A01=Robert R. Desjarlais
Author_Robert R. Desjarlais
biographical
biographical profiles
buddhist priests
Category=JHBZ
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
Category=QRFB21
death and dying
death experience
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographers
ethnographic studies
gerontology
human struggles
interviews
life and death
life histories
life journey
life stories
nepal
nonfiction biography
physical senses
religious figures
sensory experiences
sociology
spiritual
subjective experience
tibetan buddhists
touching
vision
yolmo buddhists
yolmo elders
yolmo valley
Product details
- ISBN 9780520235885
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Robert Desjarlais's graceful ethnography explores the life histories of two Yolmo elders, focusing on how particular sensory orientations and modalities have contributed to the making and the telling of their lives. These two are a woman in her late eighties known as Kisang Omu and a Buddhist priest in his mid-eighties known as Ghang Lama, members of an ethnically Tibetan Buddhist people whose ancestors have lived for three centuries or so along the upper ridges of the Yolmo Valley in north central Nepal. It was clear through their many conversations that both individuals perceived themselves as nearing death, and both were quite willing to share their thoughts about death and dying. The difference between the two was remarkable, however, in that Ghang Lama's life had been dominated by motifs of vision, whereas Kisang Omu's accounts of her life largely involved a "theatre of voices." Desjarlais offers a fresh and readable inquiry into how people's ways of sensing the world contribute to how they live and how they recollect their lives.
Robert Desjarlais is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent book is Shelter Blues (1997), for which he won the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing.
