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A SOCIAL HISTORY OF DYING
鈥淒eath is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.鈥� (W. Somerset Maugham) According to Allan Kellehear, Stone Age people had an idea of death, but not of dying.聽 Death came so suddenly and violently there was not a passage of time in which people slipped from one world to the next.聽 Dying, he claims, became a facet of human culture when the first cities began to be formed.聽聽 With the cities came disease, and with disease came dying.聽 His new book A聽Social History of Dying examines the process before death and how it has changed over 10,000 years. How does the contemporary experience of dying and its place in our culture compare with the past? Laurie Taylor and Allan Kellehear, Professor of Sociology at the University of Bath, are joined by Kate Berridge, author of Vigor Mortis; the end of the Death Taboo to discuss the nature of dying in the modern world and how the arrival of 鈥榮low deaths鈥� has transformed the ways in which people prepare for death.

OBITUARIES
Bridget Fowler Professor of Sociology, Glasgow University talks about her recent paper The Obituary as Collective Memory: a Bourdieusian Approach which she will be presenting at the Cultural Studies Conference, East London University on Saturday. Professor Fowler argues that, despite the pretence of a democratic revolution in obituaries, they still perform the function of enshrining the dominant sections of society that they had in 1900. She says that her detailed analysis shows that prejudices against the working class, minor universities, racial minorities and women are still very present in the selection of who gets an obituary, and whose life is publicly forgotten.