Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
Sensory Biographies details the life histories of two Yolmo elders, a women in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu, and a Buddhist priest in his mid eighties known as Ghang Lama.
Synopsis
"One of the most powerful ethnographies in any field that I have read in recent years. A model of anthropological analysis that addresses questions on the cutting edge of the discipline."and#151;Veena Das, author of Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India
About the Author
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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Note on Transliteration
Kuragraphy
Hardship, Comfort
Twenty-Seven Ways of Looking at Vision
Startled into Alertness
A Theater of Voices
"Iand#8217;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 Sonand#8217;s Death
The End of the Body
Last Words
Notes
Glossary of Terms
References
Acknowledgments
Index