Abstract
“The mortality of human beings is at 100 per cent”, Prof. Raymond Voltz, the head of the palliative care unit being part of my field sites, humorously pointed out in late 2013. However, what it actually feels like to die is hard to grasp by looking at statistics and probabilities, or by asking non-dying persons what they think about dying. Nevertheless, contextualizing the situation of the research participants as well as the field sites with a few instances of quantitative data will help to get a better picture of how dying usually takes place in Western Germany. Subsequently, the organizational and institutional backgrounds of dying processes taking place in Germany will be sketched.
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Notes
- 1.
If they do, they are likely to be categorized as paranoid or hypochondriac, both regarded as pathological conditions and demanding therapeutic intervention (Dr. Z., personal communication, September 2014).
- 2.
The initiating moment of a dying process falls together with having received a terminal diagnosis in Germany: See chapter 3 of this thesis.
- 3.
See Palliativzentrum Köln Festschrift (2015).
- 4.
For details of the economic aspects of palliative care in Germany, see Marckmann et al. (2012).
- 5.
Following the idea of tracing issues that are relevant to the research participants instead of imposing the researcher’s own presuppositions and interests; see e.g. Davies (2008).
- 6.
Similarly, Rosenthal (2002) and Heimerl (1999) report positive effects on the subjective well-being, if persons in existential crises are encouraged to talk about what bothers them.
- 7.
Further thoughts on the interrelations of Ethics Committees and anthropologists are presented by Riessmann & Mattingly (2005), Dilger (2015).
- 8.
The exact reasons for this were not explained to us. It happened supposedly because I found informants besides the ones that state hospitals allowed me to see under the supervision of hospital management staff. I looked for informants besides those the hospital officials presented to me because the fieldwork allowed by hospital managers included being watched by officials during fieldwork. The presence of the officials resulted in informants being afraid to tell me anything, because they feared that their saying a wrong word about their treatments could lead to their receiving worse treatment.
- 9.
How unfavorable it is to get severely ill persons’ nonverbal intentions wrong can be demonstrated by relating an episode from my fieldwork in China: without my native assistant, I would not have interpreted the courageous smile and happy photograph-showing of my first Chinese informant appropriately. After one conversation, I told my assistant I was surprised how this informant managed to fight so hard for any option of a cure despite doctors telling her she was incurably ill (which she, however, did not interpret as “I have to die soon, there is no doubt”). My assistant had a totally different perception: by showing photos of her granddaughter, our informant was telling us clearly that “This lady badly fears possibly leaving her granddaughter behind. Everyone can imagine that there will be nobody taking care of her granddaughter as soon as grandma is dead. That’s what she told you.” My native assistant regarded the informant’s smile as “incredibly sad”, and advised me to ask indirectly and carefully about her feelings. In the later course of research, it became apparent that I would have hurt the ill lady’s feelings badly if I continued to ask about her feelings at those times when she showed pictures of her granddaughter.
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Menzfeld, M. (2018). Fieldwork with dying persons. In: Anthropology of Dying. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19826-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19826-8_2
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