Exploring the Hindu concepts of good and bad deaths, this rich
ethnography follows pilgrims who choose to travel to the holy city
of Kashi to die.
Dying the Good Death is a unique ethnography, the first to focus
on the experiences of dying at the end of the life cycle. In a
region of northern India, some people at the end of their lives
leave their villages and travel to the Hindu holy city of Kashi to
die. These pilgrims expect that by dying in Kashi they will obtain
the spiritual reward of moksha -- liberation from the cycle of
death and rebirth.
Based on fieldwork conducted in Kashi's hospices or "mansions of
liberation", Christopher Justice introduces us to a number of dying
individuals and their families, providing rich and evocative
descriptions of their remarkable experiences. The social contexts
of these experiences are explored through descriptions of the
families who provide care and the priests who chant the name of God
twenty-four hours a day. The book also has clear implications for
the potential ways in which we may choose to face the ends of our
lives.
"This book is about a fascinating topic. It is about the death
retreats (bhavan) of Kashi where Hindu people go to die. It is also
about the way in which individuals in the bhavan make sense of
death within their social/cultural and religious environment. And
it is about the relationship between an individual's understanding
of the good death to that person's actual experience of dying and
the interaction between the cultural and physiological processes of
dying". -- Dorothy Counts, University of Waterloo
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