Seeing the Difference: A Project on Viewing Death and Dying in Interdisciplinary Perspective

Seeing the Difference: A Project on Viewing Death and Dying in Interdisciplinary Perspective
A project of the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities UC Berkeley

From the introduction:

What is this project about?

Regina Barreca has given us a stark dichotomy. She gives us death as "separation," as "difference." But so too do we, in our various disciplines, view death "differently." Dying bridges a "no man's land" where the unfathomed and the unknowable confront the scientific and the humanistic imaginations. While death may be the vanishing point of medical knowledge and representation, it is also a point of mediation. Neither doctors nor humanists, nor artists or policy makers can provide all the answers where death is concerned; any inquiry into its cultural, scientific, and perhaps even spiritual contours must be a plural one.

"Seeing the Difference" brings together three angles of perception: those of clinicians, humanists, and artists. These conceptual frameworks offer in turn different ways of understanding the dying body: the medical view of the body as literal text for implementing physical and psychological change; the humanist's view of the body as the site of complex layers of meaning to be explored through a range of interpretive strategies; and the artist's creation of the body in terms of alternative explanatory systems that may mediate between the physical and the metaphysical, that may confront an "unknowable" or "inexplicable" and give it form.

"Seeing the Difference" explores the boundaries and the connections that pertain among these different sites of knowledge and interpretation. The project links artists, humanists, and medical practitioners in an effort to clarify our own understandings through exchange across disciplines, to work toward the conceptualization of new forms of empathy towards those who face imminent death, and to produce a guide, in both print and video formats, that can be used in other settings where practitioners are trained to work with the dying.

Our project is in one sense about what cannot be figured: it is about absence, "negative space," "silence," and the liminal. But it is also about "making meaning" of what seems a paradox. Its purpose is to take up the challenge offered by psychiatrist and anthropologist Arthur Kleinman when he emphasized--in a residency at Berkeley in 1997--that when we address severe illness and the processes of dying and death, meaning cannot be made in medical settings alone.

To the Visit the Conference Website (Includes video/conversations/exhibits/presentations)