Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Annemarie Samuels
(Leiden University)
Sylvia Tidey (University of Virginia)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/011
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
How can/does one live towards death when there is life after death? This panel seeks to address the question of how the fact of a life's inevitable ending shapes intersubjective care practices when death is thought not to be the end of existence, but a transformation.
Long Abstract:
How can/does one live towards death when there is life after death? This panel seeks to address the question of how the fact of a life's inevitable ending shapes intersubjective care practices when death is thought not to be the end of existence, but a transformation.
With the rapidly expanding availability of biomedical technologies that can lengthen life, the timing of death has increasingly become a matter of decision making, with death figuring as biomedical failure and endpoint (Kaufman 2005). At the same time, anthropologists show that expectations of life after death, where death is not the (only) end but (also) a form of continuation or transformation, affect how people live and care towards dying (e.g. Desjarlais 2016; Stonington 2020). This panel therefore asks how hope and other temporal orientations towards different 'endings,' continuations, and possibly new beginnings, shape care practices in the face of impending death. In particular, this panel invites ethnographically grounded reflections on the ways in which people orient themselves towards death, navigate their relationships with intimate others, and accept or refuse particular forms of care, while intersubjectively reassessing what a good life, death, or afterlife might mean. Such questions are especially pressing now that the Covid-19 pandemic has not only brought death to the forefront of our collective imaginations, but has also laid bare local and global inequalities of living, dying, and accessing biomedical and other forms of care that long predate the current pandemic.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
How do orientations to what comes after life shape living with life-threatening illness in the present? In this paper, I explore how narrative possibilities shape everyday efforts of combining temporal orientations to death, life after death and present living in Aceh, Indonesia.
Paper long abstract:
How do orientations to what comes after life shape living with life-threatening illness in the present? In this paper, I explore how narrative possibilities shape everyday efforts of combining temporal orientations to death, life after death and present living. Drawing on the story of one HIV-positive mother and activist in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I analyze how her publicly articulated as well as more privately narrated hopes of future living with HIV intertwined with Islamic orientations towards death and the afterlife. As the horizons of her worldly aspiration of political and social recognition of people living with HIV in Indonesia and her personal dream of a ‘normal’ family life were shaped by a religious orientation to fate, acceptance and divine judgment in the afterlife, the act of narrating these futures was enmeshed with the recurrent experience of friends dying of AIDS and the unstable chronicity of living with HIV in the present. The silence and solitude in the interstices of crafting (activist) future narratives in the face of multiple endings – of others’ lives, her own life, and the end of the world after life – attune us to the delicate and effortful work of navigating multiple temporalities of hope in structures of social inequality.
Paper short abstract:
This paper considers the role of promises to care for intimate others in extending intersubjective ties after death. It provides a unique contribution to questions of hope, temporality, and what it might mean to live well – while one still can – after one death and in the face of another.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the role of promises to care for intimate others in extending intersubjective ties after death. Set on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, I focus on the case of one older woman, Ms. Donovan, who, when her grandchildren’s mother was dying, promised her that she would always take care of them.Years after this promise was made, when Ms. Donovan, afflicted with many chronic illnesses, was being told by her professional caregivers that her death was imminent. During this period, Ms. Donovan’s promise served as an intersubjective anchor, grounding her in her commitment to care — and thus, to stay alive and keep death and bay — despite her deeply unmooring embodied experiences of growing suffering and disability. I examine how this promise both served to keep her grandchildren’s mother alive—present in the intersubjective space—while also offering Ms. Donovan a way forward, a future in which she kept her promise and did not die while her grandchildren still needed care. This case provides a unique contribution to questions of hope, temporality, and what it might mean to live well – while one still can – after one death and in the face of another.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to live towards death with dementia when euthanasia is at the forefront of public imaginaries of dying? This paper considers different pathways towards opening up a 'between' of attuned company in which life historical narratives can be transformed into a radical kind of hope.
Paper long abstract:
As ending life through euthanasia becomes more widely accepted for people living with dementia in The Netherlands, the quest for narratives that resist the abjection associated with the fourth age in dementia becomes pressing. What does it mean to live towards death with dementia in a cultural climate that accepts as a legitimate reason to actively end one’s life a condition already considered to foreclose meaningful futures (Taylor 2017; Higgs and Gilleard 2015)? This papers draws on life history research with people with dementia to consider different pathways of transforming living towards death with dementia into something other than social death. It describes how practices of attuned company (Stevenson 2014) may open up ‘a between of the situation’ (Zigon 2021) in which potentiality flourishes. In particular, it zooms in on how such company may allow people to transform life historical narratives into tropes for a radical kind of hope; a hope for a ‘future goodness that transcends the[ir] current ability to understand what it is’ (Lear 2004).
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the issue of death and care as two interrelated realms. In the native communities of Chukotka, care is recalled through the old-time voluntary death, while contemporary suicide is associated with non-care. The notion of "return" reveals the need for constant care.
Paper long abstract:
This paper addresses the issue of death and care as two interrelated realms. In the communities of Yupik- and Chukchi people (Chukotka, Russia), care is recalled through the old-time voluntary death, while contemporary suicide is associated with non-care, isolation. Death-oriented behavior in the region has diverse forms. Voluntary death has received much scholarly attention (Bogoras, 1904 - 9; Hamayon, 1990; Vaté, 2003; Willerslev, 2009 etc.). Not restricted to but mostly related to senilicide, it is viewed as a necessary precondition of life continuity and the circular conception of the universe (Kan 1989; Hamayon 1990; Bodenhorn 2000; Vaté, 2003, 2007). Voluntary death, often ritualized and committed upon an individual's request and approval of the relatives, shall not be conflated with the non-ritualized act of suicide. Today, high suicide rates exist among all indigenous peoples of the circumpolar region (ADHR, 2004). I shall argue that it is not the confusion between voluntary death and the non-ritualized suicide that causes the methodological problem. It is rather the ethnocentric view, which frames the phenomenon of the "regular" suicide as a societal problem, predicament of culture, or the result of crisis. It is rarely examined within the same context as voluntary death, that is, in relation to the notion of life circulation. In particularly, the belief in "return" - a person's name may come back five times after his death - allows a better understanding of the constant care dedicated to the deceased relatives and of hope for life to be continued.
Paper short abstract:
The study identified intrinsic factors that are more spiritual than physical which induce people into suicide. The objective was to explore the understanding of suicide among the Igbo people of Nigeria. The findings showed that suicide is not a normal occurrence in Igbo society.
Paper long abstract:
Suicide is frequently attributed to depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse. In African context, the present study identified other intrinsic factors that are more spiritual than physical which induce people into suicide. The objective of the study was to explore the understanding of suicide among the Igbo people of Nigeria. The findings relate to the fact that suicide is not a normal occurrence in Igbo traditional society. It is very clear that traditionally, Igbo conceptualize suicide as a crime and abomination against the gods, meaning that taking one’s life is not permitted by any human and spiritual agents. Since Igboland is a large area, the study adopted culture area method of interpretation. The reason for this method is to avoid falling victim to the error of over-generalization, hence what obtains in one subculture may not be the same in another subculture. The area of concentration of the study is on central sub-cultural area of Igboland, which is Ugbaike Enugu-Ezike of Southeast Nigeria. Data for the study was generated from both event reviews and Focus Group Discussions, and the study identified the reasons for suicide which intrinsically varied. However, suicide stirs up discomfort in supernatural world and powers that is; the divinities, ancestors and other spirit forces are believed to have been offended by such act. Therefore, efforts must be made to escape their wrath, and this is through expiatory sacrifice.