Death Studies

ISSN: 0748-1187 (Print) 1091-7683 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/udst20

Dead in life. Lives pierced by death

Gabriel Gatti & María Martínez

To cite this article: Gabriel Gatti & María Martínez (2020) Dead in life. Lives pierced by death,
Death Studies, 44:11, 677-680, DOI: 10.1080/07481187.2020.1771850
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1771850

Published online: 19 Aug 2020.

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DEATH STUDIES
2020, VOL. 44, NO. 11, 677–680
https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2020.1771850

INTRODUCTION

Dead in life. Lives pierced by death

Gabriel Gattia and Mar
ıa Mart
ınezb
a
Sociology Department, School of Social Sciences, University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Leioa, Spain;
b
Departament of Sociology III (Social Tendencies), School of Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Nacional de Estudios a
Distancia (UNED), Madrid, Spain

ABSTRACT
This introduction presents the special issue entitled “Dead in Life. Lives Pierced by Death”
that emerged from an empirical need. We were confronted, in a growing number of situa-
tions, to the need to rethink the borders between life and death and the intersections
between those two states, which result in bad deaths and bad lives. The articles gathered
here examine, on the one hand, how atypical deaths are produced, managed, and lived;
and, on the other hand, look at those who are left behind after catastrophe and loss, the
life that is broken following an exposure to death, the forms of life that come into contact
with (civil or social) death.

This special issue entitled “Dead in Life. Lives Pierced
by Death” is the product of one of the research lines
pursued as part of a decade-long collective research
program: “World(s) of Victims” and was discussed at
an international seminar held in Bilbao in the month
of April 2019. As we focused in the context of this
research program first on victims and then on differ-
ent forms and cases of disappearance,1 in particular
what we have called “social disappearance” (Gatti,
2020), we gradually realized that in order to under-
stand a myriad of social situations we needed to
rethink the borders between life and death and the
intersections and overlapping between the two states,
which manifest in bad deaths and bad lives, in lives
that are not really lives. This realization was not born
merely of a theoretical concern. The cases we
researched (migrants who disappear in the borders
separating the global South from the global North,
women who are victims of sex trafficking, thousands
of people who do not exist in the eyes of the state
because there is no record of them, and individuals
forcibly disappeared by drug traffickers or caught in
the crossfire of the war on drugs, among others)
sparked the need to rethink those borders. And they
prompted us to turn to other colleagues who move in
different disciplinary coordinates and work in other
geographies, and listen to their findings on the subject
of lives that resemble death.2
It was not easy. The particularly dense line that sepa-
rates life from death is a territory that the social and
human sciences, our disciplines, have not ventured com-
fortably into. And in the rare occasions in which they
have, it has generally been to pathologize it, at best devel-
oping care policies, which are necessary, but do not
always further our understanding. The works gathered in
this issue, however, overcome those limitations and pro-
pose analyses that succeed both in shedding light on
some powerful examples of that ambiguity and in sug-
gesting new working tools for understanding them.
The time of writing this introduction, the excep-
tional moment the planet is going through with the
global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, forces us to look out
from our places of confinement and wonder about the
timeliness of what we are proposing. It also forces us
to consider whether it will be useful for understanding
the world that is emerging. We are seeing living
deaths silenced, we know of lives that are hard to rec-
ognize as such and which have gained a visibility that
they normally lack: elderly people who die alone in
hospitals or retirement homes, in places of abandon-
ment; relatives who are prevented from performing
conventional mourning rites due to the risk of conta-
gion; migrants who return to their homelands from

CONTACT Gabriel Gatti g.gatti@ehu.eus Departamento de Sociolog
ıa 2, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad del Pa
ıs Vasco, 48940 Leioa,
Bizkaia, Spain; Mar
ıa Mart
ınez mariamartinez@poli.uned.es Department of Sociology III (Social Tendencies), Universidad Nacional de Estudios a
Distancia (UNED), C/Obispo de Trejo 2, Madrid 28040, Spain.
ß 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
678 G. GATTI AND M. MARTÍNEZ
the prosperous Europe despite knowing that life there
is worse … That initial feeling—that there was some-
thing missing on that subject—has given way to
another: that it might not be necessary, given that the
pieces featured in this issue propose categories and
develop very powerful theoretical and methodological
tools for understanding a world in which the borders
between life and death are blurred.
While the lines between life and death have been a big
theme in literature, this hazy, ambiguous border region
has rarely been addressed by the social sciences. Lately,
that territory of existence has received much attention
from “high culture” and popular entertainment, resulting
in the delivery of both works of art and mass products. A
good example of one such product is the television series
The Leftovers analyzed by Gabriel Gatti and Jaume Peris
in this issue. These works and products range from excel-
lent to forgettable, but they are all indicative of a renewed
interest in that liminal area. What does that interest in
zombies, the living-dead, the dead-in-life, spirits, ghosts,
forsaken lives, and extremely precarious and vulnerable
existences say to human and social scientists?
There are many studies that look into the reasons that
explain the ubiquity of the living-dead, the nonexistent,
in each era. The works in this sense by Ulrich Beck
(1992) (uncertainties, risk), Zygmunt Bauman (2000)
(liquid modernity), Donna Haraway (2016) (boundaries
separating human from non-human), Judith Butler
(2006) (precarious life), or Anna Tsing (2015) (life in
capitalist ruins) are very diverse, but they do have in
common this interest in exploring a world where there
are few certainties, including certainties concerning the
limits and contents of the living, the human, and exist-
ence. In contexts with similar intellectual concerns but
different disciplinary frameworks and methodological
approaches, there are also many scholars who have
descended into the territories of ordinary life to examine
some of these metaphors in depth, to discover what
shapes these non-living entities, zombies, ghosts, and spi-
rits of the absent take in our everyday existence. Some of
the works that stand out in this sense are, for example,
Jo~ao Biehl’s (2013) anthropological studies on drug
addicts who are on the brink of death and have been
abandoned to their fate; the research by certain anthro-
pologists on pain communities in India, where living is
far removed from a consolidated sense of life (Veena
Das, 2008); or studies on places of social death, such as
historical slavery (Orlando Patterson, 1982) or present-
day slavery, places of non-human or nearly human lives
(Silvia Wynter, 2003; Alexander Weheliye, 2014). In
other academic fields, some scholars whose work focuses
on the psychological (Judith Butler, 2006; Vinciane
Despret, 2017; Dominique Memmi, 2011) have been
concerned with the problematization of the standard way
of managing grief and the theoretical possibility of con-
ceiving forms of collective mourning that are permanent
and non-pathological, in which the lines between life and
death are again blurred and the “social life of the dead”
takes on sociological meaning.
There is a need to address this in sociology, the
discipline we, the editors of this issue, work in.
Sociology needs to think about the bad deaths and the
bad lives, because the reality it observes demands that
reflection. It needs to know what to say about the life
of those who inhabit “death spaces,” about the death
of those who perish for lack of medical assistance or
of those who die in their journey to the global North.
It needs to understand how to manage unusual
deaths, and to know how to name the lives of women
who are trafficked for sexual exploitation or abused
by their partners, or those who are constantly exposed
to illness. But it still lacks the conceptual and meth-
odological tools to do so. The contribution of this spe-
cial issue and the process that led to it are meant to
open the social sciences up to those questions.
Toward that aim, we present a series of articles from
various disciplines, including anthropology, sociology,
literature, and cultural studies, with each discussing
these issues from their own empirical approach. We
formed a small working group and met only once in
person, but we worked together remotely on several
draft versions. We arrived at the April 2019 seminar
with a written text, but rather than presenting it, we
chose to discuss it in depth. And we sought to pose
questions as opposed to reaching conclusions. The
methodology of the process had to respect the need to
change the tools used, to find ones more apt for those
questions. In that sense, the interdisciplinary dialogue
was fruitful: How do we address objects with so many
edges? How do we prepare to listen to them? It is not
merely a matter of having a set of methodological and
technical instruments, but of a willingness to think
about empirical situations that are only seemingly
abnormal. That methodological approach to a difficult
object created communicating vessels between disci-
plines (for example, the work by Gabriel Gatti and
Jaume Peris, which combines sociology and cultural
studies), bringing us, by the hand of Kirsten Mahlke, to
a proposal for a research methodology that would func-
tion in parallel with the working method it seeks to
establish for those who have to deal with strange
deaths. It needs to be a methodology that affects.
Two lines of work structured the seminar and run
through the texts gathered in this issue. The first line

involves examining how atypical deaths are produced,
managed, and lived. In this sense, the article by
Jonathan Xavier Inda examines the production of
death as a result of the lack of care in migrant deten-
tion centers in the United States, employing a biopo-
litical approach, but at the same time transcending it.
The piece by Carolina Kobelinsky simultaneously
poses questions about the threat faced by migrants
who cross the Mediterranean, which is not only the
possibility of dying but also of disappearing, and about
those who make it to their destination but whose lives
are inevitably and profoundly pierced by the death of
their disappeared fellow travelers. Kirsten Mahlke, for
her part, focuses on how death is managed, as she
analyzes the protocols applied in Germany by the
police and psychology practitioners to deal with rela-
tives who have suffered the loss of a loved one in
strange accidental circumstances, and how those pro-
tocols limit the “possible mourning” and psychiatrize
the loss. And, as a counterpoint, the article by Gabriel
Gatti and Jaume Peris considers a more everyday way
of dealing with deaths and the lives that remain after
those deaths. Through an analysis of the series The
Leftovers, they reflect on life after a catastrophe, pro-
posing the concepts of “social death” and “social dis-
appearance” to understand those lives marked forever
by an unconfirmed death.
The second line looks at those who are left behind
after catastrophe and loss, the life that is broken fol-
lowing an exposure to death, the forms of life that
come into contact with (civil or social) death, the
bizarre vital status of those affected (Gatti and
Mart
ınez, Forthcoming). This line of analytical inquiry
addresses a paradox: life when it seems to deny itself,
when it has left the territory of life of a human being
that is complete and has moved toward “social death”
(Patterson, 1982). These are the “dead in life” or
“living dead” (Fregoso, 2017). The situations that we
call “social disappearance” create these forms of death
in life, of suspended life, of incomplete life in which
subjects, nonetheless, live life: ordinary life, political
life, individual and collective life, life that does not
recover its previous status and is not fully recon-
structed. Three of the articles clearly work in this line.
Mar
ıa Mart
ınez, for her part, reflects on life not dur-
ing some forms of gender-based violence, but precisely
after that violence, when it is considered that the vio-
lence has been overcome and life has been recovered,
a life that is lived, however, as a “death in life.” This
question regarding impossible lives is addressed by
Luisina Castelli when she analyzes the life of bodies
that are not entirely human and are continuously
DEATH STUDIES 679
exposed to death and illness. Through an ethno-
graphic work with two people with disabilities, she
raises questions about the life of those who can never
attain the standard of normality of (a) life. Both
Castelli and Rosa Linda Fregoso allow, however, for
the possibility of thinking that in such contexts of
“social deaths,” in those “death spaces,” in those pla-
ces where life itself seems to be denied, forms of life,
and even agency, nonetheless, emerge. In Fregoso’s
case, that possibility is opened by a critical discussion
of the concept of refugee as conceived by the inter-
national human rights discourse, and ends by propos-
ing the concept of “fugitivity,” a possibility for
thinking about the reconstruction of impossible lives.
Notes
1. The project is entitled “Desapariciones. A transnational
study of a category for managing, inhabiting, and
analyzing social catastrophe and loss” and is part of the
wider research project “Mundo(s) de v
ıctimas” (“World(s)
of Victims”). “Desapariciones” seeks to understand how
the category of the disappeared circulates transnationally
and contributes to manage, inhabit, and analyze different
situations marked by catastrophe and loss.
2. In addition to the researchers featured in this issue, Bruna
Bumachar, from the University of Sao Paulo (USP), Brazil,
and Daniela Rea, from the Mexican NGO Periodistas de a
Pie, also participated in the seminar in Bilbao, but their
contributions were not available for this publication.
Funding
This project was funded by the General Board of Scientific
and Technical Research of Spain’s Ministry of the Economy,
Industry and Competitiveness, under its call for “projects of
excellence” (MINECO-CSO 2015-66318-P) for the years
2016–2020: https://identidadcolectiva.es/victimas-desapari-
ciones/.
ORCID
Gabriel Gatti http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0435-5074
Mar
ıa Mart
ınez http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9337-3225
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