Anticipating an unwanted future: euthanasia and dementia in the Netherlands
In: The journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Band 27, Heft 4, S. 815-831
ISSN: 1467-9655
AbstractThis ethnographic exploration of anticipation draws on fieldwork among people with dementia and their families in the Netherlands. I examine how requests for euthanasia by people with dementia offer insight into the work of anticipation, revealing it to be a temporal orientation through which the future is made tangible. Imagining a future with dementia may prompt some people to request euthanasia, but timing such measures is extremely difficult and often results in deferral. Contributing to an emerging anthropology of time, I argue that anticipation is a process of establishing, collapsing, and renegotiating the temporal distance between present and future, bringing the future into the present while also, and simultaneously, keeping the future at bay as a continuous 'not yet'.