Social dying

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Under social death , the decline is the interaction of a person designated by its social environment, the social death ends. The term social death is not used consistently in science. It is used on the one hand in the context of human dying , on the other hand in the context of political or social exclusion .

Meanings

• The physically dying person can be treated like a dead person by others shortly before the end of his life. Relatives, nurses or doctors talk to the - in their opinion unconscious and unconscious - dying person as if they were standing in front of a corpse. According to thanato sociologists, this meaning has undergone a historical change: “In traditional cultures, social death took place after death, which was usually sudden and unexpected. The death of the individual was thus always the occasion for collective social death celebrations, for a restoration of social order, usually by doubling social reality (realm of the living and realm of the dead). "
• If a “dead person” reappears after a long time, as happened more often after wars, interaction problems necessarily arise. His "social position", the positions and roles he held are usually "occupied" or "abandoned". If he does not meet someone, such as his wife or mother, who continued to communicate with him in the imagination, i.e. maintained a fictitious interaction, he has to start over.
• Heavy losses of social capital and symbolic capital in the Bourdieu sense can be described as social death .
• People who do not have a recognized “full status”, e. B. Slaves , can be described as "socially dead". The term social death is also applied to racial discrimination in general. In this sense, the sociologist Daniel Goldhagen defines the term: “Social death is […] a formal status that characterizes all those people who suffer from these three extreme social disadvantages: dishonor, alienation through birth, violent oppression. The best known group of socially dead are the slaves. "
• Zygmunt Bauman describes how social death can be postponed beyond the end of biological life: “Remembrance rites rehearse the non-finality of death. In addition, they represent the continued existence of the community as a guarantee that individual impermanence can be overcome at least for a certain time. They separate the moment of physical death from the moment of social death, make this independent of the former and only raise the second, social death, to the rank of finality. "

literature

• Klaus Feldmann : Dying and Death. Social science theories and research results. Leske and Budrich, Opladen 1997, ISBN 3-8100-1659-4 .
• Klaus Feldmann: Death and Society. An overview of social science thanatology. VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-531-17350-4 .
• Norbert Elias : About the loneliness of the dying in our day. 8th edition, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-518-01772-1 .
• Daniel Goldhagen : Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-88680-593-X .
• Hans-Joachim Weber: The social death. On the sociogenesis of images of death. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1993, ISBN 3-631-46990-X .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Klaus Feldmann : Thanatosoziologie: Selected findings. Excerpts from: Die und Tod. Social science theories and research results 1997 , online , p. 62, PDF, accessed on April 8, 2015.
2. ↑ The presentation of the different meanings follows Klaus Feldmann: Thanatosoziologie: Selected knowledge. Excerpts from: Die und Tod. Social science theories and research results 1997 , online , p. 62 f., PDF, accessed on April 8, 2015.
3. ↑ Bourdieu describes this process as "social aging", that is: the subtle differences. Critique of social judgment. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-518-28258-1 , p. 189 f.
4. ↑ Orlando Patterson: Slavery and social death - a comparative study. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1982.
5. ↑ Wulf D. Hund : Racism. transcript, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-89942-310-5 , p. 121, online excerpt ( memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , PDF, accessed April 8, 2015. 
6. ^ Daniel Goldhagen: Hitler's willing executors. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1996, ISBN 3-88680-593-X , p. 206.
7. ↑ Zygmunt Bauman: Death, Immortality and Other Life Strategies . 1st edition. FISCHER paperback, 2016, ISBN 978-3-596-31232-0 , pp. 320 .