Developing a Cross-Cultural Model of Grief: The State of the Field

Abstract

The article explores the state of the field in developing a cross-cultural model of grief. Dialogues within several disciplines bear on the question, but those dialogues are very separated from each other. After drawing a distinction between cross-cultural and multi-cultural, the article reviews research from a broad range of psychological and social sciences. The issue of psychic unity vs. cultural diversity had prevented fuller use of anthropologists' work, but sociology of knowledge mediates between those poles. Contemporary work on the universality of emotions provides the concept of innate meta interpretive schemas within cognitive models supplied by culture. Cultural historians trace changes in how death is perceived and in the acceptability of emotional expression. The article concludes with two suggestions to carry the field forward: one a large scale cross-cultural survey and the other qualitative study in both the researcher's culture and in other cultures.