End of life - Introduction
End of life - Introduction
This special issue introduces six ethnographic contributions on end-of-life care, emerging from a workshop on Ethnographies of Endings held at Durham University in 2024. Drawing on fieldwork in Britain, France, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and India, the articles examine how institutional frameworks, clinical, bureaucratic and visual, encounter forms of human particularity they cannot accommodate. The introduction situates the collection within anthropological debates about palliative care, ageing populations and the ethics of assisted dying, arguing that a shift from curative to palliative treatment reorganises what counts as care, truth and time. The six contributions are organised around three paired concerns: the competing logics embedded in end-of-life medicine; the mediation of dying through visual and material culture; and the methodological politics of disclosure in fieldwork settings. Together they suggest that the distance between institutional provision and lived experience is not a problem to be resolved but the productive tension ethnography is best placed to hold.
3-4
Kasstan-Dabush, Ben
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Everett, Samuel Sami
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Egorova, Yulia
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3 April 2026
Kasstan-Dabush, Ben
c4d06542-79f5-4afe-9ad3-1f6dc7adb1a6
Everett, Samuel Sami
e900552b-3366-4739-8f8a-1cafa3c23243
Egorova, Yulia
20a029bb-2260-489f-960a-81c39025d8b3
Kasstan-Dabush, Ben, Everett, Samuel Sami and Egorova, Yulia
(2026)
End of life - Introduction.
Anthropology Today, 42 (2), .
(doi:10.1111/1467-8322.70057).
Abstract
This special issue introduces six ethnographic contributions on end-of-life care, emerging from a workshop on Ethnographies of Endings held at Durham University in 2024. Drawing on fieldwork in Britain, France, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and India, the articles examine how institutional frameworks, clinical, bureaucratic and visual, encounter forms of human particularity they cannot accommodate. The introduction situates the collection within anthropological debates about palliative care, ageing populations and the ethics of assisted dying, arguing that a shift from curative to palliative treatment reorganises what counts as care, truth and time. The six contributions are organised around three paired concerns: the competing logics embedded in end-of-life medicine; the mediation of dying through visual and material culture; and the methodological politics of disclosure in fieldwork settings. Together they suggest that the distance between institutional provision and lived experience is not a problem to be resolved but the productive tension ethnography is best placed to hold.
Text
Anthropology Today - 2026 - Kasstan‐Dabush - End of life Introduction
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e-pub ahead of print date: 3 April 2026
Published date: 3 April 2026
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 511521
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/511521
ISSN: 1467-8322
PURE UUID: d6e467ce-db59-4b23-8bb2-bed22ca86891
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Date deposited: 18 May 2026 16:55
Last modified: 18 May 2026 16:56
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Contributors
Author:
Ben Kasstan-Dabush
Author:
Samuel Sami Everett
Author:
Yulia Egorova
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