Robert Desjarlais is professor of anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College.
摘要
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.
目次
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
