This article examines how institutional frameworks in South Korea erase non-legal caregiving relationships within hospice and palliative care environments. Drawing on seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in a hospice ward, the study delineates how patients are categorized as “unclaimed” despite the presence of long-term companions, friends, or cohabitants who provide intimate end-of-life care. It further explores how these exclusions extend beyond dying itself, shaping post-mortem decision-making and the institutional recognition of grief. Legal frameworks rooted in the hojeok (family registry) continue to dictate who is authorized to grieve, make post-mortem decisions, or be acknowledged as kin. Through two case studies, the article demonstrates how bureaucratic classifications function as moral technologies that erase relational labor and constrain affective ties. Engaging feminist care ethics and anthropological theories of relatedness, the article contends that unclaimed death is not the absence of kinship, but the result of its legal misrecognition. By elucidating the everyday mechanisms of exclusion, the study advocates for a reevaluation of recognition, care, and kinship at the end of life.

Authors:
Seok Joo Youn, Washington University in St. Louis, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Seok Joo Youn is an MPH/Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, researching end-of-life care, aging, and kinship in Korean hospitals, focusing on hospice spaces, caregiving, and changing medical cultures.

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