Death Café Conversations

Emily Tupper

2

University of St Andrews

Department of Social Anthropology

Primary research – based Dissertation

2015

Death Café Conversations

Emily Tupper

Word Count: 10, 290

3

Menu1

“Like life, a Death Café has a start, middle and an end.”

(www.deathcafe.com/how/)

Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 4

Apéritif .................................................................................................................................................... 5

Something to stimulate the palette ................................................................................................ 5

1. Entering the field ......................................................................................................................... 5

2. Research questions, and a flavour of my analysis and findings .................................................. 6

Entrée ...................................................................................................................................................... 8

Small portions of my fieldwork ....................................................................................................... 8

1. Critique of Public Discourse ........................................................................................................ 8

2. The body.................................................................................................................................... 13

Mains ..................................................................................................................................................... 18

An engagement with literature and analysis ................................................................................ 18

1. Death Café fieldwork in context: Theoretical ........................................................................... 18

(a) Person ...................................................................................................................................... 18

(b) Space ........................................................................................................................................ 19

(c) Time ......................................................................................................................................... 20

2. Death Café fieldwork in context: Comparative ......................................................................... 21

(a) Self-help groups ....................................................................................................................... 22

(b) Grieving .................................................................................................................................... 24

Dessert .................................................................................................................................................. 25

Making death familiar: The Death Café model ............................................................................. 25

Wine List................................................................................................................................................ 27

Bibliography................................................................................................................................... 27

1 In the Death Cafés I attended, discussions followed a Death Café “Menu.” As I am examining the relationship

between the Death Café model and my own fieldwork, it only seemed appropriate that my structure take the

same form as the model in which I experienced the conversations (though I have added extra courses). My

argument appears in each section and through this the Menu simultaneously constitutes a theme or idea, the way

a culinary menu can. Death Café menus add a further structure in time and space to constitute an experience of

death, and my Menu does so within anthropology.

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Abstract

Taking place in Death Cafés, my research examines how people talk about death, within a space that

is intended for this purpose. To elaborate on this dynamic, my research centres on the relationship

between the Death Café model as a social franchise2, and the conversations that I observe and engage

in through the course of my fieldwork. I ask: How might the Death Café facilitate conversations about

death, and what kind of conversations do they facilitate? And what is the significance of Death Café

conversations for people’s lives?

I argue that the Death Café space is a tool to consider the ways in which death is understood in

everyday life. In conversations, people are engaged in a process of making sense of death, in life.

They constitute their experience of death by making sense of it through an explicit and implicit

critique of wider public discourse on death, and conversations about the body. The process of making

sense of death is possible through the positioning of the Death Café within a wider social context that

is insufficient for how they want to understand death in their lives. Through ethnographic fieldwork,

analysis, and literature engagement with social technologies and ritual, and self-help, I conclude that

the Death Café space facilitates a form of self-help and in doing so, expands understandings of the

grieving process. This is seen in the critical difference between coming to terms with death

and making sense of it. In Death Cafés, people make sense of death, providing a vital opportunity for

people to critically engage and constitute an experience of death which is less fearful, and more

familiar.

2 “At Death Cafés people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of

death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives,” (deathcafe.com)

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Apéritif

Something to stimulate the palette

1. Entering the field

“At Death Cafés people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of

death to help people make the most of their (finite) lives.” (deathcafe.com)

Jon Underwood and Sue Barksy Reid, founders of the Death Café social franchise, observed that

our engagement with the topic of death as a society was at best shallow and sporadic (Tucker, 2014).

The Death Café model was based on observations in the UK, and inspired by the work of the Swiss

Sociologist Bernard Crettaz, who set up a similar movement – “Café Mortel” in Paris (Crettaz, 2010).

A group directed discussion of death with no agenda, objectives, or themes, the Death Café social

franchise identifies itself as a discussion group rather than a grief support or counselling session

(deathcafe.com/what). Death Cafés are nomadic, existing as pop-up, sometimes regular events, in

cafés and other social spaces. The archive and world map on their website indicates where people

have been, will be, and are currently discussing death in Death Cafés – the US, Hong Kong, Australia,

Italy and Greece, to name but a few (deathcafe.com/archive and deathcafe.com/deathcafes). Each

Death Café is run by a facilitator whose role it is to set up and promote the Death Café in line with the

Death Café model, introduce the event, take part, and facilitate conversation; for example moving the

discussion if people get stuck, and managing any difficult situations (deathcafe.com/how). My

fieldwork took place in the UK over the course of the summer of 2014 (May-August) and I attended

six Death Cafés in total. The Death Cafés were listed on the website “deathcafe.com,” which serves as

a database and resource for those interested in attending Death Cafés or finding out more about them.

My own interest in attending and studying Death Cafés began when I heard a discussion involving

Sue Barksy Reid on the BBC Radio 4 programme, Women’s Hour (Hendry et al, 2013). She spoke

about the importance of talking about and planning for death, and introduced the Death Café as a

space to do this. I felt curious about Death Cafés, because their very existence was built upon

observations of social life. They were critical in their very creation, and I was compelled as to how

people would interpret such a space. Furthermore, through previous anthropology teaching modules, I

found that the topic of death was of interest to me anthropologically, and I came to understand it as a

social phenomenon to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. I was therefore intrigued to see how the

Death Café space could be a part of how people constituted their social lives.

Attendance at each Death Café researched ranged from nine to thirty people, and those in

attendance varied in terms of age and ethnicity. The social backgrounds and beliefs of those I studied

are meaningful only through the conversations in the Death Café, that is, I study persons on the terms

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by which they themselves enter the Death Café space – as strangers who will eventually die, and who

want to talk about death. An important motive of Death Cafés is the coming together of strangers

around a topic which connects us all, and it is through the topic of death and dying that I look at how

people wish to make sense of their own lives in the social space of the Death Café, and the critical

space in which the Death Café is positioned. The exact physical location of the Death Cafés I attended

is not disclosed for anonymity purposes and all names have been changed for the same reason. People

interpret the space within and outwith the Death Café and it is this process that forms my

ethnographic space – I do not look at the geographical or socio-economic dimensions of the Death

Café spaces analytically. Further studies could look at how the ability for the Death Café facilitators

and attendees to create a time to make sense of death apart from the event itself and the usual grieving

process may not be universal. It could also be telling of differences in gender, age, or ethnicity, or

differences and inequalities in socio-economic class within the UK and across the world. Death Cafés

do not exist everywhere, and are not attended by everyone, and a consideration of the specificities of

this is perhaps a significant limitation of my research here, but one that I cannot cover in the time and

space that I have as an undergraduate research student.

The Death Cafés always took place in a public, social setting, either cafés or café-bars. There was a

sign up system to the ones I attended, managed by each Death Café facilitator through the website

deathcafe.com, but it was, space permitting, possible to just turn up freely at the Death Cafés in

question as they were free and non-ticketed. The Death Cafés I attended worked through “menus,”

formed by questions which had been submitted when people had booked in online - and so

discussions were group directed. Food and drink was always available for purchase and occasionally

complementary too. Chairs would be arranged in circles, sometimes with tables, but these were not

fixed groupings and people were encouraged to move around over the course of the Death Café event.

There were varying degrees of contact with non-Death Café attendees during the course of the Death

Café event. In some cafés people were in close proximity to the Death Café in question although they

were not attending it (sometimes just at the next table), and some Death Cafés were held in a separate

space within an open social location.

2. Research questions, and a flavour of my analysis and findings

My research examines how people talk about death in a space that is created and intended for such

a purpose, itself within a wider social context that is, according to the motives of the Death Café

founder, insufficient in engaging with the topic of death. I argue that this dual context is critical for

the social space and time in which attendees constitute an experience of death. I find that

conversations in the Death Café about death are meaningful for how people live and make sense of

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their lives as social beings – a process happening across the boundaries of the Death Café space. This

process involves a constitution and negotiation of ideas of the person in Death Café conversations.

By participating in Death Café conversations, people attend to the link between their experiences of

death and their process of making sense of it. This is realised by me, the ethnographer, through a

method of participant observation in the conversations themselves. The link is addressed through

conversations that critique public discourse on death – explicitly through critique of the

medicalisation of death, and implicitly in the humour of the Death Café experience. Thus attendees

critique public discourse on death outside the death café while simultaneously constituting a different

experience of it within the Death Cafés. This is possible because of the dual context in which the

attendees of the Death Café are positioned in the ethnographic space – the space inside being critical

of the space outside the Death Café. Conversations in the Death Café about the body and death also

show attendees’ understanding of the person as an ontological entity across the event of death. In

negotiating the topic of death in the Death Café space, attendees often make sense of a universal yet

personal experience of death by an unintentional and yet more attentive understanding of the person,

as someone who will eventually die.

Having introduced death as a topic in the Death Cafés through my fieldwork, and my argument of

the Death Cafés as a critical space in social time, I develop my findings through my own analysis and

an engagement with theory (Toren, 1993, 2007), literature on social technologies and ritual

(Christensen and Willerslev, 2013), and self-help (Cain 1991, Quinn 1996, Matthews, 2000). I

understand the Death Café space to facilitate a particular form of self-help, and in doing so, expand

understandings of the grieving process. I eventually argue that attendees use Death Cafés not to come

to terms with death, but to make sense of it, and in doing so, Death Cafés facilitate a vital opportunity

for people to critically engage and constitute ideas of the person that are communicative, and an

experience of death which is less fearful, and more familiar.

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Entrée

Small portions of my fieldwork

This Entrée has been split into two sections. The topics of the conversations that most frequently

feature in the Death Cafés structure the analysis under the headings; “Critique of Public Discourse,”

and “The Body.”

1. Critique of Public Discourse

Death Café, 22-05-14: “Help”

Sheila says being in an environment where death is undoubtedly close by has changed her attitudes

towards it. She works in a dementia care home. She does not see death itself particularly negatively,

but worries about medical attitudes towards it, the emphasis on survival no matter what. Having

spoken to dementia patients about death, she realises people just want to die peacefully rather than

delaying death through medication, which can often be more painful for the dying person.

I observe that as a healthy person it is often difficult for us to put ourselves in the position of someone

who is dying – we can never be totally knowledgeable about dying because we have obviously never

experienced it. What does “help” mean in this context, I ask? And what knowledge do we hold about

death? Sheila agrees there are difficulties but makes an interesting point that, when asked if they

would want to be resuscitated, doctors predominantly choose not to be, and given the choice they

would choose heavy painkillers over medication if it looks like they were about to die. But most

people want to be resuscitated or don't realise they even have a choice.

Janice interjects that if she were to die now, she would want to be resuscitated, by the way. The three

of us laugh and I say that I would too.

Sheila explicitly critiques societal discourse on death, and does so on a number of levels. Her

worries about the medicalisation of dying are rooted in her professional experience as a care worker,

and her interaction with patients in the care home. From her observations she notes a disparity

between the experience patients want and their actual experience nearing the end of their life. I

question her further about the problem of experience; my idea being that as a living, breathing,

socially operative person we have difficulties in using a kind of imaginative empathy of those who are

dying. Sheila then immediately draws on the knowledge of those who have a deeper understanding of

the bodily process of dying – doctors - and in doing so illuminates a possible lack of effective

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communication between the medical profession and everybody else. Significantly, she is saying that

the disparity in how people make sense of death can be harmful in that people are making decisions

about their own death which may not be in their best interests.

The social context of the Death Café space means Sheila's critique has another dimension; she is

talking about what she deems to be talked about insufficiently, and is doing so knowledgeably. She

has implicitly recognised the Death Café as a space in which to critique wider societal discourse, thus

aligning her own interpretation of societal discourse on death with the interpretation that led Death

Café founder John Underwood to set up the Death Café movement itself. Here then, we see that that

the Death Café space sits quite critically as a social space for people to make sense of death. I follow

Gay y Blasco and Wardle (2007) when they state that ethnographic context is always a flexible

interpretation of reality (Gay y Blasco and Wardle 2007:41) and the reality of the ethnographic space

here finds its borders in the dual interpretations of societies' understandings of death, from both the

Death Café attendees, and the inherent observations that are made in the creation of the Death Café

model itself. With Sheila in the above example, there is an intentional engagement with the topic of

death, within the context of a general societal discourse on death that does not engage satisfactorily

with the topic.

The critique is made stronger too, by the social space that the Death Café model facilitates. Sheila

is not just writing a speech about her views, but sharing them in conversation with strangers. This

juxtaposes the previously discussed lack of communication about the dying process that characterises

public discourse, forming a powerful critique of the way that information and experiences are shared.

In questioning Sheila I was able to facilitate a development of her own process of making sense of

death through critique, allowing her to offer an example of how information not being shared could be

harmful. But I would go further here too, and say that although Sheila is critiquing public discourse on

death, by doing so in the social environment of the Death Café she - or more accurately we - are

beginning to constitute an experience of death, one that is communicable, shared, social, and familiar.

I think about death then as a social phenomenon, that can be constituted in a multitude of ways.

Death Café, 26-06-14: “The Grieving Process”

We are discussing the grieving process. Rose says she does not think society allows enough time to

grieve – work can give you just 3 days off. She hates it when the media say, a day after someone's

death; that they are “struggling to come to terms with their death” - ask them that in three years and

they'll still be coming to terms! There seems to be a general agreement about the media and death

and its flaws.

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Similarly to the example with Sheila, there is an explicit critique here of how attendees have

experienced an engagement with death. Rose is explicitly critical of the time that is dedicated to the

grieving process, first by the workplace, and secondly by the media. In later conversations, Rose tells

us that her second husband had died, and confesses that she is too afraid to visit the tree that they had

planted in his memory, because of the possibility that it might not be there any more, and what this

might mean or how it might make her feel. Her critique of the time often dedicated to the grieving

process of dying is grounded in her own personal experience of loss, of someone close.

Within the space of the Death Café facilitated by the Death Café model, Rose’s critique is powerful.

In talking about the death of her husband in a social space, after some considerable time (this is

assumed, but likely, given the tree story) proceeding his death she relates personal experience of

grieving to how it is understood in wider society. Just as the Death Café model facilitates time and

space to talk about death in society, Rose is given time and space to make sense of it in her own life,

and experiences of death. In being critical of the time allocated to “coming to terms,” Rose is actively

making sense of death as she has experienced it in her own life.

Humour in the Death Cafés offer a further, more subtle critique of public discourse. In the

conversations it is often intentional (in the Death Café “menus,” and food), ironic (food, a life giving

substance, is a required condition according to the guidelines), and suggest a need to expose and mock

the “elephant in the room”. It is a form of gallows humour, in the sense that it is a witticism in the

face of – and in response to – a hopeless situation (Vonnegut, 1971). In gallows humour, the

“hopeless situation” is that death is impending and unavoidable, and this is the reality that the Death

Café model aims to bring to light - even in their objective they make clear that we are all living “finite”

lives (deathcafe.com/what). By talking about death in the intentional irony of the Death Café space,

attendees are invited to share the gallows humour. This aligns with gallows humour typically being

made by and about the victim in the situation (Dundes and Hauschild, 1983:251) but here it

emphasises that we are all “victims” when it comes to death – and that it is necessary to share this fact.

It is further expressed in a humorous way by the Death Café social media, illustrating the universally

finite quality of our lives;

Post by Death Café facebook page

administrators, on 18.12.14

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By sharing and facilitating this kind of humour the Death Café model provides an effective critique of

the fear surrounding the inevitability of death as well as providing a basis for constituting a different

kind of experience of it which is less fearful and more familiar – familiar through the social

experience in the Death Café, rather than through the actual event of death itself.

Death Café, 27-07-14: “Coffin biscuits”

During the break, one of the hosts comes round offering more snacks. I ask what the small brown

thing is and she says it’s the last of the coffin. Wait no, sorry it’s the hearse. We laugh and I take it

with mock trepidation but weirdly it does taste how I'd imagine a hearse or coffin to taste like, kind of

musty and crumbly and I'm not sure if I like it.

The ironic humour of the food in this example offers a subtle critique by laughing about and

actually physically internalising possible fears, or the “elephant in the room”. Bringing the coffin, or

the hearse, into a foodstuff, an object to be consumed for life, is comical and exposes something

ridiculous about any kind of distance or lack of engagement with these objects which are in fact

everyday objects in society. This intentional humour by the Death Café facilitators exposed my

unfamiliarity and fears of death by juxtaposing experiences of life and death in a comical way. The

intentionality of the humour also shows them to explicitly interpret a wider societal context that takes

death as unfamiliar.

In reflecting about how the hearse/ coffin tasted how I expected it to, another fieldwork example

came to mind;

Death Café, 21-08-14: “Taboo”

I recognise John and speak to him before the Death Café introduction. Hello again, he says. I tell him

I noticed he wasn't here at the last Death Café and he mocks me, saying that he's messed up my

statistics or something and asks about the people that were there. That artist that we both spoke to the

other week was there, I said. The one that wanted to quote me about something for her art project?

Yes that’s the one. We laugh. His coffee and brownie arrive and he puts his fork slowly into the

brownie and it looks delicious and gooey. I tell him that I look forward to Death Cafés now but I feel I

am tempting fate and that someone I know will die and then I really will have to think about death. We

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laugh and then he says that’s the point though isn't it? Death is so taboo, we think that by thinking

about it, we invite it, but that makes no sense.

Here, John brings sharply into light the grounds of my fears - my own irrational thinking about

what I felt had become my detached obsession with death. It was irrational in the sense that I had felt

a causal link between an experience of those close to me dying and my conversations and

engagements with it in the Death Cafés. Significantly here, we both laughed at my irrational thinking.

Although it was a genuine worry, by sharing it with John I was able to see the irrational nature of my

thinking and laugh at it at the same time. Here, the social space of the Death Café allowed my fears

and the taboo nature of death to be relaxed and a clearer idea of how we can better make sense of

death is constituted. I came to feel that any experiences of death outwith the Death Café were not in a

causal relationship to my conversations within it – my presence at the Death Café was because death

does happen and is inevitable. I did not dispel the possibility that someone in my life will die, but

instead engaged myself in making the possibility not a fearful one. In fact, I did not understand the

event of death “in relation to” my conversations, but instead far more comprehensively in how death

is dealt with throughout life – out of my conversations within the Death Café grew further

conversations outside of it. In speaking with a close friend whose father died last year, and with a

close friend whose mother passed away recently, I felt myself directly and indirectly draw upon my

own Death Café experiences in talking with them both and making some kind of sense about the death

they had experienced. I felt the process of making sense of death to happen across the boundaries of

the Death Café space, only possible because of the intentional creation of the space itself.

Death Café, 24-07-14: “Staying Alive”

Q - How are you planning for death?

Diana says she is not really planning except she is particular about the funeral playlist. She laughs.

John says its a good idea, because she might end up with the Bee Gees. He has a pained look on his

face when he says – imagine a funeral with “Staying Alive." We all laugh. Then John points out that

even if you spend ages compiling the perfect playlist, before your death you might go through a really

weird music phase...we all laugh at the possibility of this.

The above excerpt is a good example of how humor can be effective at poking fun at death. The

question for discussion, “how are you planning for death?” could perhaps feel ominous and

uncomfortable in some situations but when it is put out there intentionally in conversation with

strangers the immediate response in this case was to laugh about it. This happened on numerous

occasions at the Death Cafés I attended and I eventually began to feel differently about broaching the

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topic of death outside the Death Café, because of these light hearted experiences within it. Although

personal and difficult experiences of death were shared and discussed in the Death Café, on many

occasions it felt as if people were consciously making an effort to enjoy themselves within the space,

such as the above example with John and Diana. The Death Café space is made through this social

interaction, and it is this that defines the space as I knew it.

Although laughter was – to my surprise – a rather consistent feature of the Death Café experience, I

follow Toren (2005) in arguing that it ultimately eludes any analysis – the revelatory force is

explained in the laughter itself (Toren, 2005:280). It is the fact that we cannot analyse laughter itself

that provides us with a key to understanding its revelatory force (Toren, 2005:268). Following on

from her original efforts to pursue the truth of the joke as a line of enquiry, Toren (2005) realises that

the force of knowledge in the laughter differed according to the perspective each person brought to

bear (Toren, 2005:277). As our perspective of a situation has its roots in social relations that have

come to form a persons' view of the world, peoples laughter in a social environment can be explained

in terms of the social relations that inform each perspective of that environment. People are usually

strangers in the Death Café environment – in the above example with John, Diana and I, we only

knew each other in the context of the Death Café environment. And yet that we all, as strangers, come

to laugh together in a discussion on death is revelatory for how people choose to talk about death

within a space intended for that purpose. What is meaningful then, is the consistency of laughter in the

Death Cafés as part of a process of constituting and transforming how the topic of death is engaged

with inside and outside the Death Café space.

2. The body

In this section, I follow Hertz in understanding that the imperative to deal with the body at death is

of a social kind (Hertz 2009 (1907:27) in Willerslev, Christensen and Meinert, 2013:1). This is my

starting point for focusing on how people talk about the body in Death Cafés. People talk about the

treatment of the body so frequently and in such a variety of ways in the Death Cafés that I came to

understand it as a central to the process of making sense of death – one’s own death, and the deaths of

others.

Death Café, 24-07-14: “She wasn’t there!”

Q - Would you like to be buried, cremated, or something else?

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Linda said she was thinking along the lines of “would I want to be visited?” She likes visiting peoples

graves but is not sure whether she would want that herself. She isn't sure about cremation either. Will

go for “neither of the above!” She says, and we laugh. There is always donating your body, I say. But

she doesn't like the idea. Went to a funeral recently where the woman had donated her body to the

medical school. Found it strange as “she wasn't there!” I am thinking that well, she wouldn't be

anyway, but I can see this is important for Linda as she repeats “she wasn't there” a few times when

speaking of the funeral.

Linda's exclamations about the lack of presence of the body in death rituals bring about a common

theme in studies of death concerning the place of the body. Tarabe (2015) identifies the importance of

the body in iTaukei (indigenous Fijian) rituals in her study. She observes how the shock and

confusion surrounding the loss of a loved one is more profound when the rituals that normally support

the mourner are invalid, i.e. when the physical body is not there, because it has been cremated due to

the iTaukei person dying overseas (Tarabe, 2015:1). These fears are grounded in expectations of the

afterlife, and these expectations and beliefs shape how personhood is achieved through treatment of

the dead body in ritual. With the iTaukei it seems that there are relatively consistent ideas about what

should happen to the body, or what is necessary to happen to it – through the shock and confusion

when the necessary rituals are impossible. My Death Café conversations about the body were

characterised by the variety, diversity, and changeability of people views about the body. Linda,

though undecided about the fate of her body, seemed aware of her choices. Nonetheless, her choice

was limited by her preference for the presence of the body at the funeral – she explicitly equates the

person with her body, repeating; "she wasn't there,” meaning that for her, the existence of a person

does not depend on them being alive, but on the presence of their body in a mortuary ritual ceremony.

Her discomfort with the lack of the body seemed similar to the shock and confusion of the iTaukei

when they have to perform death rituals with ashes instead of the dead body (Tarabe, 2015:1).

When talking about their preferences for their own body once they've died, attendees often drew

upon what they think their family or those close to them would want, as well as what they want.

Sometimes they acknowledged a discrepancy;

Death Café, 22-05-14: “Diamond Ring”

Janice admits that she has very specific instructions about what she wants to happen to her body.

Although Janice seems self-conscious about it, Sheila exclaims that she can't bring it up and not tell

us and we both laugh and egg her on. Her and her husband want to be made into carbon and

eventually a diamond and then a diamond ring and just “put out there” into the world, a pawn shop,

whatever. She also says she has put herself on the organ donor register here, but this means her body

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won't make it back to Canada very easily, and would cause possible conflict with her family’s

interests.

Clearly the attendees are aware of a wealth of possibilities for their body at the time of death, and

after their death. Preferences weren't just limited to being buried or cremated - like Janice above,

many people had specific instructions about what they would want to happen, for example which

organs they want to donate and which ones they don't, how and where they want to be buried (having

a tree planted over their body was a common preference, and people had differing views on how the

dead body should be made up and dressed). Also, their preferred location at the time of death was

often discussed. This latter preference, where people would want to die, was particularly telling about

how they thought of the body as a social entity – a person. Decisions concerning death are

inescapably decisions about life, or more accurately, social life.

Death Café, 14-08-14: “Just in case”

Q – Would you rather die in hospital or at home?

Linda and I both agree we would want to die at home. But she does say she hopes she is found

appropriately, wearing a nice nightie and clean underwear, that sort of thing. Her Mother always

used to emphasise the importance of clean underwear, you never know when you may be whisked off

to hospital. We laugh and I say that actually I have also thought about that. Linda also says she would

want her room to be tidy. She keeps her bedroom tidy, just in case.

In the above example the domestic environment of the home is seen as preferable to the hospital.

The shared worries over how we might be found in the home are telling of concerns beyond death

itself. In our laughter about our worries, we acknowledge there is a ridiculousness to our concerns,

because our experience of life will have ended – we will be dead. Nevertheless, the perception of

ourselves by others goes beyond the event of death itself. To die with dignity in the physical space of

your own home, with your possessions and your appearance in order, would require active and

continual efforts of ensuring a tidy room, a nice nightie, and clean underwear. Our belief about how

we are constituted as social persons transcends the boundaries between life and death in that the

physicality of the body and the way it is perceived are of constant importance in Death Cafe

conversations, and in how people live their lives.

Death Café, 14-08-14: “The Soul”

Q – Why is it so hard to start up a conversation about death?

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I tell Sanvi that in my research I am interested in conversations about death in a social environment,

ones which happen outside of the funeral/ grieving environment. We quickly get onto discussing her

Hindu beliefs, which centre on the body. She believes the soul leaves the body at death, goes

somewhere and lives on. She describes it like a light bulb, and points to the bare light bulb hanging

from the ceiling in the café. We see the light and the bulb but we can't see the electricity, although we

know that it is there. The soul is like that. She talks in a very visual way, with her hands, indicating

the likeness of the electricity to the inner part of the body and person. She seems to have clear ideas

about the person having outer and inner parts.

From quite an open ended question, Sanvi immediately comes to talk about death in terms of the

body. Her physical expressions when talking indicated to me how she thought of the body in terms of

“outer” and “inner” parts. I came to further understand her in the example below;

Death Café, 14-08-14: “Ego”

Sanvi tells me we need a balance of ambition and acceptance. She talks about how she heard Donald

Trump talking on the radio the other day, about how important the ego is, the ambition of the self. She

wonders whether he is actually happy. The whole Hindu belief of happiness and nirvana is the

opposite of this, it is the disintegration of the ego.

In the same conversation, Sanvi has seamlessly moved from talking about her ideas about what

happens to the person at death (the soul leaving the body and living on), to how the person must

experience their lives (in the example of Donald Trump's importance of the ego and what she believes

to be his resulting unhappiness and dissatisfaction). Similar to the previous excerpt with Linda, her

consistency in thinking about the body and the person is shown in her ability to express the resulting

lived social experience that comes from her thoughts about the body.

Death Café, 14-08-14: “Prayers”

Sanvi says she prays every morning, remembering those who have died. Even her grandmother, who

she met when she was younger, but barely knows and remembers. They are where she is now, she says,

she remembers them every day.

Sanvi’s reasons for her prayers are grounded in her Hindu aims to disintegrate the ego; she is one of

a bigger whole, and it is her aim to grasp this through the disintegration of her own ego. This is

Nirvana, she says, and its not something many people can achieve, but we should always try. Her

aims to locate herself as part of a wider whole and disintegrate her sense of ego inform how she lives

17

her life, and how she sees her death. Sanvi's visual words allow me to describe this quite clearly, but

in all the Death Café conversations I had I saw how people made sense of, and made decisions about

death and the body, in terms of how they live their lives in a social setting.

Conversations about death in Death Cafés are therefore inescapably conversations about life, and

about people. This observation was an explicit one, made by the facilitator in the introduction to a

Death Café I attended on 27-07-14, but also an observation made by Sheila at the first Death Café I

attended. When her, Janice and I were sharing our curiosities about what we had previously thought a

Death Café would be like, she said quite confidently that she expected the people who are interested

in talking about death (i.e. the people that she thought would be at a Death Café) would be the people

that were most “into” life. It wasn't something that I'd pre-empted but in hindsight her words were

very logical; these were people who were curious about how it is they can make sense of their own

lives, as someone who will eventually die, in the least harmful, least fearful, most sociable way

possible.

18

Mains

An engagement with literature and analysis

In this section, I build upon the analysis of my fieldwork experiences in order to further answer my

questions. I bring to light again my aims to examine the relationship between the Death Café model as

a social franchise and my Death Café experience through placing my fieldwork experiences in context

theoretically, and also comparatively, with self-help groups and grieving.

1. Death Café fieldwork in context: Theoretical

(a) Person

I have referred so far to an understanding of “the person” attendees constitute in Death Café

conversations. From my fieldwork we begin to see how attendees understand the person ontologically

across the boundaries of life and death, because of the person’s existence as a social being. Unlike La

Fontaine (1985) my theoretical stance does not take the person’s place in society as confirmation of

an individual’s self-identity;

“If the self is an individual’s awareness of a unique identity, the ‘person’ is society’s confirmation of

that identity as of social significance. Person and individual are identified in contrast to the self.” (La

Fontaine 1985:124)

Such a view results in the person only being meaningful to society as an individual, and this is

inadequate for explaining how people experience their lives as social persons. Furthermore, La

Fontaine states that although concepts of the person are variable across societies, the Western concept

“resembles none of those described so far in other societies, not because it’s the result of greater

sophistication or elaboration of conceptual thought but, as Mauss has made us aware, it derives from a

particular social context” (La Fontaine, 1985: 139). Unlike this theoretical standpoint, Toren’s (1993,

2007) theory of the person is comprehensive in explaining how all humans come to experience their

lives as social beings, not in a causal relationship to society. She explains that people come to be

social persons through intersubjective relationships with each other, rather than in relation to society.

That is, “the person” can be understood and studied as a result of a multitude of interactions with

other persons in a social environment. Therefore, ontogeny (coming into being) can be understood to

happen microhistorically - through a multitude of time frames - involving a multitude of interactions,

meaning we exist as persons only through other persons in a social environment (Toren, 1993, 2007).

19

Critically, in the Death Café conversations, ideas of the person are unfixed and continually in the

process of being re-made. In their critique of public discourse attendees show that a person’s

experience of death does not have to be as harmful as it often currently is. Instead, a better experience

of the dying process is found when we attend to how people experience their lives. And as they

experience their lives in such varying and diverse ways, we cannot prescribe a one-size-fits-all

approach to the end of someone’s life, which appears to be the critique of the medicalisation of death.

For the Death Café attendee, the person is thus seen as existing consistently and simultaneously

changeably. Toren's (1993, 2007) theory of the person aligns with this, and gives us an ontological

point of departure here for understanding how people come to make sense of death in their lives. The

prevalence and the frequency of conversations about the body are similarly telling of the idea of the

person held by Death Café attendees, one that sees it to be constituted meaningfully across the

domains of life and death – as seen in the conversations with Linda and Sanvi (DC 14-08-14).

(b) Space

Starting from Toren’s (1993, 2007) ontology, we can better understand the connection between the

person and the Death Café space, and how meaning is made given that connection. The person is

understood as someone who will die, and is likely to have experienced deaths of others. The created

and intentional social space with strangers is inherently critical of how death is engaged with outside

of the Death Café and positions the persons in the Death Café so that they are able to critically engage

with how death is currently discussed, or perhaps not. This was evident in many of my fieldwork

excerpts – critique was powerful implicitly because the conversations involved a sharing of personal

experiences with strangers that would not have happened outside of the Death Café.

The space of the Death Café itself provides a critique on societies' current engagement with death

and makes the persons’ position in the Death Café a critical one. Its intentional creation against an

observed wider social context means attendees are continually interpreting the space outside and

inside the Death Café. In doing so, they engage with the observations made by writers concerning the

space of death in society (Aries 1981, Becker 1973, Gorer 1965, Kübler-Ross 1969). The denial,

invisibility, or unfamiliarity of death to societies of the Western world are characteristics evident to

these authors. These observations may perhaps align with the motivations behind the creation of

Death Cafés but in the Death Cafés themselves attendees are actively opposing the relationship

between society and individuals taken by these authors. They are critically engaging in a process of

voicing their interpretation of death consistently inside and outside the Death Café space. It is made

consistent not just because they are talking about death, but because in talking about death they

engage with ideas of the person that pervade their experience of death, and the studies' (Aries 1981,

20

Becker 1973, Gorer 1965, Kübler-Ross 1969) view of society's ontology of the person. Studies of

death in society are inherently studies of the living, and the denial, invisibility, and unfamiliarity of

death is not experienced first-hand within the social space of the Death Café.

(c) Time

As we have seen, it is important to be critical of society as a social context for the space of the

Death Café to be understood ethnographically. I begin by looking at death as it is currently defined

and reviewed as a topic in anthropology, before examining the associated emergent literature which

concerns social technology and ritual. According to the entry on “death” in the Routledge

Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology;

“All human cultures attach a central place to interpreting the processes of human existence. Among

these, reproduction and the representation of death, with the associated practices which these

representations entail, are always of the greatest importance.” (Bloch, 2009: Death, in Barnard and

Spencer, 2010)

From this, we see that death can be located and examined as a representation in a particular culture.

Thus, as an event in time, it can exist apart from the event of death itself – the death entails certain

practices, which are seen to be important for representations of death in cultures. However I see the

Death Café experience to be important because it constitutes death itself. This is possible because, as I

have seen through my fieldwork, people engage with death as a social phenomenon which is

experienced in the course of their everyday social lives.

The constitution of death as a social phenomenon can be put in context of further anthropological

reviews of studies of death (Kaufman and Morgan, 2005). It is important to do this in order to look at

how studies attend to the category of the person and why it is relevant to be talking about the person

as an ontological category where death is a topic. Kaufman and Morgan (2005) say that

anthropological studies of the beginnings and ends of life are “thematically linked by an attention to

the varied ways that humans constitute and disassemble themselves and their social worlds”

(Kaufman and Morgan, 2005:318). In using death to constitute social worlds and persons, “the living”

is therefore also constituted through different understandings of life and death – life and death

themselves are not abstract concepts but are in fact made meaningful by humans themselves. I would

argue that my study would be an anthropological study of death – but is it really a study of the ends of

life? It seems to be a step removed from the study of the ends of life, more a study of the various ways

that humans constitute themselves and their social worlds, in relation to their thinking about the ends

of life.

21

Through Christensen and Willerslev’s (2013) work, I can more accurately link Kaufman and

Morgan’s (2005) view of anthropological studies of death to my own study. Significantly though, the

process of constituting and disassembling social worlds is explored by focusing on the event of death

as an event in time. They “make room for exploring practices and ideas as specific conceptions of

time, ways of creating different forms of time and thus dealing with life issues in the broadest sense”

(Christensen, Willerslev, and Meinert in Christensen and Willerslev (eds). 2013:3). My study is

therefore an anthropological study of death – made so because the Death Cafés schedule a time to

make sense of death: “The uncontrollable, wild aspect of timing death is, we (they) argue, reversed

through various forms of timework in mortuary rituals as ways of taming, not death itself, as pointed

out by historian Philippe Aries (1982), but as a way of taming the unpredictability of timing”

(Christensen, Willerslev, and Meinert in Christensen and Willerslev (eds). 2013:3).

This “taming” process is effective because of the Death Café as a ritualised space, as Christensen

and Willerslev, (2013) understand it; “Rituals establish a temporality through actions with material

objects in a set space. These social technologies help create the “time of the dead” in an explicit,

performed and material way” (Christensen, Willerslev, and Meinert in Christensen and Willerslev

(eds). 2013:2). The social context in which the Death Cafes are understood (by the creators) to sit,

establish it as a ritualised space. Their scheduling and timing to talk about death in society and the

prescription of materialities – the café space with food, drink, and warmth – create a “time of the dead”

in life.

Essentially, I understand the Death Café environment as a space where the often harmful

unpredictability of timing death is tamed through the scheduling and creation of an intentional space

to talk about it. The efficacy of the event as a means to “tame” time is seen in the ways in which the

person are engaged with ontologically. People in the Death Café are given time and space to talk

about personal experiences of death outside of a grieving context meaning the person is understood as

meaningful both at the time of death and beyond it, in a social situation. In “grasping” time

(Christensen, Willerslev, and Meinert, 2013:2) the Death Café space attends to how the person is

actively constituted through other persons, across the boundaries of life and death, and the boundaries

of the Death Café space.

2. Death Café fieldwork in context: Comparative

An affinity to my fieldwork can be found with anthropological research on self-help groups. By

comparing my ethnographic context to self-help groups, I ask; to what extent does the ethnographic

space of the Death Café conform to the self-help environment that we can see in other ethnographic

22

works? And, given the social and temporal context that allows notions of the person to be constituted;

in what ways may the Death Café challenge ideas of what self-help means and perhaps constitute a

different understanding of self-help? In answering these questions, I am led to critically evaluate what

“grieving” means to those who have experienced death.

(a) Self-help groups

Matthews's (2000) research on a spontaneously organised self-help group of breast cancer patients

in Eastern Carolina between 1990 and 1992 is similar to my project in that it looks at how the shared

model created by the women is in the context of a dissatisfaction with the dominant biomedical

discourse that informed their experience of having breast cancer (Matthews, 2000: 394). Particularly

unhelpful or harmful for them was the view of cancer “survivorship,” and its emphasis on the

autonomous individual as decision maker and its attendant male gendered sports and military imagery

(Matthews, 2000: 394). Through her method of observing and interviewing members of the group,

and recording group meetings, Matthews documents the processes members went through to arrive at

some shared understanding of the breast cancer experience (Matthews, 2000:395). This work is

similar to my ethnographic field in that a shared understanding of an experience is achieved through a

process of discussion. This discussion is in the context of a wider discourse that those who create the

groups or are a part of them, see as unhelpful or harmful. The similarities of the Death Café space to

Matthew's (2000) can be seen in the following statement;

“When individuals come together for some common purpose, they are often able to negotiate some

shared understanding of their collective experiences,” (Matthews, 2000:411).

The Death Café space differs from Matthews (2000), but our findings are similar in that the process of

coming to an understanding is in the group experience; “groups play a crucial role in promoting the

integration of divergent and often conflicting sources of knowledge by striving to find points of

agreement and by structuring them into new models of domain” (Quinn, 1996:5). Although there may

be similarities between experiences of cancer and experiences of death, the different points of entry

for discussion makes the research distinct from one another.

Cain's (1991) and my project also share similarities, whereby she looks at the importance of a

group model - the Alcoholics Anonymous model – for the process of understanding (Cain, 1991:210).

However the power that she gives to the model comes from its association with a body of culturally

shared knowledge about what it means to be an alcoholic, what typical alcoholics are like, and what

kinds of incidents have marked a typical alcoholic's life (Cain, 1991:210). In this way, the AA

constitutes a subcultural system, a meaning system within a meaning system (Cain, 1991:212). The

23

model that facilitates Cain’s (1991) ethnographic space holds partly true for the Death Café space. I

do not observe such solid boundaries between “systems” however, because, as I have previously

observed, the attendees of the Death Café continually interpret meanings across the space within the

Death Café and outside it. The contextual tension that forms the intentionally created Death Café

space seems to have an affinity with Cain's understanding of the AA group – she says that middle

class American culture finds it difficult to draw distinct lines between 'social' or 'normal drinker' and

'problem drinker' or 'alcoholic' (Cain, 1991:211). Thus the space of the AA group allows an

interpretation of meaning out of these terms by allowing members to transform their identities from

'drinking non-alcoholics' to 'non-drinking alcoholics', and it is this transformation of identity that

affects how they view and act in the world (Cain, 1991:210). However, she pre-supposes culture as a

category of explanation, and thus the interpretation of meaning by the members of the AA happens in

terms of the AA's position as a meaningful space for the person who drinks within a more chaotic

cultural space which cannot make the person meaningful on their own terms. But I do not see the

broader context of the Death Café as 'society' or 'culture' but a constantly constituted space by the

persons that inhabit the space of the Death Café and the space outside it.

Clearly the similarities between my site and the ethnographic dimensions of self-help groups as

ethnographic sites show that perhaps the Death Café does constitute a kind of self-help environment.

But in what way, and how can we be more particular about the dimensions of the self-help

environment? Firstly, the Death Café is understood as a social space in time that allows notions of the

person to be engaged with. An active process of self-help is facilitated in the process of making sense

of death in a social space. In critiquing public discourse on death, people articulate insufficiencies in

how the person is engaged with in the topic of death. Sheila, for example, aligns her interpretation of

the medicalisation of death in public discourse with the interpretation seen by the Death Café

movement and in doing so in the Death Café space, constitutes a different experience of death, one

that is talkable, shared, social, and familiar (Death Café, 22-05-14: “Help”). In implicitly and

explicitly critiquing wider discourse on death, and in conversations about the body, Death Café

experiences are empowering. Segal et al (1995) understand self-help in terms of empowerment and

follow Hasenfeld's (1987) definition; “Empowerment then, is the process of gaining such power;

(defined previously as “the capacity to influence the forces which affect one's life space for one's own

benefit (Pinderhughes, 1983) in social work practice, it is a process through which clients obtain

resources on multiple levels to enable them to gain greater control over their environment” (Hasenfeld,

1987 in Segal et al 1995:216). I would argue that the Death Café experience facilitates a process of

empowerment, constituting it as a space of self-help. Although the motives of its creation did not

align with self-help definitions, given the dimensions of the social space and time in the Death Cafe

previously explored, and the way that persons are constituted, the Death Cafe experience is able to

unintentionally facilitate a process of effective self-help.

24

(b) Grieving

Though I did not initially intend to include a focus on grieving as part of my research, from my

fieldwork in Death Cafés I better understand how Death Café conversations can offer opportunities

for self-help through putting it in the context of grieving. It is important to note that Death Cafés are

not intended, or advised as part of a process of grieving (www.deathcafe.com/what). However from

my fieldwork I find that the process of learning how to become ourselves again without the person

who is gone (Christensen and Willerslev, 2013:4) can be facilitated by making sense of death in Death

Cafes. Following Christensen and Willerslev, (2013), the process of making sense of death happens

continuously after the death of someone close and for this reason it could be a part of a grieving

process. In this context, the phrase “coming to terms” is inadequate for explaining how humans who

have experienced a loss of a person come to exist and understand their social worlds.

The phrase is explicitly critiqued by Rose (Death Café, 26-06-14) and in my analysis I hope to

follow her critique earnestly. To “come to terms” suggests that the person understands death within a

static social context, without engaging with it critically, whereas “making sense” suggests they

understand death whilst engaging critically with the social context. Here, it is the difference between

an acceptance of a social context, and an active critique of it. It is necessary to make this distinction

because of the terms by which I understand Death Café attendees actual experience of the Death Café

as a social space in time. People lose a person that has been a part of a process by which people make

sense of their world. They don’t stop making sense of the world but continue to do so without that

person. Therefore, they never can “come to terms” with a loss because that would suggest the

meaning by which they make sense of themselves would somehow end, in relation to that person. But

their histories with that person remain in their own process of ontogeny. The space of the Death Café

promotes discussion with no goal or end, meaning that the event of a person’s death can continually

be made sense of by the person who will continually be themselves because of the death they have

experienced. The Death Café model then, facilitates how people actually experience their lives and

worlds.

I do not wish to call for a re- assessment of how Death Cafés are advertised here, but instead I call

for a reassessment of how we understand the grieving process itself given how the process of making

sense of death is continuous in how people re-create themselves and their social worlds (Christensen

and Willerslev, 2013). This is clearly needed in light of how people make sense of death through

understandings of the person in the social space and time of the Death Café.

25

Dessert

Making death familiar: The Death Café model

This piece of work has undertaken an examination of the relationship between the Death Café

model as a social franchise, and the conversations that I participated and observed in the four month

course of my fieldwork in Death Cafés. My fieldwork brought about a wealth of rich material, and I

could have written many different menus based on the conversations I had. However, it was through

an explicit critique of public discourse - in particular the medicalisation of death - that Death Café

attendees often showed their motives in coming to the Death Café to align with the motives of the

creation of the Death Café itself. The humour inherent in the Death Café model and requirements

explicitly established and communicated to people within and outwith the Death Café that we are all

humans, who will eventually die. Those that attended the Death Café then, did so in the context of this

established fact, and in doing so they identified themselves to each other as similar, not just because

they will all eventually die, but because they move into the Death Café space with that knowledge.

Further, they identify themselves as similar by the very process through which they want to make

sense of death. Through laughing and appearing to enjoy the Death Café, they make sense of death in

ways familiar to each other and familiar to sociality – laughter, food, and conversation. Ideas of the

person are constituted through an engagement with the topic of death, by sharing personal experiences

of death in a space with strangers, as well as the critique of public discourse in a sociable space. Death

Cafés therefore facilitate a context for death that attends to the persons experience of death in a way

that dissolves fear and constitutes sociality.

Conversations about the body in Death Cafés allowed me to identify humans as persons made

meaningful across the boundaries of life and death, and across the boundaries of the Death Café space.

Toren’s (1993, 2007) theory enabled me to attend to the Death Café experiences of the person as

unfixed and continually in the process of being remade through intersubjective interactions between

strangers in a critically and intentionally created social space. I understand the space as one of ritual,

through Christensen and Willerslev’s (2013) definitions, and so I argue that the Death Café is a space

whereby people can constitute social worlds and persons in time. And by making sense of death in

social time, the Death Café space does constitute one of self-help though it is unintentionally but

critically (through definitions of empowerment), and effectively so. I then followed on to argue that

the Death Café environment could constitute a space of grieving for people – not because it fits into

current definitions of grieving but because we need to transform the “time of the dead” and a “time of

life” to incorporate peoples actual experiences of their lives as social persons across these boundaries.

26

I conclude with a final, critical thought on the wider context in which the Death Café space sits.

Further research could attend comparatively to the “time of the dead” in a social, political, and

economic context. I am thinking in particular here of warzones – places where people are deprived of

any time to make sense of death - though violence can be inherent in structures that affect people’s

lives such as access to healthcare in Haiti (Farmer, 2005), and the violence of everyday life in Brazil

(Scheper-Hughes, 1993). After all, aren’t we incredibly lucky to be able to create a harmless,

everyday space where we can make sense of death?

27

Wine List

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29

12 January 2015

Emily Tupper (110009652)

Department of Social Anthropology

Ethics Reference No:

Please quote this ref on all

correspondence SA10995

Project Title: Death Cafe Conversations

Researchers Name(s): Emily Tupper

Supervisor(s): Dr Lynda Newland

Thank you for submitting your ethical application form which was considered at the Social

Anthropology School Ethics Committee meeting on 5/8/2014. The following documents were

reviewed:

1. Ethical Application Form

The University Teaching and Research Ethics Committee (UTREC) approves this study from an ethical

point of view. Please note that where approval is given by a School Ethics Committee that

committee is part of UTREC and is delegated to act for UTREC.

Approval is given for three years. Projects, which have not commenced within two years of original

approval, must be re-submitted to your School Ethics Committee.

You must inform your School Ethics Committee when the research has been completed. If you are

unable to complete your research within the 3 three year validation period, you will be required to

write to your School Ethics Committee and to UTREC (where approval was given by UTREC) to

request an extension or you will need to re-apply.

Any serious adverse events or significant change which occurs in connection with this study and/or

which may alter its ethical consideration, must be reported immediately to the School Ethics

Committee, and an Ethical Amendment Form submitted where appropriate.

Approval is given on the understanding that the 'Guidelines for Ethical Research Practice'

(http://www.standrews.ac.uk/media/UTRECguidelines%20Feb%2008.pdf) are adhered to.

Yours sincerely

30

Convenor of the School Ethics Committee OR Convener of UTREC

CCS Supervisor

School Ethics Committee

UTREC Convenor, Mansefield, 3 St Mary's Place, St Andrews,

KY16 9UY Email: utrec@st-andrews.ac.uk Tel: 01334 462866

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