Organized rituals – ritualized reflection. On mourning culture in palliative care units and hospices

ABSTRACT

Although modern societies are often portrayed as increasingly ritually impoverished, practices described as ritualised are ubiquitous in hospices and palliative care units. In this contribution, we set out to enquire into the function fulfilled by rituals in the context of organised end of life care. We draw on interview material from the research project “About ‘Good Dying’. Actor Constellations, Normative Patterns, Different Perspectives”.¹ While classical theories of rituality and the palliative care literature tend to see the function of rituals as the creation of cohesion and the healing of social ruptures, we draw on a functionalist approach to argue that forms of organised rituality serve to bring a retarding moment of reflexivity into organisational work routine. Such pauses work to counteract suspicions that organisations providing end of life care are simply engaged in the bureaucratic management of death. What we want to call reflexivity rituals thus proves essential for the communicative construction of a ‘good death’ in palliative care. These rituals enable ritualised reflection that then in turn creates a legitimate routine for the organisation by interrupting these routines and concealing their organisational form. The function of these reflexivity rituals is to provide latencies paradoxically by institutionalising reflexivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Ritualization
• ritual theory
• palliative care
• organization of dying
• good death
• systems theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The whole research team would like to cordially thank all institutions and the people who are working and were living there. They made this study possible in the first place. Furthermore, we would like to thank the DFG (German Research Foundation) for funding. DFG project number: 343373350. www.gutes-sterben.uni-muenchen.de.

2. Palliative care units usually refer to the dying as “patients”, while hospices – in explicit differentiation from the medical context – speak of “guests”.

3. Of course, this kind of excess meaning does not only occur in organised contexts. But it is the organisations of dying that can derive specific benefits from it.

4. Of course, the death of specific people still represents a disruptive event in modern societies. However, less for society as a whole than for families, for example. Families as a structural subtype of society stabilise themselves through forms that – as in pre-modern societies – assign people a fixed place in their own structure and make them irreplaceable. Our argument, however, aims at the form of dying, which in modern society is primarily shaped by organisations.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [343373350].