The Whole World Will Die: Trivial Reflections on the Normality and Deviance of Death and Dying

This article deals with the way death is perceived, managed, represented and displayed in contemporary late-modern society. The purpose of the article is to delineate and discuss some of the matters related to human mortality in general as well as to the practices and understandings surrounding death in late-modern society. The article aims to show how death is simultaneously something normal and deviant and that this is an outcome of social deconstruction processes by way of which biologically natural and normal death is deconstructed into socially/culturally non-normal and deviant death. Moreover, the article then exemplifies and discusses this phenomenon in relation to the idea of ‘death taboo’ and to the recently proposed notion of ‘spectacular death’.