Based on interviews with intensive care patients at high risk of death, this study examines the tension between bodily dependence and existential agency in a hyper-technological context. Far from being mere recipients of care, patients draw on their own narratives to interpret their ordeal, anticipate an uncertain future, and renegotiate their relationships with their bodies, caregivers, loved ones, and the technological environment. In the face of death, they demonstrate a capacity for continuous adjustment: through small gestures, specific requests, or symbolic exchanges, they reinvest in their lives and maintain a sense of self despite the loss of bodily control. The stay in intensive care appears to be a liminal moment where dependence and biographical reappropriation coexist. This analysis highlights a paradoxical dynamic: between withdrawal and connection, the individual constantly redefines the conditions of their presence in the world, making dying an active, reflexive, and profoundly social process.
In Brazil, domestic care, generally performed by women, can be seen as part of a continuum of care that extends beyond the end of life. The world of the living and the world of the dead continue to interact, highlighting relationships of interdependence as well as specific conceptions of the body, the individual, and the person, in a society subject to a tension between «equality» and «hierarchy». What place(s) do the dead and the living occupy in each person’s existence? Based on ethnographic research conducted in Franca, a city in southeastern Brazil, we will first examine the concept of «dying well» and what it entails for caregivers, then explore, through certain marginal rituals, what survives of the person in the transitional period following death, and finally, consider the ways in which some deceased individuals continue to «care» for the living.
This article analyses how palliative care teams work to maintain the «social being» at the end of life through the use of Midazolam. Based on an ethnographic study conducted in four palliative care units—combining extended observations, sixty semi-structured interviews, and monitoring of dosage changes in thirty-seven patients—it shows that an individual does not vanish with the loss of their relational capacities, but is supported by a set of norms (Macherey, 2014), social practices (Mauss, 1938; Tronto, 2009), and relationships (Lenclud, 2009). From anxiolysis to deep and continuous sedation until death, each adjustment involves a negotiation aimed at preserving a form of reciprocity, however minimal. This work of care thus appears a means of containing the violence of the final stages of existence and of maintaining the social being threatened by the onslaught of pain and suffering.
Based on ethnographic research conducted in a palliative care unit, this article examines sedative practices at the end of life as a lens through which to analyse contemporary transformations of the individual in the face of death. It demonstrates that these practices cannot be understood solely through legal or decision-making frameworks, but rather stem from an ambivalent mode of action aimed at containing the transformation of the dying body and maintaining the act of care through temporal adjustments, relational mediation, and regimes of speech or silence. Employing the concept of «pharmac/kology,» the article highlights that the centre of gravity of these practices is not the molecule, but rather the dying person themselves, a liminal figure around whom the collective is formed and who, at the same time, threatens it. By following the body and its metamorphoses, the article explores the contemporary reconfiguration of rituals and the governance of dying.
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in psychogeriatric institutions and around bereavement support, this article proposes an exploratory reflection on the conditions under which a person can persist «at the edges of death». Distinguishing it from the notion of «individual», it defines the person as a relational entity which, because it is distributed across memories, narratives, and attachments, exists and can be discovered beyond the individual, embodied self. Care settings and funeral rituals are thus analysed as practices of instauration through which fragile or absent beings remain present insofar as they continue to affect those—relatives and professionals—who keep on sustaining their existence.
Monastic life is characterised by a strong focus on the community. The individual takes a back seat. Governed by the Liturgy of the Hours, monastic life unfolds in a single place. Monks and nuns pray, work, grow old, die, and are buried in the monastery cemetery. However, due to ageing and dependency, individual differences can reappear. The parenthesis opened by advanced old age challenges the priority of community imperatives over individual needs, thus allowing the individual to re-emerge, before the particularly unifying funeral rites bring them to a close.
Based in the fields of psychoanalytic clinical psychology and psychosociology, we draw upon certain findings from our research on end-of-life care during hospitalisation-at-home (HAD) to improve understanding of what becomes of a person at the threshold of their death. After initial theoretical discussion defining the persons and the organisations involved in palliative care at home, we structure our discussion around three critical points. The first concerns issues of identity that individuals encounter in their interactions within their social network. The second examines the home as a structure and territory of belonging, allowing individuals to limit the risks of narcissistic collapse of identity. Finally, the third subject concerns the relationship with time and certain unique timeframes that allow individuals to experience being alive until the very end. Our findings indicate that dying at home, far from being a time of withdrawal and separation, is a period in which individuals maintain connections with their past, the necessary present, and certain unforeseen relationships. Loved ones and caregivers play a stabilising role, bolstering an identity threatened by illness and the proximity of death. Many conflicts are persistent, and the home, in its most subjective and most specific sense—to be at home—supports the desire to return to oneself, living in a familiar and encompassing environment.
In Japan, there is a persistent disparity between the majority’s desire to die at home and its realisation by a minority. Based on observations conducted since September 2024 in a palliative care unit in Tokyo through anonymised interviews and dialogues, this article traces the transformation of a powerful desire—«to go home»—into silence, reminiscences, and «small desires» (rediscovering a flavour, seeing someone again, remaining in peace and quiet). Our analysis shows that this shift is neither a simple renunciation, nor a disappearance of the will, but rather a relational reconfiguration of desire, often supported by family, caregivers, and companions, and sometimes impeded, notably by institutional constraints and cultural norms. Drawing on concepts of universal vulnerability and interpersonal autonomy, we interpret silence as a possible relational language and form of active autonomy, and we discuss the practical implications: therapeutic adjustments, organisation of visits, and attention to the patient’s narrative.
Social anthropology highlights the plurality of social worlds that surround the idea of death and of the corpse. For our societies, contrary to a rationalist perspective, the corpse can remain the person and can engender distress regarding dissection, autopsies, tissue sampling and organ transplantation. The absence of a corpse can result in suffering due to not having said goodbye to the person, in the case, for example, of shipwrecks, crashes, or due to deliberate political will to erase traces of dissidents.
This article examines what effects the interview known as the ‘donation conversation’ may have on relatives regarding the symbolic status of the donor patient. After describing the transition from patient to dying person, which allows the issue of organ donation to be raised with the family, the wishes of their deceased or dying relative are invoked as the basis for discussion on the family’s decision to oppose or agree to organ donation. We describe the relatives’ adherence to this framework using the concept of «social survival,» constructed as a mirror image of social death. This phenomenon would then depict a model of the response from relatives expected by professionals, legitimising both the principles of the Caillavet Law and, therefore, the organ donation process itself, and thus justifying its designation as a «donation».
The ontology of deceased bodies bequeathed to science constitutes a kind of anthropological and socio-legal enigma that questions the notion of personhood, from a Maussian perspective, as a «category of the human mind». In this article, which draws on qualitative data collected during a study on the difficulties of the funeral ritual process in cases of body donations to science, we argue that the representation of these bodies involves affective, professional, ethical and legal issues. Understanding the social configuration surrounding body donations to science—primarily involving the donors, their relatives, the receiving scientists, and, more recently, the legislator—requires combining the perspectives of the actors involved, as well as disciplinary approaches, particularly historical, legal, and socio-anthropological ones. The analysis of the actors’ perspectives reveals a tension between a representation of corpses as «subjects» in a liminal situation and another as «objects» useful to science. The analysis of the history of this practice, the legal complexities, and recent legislative developments reveals the historicity and socially constructed nature of the representations of bodies bequeathed to science. Ultimately, it appears that the question of the ontology of these bodies cannot be resolved in the abstract, but must be based on the study of the forms of relationship constructed with these bodies and the forms of agency attributed to them.
This report describes a procedure of donation of organs after cardiac arrest, that is, of Maastricht 3 type, that took place in a French hospital in July 2019. Based on an ethnographic study in a neurointensive care unit, I describe the impressions that Maastricht 3 leaves on those who participate in it, the surprise it produces, the doubts it raises about what it is that resists dying in a «person», and the questions it poses about the difference between a living and a dead person.
Traduit de l'anglais par Anne Chapoutot Dans son celebre ouvrage sur la representation de la mort, Hertz, plus tard repris par de nombreux anthropologues, fait remarquer que de nombreuses cultures ne voient dans la mort ni un evenement ponctuel ni le franchissement d'une ligne sans epaisseur, mais un phenomene faisant partie integrante d'une longue evolution (Hertz 1907). Je souhaite m'attarder ici sur les consequences de cette simple observation ethnographique et montrer comment elle peut n...
Comment les médecins de l’obésité et influenceurs fitness qui vendent des programmes nutritionnels peuvent-ils légitimement prescrire de « bonnes habitudes de vie » pour changer les corps d’autrui ? Le croisement de deux enquêtes, menées auprès de ces professionnels, montre que la prise en charge repose sur des mesures (poids, taille, composition corporelle, etc.) qui permettent d’objectiver des écarts aux normes et de mettre en action les corps pour réduire ces écarts, tout en régulant les transformations. Dans l’interaction, nous observons une réorientation de la valeur à attribuer à certaines mesures (celles que mobilisent les spécialistes), plus qu’à d’autres (celles que mobilisent initialement les patients). Cependant, la valeur d’une mesure reste propre à un contexte, une situation, un patient donné. Cela rend le suivi humain de ces professionnels indispensable pour évaluer en situation, mais aussi mettre à distance occasionnellement les mesures, au profit d’une évaluation plus « intuitive ».
Soumis à l’impératif de la performance, le sport de haut niveau est perméable au projet anthropologique d’un corps augmenté (Queval, 2016). Or la matrice techno-numérique et ses promesses innovantes transforment les usages et les croyances en développant un terrain favorable pour toutes les dynamiques d’optimisation de la performance sportive, réelles ou fantasmées. Cet article questionne l’impact de cette culture de la data sur les pratiques et représentations d’entraîneurs sportifs professionnels. Figures centrales du processus de fabrication de l’excellence sportive, les entraîneurs ont des rapports ambivalents aux instruments numériques de récolte et traitement automatique des données. Les caractéristiques de la condition d’entraîneur sont déterminantes pour comprendre les dynamiques d’appropriation et de rejet, souvent entremêlées, qui qualifient leurs postures.
Alors qu’au début du xixe siècle la maîtrise de la matière par le corps est une qualité qui participe à la bonne gestion de l’atelier verrier, au fil des décennies elle devient un savoir-faire impliquant l’incorporation de procédés et des connaissances technico-scientifiques complexes, chimiques et physiques. L’engagement du corps se place ainsi au cœur de l’ensemble des valorisations socio-économiques qui légitiment l’activité du verrier. L’unité corps-matière est donc soumise à une tentative de restitution formelle, par le biais de publications techniques, qui aspirent à mesurer cette activité corporelle afin d’en faire une référence pour mesurer l’efficacité du travail. À l’aide d’un corpus constitué de manuels techniques couvrant l’intégralité du xixe siècle, cette contribution propose de réfléchir à cet effort de dévoilement du « secret » des verriers à travers l’analyse de la place du corps dans une métrologie ayant le but d’expliquer, évaluer et éventuellement enseigner les techniques de verrerie.
This article presents and comments on the archive included in the “Écho” section of this issue: Alain Wisner’s 1969 lecture “L’utilisation des variables physiologiques au cours du travail à faible charge physique”. In his talk, the ergonomist reviews a number of studies which have in common that they seek, through measurement, to assess the cost (in terms of physical health) of the mental effort we make in order to adapt to the constraints of our given tasks at work. Evaluating the human cost of mental work serves one purpose : to pinpoint abnormal working conditions that generate an extra cost (an expenditure of energy disproportionate to what the performance of the task is supposed to require). In his talk, Wisner focuses on studies that methodologically combine two models to assess the physiological extra cost of mental work: the psychological model of cognitive load and the physiological model of “activation theory”, which is a measure of the degree of vigilance or attention an organism pays to its environment.
