Prof. Annemarie Samuels Gives Department Talk: Narrating Immanent Finitude: Silence, Ambivalence, and an Ethics of Care at the End of Life in Indonesia
Narrating Immanent Finitude: Silence, Ambivalence, and an Ethics of Care at the End of Life in Indonesia
“In this talk I reflect on the ethical work of living with life-limiting illness and immanent death in conditions of marginalization. While such ethical work may include activist attempts to voice the silenced conditions of inequality, I suggest that ethical living with finitude may simultaneously rely on ambivalence, contradiction, and silence.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on HIV/AIDS in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I first discuss two narratives through which activists publicly counter stigmatization and silence, namely through an international discourse of HIV chronicity and through a regionally rooted narrative of having and giving a ‘positive life spirit’ (Indonesian: semangat). During fieldwork I found that activists, health care workers, and people living with HIV considered these narratives as enabling a healthy and ethical life and framed their expression as espousing acts of care for oneself and others that would create not only a better life in this world but also ethical merit to be taken along to the afterlife.
Yet, in the face of many around them dying of AIDS, people living with HIV also expressed their ambivalence about the possibilities and limits of these optimistic accounts. This often private, and relatively muted, ambivalence was crucial to their ethical efforts of making life livable in the face of dying – an effort that for many of them included a future beyond death. Although the ethical work of silence, ambivalence and contradiction often remains invisible in public narratives of health activism and in biomedical narratives of prognosis and denial, I conclude that it is vital to understanding the ways in which people create habitable spaces for living with life-limiting illness amidst marginalization.”
Bio
Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. She is the author of After the Tsunami: Disaster Narratives and the Remaking of Everyday Life in Aceh (University of Hawai’i Press 2019) and co-editor of Islam and the Limits of the State: Reconfigurations of Practice, Community, and Authority in Contemporary Aceh (Brill 2016, with R. Michael Feener and David Kloos) and Tracing Silences: Towards an Anthropology of the Unspoken and Unspeakable (Routledge 2023, with Ana Dragojlovic). She has extensive ethnographic fieldwork experience in Indonesia and has widely published on topics including rumor, disaster recovery, narratives and silences, HIV/AIDS, and end of life care. Her current research, funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant, focuses on the globalization of palliative care and ethnographically examines narratives and silences of care at the end of life.
