Fifteen Eighty Four

This blog celebrates publication of Facing death across cultures, a book four years in the making, begun as the pandemic first erupted. Inspiration for the book germinated two decades ago, when I was composing music for a documentary about Mitsuo Aoki, who founded the Department of Religion at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and Hospice Hawaiʻi. The hall for every lecture in his class on death and dying filled to overflowing and he counseled hundreds through their final months. Mits embraced a deeper acceptance of life in the face of mortality and touched everyone he met, regardless of their origins or beliefs. Death also touches us all, eventually.

The book provides tools for intercultural understanding at times most dire, when stakes are high, life is tenuous, and miscommunications can cause unnecessary turmoil. After eons of wandering the earth, humans comprehend reality and mortality in myriad ways. Do we stand alone, individuals answerable only to ourselves, or are we entwined with family or community? Is death the enemy or an atonement for sins? Those conceptualizations, among many, differentiates thousands of lifeways and their corresponding finales.

Stating the obvious, humans have migrated widely for tens of thousands of years, spreading across the globe and advancing technologically ever faster, wandering toward today. Over those eons, humans have ratcheted up their ability to understand and remedy a vast array of ailments and injuries, further expanding lifespans of populations already augmented by the 1/3 of infants saved from early death by vaccination and public sanitation. In the confluence of these conditions, people continue to experience illness and injury, and eventually they die just like humans always have.

Because of those migrations and evolutions, illness, treatments, and demise will often happen in the presence of people from some other culture. Precise demographic reports are increasingly elusive, but with confidence, no ethnic group is represented in the healthcare workforce of any post-industrial country equivalent to population share, whether over- or under-represented. Patients/clients, of course, may come from any ethnic group present in a country. Further, the healthcare industry is a culture itself, full of practices, behaviors, and language unfamiliar to most of humanity.

Cultural differentiation spawned thousands of mutually incomprehensible languages, but also inscrutably different ways of thinking and knowing, the epistemologies and ontologies of cultures. Those generate understandings of causation, health and illness, and metaphysics and materiality. We cannot possibly understand all of the lifeways that exist, and there are variations within cultures, but we can be aware of some patterns that help explain behaviors and beliefs. Several sources interviewed in the book advocate for an open mind and heart, approaching people as individuals; cultural sensitivity is not a matter of stereotyping, but rather of noticing what is important to a person.

Above, I alluded to the Individualism-Collectivism continuum, now considered to be contextual and influenced by acculturative processes. One cannot assume someone from a particular culture will be a collectivist, but if they are uncomfortable making decisions without family present, that could indicate a cultural imperative. Arguing against the preference may just alienate the person. Hierarchic restrictions may mean a patient culturally will not speak to or ask questions of someone they perceive as higher in status. These exemplify just two dynamics studied in cultural or cross-cultural psychology, knowledge of which may smooth a host of intercultural interactions.

Facing death presents an interdisciplinary collection of research and perspectives from cultural psychologies, medical professionals, cultural experts and practitioners, and lived experiences to help the reader understand others when reaching across cultural distances. Best wishes on your intercultural encounters!

Title: Facing Death Across Cultures

Author: Stephen Henry Fox

ISBN: 9781009111706