ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits general understandings of the terms mourning and grief commonly organized around contrasts between public and private domains of emotional expression and experience. It calls for a move beyond the popular thesis that ‘death is taboo’ to a concern with conditions of tellability, which in an age of sharing, further extend to conditions of shareability. Drawing on linguistic anthropology’s insights on mourning as situated performances of emotion whose narrative trajectories can carry important social, political, and (meta) cultural meanings, the chapter outlines the key principles of a narrative approach to the study of death and mourning. This approach can encompass a wide range of mourning practices across ritual and non-ritual, ‘traditional’ and contemporary, offline and online contexts. In addition, this chapter distils key insights and research directions from the study of death online.
