Consolationscapes in the face of loss: Grief and consolation in space and time

Human beings are grieving animals and consolation, an experiential assemblage through which grief is ameliorated or assuaged, is an age-old response to loss, expressed variously in different cultural contexts. However, in the contest of the West, over the course of the past century, consolation has dropped off the cultural radar, reduced in popular usage to the notion of ‘second prize’ rather than any positive agential process. It might seem that we don’t ‘do’ consolation any more, and Western models of bereavement in the twentieth century typically privileged coping with loss as a linear progression towards ‘closure’. The contributions to this volume highlight this relative neglect of consolation in Western popular and academic discourses and show that the international traditions of consolation discussed here illuminate diverse attitudes to death and offer insight to a range of strategies for dealing with bereavement across different cultures, and the varied ways in which grief and consolation are intertwined with the spatial fabric of social worlds across different cultural settings.