Abstract
What happens when we die? This article traces answers to this question posed to staff and residents of a nursing (frail care) home in small-town South Africa run by a Christian women’s charitable organization. The religious, cultural, and racial diversity of staff and residents, along with their different medical understandings of declining health and death constellate expansive perceptions of dying and life after death. Staff and residents share certainty about the continuity of a soul or spirit after death through a Christian God, although precise locations and modes of egress for these spiritual entities are uncertain. Heaven and hell are not strongly defined or taken for granted realities. A presentist rather than historical orientation strongly shapes the rhythms of daily life and the end of life in the home. Residents aim to find meaning in daily life and staff aim to find meaning in aiding residents in the final moments of life by being tenderly co-present. Overall, peoples’ perceptions of spatiotemporal transitions from life to the immediate after-life effectively complicate notions of immanence in the anthropology of morality, ethics, and religion. To use one informant’s terms, the end of life is “a mystery” which residents and staff engage in delicate orchestrations of carework.
Highlights
Despite the well-defined pathways for how life is supposed to end in institutional settings like hospitals or hospice, practical negotiations of treatment, caregiving, and decision-making lead people to experience death as an unsettled process.2 This article considers how residents and staff
Ones that I collected from residents like Babsie and Tina, and the Withuis staff, foreground a cultural metaphysics of dying
Douglas Bafford (2019) finds that older white South African evangelicals’ reflections on their country’s racist past are heightened in retirement and morally converge with their millenarian preparations. These findings open us to expansive visions or evaluative criteria of aging, dying, and temporality that older adults and their caregivers perceive, and how their aging-related and spiritual experiences reflect their historic and institutional setting, Taken altogether ethnographically, the diverse vantage points of residents and staff collapse presumed distinctions between past, present, and future, life and after-life, alertness and diminished cognitive functioning, and body and spirit
Summary
Despite the well-defined pathways for how life is supposed to end in institutional settings like hospitals or hospice, practical negotiations of treatment, caregiving, and decision-making lead people to experience death as an unsettled process.2 This article considers how residents and staff
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