How Society Remember the “Violent Death” in Modern Industries?

Abstract

Among the modern industrial development, many of the workers were killed by industrial disasters that cannot be predicted. In particular, hundreds of coal miners were killed in a single accident. As Jean Baudrillard argues, modern society had to treat the shock of "violent death" of workers through social rituals. Building cenotaph is considered to have been one of the examples of such rituals of remembering dead people killed by accident. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the social process of remembering "violent death" of those people from the discourse concerning cenotaphs. In particular, this paper analyses discourses on newspaper focusing on what kind of social group has erected cenotaphs, by using the search system of articles from the 1870s to the 1980s.