This essay asks three questions about death and dying: 1) Why should an entry on such phenomena, which are clearly of interdisciplinary interest, appear in an encyclopedia of sociology? 2) What related topics have been studied by sociology? 3) What issues are currently pending that call for sociological attention?

Death and Dying as a Field of Sociological Inquiry

The answer to the first question is not readily found in the history of sociological thought, although Victor Marshall once bemoaned the fact that Georg Simmel in 1908 had identified but had not pursued the topic as suitable for sociological inquiry, and a half century later the topic was thought to be a neglected area for sociology (Faunce and Fulton 1958). On other hand, Fulton reminds us that "sociological interest in death is coexistent with the history of sociology" (Fulton and Bendiksen 1994; Fulton and Owen 1988). Both Marshall and Fulton are correct...