical sciences started to hide death from the public view (Beard & Burger, 2017). Mourning rituals are not just a cultural relic from times past. They help to both create and channel the grief and sadness of the loss. Mourning is a social process, and the rituals help create a social support system to help the bereaved continue with life after loss.
Note, however, grief will be used in the general term as the feeling that comes after loss. The loss is not limited to the death of loved ones (or people), but also the death of a pet, loss of an opportunity or job, and failure, among others. Given the erosion of cultural rituals that help individuals and society cope with loss, this paper is a discussion about what other cultures can teach us about grief. It focuses not only on the dignified modern conscious theories on grief but also on different rituals, past and current, that explore how other cultures cope with grief. The significance of such a discussion is that it will enable the reader to explore the meaning of grief and possibly seek help to cope with their grief if modernist coping mechanisms are not helpful
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Dignified Modern Consciousness on Grief
Sigmund Freud in Mourning and Melancholia
Sigmund Freud, a world-renown psychologist and the father of psychoanalysis, was puzzled by mourning as a psychological behavior. In his essay, Mourning, and Melancholia, the positions mourning as a physical manifestation of love ( Quinodoz, 2018) . When people love, their love goes out, embodies, and takes on the characteristics of the object of affection, animate or not. That love which goes out dwells in them until their loss, such as the death of a loved one. The death returns the lost love back to the original owner. However, that recall is painful because the returned love takes on the characteristics of the lost object of affection ( Bokanowski, 2018) . The owner’s love struggles to assimilate the returned love, and in the process, experience their love once more. The massive death and grief were enough to shock the collective consciousness of a country and raised questions on how society could recover from large-scale grief.
Freud’s essay came out in a time where World War I shocked Europe. Furthermore, the unpredictability of the war meant that the impacts would transcend generations. For instance, while the national grief was enough to bind everyone together and build rituals to remember their lost ones, it could also set a dangerous precedent. The danger lies in the concept of justice, where if the victims remained unrecognized or the perpetrators went unpunished, the grief is passed down generations and creates enemies. Australian history of the unrecognized grief of the First Nations as well as around the world created a legacy of grief that splits society. Solving these latent dangers is essential to ensure the future of nation-states. However, it still remains that there are no direct solutions. Therefore, understanding what other cultures teach about grief could be the source of different solutions.
In protest to Freud’s essay on mourning and melancholia, Melanie Klein claimed that mourning was not the return of love once given away. Instead, grieving is a process where the individual acclimates to the thought that they have not killed the dead (Volkan & Zintl, 2018). The implication, therefore, lies in understanding the concept of melancholia. According to Brown (2018), melancholia is the unconscious fixation where an individual refuses to believe that they have lost someone or something and that the loss is irreversible and eternal. Therefore, Klein’s view on mourning and grieving is a form of stasis whereby to overcome grief; the individual has to remember their loss and bring their lost ones along throughout their lives.
Judith Butler
As simple as Freud’s and Klein’s psychoanalytic models of grief are, they ignore the fact that not all losses are equal and grievable. Judith’s concept of Greivable lives posits that losses have to be socially and psychically recognizable to be viewed as grievable (Butler, 2016). For instance, the loss of human life is socially and psychically recognized, thus greivable. Therefore, when talking about the loss of human life, it is done according to certain social norms, such as respecting their memories and never speaking ill of the dead in some cultures. In contrast, when a child loses their favorite pet (to old age, disease, or accident), it qualifies as psychically grievable but not socially. Therefore, the child will most likely be the only one to experience grief. Their friends and parents, on the other hand, could be affected but to a smaller magnitude. Finally, the killing of livestock at the slaughterhouse is not grievable, thus drawing contrast into the individual and cultural subjectivity of the concept of grievable lives.
Butler’s concept of grivable lives also creates another category where the denial of grievability of some lives has reaching influence. First, the killing of an enemy combatant is not grievable by the fact that their lives are not grievable. For instance, in the wake of the 9/11 bombings, the Guantanamo Bay facility was created where enemy combatants were renditioned and interrogated for information, oftentimes while denying them their basic rights, such as the right to representation and a trial. From the interrogators to the soldiers, Americans, and the world, the losses these individuals experienced were initially met with nonchalance. It might be that the denial of grievability to these individuals created a rationalization that it was okay to violate their human rights without consequences. Such is one of the implications and consequences of denying grievability to certain individuals or groups.
The second implication is the pervasive cultural consciousness that some people, such as race, are less than human in one or more dimensions. The consequence is that inhuman treatment becomes rationalized and acceptable, such as the case of a child losing their pet or cattle in a slaughterhouse above. A better example of a consequence was the slave trade that happened in American history or the colonization of the uncivilized world that resulted in grief and losses among the natives, especially the Aboriginal people in Australia and other parts of the world. The most pervasive consequence of these people is the cultural and social rift developed where they are still suffering from events that occurred centuries ago.
Cultural Rituals to Cope with Grief and What we can learn from them
Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead)
In communities of Mexican origin, the Day of the dead is a ritual that helps the members remember their losses (dead loved ones) and temporarily welcome them back into their lives. The ritual is a three-day celebration where the spirits of the dead are briefly allowed to re-enter the living world and re-establish their roots (Thong, 2015). The ritual is marked by altars adorned with the photos of the dead erected in the homes and communities. Furthermore, offerings of flowers, images of saints, incense, and favorite foods are made to the spirits. The Day of the Dead is also one of the few deaths and grief rituals in the world where families gather in cemeteries to celebrate and dine with the spirits of their loved ones.
Día de Los Muertos teaches several things about grief. First, it is the personification of Klein’s argument on grief and melancholia, where instead of accepting the eternal loss of the loved ones, they still live in the memories of their families and friends. The implication is that loss is not to be viewed negatively but as a process of life. After all, nothing is lost eternally. Secondly, believing that the spirits of the dead return to the world of the living to visit their loved ones gives a satisfying sense of continuity to life after death. As a result, the pain of loss is assuaged by the promise of a reunion in the afterlife. These rituals, therefore, can be applied to solving both individual and national grief that has further consequences due to the concept of grievable lives.
However, the cultural festival cannot be adapted directly as it needs a specific belief system about the afterlife. Regardless, what can be learned is that as long as there is a belief about the reunion in the afterlife with remaining connections to the world of the living (specific days or karmic connections), then most of the grief could be assuaged. Note, however, that the argument is most likely to be refuted by today’s “enlightened” masses on scientific, cultural, and religious grounds. The purpose of the argument, however, is not to gain credence with the masses but to give lessons other cultures teach about grief. The specific application remains to be beyond the scope of the paper.
Ancient Cultures
While the Day of the dead provides cultural lessons on coping with grief, ancient cultures can also contribute significantly. For instance, death was a public and social event in Europe in the middle ages. There were specific preparations to be made for friends and families to gather to eat, drink, play, and celebrate (Brooke, 2016). These ceremonies and rituals comforted the grieved, but also served another learnable function. They helped to integrate death into life. Unlike today where death is feared and rarely spoken of, Middle age Europe rituals aimed to tame death. The consequence was that loss, as well as grief, were part of life and would come and pass. Unlike the belief systems perpetuated with the Day of the Death, middle ages European rituals, to some degree, fail to the definition of melancholia and its implications to grief as posited by Klein. Therefore, acceptance of death as a part of life and not fear it is the biggest lesson middle ages European culture could teach us about grief.
Furthermore, the contrast between the expression of grief in ancient times and modern days provides another learnable moment. Today, grief is a personal experience whose expression requires control of one’s emotions and keeping it private. In contrast, the expression of grief in ancient times was a public and community event that was unrestrained. Ancient cultures share the similarity that most of the expression of grief was ceremonial, such as ritualized weeping, also known as the death wail, in different communities in Africa, Asia, South America, and Australia (Tonkinson & Burbank, 2017). The lesson learned is the need to change the current social conceptions about the expression of grief. When shared, communal grief not only brings people together but also creates a bond in the social capital that is helping each other deal with grief. The communal crowdsourcing of social support ensures that there are no lingering effects created by loss, essentially negating the stasis in melancholia. Furthermore, it helps rid of the modern fear of death.
Another ancient culture with learnable lessons on coping with grief is ancient Rome. Not only was it socially acceptable to hire professional mourners to express the grief of death, their numbers also gave the ritual a social feel, as if the masses were mourning (Fraser, 2020). Today, performance arts are used as a medium for subjective expression, especially of complex emotions and feelings. Though not used directly to cope with grief, ancient Rome set the precedence. Therefore, the ancient practice of using performance arts to express grief could be applied today. Furthermore, the lesson is adaptable. For the individual, performance art could be the channel for expressing grief, thus help cope. Performance art could also express communal, societal, and national grief that is a legacy of past wars. Apart from its entertainment value, performance art would be the best lesson to heal large wounds. Note that the previous lessons from other cultures were limited to the individual or community. However, performance art could be scaled to all levels.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the modern consciousness about grief can be understood using two arguments/theories. First are the arguments posited by Freud about the loss of love in his essay. These arguments were challenged by Klein, and added an extra dimension to understanding grief: melancholia. Secondly, there is the concept of grievability that was explored to be one of the reasons grief is passed down generations. Combined, the arguments presented a theoretical framework to understand not only the lessons other cultures could teach us about grief but also how to frame and apply them to modern society. Therefore, other cultures can teach us a lot about grief. For instance, the Day of the Dead rituals common with communities of Mexican descent teaches that loss is not to be viewed negatively but as a process of life and believing that the spirits of the dead return to the world of the living to visit their loved ones gives a satisfying sense of continuity to life after death. One the other hand, the death rituals practiced by ancient cultures to deal with grief teach several things. First, they teach that death is not to be feared. The social and cultural fear originated as a consequence of medical advances and World wars. Secondly, they teach that grief should be shared and communal, not a private matter. Therefore, the expression of grief should be acknowledged publicly, followed by social practices that facilitate said expression.
When different lessons are combined, they help create different strategies to deal with grief. For instance, while a scientist might be averted to dealing with grief by believing in the Day of the Dead, they could be more open to the communal experience of grief, especially the crowdsourced social support. Different lessons can be accepted and adopted by different people and communities to help deal with their grief.
References
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Brown, J. W. (2018). Love and other emotions: On the process of feeling . Routledge.
Butler, J. (2016). Frames of war: When is life grievable? . Verso Books.
Fraser, M. (2020). In Truth: A History of Lies from Ancient Rome to Modern America . Rowman & Littlefield.
Ghosh, S. K. (2015). Human cadaveric dissection: a historical account from ancient Greece to the modern era. Anatomy & cell biology , 48 (3), 153-169.
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Thong, R. G. (2015). Dia de Los Muertos . Albert Whitman and Company.
Tonkinson, M., & Burbank, V. (2017). Mortality, mourning and mortuary practices in Indigenous Australia . Routledge.
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