Thanato-technics: temporal horizons of death and dying

Recent advances in end-of-life technologies have destabilized religious notions of personhood, identity, and ethics; for example, in the reliance on specific device and tests to mediate decisions about when to end life support and declare death. As notions of personhood and identity in the medical setting are made to conform to the limits of the technology it deploys, some in the West have sought guidance in the techniques and views related to the dying process cultivated in other cultures and religions, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. This paper will explore this seeking behavior in connection with the author’s psychophysiological and ethnographic fieldwork (2016-2020) in the Tibetan Buddhist monastic community in India. The details and history of this fieldwork—a scientific, religious, and cultural collaboration to determine the effects of meditative practice on the post-mortem body—are also explored in relation to narrative and semiotic resonances in the intersecting spaces of exile, research setting, and death.