ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on continuing bonds as integral to the fundamentally sociological nature of grief. Most psychological models of grief now accept that continuing bonds are a normal aspect of grief. The bonds are connected with people's internalized social values, role models, and behavioral guides. The chapter explores how continuing bonds are often part of land claims and discusses how continuing bonds are vital to political bonds. The bonds with the dead play a major role in social solidarity and identity in families, tribes, ethnic groups, or nations. A good place to begin to understand continuing bonds as collective representations is by looking at the family ancestor rituals that occur at some periods in the history of most cultures. The chapter discusses funeral literature, especially eulogies, in which individual narratives and social narratives intersect. In psychological intervention with bereaved individuals it may be convenient to regard their continuing bonds as individual psychic phenomena.
