ABSTRACT
In the first two chapters, I sketched traditional and modern approaches to death and the more recent ‘revival of death’. In Chapter 3 I highlighted the late-modern and postmodern strands in this revival, which I collectively termed ‘neo-modern’. In this chapter I will set out a schema to illustrate how each of the three cultural responses to death (traditional, modern and neo-modern) are not free floating but rooted in a particular social context and a particular bodily context, which then enable a particular structure of authority. In summary:
IDEAL TYPES
Before setting out this schema in detail, clarification is in order. Traditional, modern and neo-modern death are what sociologists term ideal types. They are not ideal in the sense of desirable, but in the sense that they are ideas in the head of the sociologist. They are simplified ideas about social life that have a logical coherence but that do not exist in pure form in reality. In constructing ideal types the sociologist posits pure forms, in order to identify tensions and complexities in real life. They are like the physicists’ three primary colours which rarely exist in pure form in the colours of the real
world, but which are useful to the physicist in understanding the exact composition of the colours that actually exist. The aim of the sociologist is not to force complex reality into sociological pigeon-holes, but to use ideal types to identify themes and tensions in (in this case) the revival of death.
