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End of Life and Dying in a Plural World
ANTHROPOLOGIE ET SOCIÉTÉS (revised proposal, double issue 2021) Thematic issue edited by Sylvie Fortin1 and Josiane Le Gall2
CALL FOR PROPOSAL - continued
The many deaths that have occurred in recent months challenge us all. The current pandemic marks life, sociability and... dying in many ways. Anthropologie et sociétés has been engaged in a thematic issue on the end of life for several months now. The current context invites us to broaden the pool of contributions in order to better identify these issues in different places/institutions/locations.
The end of life is a subject that abounds in research and reflection in the social and care sciences. Population ageing, chronicity of disease, a very wide and at the same time limited range of treatments depending on the target population (from young to old) and care practices are among the current themes. Moreover, while work on death (or "the deaths”
according to Bibeau [2013:51]) and funeral rituals are dear to anthropology (Kaufmann and Morgan 2005, Engelke 2019, Jérôme and Poirier 2018), dying is less well documented and is an extraordinary window on contemporary social issues. In continuity with Godelier (2014) and his work on death, we consider the end of life and dying as a social construction and not a state of being delimited by the clinic.
The end of life and death is a matter of cultural and religious traditions for many. The rites surrounding death, present in all societies, are part of the major religious traditions (Coyer 2015, Thomas 1980) and also on the fringes of the latter in hypermodern societies where diversity, hyperdiversity (Hannah 2011) results both from mobility and migratory movements (Foner & al. 2019, Vertovec 2007), but also from the social transformations that accompany the globalisation of exchanges of all kinds (Humphris 2014). That said, culture - understood as a set of shared meanings, norms and values that underlie how members of a social group understand and act in the world around them (Crowley-Matoka 2016) - helps to shape, according to contexts and interactions, the practices, knowledge and beliefs of a given group with regard to illness, death, care. This same culture is an actor in decision-making, as is medicine as a whole as a cultural system that shapes health care practices. This medical culture - which embraces action as its driving force and where scientific progress is generating an ever-increasing range of treatments - gives rise, or can give rise, to challenging ends of life.
In this issue, we focus on end-of-life trajectories and contemporary dying, marked by a plurality of ways of conceiving the world, life, death, the contribution of biomedical technology, and the expectations and possibilities regarding the places where dying is possible (hospital, long-term care or palliative care institution, home). Understanding the
1 Full Professor, Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal, [email protected]
2 Institutional researcher, SHERPA/CIUSSS Centre-Ouest-de-l’Île-de-Montréal and adjunct professor, Department of Anthropology, Université de Montréal, [email protected]
2 relational spaces in which dying is experienced, the contexts and the quality of interactions between actors becomes fundamental (Kellehear 2014). These spaces are sometimes coloured by the family, but the family itself is also in flux (composition, recomposition, local, transnational). They can also refer to various social links, neighbourhood, self-help and associative links, and in so doing account (here again) for a plurality of accompanying actors, even involved in the decisions that mark out the trajectory of illness and death.
The concept of death trajectory allows us to understand death as a temporal process, but also as a social (rather than biological) process, at the intersection of many potentially divergent perspectives between patient, family and caregivers (Strauss et al. 1985). The trajectories of the end of life, of dying and death, are in this way inclusive, temporal, relational, contextual and give rise to a therapeutic range from cure to care, from a curative perspective to a comfort approach, from an acknowledgement of death as care (Death as care) or, on the contrary, of death as failure.
The papers selected for this call will address death and the end of life from different angles, taking into account the perspectives of people at the end of life, their families and caregivers, including the end-of-life experiences from youth to old age, the diversity of ends of life (local, transnational, social ties), subjectivities, intersubjectivities, norms and values (good death, suffering, unveiling, etc.) and the organisation of care and care practices.
Anthropologie et sociétés only publishes unpublished material. It is a French-language journal. However, submissions of papers in English are welcome and, if accepted for publication, will be translated by the journal after the review process.
We invite you to visit the journal’s web site: https://www.anthropologie- societes.ant.ulaval.ca/
Abstracts and proposals may be sent directly to the invited editors:
[email protected] & [email protected]
References cited
Bibeau, G., 2013. Là où mourir n’est pas toujours mourir. Un regard anthropologique sur la mort d’enfants dans des sociétés non-occidentales, pp. 51-69, in S. Fortin et M.J. Blain (dir.), Mourir à l’ère biotechnologique. Montréal, Éditions CHU Sainte-Justine.
Coyer G., 2015. « Anthropologie de la mort et de la fin de vie », Jusqu’à la mort accompagner la vie, 123, 4 : 11-24.
Crowley-Matoka, M. 2016. Cultural Factors, pp. 292-307, in S. J. Youngner and R. M.
Arnold (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Ethics at the End of Life. New York: Oxford University Press
3 Engelke, M., 2019. « The Anthropology of Death Revisited », Annual Review of Anthropology, 48 :29-44.
Foner, N., J.W. Duyvendak et P. Kasinitz, 2019. « Introduction : super-diversity in everyday life », Ethnic and Racial Studies, 42,1 :1-16.
Godelier, M., 2014. Introduction, pp. 9-37, in Godelier, M. (dir.), La mort et ses au-delà.
Paris, CNRS Éditions.
Hannah, S. 2011. Clinical care in environments of hyperdiversity, pp. 35-69, in M.-J.
DelVecchio Good, S..Willen, S. Hannah, K.Vickery & L. Taeseng Park (eds). Shattering Culture: American Medicine Responds to Hyperdiversity. New York, Russell Sage Foundation.
Humphris, R. 2014. Superdiversity : Theory, Methods and Practice – Rethinking society in an era of change. Conference (report) 23-25 June 2014, University of Birmingham.
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/superdiversity-institute/events/previous- events/iris-conference-report-2014.aspx (consulté le 5 juillet 2019).
Jérome, L. & S. Poirier, 2018. « Présentation. Conceptions de la mort et rites funéraires dans les mondes autochtones », Frontières, 29(2). https://doi.org/10.7202/1044157ar Kaufman, S. R. & L. M. Morgan. 2005, «The anthropology of the beginnings and ends of life», Annual Review of Anthropology, 34:317–41.
Kellehear, A. 2014. The inner life of the dying person, End-of-life care : a series. New York, Columbia University Press.
Strauss, A., S. Fagerhaugh, B. Suczek & C. Wiener, 1985. Social Organization of Medical Work. Chicago, Chicago University Press.
Thomas, L.V. 1980. Anthropologie de la mort. Lausanne, Payot.
Vertovec, S. 2007. « Super-diversity and its implications », Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30 : 1024-1054.
General Calendar
• August 20, 2020: titles & abstracts of proposal (original unpublished) 10-15 lines + full contact details of the authors (in French or English)
• August 25, 2020: confirmation of abstracts retained (or refused) - invitations to produce an article according to the journal's standards
• October 15, 2020: reception of papers (7500 words, notes and references included, abstracts in French and English)
• December 15, 2020: transmission of the assessments to the authors
• February 15, 2021: receipt of the revised texts
• May 2021: publication of the issue
