If any anthropologist living today can illuminate our dim understanding of deaths enigma, it is Robert Desjarlais. WithSubject 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. Desjarlaiss research marks a major advance in the ethnographic study of death, dying, and grief, offering broad implications and applicability of his significant insights. Ethnologically nuanced, beautifully written, and twenty-five years in the making, Subject to Deathis an insightful study of how fundamental aspects of human existenceidentity, memory, agency, longing, bodilinessare enacted and eventually dissolved through social and communicative practices of the Hyolmo people.
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 deaths 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.
