Subject to Death ─ Life and Loss in a Buddhist World

Subject to Death by anthropologist Robert Desjarlais is a profound meditation on death through an empathic ethnographic analysis of the Hyolmo, a Tibetan Buddhist community from Nepal. At the heart of the book is the question of what a good death” means. To answer this question, Desjarlais shows how the Hyolmo try through social and ritual practice to ease death’s arrival, help the deceased sever their attachments to the world, and allow survivors to establish anew their relationships with the dead. Hyolmo orientations to life and death speak to the ways in which certain features of human existence--such as consciousness, identity, memory, desire, and bodiliness--are enacted and dissolved through a form of poesis, or creative world-making. In considering Hyolmo orientations to dying, cremation ceremonies, funeral rituals, grief, and mourning, Desjarlais reveals the ever-changing flow of life and death among Hyolmo people while offering moving insights into a universal experience.

Robert Desjarlais is professor of anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of several books, includingShelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless and Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard.