Autour de la mort : perspectives anthropologiques

The way of meeting death has deeply changed in contemporary western societies. In the past, people were almost always dying at home, and all steps of the process which converted the living member of a group into a defunct, from death agony to end of mourning, were social and ritual events. Nowadays, most of the time, people are dying in a hospital, and since social and ritual significance of death is vanishing, the individual has to meet it alone. Medical personnel is the first and foremost to deal with that problem, but is not in a position for taking charge of it. The real challenge is to give to death a new social meaning instead of letting it be transformed into a pure medical issue.