Dancing Through the Perfect Storm: Encountering Illness and Death in the Field and Beyond

Abstract

This chapter is about uncertainties. The uncertainties of life and death, crystallizing in the face of a life-threatening disease. The uncertainties of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. The uncertainties of "doing fieldwork" on life-threatening diseases, while one's loved ones face illness and death. The chapter is about the unsettling aspect of these unknowns and the impossibility of preparing for them. Conducting fieldwork included ethnographic work in transplant clinics and at hospital bedsides, talking to people suffering from cancer and other life-threatening diseases. A challenging topic in itself, the author's research coincided with a close friend's cancer diagnosis, treatment and finally death. The chapter wants to approach the question of how the author's personal experiences of illness and death during fieldwork affected her ethnographic research and analysis. She weaves this very personal account together with a discussion of anthropological fieldwork, emphasizing the relational spaces that open up through this form of inquiry. The anthropological mode of research, with its emphasis on long-term, in-depth qualitative data collection, entails that the actual "doing" of anthropology very often turns into a hybrid venture between professional and personal lives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)