Subject to Death

If any anthropologist living today can illuminate our dim understanding of death’s enigma, it is Robert Desjarlais. With Subject to Death, Desjarlais provides an intimate, philosophical account of death and mourning practices among Hyolmo Buddhists, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people from Nepal. He studies the death preparations of the Hyolmo, their specific rituals of griev...

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If any anthropologist living today can illuminate our dim understanding of death’s enigma, it is Robert Desjarlais. With Subject to Death, Desjarlais provides an intimate, philosophical account of death and mourning practices among Hyolmo Buddhists, an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people from Nepal. He studies the death preparations of the Hyolmo, their specific rituals of grieving, and the practices they use to heal the psychological trauma of loss. Desjarlais’s research marks a major advance in the ethnographic study of death, dying, and grief, one with broad implications. Ethnologically nuanced, beautifully written, and twenty-five years in the making, Subject to Death is an insightful study of how fundamental aspects of human existence—identity, memory, agency, longing, bodiliness—are enacted and eventually dissolved through social and communicative practices.

Note on Transliteration
Prelude
“Ama, khoi?”
Poiesis in life and death
Theorizing death
I. The Impermanence of Life
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Note on Transliteration
Prelude
“Ama, khoi?”
Poiesis in life and death
Theorizing death
I. The Impermanence of Life
A good death, recorded
Impossibly and intensively
Creative subtraction
This life
Attachment
An ethics of care
Oral wills are harder than stone
Seeing the face
Liberation upon hearing
The pulse of life
II. Passing from the Body
Death, impermanence has arisen
Transference of consciousness
Between
Field of apparitions
Shifting, Not Dying
“Yes, it’s death”
Corpses, fashioned
Bodies that wound
The five sensual pleasures
Consoling mourners
Alternate rhythms
III. Dissolution
Trouble
Eliminating the corpse
Burnt offerings
Thirst
Ashes, burnt bones
Finality
IV. Transmutations
Resting place
Ritual poiesis, in time
Dragging, hooking, naming
Explanations, face to face
“No form, no sound . . .”
Generating merit
Blank white
Showing the way
Those dangerous supplements
V. After Life
Made for forgetting
The enigma of mourning
Staring into the sun
Afterword

Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
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