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3d

Death. So what? Sociology, sequestration

and emancipation

Hugh Willmott
Abstract
The paper argues for the widely unacknowledged importance of death in the
motivation of human conduct and the significance of the sequestration of death for
sociological theory. Sociological studies that illuminate modern strategies for coping
with death also contribute to its sequestration as they routinely naturalise the
contemporary commonsense understanding of death as something negative that
must be coped with. The (negative or morbid) representation of death, it is argued,
should be re-cognised as a social product, not reproduced in sociological studies as
something that is seemingly innate to the human condition. Otherwise, a
commonsense representation of death as unequivocally negative is reinforced rather
than scrutinised; and alternative understandings of the significance of mortality for
analysing everyday life and human emancipation are suppressed.

A distinguishing feature of modernity, Giddens (1991: 156) argues, is its

`purchasing' of ontological security through institutions and routines that
protect us from direct contact with madness, criminality, sexuality, nature and
death. Characterising this phenomenon as the `sequestration of experience',
Giddens associates modernity with `an exclusion of social life from
fundamental existential issues which raise central moral dilemmas for human
beings' (ibid). Death, notably, becomes a difficult, if not a taboo, topic to be
approached circuitously by reference to something else such as the causes of
illnesses and accidents, or the socially organized means of addressing, treating
and=or preventing their reoccurrence. An `uneasiness' surrounds death that is
routinely smoothed and managed by a plethora of experts and specialists
physicians, mortuary attendants, funeral directors, priests and, I want to argue,
social scientists employed to render death invisible or, at least, minimally
disruptive of normal appearances (Barley, 1983). Contact with death, except
vicariously through the mass media, is sanitised. Of greatest importance for the
argument to be developed here, minimal attention is given to what Mellor and
Shilling (1993: 423 emphasis added) identify as the transpersonal and existential
relevance of death. Death may be becoming less of a taboo topic of
conversation (Walter, 1991). But in such conversations and media examina# The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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tions, the significance of each person's mortality and inevitable demise is

routinely displaced or sequestered by modernist narratives of death, including
dominant sociological understandings of death, that disregard its significance
in the motivation of human conduct.
The importance of death's `transpersonal', `existential' significance resides in
its capacity to place in unfamiliar perspective, and thereby potentially render
absurd and futile, the projects and the institutions that endow lives with
meaning and value. In less abstract terms, death is present in anxieties and
limitations, for example, that `devastate' (mortify) or `breakdown' self-identity,
experienced as more or less trivial and momentary or traumatic and extended
feelings of disappointment and depression (Goffman, 1968), (Craib, 1994).
Conversely, the observation that whatever is taken to be a real or valued
anchor of self-identity can be breached (Garfinkel, 1967) and evaporate implies
that processes of constructing and sustaining the projects of modernity and
self-identity are conditional upon a suspension or sequestration of our knowledge
of mortality. Managing to avoid `mortifying' incidents is a condition of
maintaining a coherent, dignified sense of reality and self-identity. The
resonance between the symbolic death of self-identity and physical death is
articulated when, recalling incidents where the sense of self-identity is
impugned, the mundane expressions `I felt devastated' or `I could have died'
are widely invoked.
From this perspective, much human conduct is conceived to be motivated
by an unacknowledged inclination to deny physical as well as symbolic
mortality and to disavow this denial, existentially if not also cognitively, so
that a meaningful, `business-as-usual' sense of what is real can be sustained. If
this thesis is accepted, then it is remarkable, yet also to be expected, that
death's relevance for the study of social action is so widely unacknowledged
and unexplored. To be clear, there is no suggestion here that the impulse to
repress or postpone an awareness of mortality is the principle, or even a
primary, spur of human conduct. Many other candidates present themselves,
including gratification and meaning. The claim, instead, is that the
significance of this impulse has been neglected in social scientific analysis,
and that this neglect mirrors and sustains the everyday, commonsense
sequestration of death.
Mortality is important for the study of social action, I will argue, for at least
two, related reasons, only the second of which will be explored here in any
detail. First, death has material and meta-physical significance. It concerns fears
about the pain psychological as well as physiological associated with the
experience of dying, the loss of loved ones, anxiety for those who are left
behind, and uncertainty about what, if anything, might follow. Despite the
most defiant of modernist efforts to sequester it,
Death remains the great extrinsic factor of human existence; it cannot as
such be brought within the internally referential systems of modernity ...
Death becomes the point zero: it is nothing more or less than the moment at
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which human control over human existence finds an outer limit (Giddens,
1991: 162).
Deaths of family members and friends, in particular, are frequently major life
events or `critical situations' that prompt deeper reflection upon the value or
direction of life projects and the priority given to competing commitments, and
often have major ramifications worthy of sociological examination.
Second, death has a symbolic significance that is not necessarily directly
connected to the pain and uncertainty attributed to the death of others but with
the (loss of) meanings invested in life-projects. The significance of human
mortality resides in its capacity to `threaten the basic assumptions upon which
society is organized, as well as open up the individual to the dread of personal
meaninglessness. Death radically questions the taken-for-granted `business as
usual' attitude which is usually adopted in everyday life' (Shilling, 1993: 178 9
paraphrasing Berger, 1967, emphasis added). It is not (just) that death defies
the modernist impulse to control threats and uncertainty in ways that can be
profoundly frustrating and disturbing. It is (also) that the prospect of mortality
and the certainty of death can radically disrupt the meaning with which
everyday practices are routinely endowed. As Mellor and Shilling (1993)
observe, albeit somewhat in passing, 1 individuals' `reflexively constructed sense
of what is real and meaningful starts to vanish' when they `realize that they are
dying' (428, emphasis added). This realization may occur when a person is
diagnosed as terminally ill or believe themselves to have a lifethreatening
disease. But it can also be induced by awareness that every breath brings us
closer to death, and that the next breath could be our last. When mortal
knowledge is realized in this way (instead of being abstractly known and
routinely disregarded), meanings that previously had seemed solid, unshakeable, or at least significant, can become drained of their meaning and value.
What is the point of struggling to pursue the current life-project? What
difference can my life make? Who will remember me in 50 years let alone 500
years time?

The sequestration of death in modern society

Reviews of recent contributions to the sociology of death and dying have
drawn attention to the sequestration of death in modern society notably, the
privatization and medicalization of death (eg, Mellor, 1993; Shilling, 1993,
chapter 8; Mellor and Shilling, 1993). On the one hand, `(r)ather than being an
open, communal event, death is now a relatively hidden, private experience'
(Shilling, 1993: 189). On the other hand, enormous amounts of information are
being made publicly available about health and the means of prolonging life.
Today, as I revise this article, the National Health Service website is being
launched by Prime Minister Blair. Through these media, we are repeatedly
being urged to take responsibility for our health by smoking less, avoiding fatty
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foods, taking more exercise, and now for accessing the web to inform ourselves
about our medical conditions and how we should treat them.
Modernity's sequestration of experience is paradoxical. The `transpersonal,
existential' significance (Mellor and Shilling, 1993: 423) of death is excluded or
distanced from interpersonal interaction, communication and processes of
mutual understanding. In the guise of medical discourse, scientific knowledge
mediates everyday encounters with potentially life-threatening accidents,
disease and illness. Death is represented in terms of its causes (eg, concussion,
lung cancer, heart failure) so that we no longer hear or think of people `dying
of mortality' (Bauman, 1992: 5, cited in Mellor and Shilling: 425). The
`cumulative effect' of this sequestration of death is not to resolve the problem
of death by neutralising its implicit threat to self-identity but, ironically, `to
leave many people uncertain, socially unsupported when it comes to dealing
with death' as a transpersonal, existential phenomenon (Shilling, 1993: 189).
This may begin to account for why, as Walter (1991: 306 7) contends, in
modern societies the societal taboo about death diminishes but, `along with
[greater] societal acceptance of death goes the most intense personal pain' (ibid:
306) accompanying bereavement. Walter's favoured framework for analysing
the meaning of death in modern societies `points to death being highly
problematic for the modern individual, but not at all problematic for modern
society hence the lack of ritual surrounding it today' (307). In other words,
Walter contends that taboos surrounding the public discussion and viewing
(albeit simulated) of death are weakening, as indicated by the decline of
elaborate codes and conventions for dealing with death, but that the
anticipation of death remains a major existential issue and concern for modern
individuals.
Walter valuably highlights how death remains problematic and in this
respect taboo, for modern individuals who, for example, suffer the pain of
bereavement. This pain can be connected to modernist, humanist thinking that
celebrates the capacity of scientific knowledge to debunk dogmas and illusions,
including the idea of an afterlife. Legitimations that once addressed and
assuaged such pain by cementing belief in an afterlife where loved ones are
reunited have left individuals `exposed and unprotected in the face of their
inevitable demise' (Mellor and Shilling, 1993: 427). In Marx's words, as
processes of secularization debunk pre-modern beliefs and institutions, `man is
compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life' (Marx and
Engels, 1967: 83), which, in the present context, means a diminished and
perhaps exhausted faith in an after-life. As a current advertising slogan for
Virgin.net declares: `Don't count on reincarnation. Make the most of your free
time', as it invites consumers to access the site for music, travel, etc. There is no
reassurance about any form of life after death. The finality of death is
advertised in a way that reinforces the understanding that the prospect of death
`can radically undermine all that we hold to be real or of value' (Shilling,
1993: 185). If this is accepted, then it follows that participants in modern
societies are obliged to develop means of circumventing awareness of their
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mortality without recourse to legitimations derived from pre-modern beliefs

and institutions.
Attention is then focused upon preserving and extending this life.
Individuals become more vulnerable to the allure of cults and therapies,
including certain `New Age' therapies of the body, as a means of postponing if
not denying mortality. 2 The mainstream preoccupation with fitness and health
through `care' of the body is meaningful, as Shilling (1993) notes, because it
offers a degree of reassurance about life expectancy (in addition to cultivating a
fashionable, desirable physique) and, in this way, can make a subjectively
valued contribution to the sequestration of death. Where there is a substitution
of such belief systems for established religious traditions and their institutions,
it can become more, rather than less, difficult to address directly the `real
conditions of life', as death is effectively denied through immersion in the
consumption of life-enhancing therapeutic regimes. At the same time, when
established means of assuaging `transpersonal existential issues' (Mellor and
Shilling, 1993: 423) are discredited and eroded, an opening arises for
alternative and radical forms of awareness and reflection on mortality an
opening that is explored later in this paper. The possibility of engendering a
positive stance towards the postmodern condition of moral uncertainty and
disorientation, as Bauman (1994: 31) observes, offers up the opportunity `to
face the moral issues point blank, in all their naked truth', including the critical
question of how to live one's life, `as [these questions] emerge from the life
experience of men and women, and confront moral selves in all their
irreparable and irredeemable ambivalence' (Bauman, 1994: 31).
Is there any good reason for thinking that the mundane sequestration of
death associated with the life-projects of eating healthily, working out in the
gym, swimming regularly or attending aerobics classes does not extend to a
multitude of other activities such as reading the newspaper, supporting the
local football team or writing articles for learned journals? By absorbing our
attention, time and energy, such pursuits enable us to avoid or defer an
awareness of mortality and, critically, its likely deflationary implications for
the meaning and value of such projects. Immersion in such activities becomes
the secular equivalent of, or substitutions for, the internalisation of
traditional legitimations. By default, the unaddressed and unresolved
`existential and transpersonal' significance of mortality is an absent presence
in the pursuit of life projects and the accomplishment of everyday social
interaction.
If the argument is accepted that the sequestration of death is deeply
implicated in the motivation and organization of social action in modernity
then it follows that the sociology of death should not focus primarily, and
certainly not exclusively, upon social institutions (eg, hospitals, religious
institutions, hospices) and actors (eg, doctors, clerics, mortuary attendants)
that are explicitly dedicated to coping with dying and death. Nor should the
extension of its study be restricted to how people cope with `the loss of the
other, thy death' (Walter, 1991: 306). Instead, as Bauman (1992a) has argued,
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the study of death should address institutions and practices that commonsensically have little or no connection with it:
The impact of death is at its most powerful (and creative) when death does not
appear under its own name; in areas and times which are not explicitly
dedicated to it; precisely where we manage to live as if death was not or did
not matter, when we do not remember about mortality and are not put off or
vexed by the thoughts of the ultimate futility of life (7, emphasis in original).
Here Bauman articulates the understanding of death as an absent presence in
both the conduct of everyday life and social scientists' analysis of it. Much of
the activity that comprises everyday life, he implies, is conditional upon
actively forgetting about our mortality an awareness of which would `vex' or
even render `futile' the meanings and significance that are routinely ascribed to
it. 2 Death has a potent `impact', Bauman suggests, insofar as we are compelled
to `live as if death was not and did not matter' (ibid), by immersing ourselves in
practices through which we accomplish its routine sequestration. It is this
element of death's `existential, transpersonal' significance that is of most
general and critical relevance for sociological theory and analysis.

The significance of death for sociology

So far I have argued that death is an absent presence in social conduct. By
paying attention to how sociologists have addressed death and its sequestration, I now seek to show how this absent presence is largely unacknowledged
and unexamined by sociologists so that it becomes reproduced in, and
legitimised by sociological analysis.
Consider Mellor and Shilling's (1993) seminal discussion of the sequestration of death. In contrast to other studies (eg, Prior, 1989), they claim to focus
`much more explicitly upon the meaning of death for individuals' (Mellor and
Shilling, 1993: 412). This is a significant step forward since, as we have already
noted, most sociological theory and analysis mirrors the commonsense focus
upon institutions and experts that are responsible for managing death in ways
that minimise its potential to disrupt `normal appearances'. Revealingly,
however, Mellor and Shilling's (1993) discussion follows the mainstream of
sociological theory in excluding consideration of death's significance for
understanding everyday human conduct. Death's significance is equated
exclusively with the emergence and effectiveness of diverse coping strategies
for dealing with death. Death is treated as a discreet field of sociological
research rather than a matter of central and critical importance for the study of
human conduct in modern society. 3 In contrast, I have stressed the existential
significance of death and, in particular, how an awareness of mortality can
have a disruptive, deflationary effect upon personal ambition and achievement,
with consequences that are frequently disturbing and depressing but that, I will
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argue shortly, can also be releasing and enlightening. I now expand upon this
understanding in relation to the influential contributions of Berger and
Luckmann (1966) and Giddens (1984), whose work does at least incorporate an
appreciation of how our actions are conditioned by the precariousness of
human existence. 4 In their respective writings, the development and reproduction of social institutions is linked directly to the precarious ontological status
and security of human beings a concern that resonnates directly with my
primary interest in death's symbolic significance for self-identity.
Social institutions, Berger and Luckmann (1966) contend, emerge to fill a
void originating from human beings' underdeveloped instinctual organization:
institutions are constructed to `provide direction and stability for the greater part
of human existence' (1966: 69). If thrown back on pre-institutional resources
alone, human existence would be `existence in some sort of chaos' (1966: 69). It
is the social meanings enshrined in institutions that keep chaos at bay.
Institutions provide their members with a sense of reality and identity. At the
same time, Berger and Luckman stress the constructed, and therefore fragile,
sense of order assembled by processes of institutionalization. `The constant
possibility of anomic terror', they (1966: 121) conjecture, `is actualized whenever
the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse'
(1966: 121). In this formulation of the relationship between social institutions
and human ontology, there is an evident affinity with the understanding, noted
earlier, that legitimations notably, pre-modern religious beliefs serve to
channel and assuage the transpersonal and existential significance of mortality.
A broadly similar position to Berger and Luckmann's is advanced by
Giddens (1984), except that for him it is not the provision of order per se that
checks `the possibility of anomic terror'. The sense of security is not located in
orderly institutions or symbolic universes. Rather, it is continuously negotiated
and maintained by human agency. As Giddens (1979: 128) puts it, the sense of
security associated with the reassuring familiarity of routines `implies
ethnomethodological continuity more than the reproduction of the empirical
content of practices' (original emphasis omitted). Routinization `is the mode in
which the stratification of the personality is sustained ... [and] ... potentially
corrosive effects of anxiety are contained' (1979). 5 From a Giddensian
perspective, it is the process of routinization rather than the existence of orderly
routines and institutions per se that is of importance supporting individuals'
experience of a continuous, reassuring sense of self-identity. The conventions of
daily life are sustained, Giddens argues, because they `are of essential
significance in curbing sources of unconscious tension that would otherwise
preoccupy most of our waking lives' (Giddens, 1984: xxiii xiv, emphasis
added). This understanding is consistent with the thesis that, in modern society,
particular institutions and legitimisations are less important in inhibiting
anomie or in containing `the corrosive effects of anxiety' than a capacity to
become absorbed in, or (neurotically) preoccupied with maintaining, everyday
routines in ways that block `unconscious tension'. As pre-modern legitimations
are weakened, the transpersonal and existential significance of death becomes
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more apparent and intense unless substitute institutions are developed as a

way of deferring its potentially disruptive effects. In a modern, secular society,
it can be suggested, these `substitutes' do not take a distinctive (eg, `religious')
institutional form. Instead, they become an integral, parasitic feature of the
neurotic busi-ness and performativity of the central institutions of modern
society including family, as well as education, work and even leisure. 6
Giddens is vague about the `sources of unconscious tension' that propel such
busi-ness. But it is not implausible to suppose that awareness of mortality,
which problematizes the meaning of life-projects including those of selfidentity, is one such source, and quite possibly the most potent.
Berger and Luckmann and Giddens share the assumption that chaos or
insecurity precedes the development of institutions whether institutions emerge
to establish order (Berger and Luckmann) or are outcome of agents' efforts to
accomplish `ethnomethodological continuity' and=or continuous sense of selfidentity (Giddens). Chaos and tension, it is claimed, are the precursors of social
institutions, not their outcome. Yet, it is no less plausible, and arguably more
compelling, I suggest, to interpret the fear of chaos as a product of the
dependency that participation in social institutions (often inadvertently)
engenders. From this perspective, `chaos' and `tension' do not precede the
construction of institutions or practices of routinisation. Rather, chaos and
tension are an unintended or paradoxical outcome of their development. Only
when a sense of order and continuity is produced can `chaos' be perceived, or the
`tensions' arising from their disruption be experienced.
This argument is premised upon the understanding that prior to the
development of even the most rudimentary of institutions, there is neither `order'
nor `chaos'. Judgements about the `isness' of the world, involving identities and
differences, have at this point (yet) to be constructed (through processes of
institutionalization). The division between wo=man and world has yet to emerge;
and there is no sense of existing independently of this yet-to-be-identified
world, and therefore no (self-conscious) sense of mortality. It is only with the
development and acquisition of social institutions that a sense of mortality and a
sense of chaos and tension become possible as outcomes that are Other to the
ordering processes of institutionalization and self-identity (re)production.
From this perspective, what makes the anticipation of death so bewildering is
not the experience of physical death, of which we can know nothing before it
occurs, 7 but the projected loss of what we (commonsensically) know, or believe,
ourselves to be: the socially constructed sense of self-identity that arises
simultaneously with participation in modern social institutions. It is awareness of
the precariousness and projected loss and projected loss of the emotional and
cognitive knowledge upon which we depend for our sense of self-identity that is
so deeply, existentially, troubling. It is this `trouble' that can inspire or fuel an
interest in activities from love relationships through fitness projects to
authoring academic papers that enable `unconscious tensions' to be `curbed'. It
is when these projects lose their meaning or appeal what Trungpa (1975: 12)
describes as a mundane `bardo' experience (to be discussed below) that we
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become more conscious of the relative, precarious and insignificant status of our
projects and our related sense of selfidentity. In modern societies, the anxiety or
`onomic terror' identified by Berger and Luckmann is, I suggest, as much, and
more, aroused by the threat of symbolic death than it is provoked by a revelation
of the chaos alleged to lurk beneath institutional forms of order.
Here I return to an earlier refrain of Bauman's (1992a): that without a sense
of mortality there would be `no history, no culture no humanity. Mortality
``created'' that opportunity: all the rest has been created by beings aware that
they are mortal' (Bauman, 1992a: 7). Institutions, Bauman suggests, provide a
means of dealing with mortality: death is denied as a bid is made for
immortality. Or, as he puts it, by developing institutions, human beings are
enabled, more or less intentionally, to suppress or suspend `thoughts of the
ultimate futility of life' (Bauman, 1992a: 7). From this it follows that
sociological theory and analysis should incorporate a recognition and
appreciation of the significance of mortality in the motivation of human
conduct. It is to this concern that I now turn.

Death and modernity: existential threat or emancipatory opportunity?

Earlier, when commenting upon the cultural constitution of individuals, it was
noted how, in modernity, we are increasingly thrown back upon ourselves, and
thus are more `prone to reality-threatening ontological and existential
anxieties' (Mellor and Shilling, 1993: 429). I now want to argue that these
anxieties are not universal, or endemic, to the human condition but, instead,
are expressions of the socially organized privileging of a separation between
wo=man and world. As this separation occurs, the sense of the self as an
independent entity becomes institutionalized and largely taken-for-granted (by
self as well as by others). Any event or `fateful moment' that problematizes this
`solid' sense of self as an independent, sovereign entity tends, as both Berger
and Luckmann and Giddens recognise, to be experienced as a threat to
ontological security rather than an occasion to dis-close and debunk the basis
of this understanding. Why is this?
As Pollner (1987) amongst others has commented, the idea of the `self' or
`ego' is deeply engrained in Western commonsense reasoning, at least. Extreme
difficulty and trauma is encountered in problematising its existence:
As the nature of mundane reason is plumbed and conventional versions of
subjectivity become analytically problematic, the notion of `self', or `agent'
or `ego' which possesses, regulates or comprises subjectivity will also become
problematic (Pollner, 1987: 134)
The anticipation of death, in particular, is disturbing because it unsettles our
mundane, commonsense reasoning about the identity and projects of the self
(Levin, 1988, esp. Chapter 3), not least because it serves to `dwarf and make
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futile, pompous and absurd even [and, it might be added, especially] the most
grandiose of human projects' (Bauman, 1992a: 6). At the heart of the projects
of the insecure modern individual is the effort, at once grandiose and
Sisyphean, to sustain and defend a sense of self-identity as a separate entity.
Making a direct link between the biological death of the human body and the
symbolic death of the ego, and describing these as two aspects of the same
`bardo' experience, 8 Trungpa (1975) elaborates the understanding that the
sense of identity and self-importance dissolve in the face of a felt knowledge of
our mortality and insignificance:
death happens in the living situation as well ... There are all kinds of bardo
experiences happening to us all the time, experiences of paranoia and
uncertainty in everyday life; it is like not being sure of our ground, not
knowing quite what we have asked for or what we are getting into (Trungpa,
1975: 1 2).
By becoming immersed in and dependent upon routines, human beings
contrive to defy the precarious, fictional quality of self-identity, and to
minimize the risk of symbolic death experienced most commonly as ontological
insecurity or `paranoia'. 9 Yet, precisely because social institutions and routines
are precarious, the business of sustaining a solid, independent sense of selfidentity is accompanied by pervasive and recurrent anxiety that situations will
arise in which the constructed quality of self-identity will be exposed by an
inability to sustain normal appearances. In the theatre, it is called `corpsing'.
Any academic who has despaired of gaining clarity or communicating ideas
effectively will be able to identify with such everyday `bardo' experiences of
self-doubt and symbolic death. I will now illustrate this argument by brief
reference to Castaneda's `factional' 10 accounts of his relationship to don Juan,
a Yaqui sorcerer (eg, Castaneda, 1969: 1974).
Encountering symbolic death
In Reading Castaneda, Silverman (1975: 3 et seq) notes that it is not difficult to
sense Castaneda's `incomprehension, even anger, at don Juan's behaviour'.
Don Juan's playful exposure of Castaneda's sense of solidity and selfimportance repeatedly breach Castaneda's dualistic, Cartesian separation
between wo=man or self and world. 11 Don Juan's actions defy Castaneda's
capacity to understand them without first surrendering his sense of self-identity
(or `sanity'). At the same time, don Juan does not make it easy for Castaneda
to dismiss him as a charlatan or a madman.
Typical is the occasion, early in their relationship, when don Juan and
Castaneda hear a crow cawing and don Juan interprets this as an omen. The
crow's caw, don Juan says, gives `a very important indication' about Castaneda
(Castaneda, 1974: 37). At first, Castaneda laughs at such a fanciful claim. Then he
suspects don Juan to be poking fun at him. In a fit of pique, Castaneda gets up to
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leave. Don Juan's response is to start mimicking a popular folk singer. As he sings,
don Juan elongates some syllables and contracts others to produce a farcical effect
an effect that discharges Castaneda's anger by once more making him laugh.
When interpreting this episode, Castaneda reports that initially he
interpreted don Juan's parody of the singer as an attempt to show him how
foolish he was being to take seriously the absurd claims about the crow. He
understood don Juan to be drawing a parallel between the claim of the singer
to communicate some genuine, intense emotion and the suggestion that the
crow's caw communicated `an important indication'. Castaneda's comforting,
commonsense interpretation is immediately confounded, however, when don
Juan observes that the popular singer, as well as those who pay to hear him, are
not laughing: they take it very seriously. Castaneda's reaction of anger to his
claim about the crow, don Juan implies, more closely parallels the attitude of
the singer and his audience. The singer and his audience are considered by don
Juan to share a commonsense faith in the conventions that place a value upon
such artistry, and thereby enable them to confirm and sustain a taken for
granted sense of reality and identity. Similarly, Castaneda's amusement at don
Juan's claims about the crow's caw is understood by don Juan to be founded
upon an unexamined, commonsense faith, or conceit, in the authority of
Castaneda's knowledge that cawing crows could not conceivably be an omen of
anything. As don Juan puts it to Castaneda, just like the singer, he was
`conceited and serious about some nonsense that no one in his right mind
should give a damn about' (ibid: 38). Don Juan views Castaneda's dismissive
reaction of his remark as symptomatic of Castaneda's blind faith in a stock of
knowledge that is equivalent to that shared by the singer and his audience. As
Silverman (1975: 7) observes, `in order to understand don Juan's teachings,
Castaneda must let go the certainties of his mundane existence if he is to enter
the space of liminality (Turner, 1969) occupied and exemplified by don Juan. 12
Yet, in doing so, he risks losing what he conceives to be ``all his rationality'' '.
An important condition of this risk-taking and `letting go' is a lived awareness
of mortality that engenders sufficient humility to respond openly and playfully,
rather than defensively and heavily, to the idea that a crow's caw is an omen.
When commenting upon Castaneda's defensive and dismissive response to
ideas that do not confirm his self-knowledge, don Juan later asks: `how can
anyone feel so important when we know that death is stalking us? (ibid: 50,
emphasis added). Castaneda replies that it would be stupid for him actively to
develop an awareness of how death is stalking him because such morbid
thinking would `bring discomfort and fear' (ibid: 51). In response, don Juan
problematizes this widely held view a view that is reflected in the
sequestration of death in modernity and reproduced by the neglect of death
in sociological theory. `Death', don Juan contends, `is the only wise advisor
that we have' because whenever everything appears to be going wrong and
there is a sense of immanent annihilation, `your death will tell you that you are
wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch' (ibid). So long as this
advisor remains an absent presence, don Juan observes, Castaneda will
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continue to be `full of crap' (ibid). Castaneda's reaction to don Juan's talk of

crows and omens, for example, would have been more open and playful, and
less dismissive and paranoid, don Juan implies, if he had recognised its
triviality in relation to death.
The purpose of this consideration of Castaneda's experience has been to
show how existential anxieties are a product of the way identities are
represented and adopted as solid attributes or possessions. When taken
seriously, they are compulsively maintained and passionately defended as
exemplified in Castaneda's response to don Juan's claim about the crow and
his general reluctance to suspend belief in `the certainties of his mundane
existence' (Silverman, 1975: 7). Conversely, when self-identity is conceived and
experienced as a manifestation of what don Juan terms `controlled folly', there
is no basis for defensiveness because there is nothing sufficiently important or
`real' to defend. The possibility of responding to disruptions of mundaneity
openly and playfully suggests that the anxieties generated by a realisation of
the precariousness and vulnerability of self-identity are socially organized, not
naturally occurring or even an endemic feature of institutionalization. `Bardo'
experiences in everyday life, as Trungpa describes them, are an unintended
consequence of an inclination or compulsion to derive ontological security
from a seemingly solid sense of self-identity acquired through participation in
social institutions. Anxieties are generated not simply because social
institutions are precarious and subject to disruption. Rather, anxieties about
self-identity are symptomatic of a socially organized dependency upon these
institutions. This dependency is exposed on every occasion that the sense of
self-identity is threatened by the disruption of established, routinized
expectations upon which this sense depends for confirmation. Whenever this
disruption occurs, there is a fleeting opportunity to reflect critically upon our
tenuous sense of immortality. The opportunity is generally missed, or
disregarded, however, as a psychological scramble ensues to recover a sense
of normal appearances and, with them, the restoration of a solid sense of selfidentity. Castaneda's angry reaction to don Juan's claim about the crow's caw
is illustrative of this process.

Summary and conclusion

An awareness of mortality threatens to deflate the meaning ascribed to lifeprojects. In the absence of powerful legitimations (eg, belief in an after life) that
temper the significance of death, a socially organized sequestration of death
from everyday life through strategies of privatization and medicalization, for
example is to be anticipated. In modernity, contemplation of death is
routinely tabooed, if not excluded, from public consciousness and debate.
Reflection upon mortality is regarded as morbid and is avoided because it is
associated with `discomfort and fear' (Castaneda, 1974: 51).
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Yet, modernity also espouses a commitment to critical thinking, including

sociological analysis. This thinking aspires to disclose what is otherwise hidden
or mystified and thereby `to return the repressed'. By focusing almost
exclusively upon personal and institutional strategies that sequester death,
sociology has left unaddressed the wider ramifications of death's sequestration
in governing human conduct. Rarely is the study of death linked more directly
to what Mellor and Shilling (Mellor and Shilling, 1993: 423) describe as
`transpersonal existential issues'. By default, sociologists have contributed to
the sequestration of death instead of subjecting this process to critical
examination.
The discussion of death's significance advanced in this paper has not
doubted or denied the anxiety-provoking and even terrifying effect of the
threat, or anticipation, of biological death and the experience of symbolic
death. But it has been argued that this response is socially organized, not
naturally given. Such feelings arise, it has been argued, as a consequence of selfdefeating efforts to deal with the imaginary, yet very solid, sense of self as a
separate entity that is pre-served through the production of, participation in,
and defence of, institutions. Anxieties about mortality emerge from the socially
produced sense of separation between wo=man and world that is generative of
knowledge of mortality. It is through immersion in identity-forming and
securing routines and institutions that the fear of death is routinely suppressed
or circumvented. In this way, human conduct is conditioned by an
unacknowledged desire to disregard or deny mortality a desire that generally
becomes apparent in modern society only when the anticipation of death,
biological or symbolic deflates the meaning and reality ascribed to projects of
self-identity.
To be clear, this understanding of death's significance as an absent presence
involves no nihilistic rejection of social institutions as `mere' constructions.
Social institutions are a necessary feature of social life. But dependence upon
them for a sense of ontological security is not. When reframed in this way,
awareness of mortality and the anticipation of death renders life futile only
when a yearning to restore the meaning and value ascribed to past
achievements overrides its linking of `the individual lifespan to broad issues
of morality and finitude' (Giddens, 1991: 8). Awareness and study of mortality
is significant precisely because it disrupts and problematizes a tendency to
assume and reinforce the importance and seriousness of the projects of selfidentity. It is important sociologically insofar as human conduct is conditioned
and guided by an urge to suppress or circumvent this awareness. It is also
important politically because it suggests the emancipatory relevance of
mortality as an `advisor' that enables us to assess the existential and
transpersonal value of life-projects. Critical reflection upon mundane reasoning about death points to the (postmodern) possibility of developing social
institutions in which the functional value of self-identity is acknowledged, its
precariousness is appreciated, and (self-defeating) efforts to secure self-identity
become a source of playfulness and humour rather than a serious focus of
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human endeavour. This is an understanding that the discipline of sociology has

ducked or denied rather than directly addressed. A contemporary challenge for
sociologists is to reverse their discipline's collusion in the sequestration of
death.
Manchester School of Management

Received 4 February 1999

Finally accepted 2 June 2000

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Richard Weiskopf for his detailed commentary on an
earlier version of this paper in addition to the helpful, constructive comments
of two anonymous referees.

Notes
1 Mellor and Shilling do not expand upon their remarks about the `vanishing' of meaning and
reality, preferring to concentrate upon the increasing privatised nature of death in modern
society and the problems encountered in coping with it.
2 It is also relevant to note that other `New Age' movements and therapies actively encourage
reflection upon death (e.g. Tibetan Buddhism).
3 There are strong resonances between the broad thrust of my argument and the position
developed in Bauman's Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. But I do not share
Bauman's belief that social institutions can be adequately explained entirely as a means of
denying or defying mortality. It may well be true, as Bauman, following Canetti, suggests, that
few people would find life worth living if they knew that they would not die (Bauman,
1992a: 6). I also concur with Bauman when he argues that, in modern society, the socially
organized anticipation of biological death or the experience of symbolic death is routinely
accompanied by feelings of great anxiety and a strong desire to restore routines that distract
attention from its deflating impact. But, even so, it does not follow that culture is only a means
of defying death; or, relatedly, that apathy, vacillation or meaninglessness is the only possible
outcome of dissolving this defiance. I will argue that disillusionment associated with the
deflating effects accompanying with the anticipation of biological death or the experience of
symbolic can also have the more emancipatory outcome of exposing conceit and pettiness,
thereby enabling the development of a different sense of being-in-the-world where actions are
less compelled by a dualistic habit of relating to the natural and social worlds instrumentally
as a resource for maintaining and defending the seeming solidity of self-identity (see Willmott,
1994).
4 Disavowal of the significance of death is not restricted to textbooks written by authors
antipathetic to social theory. It includes, for example, Giddens' (1986) `short but critical'
introduction to sociology. Despite an acknowledgement that the extant division of labour
between the social sciences `can be justified in only a very general way' (1986: 9), consideration
of mortality, it would seem, is deemed to fail within the domain of some other discipline
presumably psychology or perhaps philosophy. The marginal importance attributed to death in
sociological theory is symptomatic of how sociology, as a discipline, has been more inclined to
`get on' with analysing specific institutions rather than striving to address and shed light upon
more fundamental issues, such as the question of why and how society is possible or how
knowledge of mortality, and the sense that is made of it, conditions human conduct. Of course,
there have been important exceptions to this rule (eg, Simmel, 1965; O'Neill, 1972).

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5 A comparison of the positions of Berger and Giddens is also made by Shilling (1993). The
universalistic orientation of Berger (1967) is contrasted with Giddens' (1991) focus upon how, in
modern societies, traditional legitimations are undermined if not swept away. Of particular
interest here is Shilling's (1993: 1845) attentiveness to Giddens's assumption that `humans
have a fundamental and unchanging need for a secure sense of themselves and the world around
them' (1993: 184). Shilling judges Giddens's `assumption of essential psychological needs' to be
less than ideal' but without explaining why. I concur with this assessment, but possibly for
different (posthumanist) reasons, to be sketched later in this paper.
6 Giddens (1984: 57) subsequently elaborates this understanding when he suggests that `the
motivational components of the infantile and the adult personality derive from a generalized
orientation to the avoidance of anxiety and the preservation of self-esteem against the ``flooding
through'' of shame and guilt'. This understanding is central to his theory of structuration in
which structure (or order, in Berger and Luckmann's terminology) is continuously
accomplished through the practical consciousness of human agency: `... the familiar in social
settings is created and recreated through human agency itself, in the duality of structure' (Giddens,
1979: 128, hasis in original).
7 It is not simply, as Baudrillard (1993) has argued, that modernity is preoccupied with extending
life expectancy and managing the risks of death by providing life-extending goods and services
but that the creation and reformation of modern institutions is motivated by an obsessive
preoccupation with making an impression and leaving a trace.
8 As Bauman (1992a: 2) observes, existentially death `cannot be perceived; still less visualized or
``represented'' ... death is the cessation of the very ``acting subject'', and with it, the end of all
perception'. This end of perception is `one state of affairs that the perceiving subject cannot
conjure up: it cannot ``blot itself out'' of the perception and still wish the perception to be'
(ibid). This is not to deny the physical pain of death or the suffering of others who grieve the
loss of loved ones.
9 For a discussion of this and its connections with existential philosophy, see Levin, 1988, Ch. 3,
Part IV. There are also some connections here with Mellor's (1990) discussion of understandings of the self and suffering developed in Buddhist and Christian traditions. However,
Mellor's consideration of the Buddhist tradition is disappointingly confined to Theravadan
beliefs and practices. As a consequence, he emphasises the importance of progressive `nonattachment through an evermore radical method of deconstruction' (ibid: 53) and only
belatedly acknowledges the power of visualizations and other tantric practices in accomplishing
this deconstruction (ibid: 60).
10 Giddens (1984) describes the most dramatic of such occasions as `critical situations' in which
individuals are no longer able to cope with events or circumstances that `threaten or destroy the
certitudes of institutionalized routines' (ibid: 61), and thus overwhelm individuals' habitualized
ways of dealing with threats to self-identity. It is when the meanings that support self-identity
collapse that life is most likely to seem futile, devoid of meaning. Desperate for security, the
temptation and tendency is for individuals to regress to a state of intensified dependency, often
accompanied by a strengthening identification with some apparently authoritative figure or
doctrine that intercedes to restore a sense of self-identity (see Giddens, 1979, esp. p. 127).
Because Giddens assumes the need to maintain `ethnomethodological continuity', he implies (in
Weberian fashion see Willmott, 1993) that the only alternative to intensified dependency
upon an authoritative figure (or drugs, etc.) is the rational selection of, and commitment to, a
set of core values that remains comparatively undisturbed by threats to self-identity.
11 Sometimes referred to as the New Journalism or the non-fiction novel, `faction' deploys the
techniques of the novelist to convey a degree of `realism' that more orthodox representations of
reality struggle to provide (see Lodge, 1992: 203 and Wolfe, 1990). There has been a lively
debate about the `authenticity' of Castaneda's writings, with some arguing that it is based upon
anthropological fieldwork and others suggesting that it is a work of the imagination. Here I
concur with Silverman's (1975: 2) view that Castaneda's writing is `for our present purposes,
less significant for its substance ... than for what you make of it'. Silverman focuses upon what
our reading tells us about our membership of the language community that provides us with this
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meaning. Here I am interested in the insights that Castaneda's `faction' brings to understanding
experience of being-in-the-world.
12 The allusion here is to Garfinkel's (1967) breaching experiments. Garfinkel was a member of
Castaneda's doctoral committee.
13 As Turner (1969: 95) characterises liminality, its attributes `are necessarily ambiguous ... liminal
entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and
arranged by law, custom, conventional and ceremonial ... liminality is frequently likened to
death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness'.

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