2021

Coursework

Advisors: Elizabeth Chin,  Sam Creely

Introduction

Funerals are sites where mixed feelings explode. Through reviewing and critiquing Live Funeral Service, a performance and artifacts design, and MIT Media Lab’s Vespers death masks, I represent humans’ underlying scare to, but at the same time tentative acceptance of death. I view this ambivalent, dynamic state of mind and its associated emotions as a state of “reluctance”: an area in between denial and acceptance of death in the spectrum of emotions related to death. In this paper, I explore why and in what forms do the reluctance exist in aftermath of death. 

I argue that this reluctance to death exists because of individuals’ internal confused understanding of death experience and socially constructed, external expectations of reactions to death. The intention of aligning attitudes and actions to social standard of death incentivize performing and purchasing of funeral commodities. Indeed, commodification relies on the state of reluctance and targets emotions