Normalising the Concept of Death and the Promotion of Religiosity, Sociocultural Norms and Prejudices in Newspaper Obituary Announcements: A Review

Abstract

This review article was intended to examine related literature on how the discourse of death and dying is naturalised, normalised and communicated to the target audience as designed and portrayed by the producers of the death announcements. Findings from the critique revealed the way the supposedly language of bereavement in the world of death is normalised as well as utilised to realise other discursive purposes such as the preservation of oral traditions, religious and sociocultural properties of given societies in the face of modernity and the dominating powers of westernisation. In addition, evidence from the previous studies reviewed showed the extent to which the concept of death is totally normalised and naturalised and even celebrated in certain contexts, where the death announcers take pride and honour in doing the announcements, the bereaved families are congratulated and the occurrence of death is considered as attaining ‘martyrdom’, which always calls for jubilations. The review has also demonstrated how the pages of newspaper death announcements were taken advantage of as platforms for promoting ethnic disparities, class struggle and perpetuating social hegemony, with some segment of the social structure being privileged at the detriment of those perceived to be the minorities in the society. Previous studies reviewed in this article drew largely from the critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 1992), Swalesian genre moves analysis (Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1997; Kong, 1998), Kress and van Leeuwen’s (1996, 2006) multimodal approach to text analysis, quantitative content analysis (see, for example, Ergin, 2010, 2012) and genre-based approach to the discourse of death announcements (Elekaei, Faramarzi & Tabrizi, 2015).