The Maintenance of Life

Additional Book Details

This second edition comes ten years after the first book. A lot has changed in the greater context of healthcare since the first edition with the passage of the U.S. Affordable Care Act in 2010 and the assault on healthcare heralded by the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Up until the 2016 elections, assisted dying policy was on the upswing around the world with laws passing in several countries and in a number of states in the U.S. The U.S. and the world is in a period of social unrest and where end-of-life policy will fall is just one of the many issues that hang in the balance. What is clear is that the landscape of death and dying has changed. Today, death most often does not happen in an instant, it is more typically a long process of life mixed in with decline and social losses that eventually and sometimes many years after an initial onset of terminal or serious illness culminates in some combination of social and biological death.

The Maintenance of Life is about what has developed in one present-day society to address social death and modern dying. It is based on a 15-month qualitative study of home death in the Netherlands with general practitioners, end-of-life patients and their family members. The book develops from two study findings: (1) that euthanasia in practice is predominantly a discussion, which only rarely culminates in a euthanasia death and (2) that euthanasia talk in many ways serves a palliative function, staving off social death by providing participants with a venue for processing meaning, giving voice to suffering, and reaffirming social bonds and self-identity at the end of Dutch life.

Through the mainstream practice of euthanasia talk, space has been created within healthcare which helps people live longer as active participants engaged in Dutch social networks at the end of life. Using direct observation and in-depth interviews with patients, families and physicians, this book looks critically at Dutch euthanasia policy and broader end-of-life practices from a cultural perspective and in comparison with U.S. end-of-life practices and policies. It concludes with a discussion of what lessons the U.S. and other countries may take from the Dutch experience maintaining life at the end of life.

The author received the Margaret Mead Award for The Maintenance of Life in recognition by the Society for Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for younger scholars who interpret anthropological data and principles in ways that make them meaningful and accessible to a broadly concerned public.

The Maintenance of Life is recommended by Choice Magazine for all levels/libraries.

This book is part of the Ethnographic Studies in Medical Anthropology Series, edited by Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew Strathern, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh.