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Living with death: the processing of dying in the modern society

This paper is about the processing of the death in the modern society; it aims to problematize the psychosocial strategies used in the modern society to live together with death. It is argued that the form as death is processed socially in the modern society is a consequence of how we relate to life. Beginning from the exam of contributions by Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias and in the individualization concepts formulated by Ulrich Beck and segregation of experience proposed by Anthony Giddens, we tried to demonstrate that the less problematic death becomes socially, the more distressing its processing becomes for the individual. To develop this argument and to show how the death experience is segregated, we applied the actor-net notion that allows the interpretation of the heterogeneous actors' juxtaposition in the processing of death.

death; processing of dying; segregation of death; actor-net; modern society


Universidade Federal da Bahia - Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas - Centro de Recursos Humanos Estrada de São Lázaro, 197 - Federação, 40.210-730 Salvador, Bahia Brasil, Tel.: (55 71) 3283-5857, Fax: (55 71) 3283-5851 - Salvador - BA - Brazil
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