I realized something important today, thanks to a post by James Marriott who quoted a long passage from an Orlando Figes description of Russian peasant life:
In every aspect of the peasants’ lives, from their material culture to their legal customs, there was a relentless conformity….The peasants all wore the same basic clothes. Even their hairstyles were the same …They had very little sense of privacy. All household members ate their meals from a common pot and slept together in one room.
Lack of private spaces, not to speak of fertility rites, dictated that the sexual act was kept at least partly in the public domain. It was still a common practice in some parts of Russia for a peasant bride to be deflowered before the whole village; and if the groom proved impotent, his place could be taken by an older man, or by the finger of the matchmaker. Modesty had very little place in the peasant world. Toilets were in the open air. Peasant women were constantly baring their breasts, either to inspect and fondle them or to nurse their babies, while peasant men were quite unselfconscious about playing with their genitals.
The result: Not only were these people well accustomed to seeing sex and procreation, but probably birth as well as dying, and not just talking about these activities and what they mean but seeing, hearing, smelling them.
Now let’s inspect the frequent trope with which modern life is often thrashed, the idea that moderns possess a taboo about death and dying and don’t talk about it. There are reasons to believe this isn’t strictly true in its unalloyed entirety, only in parts, but even there, the question is, we don’t talk about much relative to what? To some healthy baseline of talking about death and dying? To some prescribed daily references to one’s own death, which counts as enough? Where does this come from, who is the authority, what is the baseline?
I have a solution.
What I realized reading the Figes quote is this: we don’t talk about death and dying relative to how much we talk about, know about, feast our eyes and brains on, sex and procreation and reproduction (and parenting too). That’s what’s out of whack. That’s what’s out of balance. And that’s what distances us ultimately from our own living.
Yes, I am the person who wrote a book about first and last words, about putting models of the beginning in conversation with models of the end.
I’d want to argue that the reason that early modern and pre-moderns had the death culture they did wasn’t so much because death was so unavoidably frequent (wars, disease) but because other biological processes were themselves known, discussed, talked about. (You’ll refer me to the Victorians, stereotypically fascinated with death and repressed about sexuality, but this doesn’t disprove things as much as you might think; even a repressed topic is still present. Just ask Freud.) Additionally, there were other factors that produced this familiarity of life: the absence of privacy thanks to poverty and the nature of the built environment; the agricultural lifestyle and its exigencies. All of it was in the environment all the time, human and animal, for better or worse.
It's not that people used to talk about death and dying more in any absolute sense, it's that it was in balance with cultural fascinations with and mores about other biological processes, namely sex, but also social processes, like child-rearing.
Implication: death literacy ought to be anchored in biological literacy. Perhaps also a perspective that acknowledges shifting boundaries between the personal/private and the collective/public (not always the same thing, I know, but this is a blog post) over time and how that changes things. Given that perspective–the levels of privacy we have–perhaps moderns are as death literate as they can be.
