Paper short abstract:

A film about one man's journey across northern India and his search for enlightenment.

Paper long abstract:

Rajive McMullen, a history teacher makes the difficult and painful journey into the heart of Tantra, searching for meaning in holy shrines, coming close to death in cremation grounds and enjoying the chaos of the Aghori seekers.

My work is concerned with exploring our relationship with birth and death, with ethnographic speciality in India.

Our hope is to go beyond the limits of our historical perspective on childbirth and death and their culturally bound rites, and to demonstrate an emotionally connected knowledge which can contribute to the debate on how we give birth and die.