End of life – Introduction

This special issue introduces six ethnographic contributions on end‐of‐life care, emerging from a workshop on Ethnographies of Endings held at Durham University in 2024. Drawing on fieldwork in Britain, France, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and India, the articles examine how institutional frameworks, clinical, bureaucratic and visual, encounter forms of human particularity they cannot accommodate. The introduction situates the collection within anthropological debates about palliative care, ageing populations and the ethics of assisted dying, arguing that a shift from curative to palliative treatment reorganises what counts as care, truth and time. The six contributions are organised around three paired concerns: the competing logics embedded in end‐of‐life medicine; the mediation of dying through visual and material culture; and the methodological politics of disclosure in fieldwork settings. Together they suggest that the distance between institutional provision and lived experience is not a problem to be resolved but the productive tension ethnography is best placed to hold.