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Paper short abstract

The paper reflects on NDEs as ontological events that disrupt the experienced world and initiate ongoing processes of becoming. It examines how these processes unfold over time by tracing narrative repetition, omission, variation, and silence as signs of ongoing ontological negotiation.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches near-death experiences (NDEs) as ontological events that disrupt the experienced world and initiate ongoing processes of ontological work rather than singular moments of completed transformation. For experiencers, NDEs do not result in a stable ontological conversion but generate continuous efforts to reinhabit a world that has been fundamentally altered. These efforts unfold through recurring movements of immersion and emergence, as individuals are repeatedly drawn back into the affective, historical, and practical demands of everyday life while intermittently maintaining access to an altered mode of being. Because such experiences exceed available ontological and linguistic categories, ethnographic access to NDEs is necessarily indirect. The ethnographer encounters ontological work not at the moment of disruption itself, but through retrospective narratives produced within already partially stabilized worlds. While these narratives are typically coherent and socially intelligible, they do not exhaust the ontological processes they seek to convey. The paper argues that ontological work following NDEs is distributed across bodily reorientation, affective transformation, altered temporal experience, shifts in relationality, and everyday practices. Narrative constitutes a central site where these processes become communicable and livable, yet remains a mediated and selective form of access. Drawing on existing ethnographic material and cyclical interviews conducted over time with the same experiencers, the paper traces how narrative stability coexists with ongoing ontological fluctuation, treating NDE accounts not as transparent representations of an original experience but as partial narrative surfaces through which unfinished processes of ontological reintegration become visible.