THE MEDIATION OF DEATH AND THE CULTIVATION OF TRANSGRESSIVE SOLIDARITY

TAL MORSE (London School of Economics and Political Science: The Department of Media and Communications)

The research on death and society focuses on death rituals as liminal phase in which prevailing order is undermined and characteristics of identity are blurred and eroded. This is also a phase in which questions of solidarity and social cohesion are reconsidered. Death rituals redefine and reaffirm the boundaries of the community and the commitment of its members to one another. This paper focuses on death related rituals as they are performed by transnational media, and argues that the liminal phase associated with these rituals opens the possibility to delineate the boundaries of care and belonging beyond the “here” and “now”.

This paper studies death rituals as a mechanism to elicit grief and inform a sense of solidarity amongst members of the community. This sense of solidarity is a product of the symbolic work of rituals in defining the boundaries of care and commitment. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler and others, the paper considers grief as a political resource, and explores the conditions that make the death of distant others grievable.

By bringing together theories of media anthropology, sociology and moral philosophy, the paper offers an analytical framework to study and analyze news reports on mass violent death events. The proposed framework unpacks news on death, and shows how the different components of the news reports (visual, discursive and technological) inform a sense of solidarity with distant others in times of crises. The analysis shows how such media performance serve as a mechanism that create a liminal phase that transgress physical boundaries and redefines imagined symbolic boundaries based on media of communication and the meaning they disseminate.

The paper concludes by discussing the potential of death-related-media-rituals to manifest solidarity beyond established boundaries of nationality or geography, and so enable (or disable) the construction of cosmopolitan community.