Managing healing and coping with death: The margins of institutionalisation
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Death in a family usually disrupts everyday life for a considerable period of time. The death of a young person is in a way even more tragic. With the awareness that it was far from inevitable, death of a young person is accompanied by special coping strategies. These coping strategies on the other hand are very much based on improvisation. Not all things can be simply done as it is institutionalised. Religions may provide some ready-made solutions for coping but its role is rather marginal. It is able to provide death rituals etc., but it does not provide all one needs to overcome the loss. Thus healing and death, referred to in the context of functional social institutions, is something marginal. It is and is not institutionalised at once. Institutionalization seems to be partly lacking in this existential case, despite the fact that every tradition has a genuine set of ways to cope with it. For this reason death is a good case to locate the borders of institutionalisation and its applicability to everyday life. The presentation aims to address this issue, and so also the possible significance and usability of religion in everyday life. In this sense it is a search for unblocking religion. |