Autopsy, Deathways and Intercultural Healthcare in the southern Peruvian Andes

While death remains a popular topic for anthropology, relatively few ethnographic accounts consider the modern bureaucratic processes accompanying it. One such process is public health autopsy, which scholars have largely taken for granted. Existing analyses have analysed it as a form of ‘cultural brokering’ and autopsy reluctance in communities is seen, within both medical and cultural models, as a matter of ontological difference between incommensurable scientific and spiritual cosmologies. This article presents an ethnographic case study of the disagreement between a biomedical practitioner and the bereaved family on the death of a teenager who died of an unknown illness. The family’s wish to hold a wake, as is customary in the rural Peruvian Andes, clashed with the doctor’s mandate to determine the cause of death through autopsy. However, the details of the disagreement and the wider context of the deceased’s health-seeking itinerary suggest that ontological contradictions alone do not adequately explain the disagreement, but must be considered alongside the social relations in which these actors were embedded. Administrative state processes of certification, often overlooked by the anthropology of death in favour of more striking responses and rituals, are shown to be analytically vital to how communities negotiate mourning and grieving.<p></p>