Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepalas Yolmo Buddhists

1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-0-520-23588-5
Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR

Buch, Englisch, Band 2, 406 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 567 g

Reihe: Ethnographic Studies in Subjectivity

Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal.

It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Desjarlais, Robert R.

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Physische Anthropologie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Kultur- und Sozialethnologie: Allgemeines
• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Buddhismus Tibetischer Buddhismus
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnographie
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Tod, Sterbehilfe: Soziale und Ethische Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Sozialethnologie: Familie, Gender, Soziale Gruppen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Note on Transliteration

Kuragraphy
Hardship, Comfort
Twenty-Seven Ways of Looking at Vision
Startled into Alertness
A Theater of Voices
"I’ve Gotten Old"
Essays on Dying
"Dying Is This"
The Painful Between
Desperation
The Time of Dying
Death Envisioned
To Phungboche, by Force
Staying Still
Mirror of Deeds
Dispersals
"So: Ragged Woman"
Echoes of a Life
A Son’s Death
The End of the Body
Last Words

Notes
Glossary of Terms
References
Acknowledgments
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Robert Desjarlais is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent book is Shelter Blues (1997), for which he won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.