Belonging at the end of life: genealogies of 'culturally specific' nursing home care in Europe

Research has shown that minoritised communities are facing significant inequities in their access to and experience of end of life care. In this chapter, we explore ‘culturally specific’ nursing home care, a little-documented form of end of life care that seeks to address such inequities. Drawing on ethnographic research in an ‘Indisch’ nursing home in the Netherlands and a ‘Mediterranean’ nursing home ward in Switzerland, we trace the genealogies of culturally specific nursing home care in post-colonial, post-migration Europe. While culturally specific services are regularly faced with charges of ‘ghettoisation’, we show how culturally specific nursing home care is related to histories of violence and discrimination that are usually not recognised by mainstream care providers. If eldercare is intrinsically a question of rights and politics, culturally specific spaces of care, by challenging the mainstream, are fundamentally political spaces, and their existence is intimately related to ideas of deservingness and belonging.