Afterlife Reverberations: Practices of Un/naming in Ethnographic Research on Assisted Suicide

Practices of Un/naming in Ethnographic Research on Assisted Suicide

Abstract

Can ethical choices outlive the people who make them? In order to explore this uestion, this article draws on ethnographic research on transnational assisted suicide to uestion afterlife implications of practices of un/naming, particularly the use of anonymisation and pseudonyms. Assisted suicide is organised around a specic politics of naming that animates its ght for social and political recognition but which contradicts anthropology’s once long-standing disposition towards anonymity as a form of protecting research participants. This dissonance creates a situation where one of anthropology’s main tools of protection risks eopardising the political struggles and ght for recognition of the same people it seeks to protect. Against this background, this reflection argues that empirically researching death and dying reuires an additional sensitivity to un/naming practices. Thus, I propose the notion of afterlife reverberations, that is, the aects and expectations that ripple in the aftermath of a research participant’s death from their research choices made in life.