What actually happens at a Death Café? What do people talk about? And why do attendees appear to find talking about death so … enjoyable?! Over the course of my doctoral studies with the Glasgow End of Life Studies Group (2017-21) I attended 20 Death Cafes across the UK, studying people’s interactions and interviewing attendees and organisers. What I found was that while discussing the topic of death is a very important reason for people to attend Death Cafés , there was something immeasurable about the quality of these conversations with strangers. It was clear that people felt connected to others, uplifted by the depth and variety of conversations, and fascinated by other’s experiences and wisdom.
I dedicated my thesis to showing that the enjoyment of being together is an important impact of Death Café attendance, must as much as completing an advance directive. These small moments make up our life, so why are moments of levity, fascination, depth, and authenticity, experienced in the Death Café setting so often pushed to the background?
In 2017, I began my doctoral studies with the End of Life Studies Group where other scholars were also undertaking empirical and theoretical investigations into the international Death Café phenomenon.
My own research was an ethnographically inspired study of Death Cafés across the UK. Throughout my preparation for fieldwork, attending Death Cafés, interviewing Death Café organisers and participants and writing up my thesis, I found that academic papers being published about Death Cafés very frequently focused on measuring, quantifying, or otherwise describing the effects of Death Café attendance on individuals. There were also various studies that were adapting the Death Café model in institutional settings seeking to provide additional learning opportunities for various cohorts of students[1][2][3] and health professionals[4][5]; and to combat clinician burnout[6].
I wanted to go beyond simply looking at Death Café conversation content summaries[7]. In order to do this, I needed to find a theoretical framework that would be suitable to explore the fact that my research participants understood Death Café attendance as primarily a convivial, sociable, revitalising activity that reinforced their shared sentiment that it is good to talk about death. This pointed me towards engaging with French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s (1944-) ideas on postmodern sociality and his theory of neo-tribes. Most significant to me was that Maffesoli takes seriously the enjoyment that people experience from being together.
Neo-tribal theory presents a primarily optimistic view of postmodern social life whereby people gather together to connect and express themselves. It stands in contrast to the kind of alienation and individualisation identified by other narrators of postmodernity (e.g. Giddens[8], Bauman[9]). It is a rejection of this social atomisation in societies where – at first glance – it seems we have no time to find meaning in each other[10]. Maffesoli claimed that postmodernity was characterised by ‘short-lived flashes of sociality’[11] that took place in small ephemeral groupings, characterised by ‘fluidity, periodic assemblies and dispersals’ [12] he called neo-tribes. Neo-tribes are centred around their members’ shared lifestyles and tastes; shared experiences and emotions[13].
Participation in neo-tribes creates temporary feelings of belonging, group solidarity, enthusiasm, and emotional charging. This collective achievement is based on the ‘simplest of foundations: warmth, companionship–physical contact with one another’[14]. These feelings are exactly how I felt after each Death Café. The Death Café participants I interviewed expressed feeling this as well.
Authors from various disciplines (mainly sociology, tourism and leisure studies, marketing), continuing the Maffesolian tradition have shown that neo-tribal theory is a powerful tool for observing and understanding how people build collective meaning in a complex and dynamic world. Some examples of groups analysed through a neo-tribal lens are recreational vehicle users[15], Antarctic cruise tourists[16], electronic dance music clubbers[17], music and celebrity fandoms[18], football fans[19], online daters[20], vegetarians[21], gap year travellers[22], bird watchers[23], among many others. I am glad to be adding Death Café to the family of neo-tribes, where people who have gathered together feel intensely that they are there for the same reason as each other – to ‘break the taboo’ of talking about death and, put simply, this temporarily bonds them together.
My findings are now published in the journal Mortality, where I discuss how, alongside talking directly about death, dying and bereavement, people at a Death Café consistently talk about the value of being at a Death Café and about the value of talking about death. I introduce three main ways that talking about the value of conversations about death appears in a Death Café and, most importantly, I argue that talking about the value of conversations about death is an enjoyable part of the Death Café experience in its own right.
When talking about the value of conversations about death, Death Café participants reflexively consider the activity they have gathered to engage in, which strengthens the feeling of being a collective, and temporarily bonds them together into a neo-tribe. My paper demonstrates that Death Café is a valued form of social interaction, moving it away from the current academic attempts to discover Death Café’s instrumental utility.
To any Death Café organisers and participants reading this: Do you agree with my impressions of Death Café? Is this something you experienced? Maybe some of you have even been my participants? I would be really interested to hear your thoughts.
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Solveiga Zibaite undertook her doctoral studies with the End of Life Studies Group at the University of Glasgow. Her PhD thesis is an ethnographically informed study of Death Cafés in the United Kingdom using neo-tribal theory. Her background is in social anthropology. Solveiga is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Associate for the INVEST trial (Investigating the Value of Early Sleep Therapy) at the University of Strathclyde.
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