ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how consideration of the social context of grief differs from stage/phase accounts of grief. Disenfranchised grief (DG) illustrates the social context of grief. All cultures and sub-cultures have to deal with death, psychologically, practically, and socially, and the chapter emphasises the most widely practised rituals of mourning. To understand those rituals, it is needed to understand the widely held attitudes towards death itself which form a major part of the social context of grief. In modern Western societies, death has become professionalised. Some of the familial and communal rituals previously associated with bereavement have been taken over by hospitals and funeral directors. According to family systems theory (FST), the death of a family member has a powerful effect on both the family system as a whole and the subsystem to which the deceased belonged. The most often quoted academic advocates of the view that death is taboo and uniquely badly handled by modern society.
