Obit Research

For this project, I’ve been reading this book—The World of Obituaries. One thing, if not more, that interested me a lot was the difference between American obituaries and obituaries in other cultural environments.

The first discussion was about the term “obituary”. The author says that some English-language newspapers reserve the term “obituary” for staff-written obituaries and use such terms as “death notices,” “death announcements,” and the like for family-written ones. But Arabic and Persian-language newspapers do not make such a linguistic distinction but restrict the obituary pages to the family-written type and consider staff-written obituaries to be news items published in other pages of the newspaper in accordance with the importance of the deceased. That means, when famous people like presidents or major figures die, their deaths were usually reported as a news item on the front page, whereas less prominent people get written up in other pages. But when I did the interviews with staff writers with American newspapers, they told me that no matter whether the person was well-known or just an “average” person, as long as his/her life story was interesting, they would definitely choose this person to do a news obituary rather than just to put a death notice somewhere.

The second interesting discussion was about the distinct feature of British obituaries. You probably know that British obituaries are well-known for talking frankly about life and lead the supposed-to-be serious obituaries into a comic world. As discussed in this book, British newspaper obituaries have undergone a drastic change during the past twenty years or so. They are described in an article in The Economist as constituting “a genre that is changing and developing into something of a cult: obituaries as entertainment”. Their style is described as being “anecdotal, discursive, yet elegantly concise; learned, touching, and in a kindly way, often extraordinarily funny”.

Not all newspaper obituaries, however, are as “entertaining” as the British ones. Especially when we talk about obituaries in America, one may characterize them more as matter-of-fact, more serious and respectful. So the American obituaries focus more on describing the accomplishments of the deceased and both this person’s personal and professional attributes by which the writer of the obituary hopes the deceased would be remembered.

The last but not least thing I’d like to present here was the author’s observation of the difference in terms of religions.

For example, the Arabic and Persian obituaries are set in a frame of religious language much more so than are the English obituaries. They tend to quote a verse from a holy book or introduce the obituary in language borrowed from religious ceremony. The Egyptian obituaries tend not to express personal feelings toward the deceased unless the deceased is young and the death unexpected. The Persian and English obituaries tend to express more feelings: the English by using such words as “beloved,” “devoted,” and the like; the Persian by describing feelings of loss felt by the family, whole names usually appear after the text and a t times by showing concern over the happiness of the departed soul, soliciting help from friends and relative through their participation in the ceremonies. The English obituaries tend to be more formulaic in their expression of “feelings” then the Persian obituaries. The Arabic obituaries seem to be the longest and least personal of all.