I’m very pleased to announce that a special issue of Death Studies that I have co-edited with Andrew Dawson has just been published online ahead on print.

Bringing together ethnographic perspectives from around the world, the special issue explores how people navigate and understand the ends of their lives. In our editorial, we argue that, because anthropological work on death has often been concerned with what happens after people die, there hasn’t been as much engagement with what happens before death. What, we ask, can an ethnographic perspective on life’s end – rather than death’s beginning – offer?

Besides our good selves, the special issue features:

• Ellen Block on AIDS, grandmothering, and care in Lesotho;
• Gaynor Macdonald on dementia and biomedicine;
• Kathleen Venema on writing a mother’s death;
• Lone Grøn and Cheryl Mattingly on terminal illness in Denmark;
• Devin Flaherty on diagnosis and care in the US Virgin Islands;
• Natashe Lemos Dekker on dementia in Dutch care homes;
• Ari Gandsman on right to die activism.

 

Image credit: Park benches in Central Park by David Joyce on flickr