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.