Palliative care services are increasingly emerging in diverse cultural settings around the globe. Given the large cultural diversity in end-of-life care practices, we ask: How do global palliative care practices translate to various cultural contexts? How do they impact local notions of death and dying? And how, in turn, do culturally diverse practices of end-of-life care shape the practice of palliative care? This project studies the globalization and cultural mediation of palliative care practices, policies and discourses. Our ethnographic research focuses on three countries that are currently building a system of professional palliative care provisions:
In Indonesia palliative care is most developed in a few large tertiary hospitals, but is currently including a growing number professional initiatives across the archipelago. Ethnographic research will focus mainly on Jakarta and Banda Aceh.
India has multiple promising palliative care programmes and initiatives, amongst others a successful community-based palliative care system in Kerala. Research for this project focuses on end-of-life care in the capital of India: New Delhi.
In Brazil, palliative care units and initiatives are concentrated in urban centers and mostly located in hospitals. The research will both take place in institutions and follow families in the home setting. Fieldwork will be carried out in the metropolitan context of Sao Paulo and smaller towns in southern Brazil.
A Healthy Society is one of the main pillars of the Leiden Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences’ Strategic Plan. Natashe Lemos Dekker showed her research project in which she focusses on how palliative care is provided and accessed in Brazil during the Healthy Society Event on 9 June 2022.
Friday 10 June 2022 Annemarie Samuels will give a guest lecture on Medical Anthropology: Culture, Care & Illness. In this Lecture in the Guest Lecture Series of the International Center of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, Annemarie Samuels will speak about Medical Anthropology. She will discuss how medical anthropologists study the ways in which people understand illness, care and the body; approach medicine as a cultural practice; and develop critical theory about the unequal distribution of health.
In the symposium ‘For the time being – temporality, ethics, aging: Conversations between anthropology, art and philosophy’ the main question is: How do temporal perspectives on lived time and time left change with old age and what are the roles of inter-and intra-generational dynamics in elderly’s perspectives on past, present and future life challenges and horizons? In her presentation, Natashe Lemos Dekker shed light on the divergent temporalities that are at play in requesting euthanasia with dementia in the Netherlands. Particularly, she addresses the use of written statements that describe the wish for euthanasia of the person with dementia as a tool to resolve temporal dissonances and transfer responsibility to family members.