• Kaufman, Sharon ...and a time to die: How American hospitals shape the end of life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2005

These notes are the thirteenth in a series of fifteen lectures for my class Dynamics of the Family.

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1. 'Passing' as a fundamental concern in the social sciences
   1. Passing from one status to another
   2. Passing as proper participant in a status
      1. being accountable to the status whether
         1. one is successful (invisible as anything but what one's public expects of one)
         2. one is failing and possibly become an object of discipline, ridicule, instruction, etc.
2. Passing from one status to another must be marked by some public acknowledgement (or ritual)

   Otherwise how would one's public (a.k.a 'consociates') know that one has passed?

   1. Thus a concern with "rites of passage"
      1. Van Gennep (1909)
      2. Victor Turner (1969)
      3. Harol Garfinkel (1956)
   2. and, on matters of death and dying, death rituals (Huntington and Metcalf 1979)
3. But how, exactly does one move from the status of being alive to the status of the body that is the object of the death ritual?
   1. Who is involved at what times with what rights and privileges?
      1. dying and the state, through physicians declaring death
         1. Kaufman and hospitalization
            1. an expansion on Glaser (1965)
      2. the family through the "next of kin" (note how the phrase imply an ordered extension with more kin who are not "the next")
         1. being dead and its aftermath
            1. What the next of kin does next
               1. the role of various experts
               2. religious figures
               3. funeral directors
               4. experienced members of the kin group
            2. in establishing that things are done properly
   2. What are the discourses?
   3. And what about private grief?
4. Making culture when agency falters and uncertainty, if not ignorance, cannot be escaped.