Grief Across Cultures: A Review and Research Agenda

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Copyright American Psychological Association. Not for further distribution.
GRIEF ACROSS CULTURES: A REVIEW

AND RESEARCH AGENDA
PAUL C. ROSENBLATT
Everything written and everything known about grief through study

and personal experience is saturated with cultural perspectives, concepts,
and beliefs. No knowledge about grief is culture free. Many of us who study
grief are immersed in a single culture, and so it is not difficult for us to assume
that our culture (our language, concepts, culturally based views of human
nature, and culturally saturated lived experience) defines what is true about
all humans. As good scholars and practitioners we try to develop research,
theory, and practical knowledge about what we presume is true of all people but, because we are embedded in the realities of the culture we know
best, we may well be oblivious to the cultural saturation of our knowledge
and the many ways that such saturation makes us ill fit to understand, or
even pay attention to, the grieving of people from cultures different from
our own.
O n the other hand, even as the bereavement field, like other fields
devoted to understanding human beings, continues to develop a substantial
literature that is oblivious to culture (an argument made by Currer, 2001),
it also is developing a substantial literature about the connections of culture and grief (see, e.g., Goss & Klass, 2004; Rosenblatt, 2001; Rosenblatt
<Si Wallace, 2005a, 2005b; Rosenblatt, Walsh, (Si Jackson, 1976; Shapiro,
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14498-010
Handbook of Bereavement Research and Practice: Advances in Theory and
Intervention, edited by M. S. Stroebe, R. O. Hansson, H. Schut, and W. Stroebe
Copyright 2008 American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
1996). The primary message of this culturally sensitive literature is that culture
creates, influences, shapes, limits, and defines grieving, sometimes profoundly.
Understanding the complex entanglement between culture and grieving
is a first step toward theorizing about grief in a culturally attuned way and in
providing support to culturally diverse grieving people. Beyond that, it can be
theoretically of great importance to understand what the cultural differences
are. Such differences can tell us much about human plasticity; about important
variations in human telationships and meanings related to grieving; and the
awesome ways in which grieving from culture to culture is embedded in fully
functioning, ongoing systems that make sense in their own terms even if they
are stupefyingly nonsensical from the perspective of one's own culture.
LITERATURE REVIEW
There are substantial differences across cultures in how, when, and possibly whether grief is expressed, felt, communicated, and understood. Cultures
differ in the ways people grieve for various kinds of deaths, and they differ in
how deaths are classified. For example, one culture may treat a miscarriage as
a death to be grieved, whereas another may ignore it. One culture may give
special attention to a death in warfare, whereas another may see it as no different from other deaths. In fact, every topic discussed in this volume (death,
grief, gender, feelings, emotion, culture, cognition, society, evidence, religion,
trauma, family, etc.) is culturally constructed and could be validly and usefully
understood in ways that are alien to the Western culture version of modem
psychology (Rosenblatt, 2001). Making sense of the many cultural variations
in grieving and in meanings of what one takes as givens is important from the
viewpoint of understanding grief, providing grief support and services to diverse
others, and making sense of our own grieving (Stroebe & Schut, 1998).
A culture is a social construction. One might frame it as a construction
that encompasses language, beliefs, practices, social pattems, history, identity, something like a religion, and so on. However, it is also important to
remember that many cultures encompass a great deal of variation in language
spoken and language fluency, in beliefs, practices, social patterns, religion,
and so on. Cultures are fluid, ever changing, filled with contradictions and
ambiguities, and often entangled in blurry and complicated ways with other
cultures. Thus, knowing that someone is, say, culturally Zulu from South
Africa, one still needs to know whether this person's religion comprises traditional Zulu ancestor beliefs or something she understands as Christian;
whether she lives in the Zulu homeland of KwaZulu Natal or one of the
great cities of South Africa; and whether Zulu, English, Sotho, or some other
language is the language of her everyday life and thought. In fact, any simple
statement about how people in a given culture grieve is probably so simplistic
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as to be unhelpful to a person trying to help or support someone from that culture who is grieving (Rosenblatt, 1993, 1997). Moreover, to understand how
an individual from a culture is functioning in bereavement, one needs not
only to understand her culture but also to examine the fit between how she
is grieving and what her culture appears to ask of bereaved people (Shapiro,
1996). The issue of fit is partly about how much knowing a person's culture
or cultures tells about the cultural patterning and resources of the person's
grief, but it also tells one how much, and in what ways, the person's grief is
policed by others (Walter, 1999), pushed along some paths and denied
access to other paths.
There are many steps on the way toward deep and thorough cultural
sensitivity and awareness. Among those steps are writings that characterize
great religions of the world (Gunaratnam, 1997). Knowing "the" Muslim,
Buddhist, and so on view of death and grieving can be a helpful source of
hunches and potential insights about someone's grieving, but followers of the
great religions are enormously diverse culturally and in their interpretations
of and adherence to their religion (Al-Adawi, Burjorjee, & Al-lssa, 1997;
chap. 16, this volume; Klass, 1999; Wikan, 1988). Another step that might
on occasion be useful but is no substitute for deep cultural sensitivity is what
may be called a fact summary, which in one page or chapter provides a brief,
broad overview of a culture. Treating such brief statements as though they
necessarily are accurate or necessarily apply to the diversity of people to
whom they are said to apply would be a mistake that substitutes stereotypes
for genuine understanding (Gunaratnam, 1997). It may actually be better
to start in total ignorance of someone's cultural background and try to be
genuinely open, curious, and free of assumptions (Gunaratnam, 1997).
Another step on the path toward greater cultural sensitivity, but one
that falls short of actually getting there, is what Klass (1999) called a multicultural perspective, which presumes that human grief everywhere has a core
of similarity. As Klass characterized the multicultural literature, there has not
been an openness to challenging the presumption of universality of a core to
grieving, so there is no documentation, just a claim based on untested, undocumented faith. A t the same time, this presumption makes it more difficult to
recognize how different grief is from one culture to another and to challenge
the concepts of grief that underlie the multicultural perspective.
Different Realities in Different Cultures
One way to begin to grasp the challenge in knowing and understanding
how grief varies cross-culturally is to recognize that people in different cultures may have divergent realities. Even the most fundamental matter in trying to understand griefthe meaning of death, for examplemay vary widely
from culture to culture.
GRIEF ACROSS CULTURES
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The Meaning of Death

In the United States, the time of death is generally considered to be the
point at which a person stops breathing. In other cultures, the time of death
may be quite different. For example, in Oman, some people who stop breathing are considered not dead but temporarily removed from the present as a
result of a sorcerer's action (Al-Adawi et al., 1997). Even after burial and the
end of formal mourning, people may still believe it is possible that the dead
person will be brought to life by something that neutralizes the sorcery. In
such cases, the initial meaning of death is not an end but a victimization that
temporarily removes one from the living. On the other hand, there are culturesfor
example, the Matsigenka of Peruin which someone may be considered
dead before cessation of breathing (Shepard, 2002).
From another angle, one aspect of the meaning given to a death has to do
with the multiple losses that come with it. These multiple losses vaty enormously from culture to culture, so the meanings of a death must also vary. Even
losses that seem the same between two culturesfor example, economic losses
or losses of a planned-for futuremay seem similar only when worded in
abstract terms. When we get down to specifics, there are many cultures in which
the multiple losses that come with a death are far outside the experience of most
who write about grief For example, a young Arapesh man grieving the death
of his father may talk about losing the mentoring he needed to become effective, the loss of help his father would have given him in obtaining a wife, and
the strength a young man is able to draw out of his father (Leavitt, 1995).
(Putting these ideas into English obscures how alien the Arapesh world of help,
obtaining a wife, and acquiring strength is to Western culture.)
In many cultures, deaths are classified as "good" or "not good"
(Abramovitch, 2000; chap. 4, this volume). However, what is considered
good and what is not may vary immensely from culture to culture. For example, a good death in one culture may be death as a religious martyr, whereas
in another culture a good death may be death in extreme old age, surrounded
by children and grandchildren.
A n important part of the grieving of quite a few adults in many societies is to develop a narrative about the person who died, how the death
came about, what the death means, what the bereaved person's relationship
is with the deceased, and what has happened as a result of the death (Riches
(Sl Dawson, 1996; Rosenblatt, 2000). Across cultures, such narratives deal
with an enormous diversity of realities, and those realities are often built
around cultural scripts or discourses that are widely known and that provide
key ingredients or patterns as grieving people work at making sense of a
death (Scale, 1998). Fot example, in a culture in which sorcery is often seen
as a cause of death, a grieving person's narrative may talk about who killed
the deceased through sorcery, why the deceased was a target, and how the
sorcery was carried out (Brison, 1992). African Americans' grief narratives
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may often deal with racism in the life of the deceased and as one of the causes
of the death (Rosenblatt & Wallace, 2005a, 2005b). However, a narrative
at any given time may not be what it will be later on. For example, the narrative of a Japanese mother grieving the cancer death of her child will
change as the mother's sense of the location of the child changes, as her relationship with the child changes, and as her relationship with the remains of
the child changes (Saiki-Craighill, 2001).
Cultures vary widely in explanations for death, and often several explanations are available for a particular category of death. Sometimes more than
one explanation is put forward for a particular death, and these may or may
not seem logically consistent to a cultural outsider. Consider Hmong immigrants in Australia making sense of child and maternal death (Rice, 2000).
Among explanations that make cultural sense are that the woman carried
too heavy a physical load, that she behaved badly toward her parents, that
her labor in childbirth was too long and difficult, that the life aura of the
mother and baby were imbalanced, or that the mother had a chance encounter
with a malevolent spirit. In the first case, the heavy lifting is thought to distress the baby and may cause it to die. In the second case, behaving badly
toward a parent may cause the spirit of a deceased parent to return to take the
daughter's life.
The Spirit of the Deceased
Many people in most cultures think that a person who died continues to
exist in some form (Rosenblatt et a l , 1976) and that the deceased maintains
contact, at least for awhile, with the living. In some societies, people typically
welcome this; in others, they fear it. There is great variety in whether and how
the living and dead are thought to be in contact with each other and in what
exactly contact means. For example, deceased relatives may come to the Toraja
of Indonesia in their dreams, and those dreams may be welcomed as a portent
of coming prosperity (Hollan, 1995; Wellenkamp, 1991). Taiwanese widows
(Hsu, Kahn, &. Hsu, 2002) believe in the reality of the ghost of a deceased husband and in the possibility that the ghost could be a watchful and helpful presence or could cause serious trouble as the ghost tries to clear up unfinished
business. One could consider this similarity of belief in the continuity of the
deceased in spiritual form as a sign of basic human processes across cultures
(Klass, 1996; Rosenblatt et al., 1976). However, the emphasis on similarity
submerges the details of difference that are likely to have enormous impact on
the grief process. There may be a world of difference in the grief process when
in one case the spirit of the deceased is a benevolent, watchful presence versus when the spirit is disgusting, terrifying, and dangerous; when the spirit portends good things to come versus when it is a distant god with little or no
interest in the living; when the spirit becomes a larger-than-life hero who will
21.
return to earth to help his family versus being reincarnated in the next child
born in the community. Such differences may have a great impact on grieving; however, it may be that the grief process and the natute of the spirits'
actions are related to some underlying factor. Goss and Klass (2004, p. 5)
suggested that perhaps the spirits of the dead are much more likely to be benevolent in societies where people have a great deal of freedom to choose their
social bonds, for example, where marriages are not arranged and where adults
have the freedom to be close to or distant from parents.
The Nature of Grief
Cultures differ greatly in how grief is expressed. For example, bereaved
people in some cultures often somaticize grief, so that a grieving person often
feels physically ill (Abu-Lughod, 1985; Fabrega (Si Nutini, 1994; Prince,
1993). Cultures also differ greatly in who grieves, how they grieve, and how
much they grieve. In some cultures, the dead, and not the living, are thought
to grieve the most (e.g., among the Matsigenka of Peru; Shepard, 2002), and
then it is the reactions of the living to the grief of the dead that greatly influence what goes on after the death.
Cultures differ greatly in the extent to which grief involves remembering or forgetting the deceased. Among the Achuar, a Jivaro cultural group of
eastern Ecuador, bereaved people exert considerable effort to forget the dead
(Taylor, 1993), including their names, individuality, and deeds, distancing
the connections they had with them in life. The process is facilitated by the
postdeath transformation of the image of the deceased to a troublesome,
vengeful, or murderous entity. The dead are seen as intensely lonely and as
not wanting to separate from the living, and survivors fear the connection the
deceased might want with them. Immediately after a death, Achuar people
will feel and express something that could be glossed in English as griefwith
women wailing and appearing to be distraught and nostalgic and men appearing in public to be enraged and perhaps wailing implicitly or in private. Soon
after, a series of rituals is held to reduce the connection of the living with the
dead. Women, however, are more likely to continue to wail for the deceased
and treat the deceased as still kin, whereas men will deny their relationship with the deceased. Both genders, but particularly men, will distance the
deceased by using only a generalized pronoun in speaking about or addressing
the deceased and by working at imagining the deceased as decomposing
father than as the person he or she was when alive. Soon, the name of the
deceased is recycled by being given to a newborn.
Some cultures have ideas about something like grief pathology, grief that
in some way has gone wrong (Rosenblatt, 1997). These notions may be quite
different from such pathology as defined in the West (Shapiro, 1996). A culture may have a sense, for example, that grieving that goes on too long or not
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long enough, that is too expressive of feeling or not expressive enough, is a problem. To illustrate, a grieving Balinese person who is visibly sad or upset is seen
by other Balinese as vulnerable in many ways, and they may try to cheer the
person up (Wikan, 1990). For the Balinese, visible sorrow is pathological
because of the trouble it may bring. The Toraja worry about a person who does
not cry immediately after a death or who grieves too much, for too long
(Wellenkamp, 1988). A bereaved Toraja who lacks emotional equanimity is
perceived by other Toraja as at great risk of physical and mental difficulties,
punishment from the ancestors, and vengeful behavior from others who take
offense at what the person does while he or she is in an intensely emotional
state (Hollan, 1992). However, what is grief pathology in one culture may be
appropriate in another. For example, a mother in Cairo, Egypt, who was close
to catatonic with grief for years after a child died would not be seen as deviant
there (Wikan, 1988). In many African American communities, bereaved people often grieve much more intensely at a funeral than is common for European
Americans (Rosenblatt (Si Wallace, 2005a). O n the other hand, Taiwanese
widows are discouraged from crying in front of the body of a recently deceased
husband (Hsu et al., 2002), although later on they are free to cry and may do so
quite intensely. Thus, from a cross-cultural perspective it is risky to take the
concepts of grief pathology from one culture and apply them to people from cultures in which grief is conceptualized differently (see also chap. 7, this volume).
Cultures differ in how they categorize what in English would be defined
as grief. In English, grief is an emotion. Emotion theorists have different ways
of defining emotions, but for the sake of argument let us say an emotion in English is a feeling with a verbal label and some sort of cognition attached. Other
cultures may think of grief differently. For example, in some cultures grief is
thought of as feeling-thought, an inseparable binding of feeling and thought
(Lutz, 1985; Wikan, 1990). The distinction is subtle but, 1 think, real. Future
research could examine the feeling-thought idea and other conceptions of
grief across cultures to understand human plasticity and the grief of people in
cultures that conceive of grief in those ways.
There is also the issue of what exists in various cultures in the emotional
space that in the English language is expressed with the term grief, a word that
highlights sorrow and sadness. In some cultures, that emotional space is
inhabited by something elsefor example, the desire for revenge or to exact
restitution (see Bagilishya, 2000, who wrote about Rwanda)or emotional
emptiness.
Across cultures, there are enough seemingly different and unique "feeling ternis" that describe what people experience after a loss that it might be
useful to explore what these differences imply about grief A comparative
study might explore what underlies such diversity in grieving as, for example,
lalomweiu and fago among Ifaluk people in the Pacific (Lutz, 1985); the combination of sadness and anger, of grief and indignation, that demands com-
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pensation among the Kaluli of New Guinea (Schieffelin, 1985); and grief
expression in Iran (Good, Good, & Moradi, 1985), which includes feelings
of duty, the moral rightness of anger at being victimized, and identification
with the kin of religious martyrs.
Cultural Context and Grief

Every culture provides a set of contexts for grieving, situations and experiences that profoundly affect the living and that often are a major source of
how deaths come about. By this I mean contexts such as poverty, warfare, and
racial discrimination. These contexts, which of course are filtered through
cultural meanings and conceptions, can have an enormous impact on grieving (see also chap. 4, this volume). For example, governments are often
directly or indirectly responsible for many deaths. These include the deaths
of political opponents; people forced to live in dangerous or unhealthy locations; people who because of political decisions by others are denied adequate
food, police protection, health care, or housing; people forced to work at dangerous jobs; and people forced into a migration that can be life threatening.
Grieving a death caused by a government can be risky. For example, people
in Latin America grieving for relatives who have been "disappeared" or murdered during times of political violence typically have to refrain from communicating their thoughts and feelings about the disappearance or death to
others (e.g., Hollander, 1997; Zur, 1998). Self-censorship in grieving might
well give the grief powerful elements of emotional control, distance from
others, fear, and unreality, as well as a possibly very difficult, large disjunction
between what the grieving person does in private versus in public.
To consider another example, genocide may also provide a context that
has an enormous impact on grieving. For example, during the genocide in
Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of the dead did not receive proper funeral rituals. According to Rwandan beliefs (Bagilishya, 2000), when proper funeral
and mourning practices are not followed, misfortunes arise. Knowing that this
will happen, a Rwandan grieving for loved ones killed in the genocide will
experience not only grief for each relative lost but also emotions linked to the
loss of a way of life and an ongoing family as well as feelings about the consequences of the failure of the proper rituals to have been followed.
Cultural Variation in Mourning and Grief
T h e distinction is often drawn between mourning (cultural practices
observed by people connected in certain ways to a person who has died) and
grief (feelings and thoughts of people who have experienced a loss that are
not part of mourning). This distinction once made sense to me, but 1 think
now it is a blurry one. Perhaps it is never possible to know whether grieving
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or an expression of grief is unconnected to mourning. Perhaps most, if not all,

mourning practices are tinged by gtieving. Perhaps grieving reflects the
demands of mourning, particularly when mourning necessitates major changes
in everyday life (cfi Stroebe (Si Schut, 1998). Those caveats aside, it is clear
that many cultures have certain mourning practices that seem to limit and
shape when, how, and how long people grieve. In the following sections, 1 discuss the common practices of marking and isolating the bereaved.
In some cultures, bereaved people in certain categories (e.g., children of
the deceased, widows) are marked in some way that sets them off from others
in the communityfor example, their heads are shaved, or they wear special
clothing (Rosenblatt et al., 1976). In some cultures, bereaved people in certain categories are isolated from most or all other people (Rosenblatt et al.,
1976). The cultutal meanings of these ritual activities vary widely from society to society. Among the Zulu of South Africa (Rosenblatt (Si Nkosi, 2007),
widows typically are marked by wearing special black clothing for 1 year and
are relatively isolated from others (e.g., they are not supposed to interact
directly with others, or to attend various social events, and they are required
to sit behind others rather than-with or in front of them). These mourning
activities of Zulu widows express respect for the deceased husband, show that
they are proper Zulu women, and protect others from the bad fortune that
widows are believed to radiate. Also, other Zulus may fear that a Zulu widow
is a witch, so they are strongly motivated to keep their distance from her. A
widow's grief is quite likely shaped by marking and isolation, which reduce
her contact with people who might be supportive and reduce her opportunities to talk about the death. This means she has relatively little opportunity
to develop grief narratives through conversing with others. At the same time,
the marking and isolation give the widow more time to feel, to think, to
reflect, to live the grief rather than having it be buried under the demands of
high levels of interaction with others.
In some cultures, grief centers in important ways on the remains of the
deceased. For Bosnian Muslims (Pollack, 2003), a failure to carry out certain
rituals involving the remains of loved ones means one cannot move on in the
mourning process, perhaps cannot even accept that the loved one is dead.
Without those rituals, the soul of the deceased cannot move on to heaven
(Pollack, 2003). Engaging in the proper rituals might also symbolize (to the
world, to other Bosnians, to Serbs, to politicians) various political messages,
including the horror and insanity of massacres that killed so many Bosnian
Muslims and of what has transpired in Bosnia since then (Pollack, 2003).
The Search for Grief Universals and Differences
From a positivist perspective, looking for universals in bereavement is a
noble activity. The search for universals can help us recognize what is present
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in all (or most, or some) of humanity. It can help us see what is basic to human
biology, social relationships, and culture and to feel the hopefulness that comes
with thinking that there is a common foundation for understanding one
another. We can know, for example, that in societies all over the world many
people are obviously upset by the,death of someone close to them, and the
upset may continue long after the death. Also all over the world, deaths bring
many lossesnot just the loss of the person but the loss of planned futures, the
deceased's economic contributions and companionship, shared memories, and
much else. If one looks for universals, one may find them. On the other hand,
from a postmodern perspective (e.g., Kvale, 1996; Rosenau, 1992), looking for
universals is rather pointless. If we look for universals, we will mislead ourselves
about the nature of knowledge and will miss all the extremely useful information that is bound up in the specifics, details, contradictions, and variability
and the narratives that are different from place to place, time to time, context
to context, person to petson.
Related to the crucial importance of difference is that thete are enormous,
and as yet not well studied, challenges in translating bereavement feeling terms
from one language to another. A frustration is.that some terms do not translate,
or translate poorly, from one language and culture to another. For example, Lutz
(1985) wrote about the terms lalomweiu and/ago, part of the vocabulary ofgrief
in Ifaluk, a Pacific atoll society. It is possible to render a rough English language
approximation of the terms, but that rough translation does not capture linguistic, cultural, emotional, and historical context or the full meaning of the
terms. In fact, even when terms appear on the surface to translate well there can
be such differences in context and connotations that the appearance of similarity is almost meaningless. For example, widows in the United States and Zulu
widows in South Africa may both speak of feeling angry about the death of their
husband, but the U.S. widow may feel angry about suspected medical malpractice or the loss of a plarmed fijture, whereas the Zulu widow may feel angry about
the witchcraft that killed her husband, the grinding poverty with which she is
left to cope on her own, or the burdens of observing year-long widowhood
mourning practices (Rosenblatt (Si Nkosi, 2007).
To consider another example, Hsu and Kahn (1998-1999), writing
about Taiwanese widows, listed activities engaged in by some of the Taiwanese
widows they interviewed. Some widows dealt with feelings of loss, guilt, unfinished business, or continuing obligations to their deceased husband by "doing
something for him"perhaps chanting at a mass Buddhist ritual, paying for a
ritual, or providing continuing financial support to the husband's mother. One
could draw similarities between these feelings and activities and what one
might commonly observe in widows in the United States. However, to interpret those things that way is to be oblivious to differences that might be substantial between Taiwanese and U.S. cultures. For example, the feelings that
translate from Chinese into hss, guilt, unfinished btisiness, or continuing obligation
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may be quite different in Taiwan than they are in the United States. The activities, although superficially alike, may be quite different in what they require
of the widow and what they mean. Hsu and Kahn, alert to the possible differences, wrote that "there were important cultural and linguistic differences in
interpreting emotional terminology. As with many other languages, intended
meanings were frequently hidden by surface terms that made use of proverbs,
idioms, and other forms of metaphor" (p. 275). They discussed the rich cultural
context of Chinese widow obligations, the Chinese concept of self cultural
rules about being reticent about feelings and not expressing certain feelings
directly, Chinese concepts of harmony, and Chinese conceptions of being a
good wife. So someone in the United States might say, "What Taiwanese widows do sounds familiar," but the more one understands about meanings and
context (and I have simplified what Hsu and Kahn wrote), the more one understands that the equivalence might be superficial and the underlying differences
profound, great, and of the utmost importance.
RESEARCH A G E N D A
Researchers in the field of grief and mourning need to give the highest
priority to rich studies of grief in diverse cultures. Such research would
include data on indigenous terms, concepts, relationships, theories, beliefs,
understandings, philosophies, values, and local practices. To be usefully
informative about culture, those studies would examine what is in those cultures, the understandings, ways of talking, and so on, rather than exploring
how their practices fit into and mesh with universalistic theory and research
findings. Research is needed that is free to come to new conceptions and
understandings of grief Such research would certainly be a strong basis of
practice, if practice is appropriate with people from the culture in which the
research was conducted (see Almeida, 2004; see also chap. 7, this volume).
This type of research also would develop alternative theories that might better fit the culture under study and could conceivably challenge researchers
and practitioners in the United States and other countries who are working
with more or less shared understandings of grief to look at grief in new ways
(see Currer, 2001).
The research almost certainly would not fit dominant models for study- '
ing grief represented in this volume. For example, research in some other
cultures might focus on lamentation (Wilce, 1999) or other forms ofgrief
expression and communication that are not common in the cultures in which
bereavement is usually studied. Also, the research in other cultures may focus
on changing forms of grieving or diversity in forms of grieving as the culture
changes. Some of those changes may come from the influence of Christian
or Muslim missionaries (Wilce, 1999), although even in those cases we must
217
be alert to the enormous diversity of local practice and belief associated with
various worldwide religions (see, e.g., Wikan's [1988] discussion of Islam). We
must also be alert to the possibility that the changes themselves are sources
of grieving as people grieve a lost way of life (see, e.g.. Prince [1993], who discussed the Cree of northern Quebec). Researchers also should realize that it
is possible for adopted beliefs and practices surrounding bereavement to coexist with those from the culture's past (Adams, 1993; Grain, 1991; Rosenblatt
& Nkosi, 2007).
Such cross-cultural research would certainly look at how grief is linked
to other aspects of culture. Wikan (1988), writing about grief in Egypt and
Bali, made a sttong case for looking at cultural conceptions of health and sanity; that is, how people grieve or do not grieve is linked to what is considered
good for their health and what is considered sane.
Research that is sensitive to culture must also be sensitive at a methodological level. One cannot presume that the methods one would use in
studying bereavement in cultures where psychology has flourished would be
appropriate in other cultures. Every aspect of research might have to fit the
cultural setting. For example, it is much more challenging to conduct interviews in a culture in which a direct question or a follow-up question may be
considered rude (Rosenblatt (Si Nkosi, 2007). In fact, it may even be difficult
to recruit people to talk about bereavement. Hsu, Tseng, Banks, and Kuo
(2004) needed V/i years to recruit 20 women informants in a study of
Taiwanese grieving after stillbirth. Most women they contacted refused to participate, saying they did not want to cry again or did not want to bring bad luck
into their lives or would be going against how other family members felt about
how to deal with the tragedy if they gave an interview. In some cultures, an
older person would never reveal his or her emotions to an interviewer who was
the age of his or her children (Bagilishya, 2000). In research on Zulu widows
by Rosenblatt and Nkosi (2007), many people in the communities where the
study was conducted thought it was an insane pursuit of bad luck to talk with
widows, who carried bad luck with them and were possibly witches. Of course,
the questions asked of people cannot be based on universalist assumptions
that the terms used in research interviews in one culture (e.g., gdefi) are meaningful in, or even translatable into, the language of another. In some cultures
crucial aspects of people's thoughts and communication about the aftermath
of a death might not be statements of feeling or memory but something else
for example, proverbs, tales, parables, and culturally meaningful nonverbal
gestures (Bagilishya, 2000).
The results of this proposed research might challenge Western understanding of the emotions of grief For example, in the metaphors for grief in
Tagalog (a dominant language in the Philippines), grief is talked about as an
intense pressure erupting from the chest or as a hard feeling, like tears of stone
(Palmet, Bennett, (Si Stacey, 1999).
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PAUL C. ROSENBLATT
Culturally sensitive grief studies could eventually lead to a typology in

which most or even all cultural variations in grieving would seem to fall into
a limited range, perhaps of what Klass (1999, p. 165) called "archetypical
scripts." In that way of thinking, there are cross-cultural differences in patterns that recur; perhaps among them would be feelings connected to a belief
that a death has been caused by a malevolent force and that calls for vengeance.
Klass (1999), however, asserted that "death . . . can be regarded as a universal arouser of something called grief (p. 165), although which deaths would
produce which reactions would depend on interpretive schemes provided by
culture. The scheme might include interpretations of death (e.g., as polluting or dangerous) and of matters related to who died or individual mourners,
for example, gender, emotional control, or death through illness. Similarly,
Stroebe and Schut (1998, 1999) have offered a dual-process model that
addresses cultural differences in loss-oriented vetsus restoration-oriented
approaches to dealing with a death. Their model also assumes that grief is universal, although cultures differ markedly in the context, rules, expectations,
and so on that they provide for grieving people.
For grief research and theory to advance, they must be informed by
cross-cultural information and perspectives. To be effectively cross-cultural,
grief studies must be freed from a "science" that assumes all cultures and all
humans can be understood on the basis of principles, concepts, categories,
and processes that make sense in English and a few European languages. It
must move to a science in which not everyone can be measured on everything, in which measurement is always a matter of great skepticism, and in
which contradiction and difference count fot a lot. Grief studies can advance
if they are freed from ethnocentrism, the assumption that what makes sense in
one culture makes sense in all. Ethnocentrism may lead to generalizations
about or idealizations of all cultures or of "primitive" cultures (Walter,
1994-1995). It also may lead to the belief that the psychology, sociology, and
thanatology developed in one culture offers the best or even the only way of
understanding people in other cultures. The reality is that with a genuinely
open perspective on culture, everything is open to questionwhat is grief
what are standards for human and family functioning, what is "normal," and
how it is we know what we know. Otherwise, grief is policed (Walter, 1999)
not only at the level of the local community or culture but also limited, controlled, and shaped by researchers who study, write about, and attempt to help
others deal with loss.
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Grief Across Cultures: A Review and Research Agenda

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How does the author define culture and its relationship to grief?

How does the author define culture and its relationship to grief?

What are some of the substantial differences in how grief is expressed across cultures mentioned by the author?

What are some of the substantial differences in how grief is expressed across cultures mentioned by the author?

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