The roles of the agency of the dead in the lives of individuals in contemporary society

ongoing

Each from their own perspectives, various disciplines have shed light on the roles fulfilled by the dead in contemporary society. Their findings, however, remain compartmentalised, their insights scattered; a comprehensive understanding of their role in the lives of individuals is still missing. This project will benefit from the insights of each of them, with the aim to transform the current partial understandings into a complex view of the roles that the dead play in individuals’ lives. Instead of focusing exclusively on the role of personally significant dead for the bereaved or treating the dead as expression of “folk belief”, or metaphors of cultural and social problems and changes, the project will view the dead as being actively involved in the intricate relationships between individuals and larger social and cultural processes. The over-arching aim of DEAGENCY is to generate a new theory for comprehensively understanding the roles that the dead fulfil for individuals in contemporary society. This will be achieved through identifying: 1) the ways individuals experience and conceptualise the agency of the dead; 2) the reasons and contexts within which it is triggered; and 3) the aims and manners of interaction with the dead. To gain insight into the widest possible range of the roles of the agency of the dead in individuals’ lives, the project will study them within three disparate areas of social / cultural changes and problems, related to the post-socialist period: 1). the effects of the problematic political past (mass graves); 2). changing religious landscape; and 3). changing social life in rural communities. To access subjective experiences of individuals, the ethnographic method will be used in fieldwork conducted in Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Through comparative analysis, common patterns transcending particular changes / problems and contexts will be identified, leading to the final synthesis: the generation of a new theory.