Despite his prominence as a leading contemporary social theorist, Zygmunt Bauman's long-term writing on the cultural theory of death and dying has largely been overlooked in the sociological literature of death and dying, particularly in the United States. Bauman uniquely theorizes how we survive death-anxieties today: Contemporary, liquid modern culture has engaged us in ceaseless pursuit of the unattainable consumer sensation of bodily fitness as a way to suppress and thus survive our death-anxieties. Bauman also argues that the prevalence of this cultural formula to survive death-anxieties has simultaneously increased, more than ever before in social history, the volume of individual responsibility for restlessly coping with existential anxieties in the societies of consumers. While unique and insightful, his theoretical argument has a limitation; largely succeeding Freud's classic view of mortality, Bauman's contemporary theory may lead us to neglect potentially important social, cultural, and historical variations in how mortality has been understood.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
AriesP. (1979). Western attitudes toward death: From the Middle Ages to the present. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1974.).
2.
AriesP. (1981). The hour of our death. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (Original work published 1977.)
3.
ÁrnasonA.HafsteinssonS. B. (2003). The revival of death: Expression, expertise and governmentality. British Journal of Sociology, 54 (1), 43–62.
4.
BaudrillardJ. (1993). Symbolic exchange and death. London, UK: Sage. (Original work published 1976.)
5.
BaumanZ. (1973). Culture as praxis. London, UK: Routledge.
6.
BaumanZ. (1978). Hermeneutics and social science: Approaches to understanding. London, UK: Hutchinson.
7.
BaumanZ. (1987). Legislators and interpreters: On modernity, postmodernity and intellectuals. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
8.
BaumanZ. (1992a). Morality, immorality and other life strategies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
9.
BaumanZ. (1992b). Intimations of postmodernity. London, UK: Routledge.
10.
BaumanZ. (1997). Postmodernity and its discontents. New York: New York University Press.
11.
BaumanZ. (1998a). Postmodern adventures of life and death. In GrahamS.HiggsP. (Eds.), Modernity, medicine and health: Medical sociology towards 2000 (pp. 216–231). London, UK: Routledge.
12.
BaumanZ. (1998b). Work, consumerism, and the new poor. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.
13.
BaumanZ. (1998c). Globalization: The human consequences. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
14.
BaumanZ. (1999). In search of politics. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
BaumanZ. (2009a). Living on borrowed time: Conversations with Citlali Rovirosa-Madrazo. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
28.
BaumanZ. (2009b). Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?Cambridge, MA: First Harvard University Press.
29.
BaumanZ. (2010). Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
30.
BaumanZ. (2011). Culture in a liquid modern world. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
31.
BeckerE. (1973). The denial of death. New York: Free Press.
32.
BeilharzP. (2001). Introduction by Peter Beilharz: Reading Zygmunt Bauman. In BeilharzP. (Ed.), The Bauman reader (pp. 1–17). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
33.
DavisM. (2008). Freedom and consumerism: A critique of Zygmunt Bauman's sociology. London, UK: Ashgate.
34.
EliasN. (1985). The loneliness of the dying. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1982.)
35.
FoucaultM. (1973). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1961.)
36.
FoucaultM. (1978). The birth of the clinic: An archeology of medical perception. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1963.)
37.
FoucaultM. (1994). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1966.)
38.
FreudS. (1966). Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence. In StracheyJ. (Ed.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 3., pp. 162–185). London, UK: Hogarth. (Original work published 1896.)
39.
FreudS. (2002). Civilization and its discontents. New York: Penguin Group. (Original work published 1930.)
40.
GiddensA. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
41.
GorerG. (1965). The pornography of death. In GorerG. (Ed.), Death, grief and mourning (pp. 192–199). Garden City, NY: Doubleday. (Original work published 1955.)
42.
HoganT. (2002). The spaces of poverty: Zygmunt Bauman “after” Jeremy Seabrook, Thesis Eleven, 70, 72–87.
43.
IllichI. (1975). Limits to medicine: Medical nemesis, the expropriation of health. London, UK: Marion Boyars.
44.
JantzenG. M. (2004). Death and the displacement of beauty: Volume 1, Foundations of violence. London, UK: Routledge.
45.
KastenbaumR. (1993). Reconstructing death in postmodern society. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 27 (1), 75–89.
46.
KearlM. C. (1989). Endings: A sociology of death and dying. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
47.
Kübler-RossE. (1969). On death and dying. New York: Touchstone.
48.
LoflandL. (1974). The craft of dying: The modern face of death. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
49.
MarxK.EngelsF. (1998). The manifesto of the communist party. New York: Penguin Group. (Original work published 1848.)
50.
McInerneyF. (2000). Requested death: A new social movement. Social Science and Medicine, 50, 137–154.
51.
MellorP. A.ShillingC. (1993). Modernity, self-identity and the sequestration of death. Sociology, 27 (3), 411–431.
52.
PfohlS. (1992). Death at the parasite cafe: Social science (fictions) and the postmodern. New York: St. Martin's Press.
53.
TesterK. (2004). The social thought of Zygmunt Bauman. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
54.
WalterT. (1991). Modern death: Taboo or not taboo?. Sociology, 25 (2), 293–310.
55.
WalterT. (1994). The revival of death. London, UK: Routledge.
