New tanatological practices and the emergence of the neomodern model of death.

Abstract

Opposite to the great collective rituals and the transcendent meaning granted by traditional communities, Modernity would have reduced death to silence and transformed the act of dying into a solitary and institutionalized process. Nevertheless, in the last decades a new model of death could be emerging in our societies: the neo-modern model, since it doesn't question the central role of the sanitary system in the management of death, but tries to correct the gaps that the latter didn't achive to satisfy. Death would thus gradually return to the public space, but in a fragmented and decentralized way, as a set of scattered practices and discourses that would have in common a renewed interest in talking about death and dying. In this article I intend to verify the possible presence of the neo-modern model of death in a series of very different cultural products and practices. I will discuss whether all of them have a common thread in the neo-modern model or if, as other authors claim, they are rather a product of the tendency towards media hyper-transparency and the search for strong sensations typical of the consumerist society. I also examine some criticisms to the model and its internal contradictions. I conclude by trying to anticipate future trends in the way of dying in light of the evidence presented.