Annemarie Samuels, University of Leiden, 'Silence and Care at the End of Life: Multivocality at the Edges of Narrative Possibility'

Abstract

Over the past decades, there has been growing societal and academic interest in silence and speech around dying. Recent work in anthropology brings attention to the ways in which diverse, culturally situated, modes and moralities of articulation and non-articulation influence practices of end-of-life care. Contributing to this scholarly field, this talk draws on person-centered ethnographic research with people living with HIV/AIDS in Aceh, Indonesia, to theorize the multivocality of silences in care at the end of life. Focusing on the ways in which individuals practice end-of-life care, Annemarie Samuels explores how multiple modes of articulation and non-articulation of death and dying affect caregiving interactions within a particular socio-historical situation. Closely attending to narrative interactions, she suggests, allows us to better understand the ways in which individuals subjectively navigate the moral stakes of care and silence in advanced illness. Finally, the focus on silence in the analysis of multiple modes and models of end-of-life care opens up important questions for research in global palliative care.

Bio

Annemarie Samuels is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. She is Principal Investigator on the European Research Council-funded research project ‘Globalizing Palliative Care: A Multi-Sited Ethnographic Study of Practices, Policies and Discourses of Care at the End of Life’. She has extensive ethnographic research experience in Indonesia on topics including disaster, care, morality, health, narrative, and HIV/AIDS. She is author of After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh (University of Hawai’i press 2019) and co-editor (with Ana Dragojlovic) of the Special Issue ‘Tracing Silences: Towards an Anthropology of the Unspoken and Unspeakable’ (History and Anthropology 2021). In her current research project, she studies the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses.

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