Anthropologica

Notes from the Editors

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier — 2025-12-17

Notes des rédacteurs

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier — 2025-12-17

An Anthropological Lens on End-of-life Transitions and Liminality

Sylvie Fortin — 2025-12-17

Transitions et liminalité en fin de vie : Perspectives anthropologiques

Sylvie Fortin — 2025-12-17

Good and Bad Deaths, or Dying as a Temporal Sequence

Sylvie Fortin — 2025-12-17

Based on pre-pandemic research conducted in Montreal among relatives who supported a child, an adult, or a senior through illness and end of life, this paper discusses the time of dying as a temporal sequence. Identified as the (long) time of illness, the time of end of life (the hours or days preceding death) and the time of death, each time in this temporal sequence had a bearing on whether a death was perceived as good or bad by the over 100 relatives we met with. The end-of-life trajectories we documented bring into question the elements that contribute to the many-sided notions of good or bad deaths as they intersect without offering unambiguous points of reference. When people refer to a bad death, are they referring to the time of illness, the time of end of life, or the time of death? The imbalance between these different times or, on the contrary, their concordance gives rise to the perceptions of a bad death or a good death that are at the heart of the “dying with dignity” discourse.

Chemotherapy Bells and Liminality in Advanced Cancer Care

Alyson Stone — 2025-12-17

Ringing a bell at the end of chemotherapy treatment has become a pervasive practice across cancer centres in Canada and the US. The ritual fails to accommodate the unique position of patients diagnosed with advanced cancer who may remain on chemotherapy treatment up to the end of life. Drawing on 17 months of fieldwork in a Canadian cancer hospital and classical liminality scholarship, I argue that the modern proliferation of cancer treatments produces a liminal space, an ambiguous territory that exists between the hope for a cure and the imminence of death. I show how patients’ liminal status becomes concealed by the bell ringing ceremony. While the ritual is meant to signal transition to reincorporation, it inspires ambivalence on the part of advanced cancer patients precisely because, for them, the end of chemotherapy does not translate as aggregation into the cancer-free world. Witnesses such as nurses, family, and friends should be aware of the bell’s heavy symbolism attached to patients’ uncertain futures and recognize that a myriad of conflicting reactions are possible. The focus on treatment keeps patients in an extended time of illness, preventing them from preparing for the end of life.

Negotiating End-of-Life Decisions

Louise Chartrand — 2025-12-17

When someone is very ill in Canada, the individual is taken under charge of the medical system and put on one of two distinct paths for handling the situation: either acute or palliative care. In the acute path, all available medical technology is deployed to save lives and avoid death, while the main objective of the palliative path is comfort, as death becomes inevitable and expected. The two paths are ordinarily seen as part of a linear process, wherein acute care is initially deployed and palliative care only after acute care is determined ineffective. In practice, however, the two paths are intermittent, as the reasoning repertoires that guide care practices along both paths are constantly renegotiated by care teams. This article follows the decision-making process regarding the use of the ventilator for two individuals at the end of their lives as their care teams alternate between legal, curing, and care repertoires. The entanglement of these repertoires leads to unexpected care practices as patients are shifted from one path to another. In both cases, the transition from acute to palliative care was nonlinear, and the purposes of the possible medical actions that could be taken along the two paths kept changing as events unfolded.

Seuil moral de l’acceptable

Sabrina Lessard — 2025-12-17

In modern Western societies, the experience of dying is often intertwined with that of being very old. Paradoxically, and despite the social context that gives everyone at the end of their life the right to “die with dignity,” the care surrounding death (palliative care and end-of-life) is significantly less likely to be provided to people over the age of 84. Based on stories about the very old who died in old-age institutions between 2017 and 2018, this ethnographic study focuses on the moral threshold from which the death of a very old person becomes legitimate. Informed, on the one hand, by the social imaginary surrounding the very old and, on the other hand, by the concept of the value of life, we addressed the construction of the legitimacy of life and death, the care allowing for the preservation of a liminal state, and, lastly, the threshold from which care intended to prolong life becomes unacceptable. Through these stories, we aim to contribute to a deeper understanding of the nuanced value of life and death in our aging society.

A New Category of Death

Ellen Badone — 2025-12-17

Since June 2016, federal law in Canada has permitted eligible adults to request medical assistance in dying (MAiD). Until March 2021, however, the law stipulated that only those whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable” were eligible to access MAiD. At that time, the legislation was changed to permit MAiD for anyone with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition,” including mental illness. For the latter category, however, a series of delays in enacting the legislation has postponed it until March 2027. Using publicly available sources, including testimony at Senate hearings on this issue, this paper explores debates among psychiatrists on the issue of extending MAiD to those suffering solely from mental illness. While some psychiatrists claim that the denial of MAiD for grievous and irremediable mental illness is paternalistic and discriminates against the mentally ill, others argue that there is a lack of scientific evidence to support the idea that any mental illness is irremediable and that high-quality mental healthcare can alleviate suffering, making MAiD unnecessary. Still others point to the vulnerability of people with mental illness and their potential lack of capacity for decision-making, as well as to inequities in access to mental healthcare despite Canada’s publicly funded healthcare system. This paper analyzes these competing discourses and argues that one stems from an ethical stance of reasoning from first principles, while the other is based on a feminist ethic of care. Additionally, I suggest that the arguments against MAiD for grievous and irremediable mental illness are rooted in Cartesian dualism, which posits a clear distinction between mind and body. Ultimately, I conclude that MAiD, as a new conceptual category of death, remains in a liminal state, and that the debates over MAiD in Canada also reflect debates about the nature of embodied life.

Spiritual Transitions at the End of Life

Rachel Cummings — 2025-12-17

This article considers the liminality of dying through the lens of “deathbed experiences”: reports of events occurring towards the end of life subject to multiple, potentially conflicting explanations, both medical and transcendent. Examples include a dying person reporting conversation with a deceased relative or reaching towards something unseen. While deeply meaningful and metaphysically significant to some, others explain them in material terms: as opioid toxicity, delirium or similar. These differing explanations bring an ontological liminality into the clinical realm. Based on ethnographic research within a UK hospice and 42 interviews with palliative care staff, this piece puts deathbed experiences in conversation with anthropology’s “ontological turn.” It compares the responses of clinicians to those of ethnographers confronting ontological difference. Drawing specifically on the methodological strain within this literature, it argues for care in such moments to be informed by “recursivity.” The article considers the consequences of this recursive form of care more broadly with reference to the biopsychosocial model. It ends with a discussion of how to do research about recursive care in a suitably recursive way.

Pratiques de crémation, mise en urne et disposition des cendres

Geraldine Mossiere — 2025-12-17

In the context of increasing instances of mortuary cremation, I examine the material dimension of funeral ritual creativity, focusing on the rituals surrounding cremation, ash disposal practices and the relational dynamics underlying ritual choice. Drawing on notions of ritual creativity as well as anthropological knowledge on religious materiality, I describe funeral rituals that involve cremation processes, and explore the role of the urn and ashes in the ritual arrangements put in place, particularly in mobilizing the subjectivity of the actors and staging the mourning experience. Because these innovations cannot fill the symbolic void left by loss, they are also the theater in which social relations and emotional, social and spiritual tensions unfold. It follows that rituals are not always as effective as they could be in paving the passage of the bereaved, as the material presence of the deceased maintains a certain porosity between the world of the living and that of the departed.

Orcas: Our Shared Future

Darcie DeAngelo — 2025-12-17

Resounding Resistance in Rebecca Belmore’s VALUE

Kelsey Doyle — 2025-12-17

Fruits frais, corps brisés : Les ouvrier agricoles migrants aux États-Unis, par Seth M. Holmes

Alexis Smith — 2025-12-17

Notre nouvelle nature. Guide de terrain de l’Anthropocène, par Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman, Saxena et Feifei Zhou

Émile Duchesne — 2025-12-17

“Live right off the Land and Water”

Charles Menzies — 2025-12-17

Drawing from community-based research in the author’s home First Nation, Gitxaała, this paper documents an articulation between a First Nations economy and the insertion of capitalism within their territories. Voices of Gitxaała hereditary leaders, matriarchs, and harvesters are prioritized and emphasized. The story that unfolds is of the cultural reliance and persistence of Gitxaała people in the face of economic transition.

River Energies

David Jaclin — 2025-12-17

From 2024 and its spring débâcle to 2025’s first fall snow, an ethnographical collective of researchers from the University of Ottawa took off from campus for two ‘‘river semesters.’’ Following a speculative drop of water taken from the Kichissippi River (the Ottawa River in English or rivière des Outaouais in French), we fieldworked in, on and around water for an experience in elemental anthropology. We engaged with the various circulations sustained by the river flow, at times geo-chemical, at times eco-cosmological, always anthropogenic. From the sacred Anishinaabe island of Asinabka, to the adjacent massive dam of Chaudière Falls, through the headquarters of Brookfield Energy (a major hydroelectricity trading firm), to the multimillion-dollar riverfront development called Zibi—with its net zero dream of community living and neighbouring toilet paper factory that heats buildings in the winter—we regarded this sensitive anthropological confluence as a saturated flow (following Ruiz and Jue (2022)). A flow where water is, disparately and at times concomitantly, looked upon as a natural resource, a valuable landscape, a precious witness of perilous climate events to come, an alluring promise, a discomforting oracle or a forthcoming expansion of capital. Along the flooded banks of this continuously changing watercourse, which once was a highway for Indigenous peoples to travel, trade, and strive, and where the parliament of a rather young state now sits, we investigate the pulsating milieu where everything that is to come seems to run from.

“I have to do so much more work… to let them know I’m different”

Victoria Clowater — 2025-12-17

Nonbinary Ontarians may now get an X gender marker on IDs and birth certificates, and gender markers have been removed from Ontario health cards. These changes are part of a broader movement to prevent discrimination against nonbinary and transgender people in Canada. Nonetheless, those who adopt X markers still find that the gender binary structures their experiences in institutional contexts in ways that render nonbinary existence unthinkable. This paper explores the shortcomings of gender marker reform by considering how, to have their identities recognized, nonbinary people must initiate institutional change themselves. By bringing Ahmed’s (2021; 2019) work on complaint into conversation with reproductive labour, this paper discusses how nonbinary people must labour to reproduce conditions that allow for their existence as nonbinary. While gender marker reforms may help dismantle binary logics, the current implementation of gender marker expansion and removal in Ontario cannot accomplish this.