Grief as an extended emotion

Introduction

Imagine that you are at a funeral service.¹ You have lost someone that you really love, perhaps one of your parents. The coffin is in the middle of the room, and every time you look at it, you think of the dead body of the person inside and how much you miss him or her. You hear the minister speak about the person, and the words make your eyes well with tears. When the organ plays the beautiful psalms and the participants of the ceremony sing, you try to sing along yourself, but every time you try, you have to stop because it makes you cry. In the days before the ceremony, you have talked with your relatives about what should happen. You have shared memories of the deceased, looked at pictures from his or her life, and perhaps distributed some significant belongings of the person among the family members. The deceased might have been an avid bass player, and when you look at the instrument, which is now in your house, you feel a strange blend of sadness and gratitude. In the days, weeks, and years to come, you keep returning to this and other objects, you keep telling stories about the person – perhaps to your children and grandchildren – and you keep looking at pictures. You might become interested in books written by other bereaved individuals and find a certain comfort in the fact that a loss like this happens to almost all human beings. Or, if your grief continues to weigh you down and does not allow you to return to an active life, then you might join a bereavement support group or even receive a diagnosis of complicated grief from your doctor.

Most of the contents of this little introductory vignette are quite uncontroversial, perhaps even insignificant at first sight. They are bits and pieces of experiences that are common when someone dies and one is left to grieve. In this article, however, we will take what is common and uncontroversial and interpret it in the light of a recent theory of the human mind and its emotions that may initially strike one as somewhat strange. For what we want to argue is that the process of grieving described above can best be understood not as a psychological process that takes place “inside the mind”, but rather as an extended psychological process that involves objects and persons within the environment as constituent parts of the emotion as such.

The hypothesis of the extended mind is by now becoming an established position across psychology and other human sciences, but only few scholars have applied it to human emotional life (notable exceptions include Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009; Krueger, 2014; Slaby, 2014), and no one has so far (to our knowledge) discussed it in relation to grief specifically. The extended mind hypothesis states generally that objects within the environment (e.g. notebooks or calendars) can function as a part of the mind and are centrally involved in cognition. Thus, the mind is not simply in the head, but is organismically embodied, contextually embedded, and environmentally extended and distributed.

In this article, we will first introduce the extended mind thesis and extended emotions before applying the idea to the emotion of grief specifically.² We try to explain this thesis by introducing the notion of an affective niche within which grief is usually scaffolded and enacted. An affective niche couples the person and the environment and enables the realization of affective states. In the case of grief, it can involve individual scaffoldings such as tombstones, clothing, belongings, and pictures of the deceased and also collective scaffoldings such as rituals and ceremonies, joint attention to music and other communal grief practices, some of which were illustrated in the opening vignette. We will argue that more attention should be given to the materially extended and socially distributed character of grief, which, however, is difficult in a cultural context that thinks extremely individualistically about emotions.

The extended mind hypothesis

In a generic sense, the extended mind hypothesis can be traced back 200 years to philosophers such as GWF Hegel, who depicted the individual’s mind as dependent upon the operations of social practices and institutions (Crisafi & Gallagher, 2010). However, in recent philosophy of mind, the thesis was articulated in the 1970s by Hilary Putnam, who famously argued that meanings are not “in the head” (Putnam, 1973). Putnam set out a thought experiment in which he imagined that our planet Earth has a twin, a twin Earth that is completely identical to ours except that water on this twin Earth does not have the molecular structure H2O, but instead has a molecular structure XYZ (the following is argued more thoroughly in Brinkmann, 2017). All of the superficial properties of the water are the same in both places: It is usually wet and can quench the thirst, freezes at zero degree Celsius and boils at 100, etc. Putnam now asks: if a person on Earth and a person on twin Earth, who are completely identical, molecule for molecule, both think about water, do their thoughts have the same meaning? Are they thinking about the same thing? And Putnam answers in the negative. Because the person on Earth is thinking about H2O, while his counterpart on twin Earth is thinking about XYZ. This is true even if they do not personally know the molecular structure of what they call water. Putnam’s point is that what they think about depends on the nature of the physical world and not only on their knowledge or mental representations. It is not a difference in people’s “heads” that determines whether they think about the one thing or the other, but rather a difference in their environment. The “contents” of the mind can only be understood by looking at what is “around” the mind (Noë, 2009).

Putnam’s extended theory was a “semantic externalism”, i.e. a theory about meaning as something external. In the late 1990s, philosophers such as Andy Clark began to expand the externalist view to something that Clark calls “active externalism”, which is probably the most commonly discussed theory of the extended mind today. Clark argues that we humans are “natural born cyborgs”, who use things and technologies to expand and refine our cognitive processes (Clark, 2008). Everything from glasses that help us to see more clearly, to scientific instruments, books, charts, etc. are involved in human cognitive processes, and as such can be thought of as part of the mind. Whereas Putnam’s externalism was passive, because it was just a static difference in the environment that made a difference in the meaning of people’s thoughts, active externalism focuses instead on how people and environments are actively and reciprocally involved in cognitive and, more broadly, mental processes (Clark & Chalmers, 1998).

This idea can be illustrated with a multitude of examples. Let us borrow from Clark and Chalmers and discuss the innocent example of a notebook. If a patient with incipient Alzheimer’s manages to cope with everyday life by noting relevant information in a notebook, then the notebook is, of course, a substitute for the “brainpower” that previously helped the person to remember, but, according to the extended mind theory, there is no reason to believe that the notebook is any less part of the mind simply because it is outside the skull. Of course, the extended mind hypothesis has been criticized, because it breaks with the deeply ingrained belief in Western thought that “the mind is in the head”. A counter-argument sometimes raised is that an artefact such as the notebook should not be regarded as part of the mind because it is physically separate from the person and can be located far away. You may lose the notebook, but you cannot lose your brain! In a sense this is obviously wrong, precisely because the Alzheimer’s patient can be said to have “lost” part of his brain. It is also more generally questionable to require that something be physically carried on your person as a condition for it to be part of the cognitive system. A person who needs to wear glasses to be able to make out the letters in a book can still be said to be able to read, after all, even if he has lost his glasses. In much the same way, a blind person’s cane is a technology that enables an extension of his or her awareness of the external world, whether or not the cane is permanently attached to the person’s arm or can be set aside. So, what matters is whether the artefact plays a relevant functional role in relation to the person’s ability to carry out specific mental tasks. However, this conclusion gives rise to new theoretical problems, since the limit of things that can be said to belong to the mental realm must be expanded almost indefinitely because all kinds of things may play a functional role – large or small – in almost any conceivable mental process. For example, the notebook is manufactured from a specific material that is processed by specific people through specific social practices. Should all of this be included in the person’s mind? This sounds absurd, and herein lies the greatest challenge for the extended mind perspective, which is about delimiting the parts of an organism’s environment that are relevant to the organism’s mental processes. Without getting too deeply into this debate, we will mention that our proposal in this article is to downplay the discussion of “localization” in a narrow sense. If we approach mental phenomena such as emotions not as “things” or “objects” (e.g. in the brain), but instead see them as skills and dispositions to act, think, and feel (following Bennett & Hacker, 2003, among others), then the question is not so much where the mind is (because skills and dispositions are not easily placed in physical space), but rather what kinds of mediators enable persons to act, think, and feel skillfully (Brinkmann, 2011). From this perspective, what we should think of as extended (in extended mind theory) are the mediators that constitute the range of skills and dispositions of persons and enable these persons to recognize features of the world, solve problems, act and respond emotionally to what is happening, which is what we will now discuss.

Extended emotions

When we discuss whether it makes sense to say that emotions such as grief can be extended, it is crucial to have a precise conception of emotion in mind, since the term itself can mean many different things. On some definitions, it might make little sense to say that emotions can be extended, whereas on others, we need to acknowledge the extendedness of emotions as absolutely central, or so we shall argue. To begin with a theory of emotions that belongs to the former category, we can mention the well-known theory of Robert Zajonc (1984). This theory emphasizes the immediate affective response of an organism and downplays the role of cognitive and evaluative procedures in emotional life. Emotions, on Zajonc’s account, are in a sense “inner” organismic reactions and thus by definition not extended. Similarly, Antonio Damasio’s (1999) influential neo-Jamesian theory of emotions, according to which an emotion is “a specifically caused transient change of the organism state” (p. 282), would also see them as something “inner” or internal to the organism. “Feeling an emotion is a simple matter”, Damasio says: “It consists of having mental images arising from the neural patterns which represent the changes in body and brain that make up an emotion.” (p. 280). We see here the legacy from William James who famously argued in The Principles of Psychology that “bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.” (James, 1890, p. 1065). Thus, according to James, having an emotion consists of feeling bodily changes, and common-sense is therefore wrong when it says that we are sorry and weep because we lose our fortune, or that we meet a bear and run because we are frightened. Instead, we should say that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, of fearful” (p. 1066). Although the theories of Zajonc, Damasio, and James are different, they are united in their internalism, i.e. the idea that what we refer to as emotions are processes that can be understood by looking exclusively at what takes place in an individual organism.

This article is written from quite a different view of emotions (see Brinkmann, 2006, for a critique of the theories of Damasio and James). What the internalist theories of emotions miss is first and foremost the intentional, evaluative and object-oriented character of emotions. Against the Jamesian viewpoint, a common-sense objection would insist that the reason I know that someone committed some unjust act and become angry, for example, is not because I flush upon hearing of it (Bennett & Hacker, 2003, p. 216), as James and Damasio would have it. Rather, I am indignant (and may or may not flush in anger) at someone’s act because it is unjust, and I know that it is unjust, not because I feel any organismic perturbations such as flushing, but rather because I understand that the act disregards someone’s rights or is disrespectful. Anger as an emotion is thus directed at an object or event in the world (and not at changes in the organism), and I can be said to have a reason to feel angry when someone acts unjustly. Anger, like other emotions, is thus a normative response to an event rather than a pure causal or mechanical reaction to changes in the body (Kofod & Brinkmann, 2017). This is not to say that the body is unimportant in our emotional lives, but it is important because it is part of the person’s active way of understanding the world (something Merleau-Ponty, 1945, would conceive as the lived body). That is, we propose to view the body as a subject of emotions (the embodied person) rather than as a reservoir of inner emotions as objects that a person may feel. Having emotions is not about reading the signals of one’s body like a meter, but it is about using one’s body to understand real situations in the world. DuBose (1997))) has examined grief specifically from the perspective of a phenomenology of the body, based on the work of Merleau-Ponty, and he describes the body as “a relational matrix” that connects bereavement, grief, and mourning (p. 369). The existential phenomenological perspective is certainly aligned with ours, and we return to the embodiment of grief below.

The most significant group of emotion theories within psychology to stress their intentional and normative character is the so-called appraisal theories. According to a standard definition of emotions from this perspective, emotions are “adaptive responses which reflect appraisals of features of the environment that are significant for the organism’s well-being.” (Moors, Ellsworth, Scherer, & Frijda, 2013, p. 119). Appraisal theories go back to Aristotle and were re-actualized in psychology by figures such as Magda Arnold (1960) and Richard Lazarus (1991) from the 1960s onwards. Centrally, these theories emphasize the idea that emotions involve judgements about what is significant for an organism. Such judgment is conceived as a transactional process that involves changes in a number of physiological and psychological components, including cognitive ones. As the influential philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2001) wrote in her magnum opus on the emotions: “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature, they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.” (p. 3). For appraisal theorists, an emotion is a syndrome made up of many components, including a motivational component, a somatic component, a motor component, a feeling component, and, most essentially, evaluations. We will argue, then, that if one or more of these components routinely include properties in the organism’s environment, emotions should be thought of as at least partly extended.

Central to appraisal theories of emotions is the intentionality of emotional life. Thus, our emotions are about objects in the world. They are not simply physiological states or processes – or inner feelings or sensations – but display the key quality of aboutness. More precisely, emotions express a person’s attachment to objects that are beyond the person’s full control. According to Nussbaum (2001))), emotions should be understood as “a certain sort of vision or recognition, as value-laden ways of understanding the world.” (p. 88). This may provide us with an overview of the various emotions based on the nature of the specific relationship the person has to the object: Joy is thus felt when the beloved object is at hand; fear when it is threatened; grief when it is lost; gratitude when someone fosters the object’s good; anger when the object is damaged; envy when another has an object that one desires; and jealousy when another becomes a rival with regard to the object, etc. (p. 87). Furthermore, this key characteristic of intentionality also means that emotions are normative in the sense of being more or less trustworthy as ways of understanding the world. Emotions can be world-disclosing, and it is not the case that something was praiseworthy, because I felt pride (that would be a subjectivist or emotivist fallacy), for that would make emotions incorrigible. Hence, this is the other sense in which emotions are normative: Like thoughts, they may themselves be evaluated relative to normative standards of correctness. We praise and blame people for their emotions in everyday life, which would be unfair if emotions simply happened causally, like physiological phenomena, without any agentic mediation. If I become angry with my small child, because she spills a drop of milk, my anger is quite simply normatively wrong in the sense of being disproportionate, and others may rightly give me a reprimand for being angry.

If emotions are inherently intentional and normative (and hence have a cognitive component), our question becomes whether this is possible without external scaffoldings provided by the environment. If we go back to the initial vignette, we see that the emotion of grief as described is intimately connected to physical objects such as a coffin, belongings and pictures, aesthetic practices related to music and singing, and also socio-material arrangements of the ceremony, the church as an institution and several other traditions for organizing emotional life. We also know from ethnographic and cross-cultural studies that grief manifests itself differently in different cultures and epochs (Kofod, 2017; Rosenblatt, 2001). Different cultures embody different sets of “feeling rules” (Hochschild, 1979) and “emotionologies” (Gerrod Parrott & Harré, 2001), i.e. normative scripts for expressing emotions in concrete contexts. Grief can be defined quite simply as a “reaction to bereavement, involving both psychological and bodily experiences” (Gross, 2016, p. 5). What we want to argue is that how we react in grieving – and the psychological and bodily experiences that ensue – are often dependent on material, social, and semiotic factors in the environment, which scaffold the emotion and can be considered part of the emotion. The many examples of artefacts in the vignette direct the person’s attention to the lost loved one and initiate a cycle of affective remembering that is inherent in grief, and without which it is difficult to imagine that this emotion would be possible. Absent the physical, aesthetic, ritualistic, institutional, etc. scaffolds of remembering the deceased and feeling the grief, there could at most be an amorphous process of organismic perturbations, but – as we argued above – this is insufficient to constitute a human emotion of grief as such. Without the extended scaffoldings, it would often not even be possible to identify the given feelings as instances of grief, because something is grief only if the person understands that she or he has lost a loved one, and this understanding, we believe, is best thought of as constituted by a range of scaffoldings and mediators rather than a subjective idea in the head of the lone individual. This is our main idea, and in order to corroborate it, we unfold below the notion of an affective niche that makes the human emotion of grief possible. First, however, we shall look at the body.

Grief as an embodied emotion

One of the first attempts to think of emotions in light of extended mind theory was an article about “emotions in the wild” by Griffiths and Scarantino (2009). They argued that emotions are not primarily internal states of the organism (which would make them indistinguishable from simple sensations like itches or physical pains), but rather social signals designed to influence other organisms. They present the emotional signal system as culturally supported or scaffolded by social norms, and their theory thus points in two directions at the same time: Emotions are something humans undergo, but they are also something we actively perform in attempts to change the social environment (Attig, 2011, describes grief specifically in such terms). Since their article was published, a small but significant group of scholars have continued to theorize the extendedness of emotions. In a paper on “Varieties of extended emotions”, Krueger (2014) has gone beyond Griffiths and Scarantino and articulated two versions of the extended mind hypothesis in relation to emotions, which he calls the hypothesis of bodily extended emotions and the hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions, respectively. We will now go through these with the aim of understanding the affective niche of grief.

The idea that emotions are bodily extended is no doubt the least controversial. We briefly touched upon it above when we considered the phenomenology of the body as described by Merleau-Ponty and “the grieving body” analyzed by DuBose (1997). Even though the body plays a role in the emotion theories of James and Damasio as recounted above, it is only as an element in a causal chain that leads up to the emotion, which is conceived as a feeling of bodily changes. Unlike such theories that approach emotions as mental entities of some sort, the view of emotions as bodily extended claims that the body itself can be affected and thus centrally involved in the individual’s emotional life. The idea that the body as such can be grieving is easily illustrated if one simply goes online and googles the word “grief” and browses through the images that come up. In the large majority of images of grief, we see that a grieving body is one that involves hands and heads. In many instances, the griever covers his or her eyes or forehead with the hands, or else has a drooping head and perhaps rests the head in the hands. Famous paintings of grief such as van Gogh’s At eternity’s gate from 1890 or Munch’s The sick child from 1907 also depict people with drooping heads and with their hands centrally placed as essential to the embodiment of grief. The bodily imagery of grief resembles shame quite closely on this point. In shame the person is painfully revealed to the eyes of others and symbolically tries to hide the face behind the hands. This is a good example of how our bodies undergo and express two very different emotions – grief and shame – that can often be distinguished only by understanding the situation in which the body finds itself. When a loved one dies, the body turns in on itself and becomes small and heavy; when someone is ashamed the body turns away from the others. A snapshot of the two emotional episodes may not reveal the difference. It is revealed only if we look at the emotional body as extended into and living through contextual space and time. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein (1953) imagines that someone says “For a second he felt deep grief” (p. 174). It might make sense to say “For a second he felt violent pain”, because such unpleasant sensations may come and go in a flash, but grief is precisely not a sensation, Wittgenstein wants to show us, but an emotion that can be what it is only in a specific context; what Wittgenstein elsewhere calls “the whole hurly-burly” of life (see Brice, 2013, for a Wittgensteinian approach to embodied and embedded cognition). If the theories of James and Damasio were right, and grief could be read off from discrete and inner organismic changes, then it would in principle make sense to say that someone felt deep grief for a second regardless of the circumstances. The fact that this does not make sense illustrates that grief is not an inner mental object, but something manifested by a living human body that exists in both a temporal and environmental context. In other words, in an affective niche.

Our point is thus that yes, grief is in most cases an embodied emotion – represented for example in the imagery we referred to above – but it is also contextually embedded and scaffolded by the environment. We suggest viewing the relevant features of the environment as an affective niche, and this brings us to Krueger’s other hypothesis about extended emotions: The hypothesis of environmentally extended emotions.

The affective niche of grief

Colombetti & Krueger (2015) define affective niches quite broadly as “instances of organism-environment couplings (mutual influences) that enable the realization of specific affective states.” (p. 1160). In order to unpack this general definition, we will map the affective niche of grief by introducing two distinctions from the sparse literature on extended emotions.

The first distinction is discussed by Slaby (2014) and concerns a difference between diachronic and synchronic scaffolding. The term ‘scaffolding’ comes from sociocultural theory and simply means that some process is guided and supported by the social and/or material environment in which it unfolds (Griffiths & Scarantino, 2009, p. 440). Diachronic scaffolding thus refers to how emotions are shaped “by cultural frames, scripts, templates (and one should add: institutions of emotion such as romantic love […])” (Slaby, 2014, p. 40). This term is therefore related to other concepts that we introduced above such as “feeling rules” and the “emotionology” of a culture. In a discussion of the extended mind in general, Gallagher (2013) has elaborated on the theme of cognitive extension by extending the mind to include processes and social practices that occur within cultural institutions, which he calls “mental institutions”. Mental institutions are defined as institutions that help us accomplish certain cognitive processes or even constitute those processes and thereby function as an example of how cognition can be socially extended. As examples of mental institutions, Gallagher refers to legal systems, educational systems, and cultural institutions and claims that “these socially established institutions sometimes constitute, sometimes facilitate and sometimes impede but in each case enable and shape our cognitive interactions with other people” (p. 7). Our point is that this also applies to our emotional interactions, and without such normative and institutional scripts about what, how, and when to feel something, the individual griever will not know how to enact her emotional life. These scripts are not simply “in the head”, but materialized in the social practices of a culture, and these, obviously, are subject to change.

Tony Walter (1999) has charted how “the culture of grief” changes historically along with the transformation in “emotional scripts”: “Grief is performed, evoked by social contexts as much as bursting out from within” (p. 120). Bearing the initial description of grief in mind, we see how the experience of grief is co-constituted by various scripts that have evolved throughout cultural history. Walter (1997) argues that the cultural preoccupation with grief per se emerged as a consequence of secularization and individuation processes in the wake of modernity, insofar as previous religious concerns with the destiny of the dead persons’ soul in the afterlife was gradually replaced by a concern with the destiny of the bereaved who must live on without the dead loved one. In this process, earlier strict mourning practices, the aims of which were largely determined by how it served the deceased person’s soul, were gradually replaced by a focus on the grief process and how this process aided the bereaved person in returning to social life. More generally, Walter (1999) has articulated seven diachronic scripts for grief today, which he calls personal grief, anomic grief, private grief, forbidden grief, time-limited grief, distracted grief, and expressive grief (p. 152). We cannot go into these in detail, but the point is that there is not simply one script available, but rather something like a menu of grief scripts from which the grieving individual can find his or her own way of dealing with the loss. However, although originally viewed as liberating, the severing of former strict regulated mourning practices has increasingly been bemoaned as a loss of guidelines that leaves the individual mourner in a state of anomie (p. 131). Although probably no one today would suggest imposing rituals on bereaved individuals regardless of how they feel, this lack of an agreed-upon norm for grieving and the problem of de-ritualization, which, more precisely, should probably be understood as “multi-ritualization”, or “individually tailored rituals”, as Walter terms it (p. 131) poses new challenges to the bereaved individuals (Ariès, 1974; Rando, 1993).[AQ: The year “1993” in reference citation “Rando (1993)” has been amended to “1992” in accordance with that given in the list. Kindly confirm whether this is OK]

Synchronic scaffolding is “the occurrent, ‘online’ shaping of emotional experience by direct coupling and continuous interaction with the environment.” (Slaby, 2014, p. 40). Here, we are in the concrete here-and-now; the griever at the funeral, visiting the grave, looking at pictures, listening to a speech or a piece of music, etc. Another distinction can be made in this regard between tools for feeling emotions that can be employed by the individual (let us call them individual tools) and collective forms of emotional scaffolding. These represent different facets of the affective niche, some of which are constructed by the individual alone, while others can only be possible in joint action. Examples of the former include how the bereaved organizes her life after having lost a loved one, e.g. by creating a home altar with photos and other tokens representing the deceased, or having a tattoo or piece of jewellery as a physical manifestation of the connection to the lost loved one. Examples of the latter include songs and music in the church, e.g. as argued by Krueger (2014): “the mournful reverence and subdued dynamics of funeral music speaks – and, indeed, shapes – the collective grief (and its associated expressions) of those in attendance.” (p. 548).³ Like Krueger, we do not wish to deny the first-person character of emotions – i.e. that an individual person feels the grief, for example – but we do wish to argue that more than more person can share the emotion of grief.[AQ: Please check clarity: ‘…more than more person…’] It is no more mysterious than the fact that “it takes two to tango”, as they say. There simply are phenomena in the world that only are what they are, because they are shared among several persons. In this way, we can also understand practices of collective grief as enacted by professional mourners in different cultures, e.g. the traditional keeners of Ireland. We know from many instances in our lives that it matters to many of our experiences whether we are alone or together with others while having them (think of enjoying the beauty of a sunset or the performance of musicians), and this is especially the case for emotions such as grief. The patterns and rhythms of crying are also known to be different depending on whether one is alone or together with others (Katz, 1999). Likewise, silence experienced in solitude is qualitatively different from shared silence. While the former may often go unnoticed, the experience of silence shared with others can have multiple connotations, and sometimes feels awkward, depending on the circumstances. In the grief literature, silence surrounding death is often discussed as a problematic aspect of contemporary Western grief cultures (see, e.g. Arnold & Gemma, 2008; Doka, 1987). In a culture that generally valorizes verbal and emotional expressions, other people’s silence concerning one’s loss can be experienced as hurtful and offending, while at the same time, bereaved individuals may feel a normative pressure to express grief in situations where they find it uncomfortable. In any case, the presence of other people qualitatively alters the experiences and meanings of silence.

Conclusion: What can we gain by viewing grief as extended?

Throughout the 20th century, grief has been subjected to individualized, universalized and psychologized understandings, i.e. grief has been depicted as an intra-psychological, mental phenomenon, analytically separable from socio-cultural and material practices and technologies. However, recent work within the sociology of emotions, anthropology, and history of emotions challenge this conception of grief as a universal and ahistorical phenomenon (Charmaz & Milligan, 2006; Scheer, 2012; Scheper-Hughes, 1993). In our view, the emerging literature on extended emotions offers a promising analytical framework for examining the affective niche in which grief is enabled and enacted. By expanding the scope of analysis from the individual mind to the embodied mind in its socio-material environment, the extended mind perspective allows us to explore how “grief work” takes place not only within the individual mind, but also between people, enabled and scaffolded by socio-material practices and technologies. This perspective may for example inform future studies of the significance of socio-material practices such as tattoos, online bereavement communities, home altars, journal writing, individual and collective rituals, etc.

The practical implications of such a perspective may include critical examinations of contemporary diagnostic and intervention practices concerning grief, as well as studies of how contemporary grief cultures enable and restrict certain ways of experiencing and enacting grief. The former may involve a broadening of current individualistic approaches to diagnostics and interventions, e.g. by applying relationally and materially sensitive approaches to grief complications, and by developing community-oriented interventions as a supplement to the prevailing individual-oriented interventions of contemporary bereavement care. Prior to offering individual counseling to a bereaved person, one could imagine community-oriented interventions like offering opportunities for sharing experiences and memories among those affected by bereavement, developing shared rituals to memorize the deceased, etc. Individualistic approaches are already being challenged, especially at grass root levels, by bereavement groups and shared rituals of remembrance. Moreover, a critical examination of the cultural and socio-material conditions for grieving may highlight how these conditions enable and restrict individual experiences and enactments of grief. For example, addressing how the contemporary inclination to individualize grief may produce experiences of loneliness and isolation can potentially be the first step towards challenging and altering the current conditions for grieving.