Although Martineau, Du Bois, and Wells are now recognized figures in sociology, their contributions to the study of death and for undoing its Eurocentrism from within have thus far gone unnoticed. Wells, whose work offers a valuable resource to sociologists studying death. These histories indicate engagements with loss that extend well beyond Émile Durkheim’s iconic study of suicide to include other early sociologists such as Harriet Martineau and W.E.B. That is, matters of death and to an extent mourning were part of the discipline’s formation in ways that have cleared the path for attending to social difference and social inequality. Death, funerals, and bereavement came to occupy a central place, and even something of a spectacle, in the wake of the pandemic.Īt the same time, even a cursory look at sociology’s early history, from approximately the 1830's to the early decades of the twentieth century, indicates that such critical interventions are not new. Not since Septemand Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 had loss and mourning occupied the national spotlight and then only to quickly surpass these earlier milestones in scale and intensity.
with cascading images of white-sheeted bodies in refrigeration trucks substituting for overfilled morgues in cities like New York and Boston, online funerals, and healthcare workers keeping vigil over those taking their last breath. Beginning in March 2020, reports of fatalities, unceremonious funerals, lines of coffined bodies awaiting disposal, and overwhelmed funeral homes in the towns and provinces of Italy and then Spain began flooding the daily news. The interfaith service was intended to commemorate the staggering losses and mark the absence of any national memorializations many months after the surge in deaths. flags on the National Mall facing the White House. Footnote 1 Organized by a group of friends in Washington DC, the event was marked by placing 20,000 U.S. that were linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. On September 22, 2020, the COVID Memorial Project held a public remembrance for the approximately 200,000 deaths in the U.S. This view supplements efforts toward encouraging intersectional and geopolitical approaches to the study of death in sociology, approaches that are more needed than ever before to contend with the scale of loss and suffering that is filling lives. It shows that questions of suicide and Black death were a significant part of these scholars’ writings and that attention to loss and mourning shaped emergent understandings of the social, sociological frameworks, and methodologies. Du Bois, the article seeks to provide an alternate genealogy of the sociology of death and to make a case for mainstreaming the study of death within the discipline. Engaging sociological thinkers Harriet Martineau, Émile Durkheim, Ida B. Providing an overview of sociological studies of death that consolidated into a subfield in the 1990s, it shows how recent attempts at including intersectional and decolonial approaches link with considerations of death in sociology’s early history.
This article seeks to rewrite the genealogy of sociology of death by revisiting the history of sociology, from the 1830s to the early twentieth century.