The Dynamics of Choices at the End of Life for First and Second-Generation Migrants. A Case Study Based on Participant Observation During Hospitalization
This study is based on ethnographic notes taken when I accompanied my 90 year-old father through the emergency board, hospital admissions and medical care required by a rapid deterioration of a gangrened lower leg. It explores the complex power relations between the institutional system of patient care delivery, on one hand, and, on the other, the trajectory and becoming of a patient and his existential knowledge, produced once he is confronted to the socio-demographic limitative factors of the societal norms at play in nowadays urban hospitals. The end-of-life choices that first and second generations of intra-European migrants must face mobilised transnational and transgenerational cultures within a personal day to day emotional support and care delivery. This understudied aspect of the informal care within the hospital board could fill a gap within the medical normative structures regarding end-of-life patients. In their specific context, intra-European oldest migrants contemplate the “borders”, spatial and temporal, of their personal lives: they become embodied vehicles for cultural memory transmission processes, which help to coin new, (un)earthed (hi)stories, recently un-silenced.