ABSTRACT
Today, although the issues are complex, we do have more to draw on. Anthropologist Jenny Hockey (2007) suggests there are wider social trends reshaping our encounters with death. In Chapter 2, we already discussed the shift from industrial to postindustrial living, and between the modern and postmodern eras. The trends identified as being particularly important in the field include: sequestration of death (which relates to the process by which we isolate the experience of death from everyday life so that people don’t directly experience it anymore); secularization (which refers to the abandonment of traditional religious belief systems, including about what, if anything, happens after we die); and desecularization (the process of strengthening faith in traditional religious systems, reclaiming spirituality, or imbuing things done by secular social institutions with meaning and purpose).
