ABSTRACT
Contributors to this book have explored differences in the way death is experienced not only in various cultures but also by men and women. Something of the variety of experience that exists between different ethnic groups is presented in chapters by Smaje and Field and by Gunaratnam. Jonker looks at how these experiences are shaped by the overall cultural and social context within which a particular minority group lives. Social context is explored via the public representation of death and dying and the reactions to it in Littlewood, Pickering and Walter’s chapter. They critique press reports in terms of gender portrayals and in so doing link with those other contributors who underline the need to recognise differences between genders. Here, as in the chapters by Hockey, Hallam and Thompson, the approach is to emphasise specific aspects of death and dying and look at these in the context of gender. Chapters by Lovell and by Riches and Dawson offer a further variable, that is the characteristics, particularly the age, of the person who dies.
