Author: Panagiotis Pentaris, PhD Researcher Goldsmiths, University of London, STaCS Department p.pentaris@gold.ac.uk Draft paper Culture and the social reality of death: the Afghani experience Death is a concept embedded in people’s lives since birth. It is an irreversible, universal and inevitable event in life. A great number of historians, social scientists, medical scientists and philosophers have contributed to the specification of the nature of death (Kamath 1978), as well as definition of what death is and how it is integrated in one’s life (Glaser and Strauss 2005; Walter 1994; Aries 1974; Becker 1973; Kübler-Ross 1969). Aries (1974) draws determinant points that reflect how death has been treated in the past and how the understanding and meaning of death has developed through the centuries in the Westernized societies. Through his essays, and besides the distinguishing points made, certain parameters and understandings stand out and remain highlighted in the contemporary world. He says that ‘The certainty of death and the fragility of life are foreign to our existential pessimism’ (Aries 1974, p.44). In the book The Birth and Death of Meaning (Becker 1971), the search for the meaning of human life can best be explained through the ‘ultimate fear of death’. It is a human quality to have self-awareness. The self-awareness of our inevitable death also forms the perceptions of the meanings of death. John White (2004) has focused on higher human development and stresses factors in his work that closely associate with Death, Dying and Bereavement (DDB). In his guide to death and dying, White (2004) talks about self-awareness in the way we die, but draws contrasts between the Western world and the Himalayas. He talks about the interconnection between the nature of objective death (Cicirelli 1998) and the meanings that subjectively form and guide us through the experiences of DDB (Riley 1983). Death is a composition of two parts; an objective event of death, which is inevitable, and the subjective interpretation and reaction to the event, towards the event and at the event. Those two combined, can reflect an isolated from social tenures individual. However, due to our social nature, we are ‘products’ of social interaction, and to 1