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CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this study is to analyse the discourses pertaining to the way Tshivendaspeaking women construct performance of bereavement rituals. Therefore, a theoretical framework that considers performance of bereavement rituals as a social action is needed. This framework adheres to postmodern paradigms that regard the nature of reality as being socially constructed. For the purpose of this study, I have adopted a theoretical framework that emerged from a postmodern stance, namely, social constructionism, which assumes that performance of bereavement rituals is a socially constructed reality. Therefore, I cannot deny that multiple realities of performance of bereavement rituals could also exist. In this chapter, I first focus on where social constructionism originated and then address its nature as it is relevant to this study. The discourses that were identified from the literature chapters are also discussed in this chapter.
THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM
Like many theories, social constructionism originated from various sources and disciplines. Literature reports a gradual emergence of alternative approaches to the study of human beings in Britain and North America a few decades ago. These approaches arose in critical psychology, discursive psychology, discourse analysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism. What appeared to be common to these approaches is now referred to as social constructionism. Social constructionism is a theoretical orientation that underpins the approaches currently offering radical and critical alternatives in psychology and social psychology, as well as other disciplines in the social and human sciences (Burr, 2003).
In light of the origins of social constructionism, the factors influencing its emergence deserve attention. It is important to consider that these influences, and the history of social constructionism, are just one of many possible constructions of what was happening at the time. Literature shows that sociology fundamentally influenced the development of social constructionism (Burr, 2003). Sociology emphasises the thinking that, through social interaction with others, people construct their own and others’ identities and inner voices (Hoffman, 1993). The influence of sociology on social constructionism may be traced back to Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) book entitled The social construction of reality: A treatise in the sociology of knowledge (Liebrucks, 2001). These authors’ account of social life argues that it is through social interaction and practices that human beings create and sustain all social phenomena. This occurs through externalisation, objectivation and internalisation.
In “Introduction to social constructionism”, Burr (1995) argues that when people externalise, they get involved in some activity; they create some artefact or practice. For example, they may have an idea about a phenomenon like death, and externalise it by telling a story about such a phenomenon. As people listen to the story and retell it, the story takes a certain form. This is where its idea “becomes an object of consciousness for people in that society” (Burr, 1995, p. 10). This makes it appear to be something out there waiting to be known rather than something consisting of the constructions of people through their interaction. As a result, future generations end up internalising the idea that they found already in existence, and consciously understand it as part of their world. Keeney (1983) argues that one’s knowledge is recycled in the (re)construction of the world. This involves how the social practices of people can socially construct the world. At the same time, the social world can be experienced by people as something that was there. Burr (2003) maintains, therefore, that social constructionism carries the status of an object.Burr (2003) reports that social psychology emerged during the Second World War, at a time when psychologists wanted to provide the governments of the United States of America and Britain with knowledge that could be used for propaganda and to manipulate people. This occurred in a period when psychology was adopting the positivist methods of the natural sciences, that could not answer the how questions. In the 1960s and 1970s, social psychologists were worried about the way psychology was serving the dominant groups and ignoring the voices of the ordinary people. To create a balance between the marginal and the dominant groups, a number of books that proposed alternatives to positivist science were published (Hibberd, 2005). These books focussed on the accounts of ordinary people and challenged the oppressive ideological uses of psychology (Burr, 2003). These concerns are apparent in social constructionism. In psychology, social constructionism’s emergence dates back to Gergen’s (1973) paper “Social psychology as history”. In support of Gergen, Burr (2003) argues that all knowledge is historically and culturally specific. As a result, people have to extend their “enquiries into social, political and economic realms” so that they can understand the evolution of current psychology and social life (Burr, 2003, p. 13). Gergen’s (1973) paper also argues that there is no final description of people in a society because social life is not static, but always changing. That is also because meaning making is not static and fixed, but is fluid, provisional and context-dependent (Coyle, 2007). The ideology that gives shape to social constructionism is postmodernism. Postmodernism arose as a rejection of the fundamental assumptions of the modernist movement that preceded postmodernism and that continues to exist parallel to it. The main tenet of modernism is to search for “the true nature of reality through application of reasons and rationality” (Burr, 2003, p. 10). This implies that there are underlying rules that inform our functioning in the world. Postmodernism opposes the theories that consider the nature of life to be based on underlying structures (for example, Freudian psychoanalysis). Rather, it embraces the understanding that the social world is always changing, and that such changes depend on social relations. As in architecture, postmodernism’s argument is that there is no good designer because it depends on people’s interpretation of what they observe (Burr, 2003). One can argue that the way people construct their world cannot be judged according to how the previous generation judged it. Equally, today’s standards cannot be used to judge the next generation. That is because grief and bereavement vary across places, times, and groups in terms of how and when, or even whether emotions are expressed (Rosenblatt, 2001). Postmodernism also opposes the idea that social change is about discovering and altering the underlying structures of social life through the application of a theory or meta-narrative. Social constructionism shares this stance, and points out that the word ‘discover’ implies something that existed before (Burr, 2003). The above section showed how social constructionism originated from several sources. Burr (2003) adds that social constructionism was influenced by the works of French intellectuals like Foucault and Derrida within the cultural backdrop of postmodernism, with its intellectual roots in earlier sociology and in the concerns of the crisis in social psychology.
THE NATURE OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM
Social constructionism accepts that there is not one truth or reality for any situation. Instead there are multiple descriptions or realities constructed in the interaction between people (Gergen, 1999; Rosenblatt, 2001; Willig, 2001). Rosenblatt supports authors like Gergen (1999) and Liebrucks (2001) who argue that the way people construct reality depends on the influences received from societal gatherings, history and interaction with others. In social constructionism, people’s thoughts, feelings, and experiences are the products of systems of meanings that exist at a social rather than an individual level(Terre Blanche, Kelly & Durrheim, 2006). As people interact with each other, they
construct a particular reality about their world and attach meaning to it. Furthermore, social constructionism questions the value claims of what is real and what is perceived. It views knowledge as historically and culturally specific and sustained by social processes such as those in the Tshivenda practice of bereavement rituals. The performance of bereavement rituals is therefore assumed to be a social action and social processes emerge as a function of culture and social history as people construct meaning from their experiences. Social constructionism gives voice to ordinary people who are usually excluded from mainstream research practices. In particular, women whose evidence was long being there that they were undervalued and anything associated with them seemed to be perceived negatively (De la Rey, 1992). Thus, similar to feminism that gives focus to women’s lives and activities previously marginalised and subsidiary to men (Bryman, 2008) and promoting equalities between men and women (Ohara & Saft, 2003), social constructionism allows liberation and the practice of human rights that put men and women in the same position (Peltola, Milkie & Presser, 2004) where their voices can be raised and heard. As it is the case in this study, women are understood from their own perspective and context, through their use of language and voices as a form of social action through which they give meaning to their diverse and often anomalous accounts of their perceptions and experiences.
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1.1 INTRODUCTION
1.2 BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE
1.3 ASSUMPTIONS AND PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
1.4 ‘TRADITIONAL AFRICAN’ AND ‘AFRICAN CHRISTIAN’ GROUPS
1.5 ORGANISATION OF THE THESIS
1.6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
2.1 INTRODUCTION
2.2 THE ORIGINS OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM
2.3 THE NATURE OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONISM
2.4 THE RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL DISCOURSE
2.4.1 Conceptualising the religious-cultural discourse
2.4.2 Social constructions informing the religious-cultural discourse
2.4.3 The model defined
2.4.3.1 Social discourse
2.4.3.2 Power discourse
2.4.3.3 Gender discourse
2.4.3.4 Abnormality discourse
2.4.3.5 Blame discourse
2.5 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 3: RELIGIOUS-CULTURAL WORLDVIEW
3.1 INTRODUCTION
3.2 CULTURE AND RELIGION
3.2.1 Culture
3.2.2 Religion
3.2.2.1 Religions in the Tshivenda-speaking community
3.2.2.2 Introduction of Christianity among the Tshivenda-speaking people
3.2.2.3 Construction of death as continuation of life
3.3 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF DEATH AND DYING
3.3.1 Socially constructed perceptions of death and dying
3.3.1.1 Good death
3.3.1.2 Wild death
3.3.1.3 Causes of death
3.4 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 4: BEREAVEMENT AND BEREAVEMENT RITUALS
4.1 INTRODUCTION
4.2 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF BEREAVEMENT AND GRIEF
4.2.1 Bereavement
4.2.2 Grief
4.2.3 Coping with death
4.3 DISCOURSES ON BEREAVEMENT AND MOURNING
4.4 BEREAVEMENT RITUALS IN A TSHIVENDA–SPEAKING COMMUNITY
4.4.1 Meaning of rituals
4.4.2 Functions of rituals
4.4.2.1 Public display of grief
4.4.2.2 Assisting the deceased to the afterlife world
4.4.2.3 Assist change of status to new roles
4.4.2.4 Provision of healing or therapy
4.4.2.5 Purification of the mourners
4.5 GENDER AND BEREAVEMENT
4.5.1 Different rules for men and women
4.5.2 The power of religion and culture
4.5.3 Constructions of bereavement rituals according to gender
4.6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 5: METHODOLOGY
5.1 INTRODUCTION
5.2 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
5.3 RESEARCH APPROACH
5.3.1 Discourse
5.3.2 Discourse analysis
5.3.4 Credibility and trustworthiness in qualitative research
5.4 COLLECTING DISCOURSES
5.4.1 Selecting participants
5.4.2 Focus group discussions
5.4.3 Procedures for focus group discussions
5.4.4 Ethical issues
5.4.5 Transcription and translation
5.5 ANALYSIS
5.5.1 Unit of analysis
5.5.2 Analytical procedure
5.5.3 Identifying discourses
5.5.3.1 Organising discourses as a coherent system of meaning
5.5.3.2 Discourses as realised in text and the situated meanings
5.5.3.3 Discourses referring to other discourses
5.5.3.4 Discourses about objects and subjects
5.5.3.5 Discourses as historically based
5.5.3.6 Discourses as reproducing power relations
5.5.3.7 The dimension of interpretation
5.6 REFLEXIVITY
5.7 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 6: INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TEXT
6.1 INTRODUCTION
6.2 CONSTRUCTION OF GRIEF EXPERIENCES
6.2.1 Reaction to the knowledge of death theme
6.2.2 Pain associated with multiple losses
6.2.3 The family responsibilities theme
6.2.4 The need for social support theme
6.3 CONSTRUCTION OF EXPERIENCES OF BEREAVEMENT RITUALS
6.3.1 The theme of cultural prescriptions
6.3.2 The theme of perceived functions of the bereavement rituals
6.3.3 The theme of agency and control
6.3.4 The theme of detachment
6.4 SUBJECT POSITIONS ENACTED WHEN GRIEVING FOR A DECEASED HUSBAND
6.5 CONTRADICTIONS IN THE CONSTRUCTIONS OF BEREAVED WOMEN
6.6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 7: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
7.1 INTRODUCTION
7.2 CONTEXT OF THE DISCOURSE – THE PARTICIPANTS’ STORIES
7.2.1 Semiotic building
7.2.2 World building
7.2.2.1 The people
7.2.2.2 The places
7.2.2.3 The times
7.2.2.4 The objects
7.2.2.5 The institutions
7.2.2.6 God and ancestors
7.2.3 Activity building
7.2.4 Socioculturally situated identity and relationship building
7.2.5 Political building
7.2.6 Connection building
7.3 DISCOURSES
7.3.1 Discourse of being not ‘normal’
7.3.2 Power/patriarchal discourse
7.3.3 Gender discourse
7.3.4 Religious-cultural discourse
7.3.5 Minor discourses or discourses found within other discourses
7.3.5.1 Fear discourse
7.3.5.2 Religious discourse
7.3.5.3 Blame discourse
7.3.5.4 Witchcraft discourse
7.4 CONCLUDING REMARKS
CHAPTER 8: REFLECTIONS ON PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES
8.1 REFLECTION UPON THE PROCESSES AND OUTCOMES OF THE STUDY
8.2 REFLEXIVITY
8.2.1 Methodological reflexivity
8.2.2 Personal reflexivity
8.3 THE BUILDING TASKS AND DISCOURSES IDENTIFIED DURING ANALYSIS
8.4 CONCLUSIONS
8.4.1 Construction of grief experiences
8.4.2. Constructions of bereavement rituals
8.4.3. Subject positions the participants enacted when grieving
the husband’s death
8.4.4. Contradictions in the participants’ constructions
8.5 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
8.6 RECOMMENDATIONS
8.7 CONCLUSION
REFERENCES
