Traditional Death
Walter ’s analysis of the postmodern attitude toward death is situated as part
of one of three schemas illustrating pervasive cultural responses to death in
the west. He notes that these three schemas are ideal types emerging out of
careful studies of death related practices and do not have fixed or absolute
correspondences with historical experience. These ideal types capture the
consistency of a cultural logic that can be theoretically differentiated in terms
of its qualitative and institutional treatment of death and dying: traditional,
modern, and neo-modern, with neo-modern responses to death divided into
two strands, late modern and postmodern. Much of this schema shares com-
mon elements with Philippe Ariès analysis of western attitudes toward death,
which read changing attitudes toward death and dying as a gradual coming
into awareness of the self-conscious individual (Ariès 1981).
Walter maintains that the traditional response to death is rooted in and
mediated by the norms of religious communities. The archetypal bodily con-
text of death is a death that is rapid and frequent, typified by death brought
about by plague or during birth or early childhood. The social context for
dying and death is communal, theorized by Ariès as “tamed death,” with
each person seen not so much as an individual but as a participant in a dense
web of social relations in which the community experiences death as a com-
munal rather than individual loss. Death and dying are mediated by reli-
gious authorities and proscribed rituals of mourning. In traditional practices
the body is the responsibility of religious officials and often immediately
buried in a communal grave in the courtyard of a church, later being placed
in a charnel house (ideally, ad sanctos). A death not mediated by these factors
was viewed as “cursed.” Death is wild, but tamed through religious ritual.
The eschatological emphasis for most European Christian communities is not
on the salvation of the individual soul, rather, is perceived in terms of com-
munal salvation, the anticipation of the entire community being raised up
together in the Final Judgment. It is not until much later, particularly after
the Black Plague, that salvation is transformed into highly individualistic
terms, with judgment occurring at the moment of death. Despite this turn
toward the individual self, traditional death retains many of its characteris-
tics well into the modern period. Traditional death can be charted in Europe
from about the fourth century through until the late eighteenth or nineteenth
century with qualitative changes around the thirteenth century.
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 181