Paper short abstract:

Drawing on participant observation with a now deceased Balinese transgender woman (waria) and in-depth interviews with her kin, this paper addresses the necessity of care, understood as an attuned relationality towards intimate others, in ensuring a good death and afterlife.

Paper long abstract:

For Balinese Hindus, death marks both the end of one’s bodily existence and a moment of transition for one’s spiritual journey into its next existence: reincarnation into younger branches of the ancestral tree or, ultimately, the achievement of eternity. The ngaben cremation process and the purification rites that accompany it are necessary for freeing spirits from their earthly housing. This process requires significant care from family and intimate others in the form of preparing the body, collecting the funds, and conducting the rites (cf. Desjarlais 2016; Pogue Harrison 2003; Ruin 2018). Not everyone is assured such care and, consequently, the possibility of continuing one’s spiritual journey and ancestral incorporation. For example, often burdened with the double stigma of gender-nonconformity and a positive HIV status, many transgender women (waria) in Bali fear their families’ reluctance to ensure proper care in death. This makes the question of how to live a worthwhile life without risking the alienation of family care a deadly serious one for Balinese waria. Drawing on participant observation with a now deceased waria and in-depth interviews with her kin, this paper takes up this question by addressing the necessity of care, understood as an attuned relationality towards intimate others, in ensuring a good death and afterlife. In contrast to phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger (2008 [1962]), who view death as the definitive marker of our finitude as well as ultimate event that individuates us, this paper, instead, emphasizes the relational context of death. In doing so, it draws on Anne O’Byrne’s (2010) reminder that birth, besides death, ought to be viewed as a marker of our living finitude and, moreover, as one that show us to be in relation. Bringing O’Byrne’s insights on relationality in birth to bear on the phenomenological insistence on the individuating character of death, I suggest that death, like birth, can be a marker of our living finitude that shows us to be in relation. This claim is especially pertinent in the Balinese context, where death is not ending of one’s existence per se but an ending in which one can no longer pursue one’s own possibilities and needs to rely on others to do so.

Paper short abstract:

This paper considers how 'proper' taste and the making of risk among generational healers re- construct a debate about continuity after death, where death is incorporated into the very definition of Ayush or life, and, yet, seeks to supersede physical limitations of the body.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws from a peer learning initiative among generational healers, whose emphasis on “practice as different from theory (of medicines)” re- constructs a debate about continuity after death, where, on the one hand, death is incorporated into the very definition of Ayush or life, and, on the other hand, seeks to supersede physical limitations of the body. Ayush, within Ayurveda, incorporates the finality of death and the uncertainty of what persists after it as a reflection upon one’s present life, longevity and wellness. In the midst of this uncertainty, practitioners advise with an Astika viewpoint: that life persists after death and the awareness of this affects not just one’s wellbeing but, pertinently, the wellbeing of everyone. Rasa- aushadi, or the use of purified metals and minerals in medicines and the main focus of the peer initiative, are part of alchemic experiments in prolonging the lifespan and expanding the potential of the physical body (past the perishability of seasonal herbs). These intricate and detailed recipes require several months and rely on sustaining new friendships and peer- relationships that adjust the boundaries and activities of medical work. This paper considers how 'proper' taste-- of purification, of vitality-- emerges through with anticipatory gaze that simultaneously seeks to forsee, predict and mitigate the circumstances of ill- health while encouraging participants to learn through risk, of developing personal shorthands and initiating new recipes. This paper unpacks how changing intersubjectivities re- cast the initial debate and complicate what it means to understand 'what lies beyond'.

Paper short abstract:

My paper will show how the Buddhist notion of the Pure Land influenced the end-of-life (and after-life) care of a member from a Vietnamese-Buddhist congregation in East Berlin. Furthermore, I introduce the practice of what I would like to call digital dying and its connection to remote care.

Paper long abstract:

In my talk, I will present some preliminary findings of my still ongoing PhD research. In the last one and a half years, I was first digitally and then via participant observation, mapping a Vietnamese-Buddhist deathscape (Maddrell and Sidaway 2010) in Berlin. The lion's share of my research takes place in a pagoda where every Sunday and for special Buddhist festivals care for the deceased ancestors takes place. By chronicling the recent death of a member from this congregation, I will show how Buddhist notions (i.e. the belief in the rebirth in the Pure Land) shape the individuals' preparation for death as well as the spiritual (care) practices done by the community for the dying and dead. In addition to the introduction of this example of Buddhist care (Watts and Tomatsu 2012), I am going to shed light on the practice of what I would like to call digital dying. The death process of the aforementioned pagoda member was live broadcasted, from her last days to the subsequent funeral, to connect this moment with family in Vietnam or other members of the diaspora community. Furthermore, by sending Buddhist mantras and prayers via chat people could, in a kind of remote care, wish for the deceased to be reborn quickly in the Pure Land.

If feasible till July, I would also like to include the first findings of my training to become a voluntary hospice care worker (beginning in March) in the Vietnam team of an intercultural hospice organization in Berlin.

Paper short abstract:

The long-held association between Brahmanical Hindu widowhood and the imagery and metaphor of death has shaped a prevailing sentiment that the experience of Hindu widowhood is a negation of subjectivity. I propose to study the forms of subjectivity that death might make possible.

Paper long abstract:

This talk comes from a dissertation proposal for fieldwork among Hindu widows in Vrindavan, a pilgrimage city in Uttar Pradesh, to be completed from August 2022 to August 2023. Hindu Widowhood in India has been portrayed as a simultaneous vulnerability and rigidity in one’s relationships with the matrices of religious obligations, state apparatuses, family, caste, and gender. It is often understood as a form of death. Because scholars have privileged marriage in South Asia as a site through which women gain social recognition as wives and mothers, the death of a husband—especially in the absence of children—has been understood as the undoing of a woman’s very existence. Taking inspiration from Saba Mahmood's (2012) treatment of norms as a lived experience, I have proposed to ask how Hindu widows live beyond the norm of conjugality, while always in relation to it in Vrindavan, the "city of widows."

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how ESKD patients underscore chronic dimensions of their lives, frame COVID-19 as “just one more thing,” and orient to God to silence contemplations of an imminent death and embrace dependence on kin and medical technologies to reject rupturing their social networks and routines.

Paper long abstract:

End-stage kidney disease (ESKD) patients are expected to die within weeks in the absence of either a kidney transplant and dependence on lifelong immunosuppressant medications, or dialysis, an arduous process that binds sufferers to machines three times weekly and leaves them drained (Crowley-Matoka 2005; Kaufman 2005). Even without a typical slew of comorbidities, such patients’ health-compromised state renders them epidemiologically vulnerable to COVID-19 (Pakhchanian et al. 2021). Anxiety over their precarious existence and looming end of life would thus seem overdetermined among patients. Yet, in ethnographic interviews with twenty poor and racialized Boston Medical Center ESKD patients and five clinicians enrolled in a study investigating the syndemic effects of the pandemic and associated stigmas, orientations to illness, time, and care differed. Drawing on these interviews, I explore how patients underscore the chronic dimensions of their lives and frame COVID-19 as “just one more thing,” while clinicians use a “grammar of crisis” (Giordano 2020) to characterize their patients’ worsened situations. Narrating themselves as haunted by the anger and hurt they felt in response to White racism, patients come close to articulating a political etiology of their illness (Hamdy 2008), yet nonetheless affiliate with prevailing American biomedical ideologies of health that privilege individual agency and control over one’s life (Martin 1992) to embrace their chronicity. Concurrently and perhaps paradoxically, they frame life as in the hands of God to silence contemplations of an imminent death and embrace dependence on kin and medical technologies to reject rupturing their social networks and routines.