ABSTRACT
The care of the dying is a strongly gender-related practice and Finnish caregivers for the dying are traditionally, typically and predominantly women. This chapter, which is based on textual and ethnographical research published in Present, Naked, Pure: A Study in the Anthropology of Religion on Women by the Side of the Dying (Utriainen, 1999), analyses the embodiment of the situation by the deathbed and its often religious and ethical imagery. This imagery depicts the caregiver as inherently feminine and maternal. The chapter shows how various symbolic and imaginary practices continually construct, maintain and reinforce the social and embodied practice of caring for the dying as more apt for women than for men.
