Death, loss and mourning: anthropological perspectives - 2

While funerary practices and socio-cultural conceptions of death have been a central research theme for anthropology, far less attention has been devoted by anthropologists to the ways in which the living react to the loss of a loved one. Nevertheless, a reflection on this theme seems all the more important as, at present, the Western world, among others, is traversed by lively scientific and societal debates on ways of coping with the experience of the death of a loved one. Mental disorders related to bereavement have recently been included in both international psychiatric diagnostic manuals, the historical culmination, some would argue, of a tendency to medicalize the experience of loss and normalize its course. But if this experience of loss is indeed universal, is it possible to define absolutely how it is or should be experienced? Does the very notion of "mourning" make sense in any social context? And if specific somatic and emotional reactions are often considered to go hand in hand with the experience of loss, how does the management of these states of the body and sensibility vary from one society to another? And what happens when divergent, even conflicting, ways of dealing with loss are encountered within the same society? Whether in situations of contact between cultures; or because various institutions (therapeutic, religious, political...) shape differently within the same human milieu the apprehension, perception and living of the experience of loss and the "symptoms" that accompany it.

The sessions of this seminar will address these questions from anthropological, theoretical and empirical contributions, covering both Europe and other regions of the world. Sessions will regularly welcome researchers adopting other approaches - philosophical, psychoanalytical, filmic, literary, artistic. Many interventions will focus on the Himalayan region (India and Nepal), the ethnographic terrain of the ANR Phantasies research program with which this seminar is associated.

This research seminar is led by Serena Bindi (Université de Paris, Centre d'Anthropologie Culturelle CANTHEL) and Aidan Seale-Feldman (University of Notre Dame)

The program for this session:

• 4-6pm: Mourning in the World: Island Experiences of Loss, Home, and Place
  Devin FLAHERTY (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas- San Antonio)
• 6-8pm: Funeral rites 'for the living', mourning rites 'for the dead', exorcisms and scapegoats: treatments of misfortune and adversity by Buddhist populations in Nepal
  Brigitte STEINMANN (Professor Emeritus, Social Anthropology, University of Lille, CLERSE; Centre d'Etudes Himalayennes)

Information and registration:
https://u-paris.fr/calendar/action~agenda/page_offset~1/request_format~...