Paper short abstract:

The meaning of death is not just a natural course or an end of life to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Rather, death is a form of designed demonstration of power against ethnic and religious minorities, and a weapon for powerful majority to discipline powerless block in post-colonial Myanmar.

Paper long abstract:

Cross cultural meanings of death, death related religious and cultural rituals, and cultural perceptions of good, bad and sudden deaths and death in the context of inequalities in capitalist societies have been core research interests for many anthropologists (see Hertz 1990; Malinowski 1921, Block 1971;Scheper-Hughes 1992). From the points of all Abrahamic religions and Eastern religions death is a natural process of the end of worldly life and the first step for gaining "nirvana" (Miller 2017: 207). According to Freud (1915), death is perceived as "The Return of the Repressed". From August 2017, we have observed that more than 10,000 Rohingya people were victims of the Myanmar military since the "clearance operations" started [See the 2017 Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Boarder) estimation]. Around nearly 690,000 Rohingya people had fled already or on the way to Bangladesh to escape from violence, rape, torture and death (UN 2018 report). Then the meaning of death becomes a key question of human lives and finding an answer requires a critical review in the post-national and global political, racial, religious and ethnic contexts in the current world. By incorporating lived experiences and case studies from the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh camps, this paper is aiming to challenge the idea of naturalization or neutralization of images of death in global post-colonial context. Death then is a form of designed demonstration of power against ethnic and religious minorities, and a weapon for powerful majority to discipline powerless block (see Foucault).