Browsing by Author "Heald, Justine Carla"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Cake and death: three death cafes in South Africa
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-12) Heald, Justine Carla; Van Wyk, Ilana; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis is concerned with three Death Cafés (DC) in South Africa and the individuals that gave shape to and engaged with these DCs.The DC is an international movement and social franchise that was founded in 2011 in London, that aims to break the social “taboo” around discussing death and dying. The DC is held in pop-up locations, where individuals can come together, eat cake and discuss death. In common with the DC’s audience, academic literature has long held that people in the West did not talk about death and had an uncomfortable relationship with it. The DC has grown enormously popular in various countries throughout the world since then and in 2017 reached South African shores. Within a year, eight DCs and a Facebook DC had sprung up in the country. It attracted mainly white people, particularly people who were trying to defy there pressive boundaries of what it meant to be white. I did ethnographic research on two DCs in Cape Town and approached the DC’s Facebook site netnographically. At the Kenilworth DC, held at a Buddhist centre, the core group of attendees knew one another well and talked about death and dying in ways that conformed to a self-authorising New Ageist practice that embraced alternative, spiritual paths and “journeys”. The Woodstock DC, my other fieldsite, looked very different. Here, a changing group of creative and academic attendees spoke about death in decidedly secular ways, often using humour. Their use of humour served on the one hand to set the living apart from the “foolish” dead and from an outside, (white) public that supposedly repressed talk around the topic of death. Online, the Facebook DC was a very different ‘social’ space that was largely defined by the memes, quotes and photos that users shared about death while community interaction was minimal. On Facebook, the DC was again a largely white group of people, with a number of participans also active in physical DCs. Here, talk about death was largely taken over by visuals that dealt with death while users usually only engaged other users over controversial topics. Given that the DC falls under the recent “deathpositive” movement, my research situates whether or not these traditionally ‘taboo’ notions of death and dying were changing for white South Africans? This thesis troubles that supposed taboo in terms of deaths prominence within the language of infotainment commodities. What we see here, even in a small death-positive group, are salient internal diversity and divisions. It outline show the Death Café serves to soften this supposed taboo, and the ways in which these groups consciously transgress the boundaries of what it means to be properly white.