Senior Research Seminar with Dr Annemarie Samuels (Leiden University)

Caring beyond death: Narrative reorientation and the ethics of recognizing dying in Indonesia

Dr. Annemarie Samuels (Leiden University)

In a time of ever expanding, and expensive, medical possibilities to postpone death, in which dying is increasingly shaped by prognosis and decision making, how do people orient towards (and away) from a looming end of life? Drawing on ethnographic research in the Indonesian province of Aceh, in this talk I use a narrative approach to think through the ethical stakes of people’s orientations to death and an afterlife. Building on an anthropological perspective on narrative that shows that narrative is oftentimes not straightforward, coherent and linear, but that our everyday lives are rather shaped by and through narratives that are nonlinear, ambiguous, open-ended and suffused by the unsaid and unspeakable – in whispers, pauses, offhand remarks and unfinished sentences – I explore what attention to narrative’s subjunctive mode can tell us about grappling with uncertainty and finitude, particularly in the face of death. Ethnographically, I highlight a setting in which rather than relying on medical prognosis, people orient themselves to different signs of impending death to navigate intertwined biomedical and Islamic religious temporal registers and conflicting ethical demands of care.

Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her research focuses on end-of-life care, narrative and silence, and health inequalities in Indonesia and beyond. She is co-editor of the recently published collections ‘Tracing silences: towards an anthropology of the unspoken and unspeakable’ in History & Anthropology and ‘Silent reverberations: potentialities of attuned listening’ in American Anthropologist. She is an editorial committee member of the Annual Review of Anthropology and principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded project ‘Globalizing palliative care: a multi-sited ethnographic study of practices, policies, and discourses of care at the end of life.'