Could She Be Dying? Dis‐Orders of Reality around Death in an American Hospital

Dying in an American hospital is a site of conflict among clinicians with competing orders of reality differing from each other and from the patient and family. Anthropological studies of death have often shown that the participants share a cosmology in common. Hospitalized patients may die among strangers, clinicians who exert different forms of control and attempt to make their own meanings out of the dying process. Their efforts can interfere with the patient and family's opportunity to reconnect with their life worlds at the time of death. A particular case from a research project on the dying process in the hospital is used to illustrate these points.