The Staying Power of Analytical Distance: Lyn Lofland's Contribution to the Sociology of Death, Dying, and Bereavement

Lyn Lofland's The Craft of Dying remains integral to the small canon of texts that sociologists have written in death studies. This article uses her work to consider how we approach the politics of knowledge production in our own scholarship today. Lofland wrote at an “analytical distance,” which to say that she resisted adopting the taken‐for‐granted assumptions that underpin everyday meanings. Her refusal to adopt in her work popular understandings of what it means to “die well,” I contend, laid the groundwork for an intersectional feminist critique of the contemporary death positive movement. Despite yielding observations that have remained trenchant more than 40 years after publication, Lofland's analytical distance risked flattening the humanity of the people she wrote about. Here I weigh the dangers and dividends of her approach and, in the end, make an argument for its ongoing utility.