At the end of life, our comfort lies mainly in relationships.
In this book, Daniel Miller, one of the world's leading anthropologists,
examines the social worlds of people suffering from terminal or
long-term illness. Threading together a series of personal stories,
based on interviews conducted with patients of an English hospice,
Miller draws out the implications of these narratives for our
understanding of community, friendship, and kinship, but also loneliness
and isolation.
This is a book about people's lives, not their deaths: about the hospice
patients rather than the hospice. It focuses on the comfort given by
friends, carers and relatives through both face-to-face relations and,
increasingly, online communication. Miller asks whether the loneliness
and isolation he uncovers is the result of a decline of English patterns
of socialising, or their continuation.
This moving and deeply humane book combines warmth and sharp observation
with anthropological insight and practical suggestions for the use of
media by the hospice. It will be of interest not only to students and
scholars of anthropology, sociology, social policy and media and
cultural studies, but also to healthcare professionals and, indeed, to
anyone who would like to know more about the role of relationships in
the final stage of our lives.
