1 Julien Simard, M.Sc. Département d’anthropologie, Université de Montréal. Montréal, Québec zmardjulien@gmail.com EASA Medical Anthropology Network AAA Society for Medical Anthropology Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalunya Juny 12-14, 2013 Encountering death in a palliative care setting. Fieldwork experience and analysis from Montreal, Canada. 10 minutes. During a year‐long fieldwork that I realized in 2011 in a palliative care institution, I encountered cancer and death, but mainly the people who work within this liminal space and alongside liminal bodies, not fully alive, but on their way to something else. The ethnographic encounter that took place between me, the staff and the dying people and their families was mainly realized with, through and about emotions. The main norm regarding the embodied responses to death in this institutionnal setting was a complex control and release system of emotions, with a tendency of the staff to see death and dying as a « beautiful passage », even a « gift », while being able to cry sometimes and « let go ». Something that appeared quite loose in the first place – the right of everyone to approach death as (s)he feels – seemed in fact quite stiff, pointing directly to the presence of what Castra (2003) names a « ritual of pacification », a systematized evacuation of the violent pulsions related to death in palliative care environments. The main challenge of the encounter is to name this social fact and give back to the actors this ethnographic data in a constructive way, while understanding that good intentions and charismatic values, in Weber’s sense, are the basic motives for working with dying people. In fact, my fieldwork adresses directly the emotional dynamics and normativization of the professionalized accompaniment of the dying. Keywords : palliative care, dying, cancer, good death, pacification, emotions. Thanks : to MEOS (Médicament comme objet social), Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Montreal, FESP (University of Montreal), and Annette Leibing for their support.