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Accepted Paper:

Enjoying the death of the others? Some anthropological reflections around the volunteer work with dying patients  
Yannis Papadaniel (University of Lausanne)

Paper long abstract:

My contribution aims to explore the activities of volunteers who work with people who are terminally ill and dying in Switzerland. I will focus more specifically on the following two research questions:

a) How and Why do the volunteers cope with the constant presence of death in their everyday lives?

b) How does death come to be presented as an "attractive" and creative outcome in palliative care contexts?

In order to answer these questions, I will present some results based on an ethnographic research. For three years I have been indeed engaged in a participant observation in four volunteers associations in Lausanne, Switzerland. As such I will explore these two questions further by examining the meanings that the volunteers attach to their own practices.

Panel W013
Death and imagination: creative strategies to embrace and avoid the crisis of death
  Session 1