Palliative care has been developing since the 1960s as a form of caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or when a patient is at the end of life....Show morePalliative care has been developing since the 1960s as a form of caregiving that focuses on the relief of suffering when there is no prospect of a cure or when a patient is at the end of life. Originating in the UK and US, palliative care has been taken up by global institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO), and implemented in various cultural and socioeconomic settings. Anthropological studies have long been highlighting the wide variety of experiences and needs in illness and dying and have problematised the supposedly universal ideas behind palliative care. After a brief discussion of the historical and institutional development of palliative care, this entry highlights the links between palliative care principles and notions of a good death. It then turns to the medicalisation of death and the primacy of choice in palliative care discourses. It elaborates on anthropological studies that have observed how palliative care comes to relate to existing end-of-life care practices and the diversity with which local practitioners and care recipients give shape to this new care paradigm. Finally, it discusses various cultural and moral attitudes towards disclosure and concealment of dying as a site of friction in palliative care. Show less
Goeree, N.; Lemos Dekker, N.; De Reuver, Y.; Haagen, J.F.G.; Vermetten, E. 2023
In this article, I address the experiences of family members of people with dementia, as they expressed the sensation of gradually losing the person with dementia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork... Show moreIn this article, I address the experiences of family members of people with dementia, as they expressed the sensation of gradually losing the person with dementia. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in nursing homes in the Netherlands, and contributing to the anthropology of grief, I explore the co-existence of experiences of anticipatory grief and manifestations of care to maintain meaningful relations. I show how my interlocutors adapted to changing circumstances as the disease progressed, and in so doing found new ways to relate, as well as prepared for future losses and the expected end of life. I argue that anticipatory grief is temporal and relational, encompassing both present and future losses, and involving a continuous negotiation between the loss and the continuing relationship. I underscore the entanglement of loss and connection, showing how both exist parallel to, and may emerge from one another, and demonstrating how an anthropological approach to anticipatory grief can reveal the nuanced and equivocal character of experiences of illness and at the end of life. Show less
Nishimura, M.; Harrison Dening, K.; Sampson, E.L.; Iglesias de Oliveira Vidal, E.; Correia de Abreu, W.; Kaasalainen, S.; ... ; Steen, J.T. van der 2022
