Front and Back Covers, Volume 42, Number 2. April 2026

Abstract

Front and back cover caption, volume 42 issue 2

END-OF-LIFE CARE

In this special issue, guest editors Ben Kasstan-Dabush, Samuel Sami Everett and Yulia Egorova bring together six ethnographic contributions on end-of-life care. Sean Weisgerber's work on paper This might not last sits on the covers – four words that say, with economy, what the issue examines at length.

The phrase arcs across an ochre field built from several washes of prune nectar. The white block letters reveal the raw paper beneath, beginning upper left, ending lower right, its centre dropping out of the frame. The missing middle is the formal argument. What should hold the sentence together falls away, and readers complete it themselves. The ambiguity is deliberate and multiple. ‘This might not last’ can be a prognosis, a hope, a warning or uncertainty. Applied to a moment of care – a good day, a period of remission, loved ones still gathered – it names the thought that cannot quite be spoken aloud. The ochre ground gives the work warmth without comfort.

Dying is rarely the clean event that clinical categories suggest. A shift from curative to palliative care reorganizes what counts as treatment, what counts as truth and who gets to know what. Patients, families and clinicians navigate these reorganizations under pressure, often without shared frameworks, sometimes without a shared language. The anthropological contribution is to stay close to that process, in NHS wards, in Parisian hospitals, in hospice archives, in a multifaith space in Marseille, and to ask what care looks like when life reaches its limit.

The contributions here pursue that question across clinical, visual and methodological registers. They examine intervention and acceptance, repatriation and belonging, institutional ideology and its silences, truth-telling across clinical, cultural and religious difference, and the ethical weight fieldworkers carry when they know what patients do not.

Four words.

The rest takes longer.