This book explores the lived experiences of individuals diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), focusing on their daily lives and the challenges they face. It delves into the support provided by medical professionals and loved ones, highlighting the collaborative efforts to navigate the complexities of the illness. Through an anthropological lens, the narrative examines how these relationships shape the understanding and meaning of life with ALS, offering insights into resilience and adaptation in the face of neurodegeneration.
The first book length anthropological study of voluntary assisted dying in Switzerland, Leaving is a narrative account of five people who ended their lives with assistance. Stavrianakis places his observations of the judgment to end life in this way within a larger inquiry about how to approach and understand the practice of assisted suicide, which he characterizes as operating in a political, legal, and medical “parazone,” adjacent to medical care and expertise. Frequently, observers too rapidly integrate assisted suicide into moral positions that reflect sociological and psychological commonplaces about individual choice and its social determinants. Leaving engages with core early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and sociological texts arguing for a contemporary approach to the phenomenon of voluntary death, seeking to learn from such conceptual repertoires, as well as to acknowledge their limits. Leaving concludes on the anthropological question of how to account for the ethics of assistance with suicide: to grasp the actuality and composition of the ethical work that goes on in the configuration of a subject, one who is making a judgment about dying, with other participants and observers, the anthropologist included.
