An Anthropological Lens on End-of-life Transitions and Liminality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
T he end of life and death are moments of transition and liminality (Jordan et al. 2015).Without clear markers to establish the threshold at which a person begins to die (Kaufman and Morgan 2005), several transitions nonetheless mark the non-linear trajectories of people who are on this pathway: a time of illness, a time of end-of-life (hours, days before death), a time of death (Fortin and Le Gall 2025) and a time beyond death (Lavoie et al. 2009).More precisely, this liminality is an in-between phase, a transition between the representations of "no longer" and "not yet" (Zulato et al. 2025).Introduced by Arnold van Gennep at the start of the last century (1969 [1909]) through a study on the rites of passage, the concept of liminality clarifies the phases of transformation from one state to another: the phase of separation from an initial state, the liminal phase where the person experiences their marginalization in relation to a normalized state, and lastly, the phase of a new state of being.As expressed by Victor Turner (1977, 37), the liminal phase is the one that "evades ordinary cognitive classification, too, for their neither-this-northat, here-nor-there, one-thing-not-the-other. [...] They are in a sense 'dead' to the world, and liminality has many symbols of death."Following the example of van Gennep and beyond the phenomenon of rites of passage, this concept has been rethought many times since in an effort to better grasp the social phenomena experienced by humans.Existence is made up of routines and repetitions, but is also punctuated by situations that are outside of "everyday normality" (Thomassen 2014, 2), such as the experiences of dying and death touched upon in this issue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".