Life in Suspension with Death: Biocultural Ontologies, Perceptual Cues, and Biomarkers for the Tibetan Tukdam Postmortem Meditative State.

This article presents two cases from a collaborative study among Tibetan monastic populations in India on the postdeath meditative state called tukdam (thugs dam). Entered by advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners through a variety of different practices, this state provides an ontological frame that is investigated by two distinct intellectual traditions-the Tibetan Buddhist and medical tradition on one hand and the Euroamerican biomedical and scientific tradition on the other-using their respective means of inquiry. Through the investigation, the traditions enact two paradigms of the body at the time of death alongside attendant conceptualizations of what constitutes life itself. This work examines when epistemologies of these two traditions might converge, under what ontological contexts, and through which correlated indicators of evidence. In doing so, this work explores how these two intellectual traditions might answer how the time course and characteristics of physiological changes during the postmortem period might exhibit variation across individuals. Centrally, this piece presents an epistemological inquiry delineating the types of valid evidence that constitute exceptional processes post-clinical death and their potential ontological implications.

Chasing dön spirits in Tibetan medical encounters: Transcultural affordances and embodied psychiatry in Amdo, Qinghai.

Although spirit possession is generally considered a psychiatric illness, the class of conditions designated as dön (Tib. gdon, "afflictive external influences," often glossed as "spirit affliction") in Tibetan medicine represents a distinctive paradigm for an etiology where physical and mental facets inhere in every illness. This study draws upon ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Tibet to examine two conditions that represent illness presentations at both ends of the dön spectrum: one that maps onto a biomedical etiology of stroke and another that presents in a way similar to schizophrenia. The case studies illuminate the forms of harmful external influences that (1) have physiological and psychological impacts that present as symptoms and (2) contribute to a pathogenesis common to both conditions. Our analysis considers the dual role of cultural affordances and bio-looping in the cultural presentation of the two conditions, as well as how the Tibetan medical tradition draws upon cultural, social, biological, and psychological determinants to understand this class of conditions. We also explore the implications the dön illness category has for biomedically oriented paradigms through the way in which it accounts for cultural models for both diagnosis and treatment of several chronic inflammatory conditions that have significant concomitant mental health presentations.