“Fall apart and put yourself together again”: the anthropology of death and bereavement counselling in Britain

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is theoretical: to suggest ways in which Bloch and Parry's theory of mortuary rites as an occasion for the creation of the social order, can be linked to certain Foucauldian insights into government, and the combination used to analyse certain mortuary rites in contemporary Western societies. This paper will take as an example some of the practices and ideas encountered among bereavement counsellors in Britain during fieldwork in the mid- to late-1990s. The analysis will touch on the notion of personhood implicated in bereavement counsellors' understanding of grief. The paper suggests that bereavement counselling can be understood as a process through which the client is encouraged to reconstitute themselves as an autonomous being. The paper concludes by attempting to link this analysis of bereavement counselling as a process of subjectification to Bloch and Parry's (1982) general theory of mortuary rites.