Abstract
This article aims to describe how actors (terminal cancer patients, their families and related medical staffs including physicians, nurses, social workers and priests) narrate and construct texts to face cancer and death. The texts include local knowledge of ‘‘cancer,’’ mysterious experience in dying process, family relationship, relationship of patients/families and medical staffs, funeral and memory of the dead. The actors create texts during curing process and adapt to fatal illness attack by given cultural tradition, social institution, value and belief in everyday life world and medical field. It is not only about death attitude, but also about reproducing human and society, about enacting and reconstructing medical ideology, belief, and knowledge and about power for doing cultural discourse and social construction.From fieldwork in wards and interview with subjects, we could say that everyone co-constructs medical field, deeply immerses into dominating context and resists it at the same time. Albeit patients and families living in the social world, they don’t agree with each other about death attitude and evaluation of medical staffs’ reaction. Sometimes medical staffs at similar social stratum don’t have fixed behavior pattern, though there is given norm for curing (caring) patients and (or) families. Physicians may cooperate with nurses and families not caring about patients’ thought. Patients, families and nurses believe in mysterious experience in dying process, but physicians don’t. So patients and families create family relationship discursively. Also they and medical staffs make their relationship diversely.There are theoretical and practical implications in research consequences. In the theoretical part, firstly it illustrates how the actors’ performance at different ward’s stage under social-cultural background to fulfill medical profession. Considering actors, wards and hospitals as different bodies, all of them are reproduced by the same infrastructure, which is a power (force) network enacted by actors, stages and social-cultural background. This result could be compared with the concept of “power” proposed by M. Foucault or that of “force” by V. Turner. Secondly it explains how funeral is practiced and what everyday life world is constructed. The practicing and constructing process could be compared with “social constructionism” suggested by P. Berger and T. Luckmann or “the logic of practice” by P. Bourdieu. In the practical part, it makes medical staffs concern more about the thinking of patients and families in dying process and suggests that health–promoting departments and medical schools should plan medical and life-death education with holistic view in the future.