Death and the Discourse of the Body

Abstract

A meaningful discourse on death needs to take into account the various ways in which the body is “constructed” in different cultures. Biomedicine, which is rooted in western culture, places a great deal of importance on the body and this creates an anxiety over death. In contrast, the Indian science of medicine draws heavily from an ancient philosophical tradition in which metaphysical ideas about the soul have contributed to the relative insignificance of the body. Both disease and death have been understood in meta-body terms and there is a cultural embrace of death rather than its denial. The article concludes by suggesting the need to move away from sheer biological essentialism in understanding the human dimension of death in different cultures.