Selection of obit subjects reveals hidden prejudices of a culture
I’ve been working my way through a rather thorough examination of the more sociological aspects of obituary writing, and it seems clear that we can learn quite a bit about some of the more difficult-to-spot assumptions that a culture makes.
Though there seems to be a general feeling among obituary editors that the medium has democratized substantially, particularly since the early ’80s, it turns out that it doesn’t seem to be true, in the aggregate. Obits today are still primarily about men, primarily about cultural producers/professionals (writers, artists, etc.), and primarily about those in the dominant social class.
A particularly telling quote from their conclusions in a chapter called “The Social Value of Death,” from the book The Obituary as Collective Memory, by Bridget Fowler:
“We are compelled to argue -outside certain clear-cut lines of universalistic achievement such as sport -that the editors are still unconsciously affected by the common patterns of action, speech and lifestyle by which an elite recognises itself. It is elite membership -and the cultural capital that accompanies it -that preserves the subject from the judgement of being ‘boring’. In other words, studying obits is one route into today’s status classifications, the ordering of symbolic capital. Such social classifications are still profoundly determined by the accidents of great wealth, or negatively, by forms of class racism. They disqualify from serious consideration those who have not been educated at great schools or the higher-ranking universities and those who do not work at the most esteemed of national institutions.”