TED字幕.docx

1、TED字幕Life that does not end with deathI think its safe to say that all humans will be intimate with death at least once in their lives. But what if that intimacy began long before you faced your own transition from life into death? What would life be like if the dead literally lived alongside you? 0

2、:32 In my husbands homeland in the highlands of Sulawesi island in eastern Indonesia, there is a community of people that experience death not as a singular event but as a gradual social process. In Tana Toraja, the most important social moments in peoples lives, the focal points of social and cultu

3、ral interaction are not weddings or births or even family dinners, but funerals. So these funerals are characterized by elaborate rituals that tie people in a system of reciprocal debt based on the amount of animals - pigs, chickens and, most importantly, water buffalo - that are sacrificed and dist

4、ributed in the name of the deceased. So this cultural complex surrounding death, the ritual enactment of the end of life, has made death the most visible and remarkable aspect of Torajas landscape. Lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, funeral ceremonies are a raucous affair, where commem

5、orating someone whos died is not so much a private sadness but more of a publicly shared transition. And its a transition thats just as much about the identity of the living as it is about remembrance of the dead. 2:05 So every year, thousands of visitors come to Tana Toraja to see, as it were, this

6、 culture of death, and for many people these grandiose ceremonies and the length of the ceremonies are somehow incommensurable with the way that we face our own mortality in the West. So even as we share death as a universal experience, its not experienced the same way the world over. And as an anth

7、ropologist, I see these differences in experience being rooted in the cultural and social world through which we define the phenomena around us. So where we see an unquestionable reality, death as an irrefutable biological condition, Torajans see the expired corporeal form as part of a larger social

8、 genesis. So again, the physical cessation of life is not the same as death. In fact, a member of society is only truly dead when the extended family can agree upon and marshal the resources necessary to hold a funeral ceremony that is considered appropriate in terms of resources for the status of t

9、he deceased. And this ceremony has to take place in front of the eyes of the whole community with everyones participation. 3:40 So after a persons physical death, their body is placed in a special room in the traditional residence, which is called the tongkonan. And the tongkonan is symbolic not onl

10、y of the familys identity but also of the human life cycle from birth to death. So essentially, the shape of the building that youre born into is the shape of the structure which carries you to your ancestral resting place. Until the funeral ceremony, which can be held years after a persons physical

11、 death, the deceased is referred to as to makala, a sick person, or to mama, a person who is asleep, and they continue to be a member of the household. They are symbolically fed and cared for, and the family at this time will begin a number of ritual injunctions, which communicates to the wider comm

12、unity around them that one of their members is undergoing the transition from this life into the afterlife known as Puya. 4:48 So I know what some of you must be thinking right now. Is she really saying that these people live with the bodies of their dead relatives? And thats exactly what Im saying.

13、 5:00 But instead of giving in to the sort of visceral reaction we have to this idea of proximity to bodies, proximity to death, or how this notion just does not fit into our very biological or medical sort of definition of death, I like to think about what the Torajan way of viewing death encompass

14、es of the human experience that the medical definition leaves out. I think that Torajans socially recognize and culturally express what many of us feel to be true despite the widespread acceptance of the biomedical definition of death, and that is that our relationships with other humans, their impa

15、ct on our social reality, doesnt cease with the termination of the physical processes of the body, that theres a period of transition as the relationship between the living and the dead is transformed but not ended. So Torajans express this idea of this enduring relationship by lavishing love and at

16、tention on the most visible symbol of that relationship, the human body. So my husband has fond memories of talking to and playing with and generally being around his deceased grandfather, and for him there is nothing unnatural about this. This is a natural part of the process as the family comes to

17、 terms with the transition in their relationship to the deceased, and this is the transition from relating to the deceased as a person whos living to relating to the deceased as a person whos an ancestor. And here you can see these wooden effigies of the ancestors, so these are people who have alrea

18、dy been buried, already had a funeral ceremony. These are called tau tau. 7:03 So the funeral ceremony itself embodies this relational perspective on death. It ritualizes the impact of death on families and communities. And its also a moment of self-awareness. Its a moment when people think about wh

19、o they are, their place in society, and their role in the life cycle in accordance with Torajan cosmology. 7:33 Theres a saying in Toraja that all people will become grandparents, and what this means is that after death, we all become part of the ancestral line that anchors us between the past and t

20、he present and will define who our loved ones are into the future. So essentially, we all become grandparents to the generations of human children that come after us. And this metaphor of membership in the greater human family is the way that children also describe the money that they invest in thes

21、e sacrificial buffaloes that are thought to carry peoples soul from here to the afterlife, and children will explain that they will invest the money in this because they want to repay their parents the debt for all of the years their parents spent investing and caring for them. 8:26 But the sacrific

22、e of buffalo and the ritual display of wealth also exhibits the status of the deceased, and, by extension, the deceaseds family. So at funerals, relationships are reconfirmed but also transformed in a ritual drama that highlights the most salient feature about death in this place: its impact on life

23、 and the relationships of the living. 8:56 So all of this focus on death doesnt mean that Torajans dont aspire to the ideal of a long life. They engage in many practices thought to confer good health and survival to an advanced age. But they dont put much stock in efforts to prolong life in the face

24、 of debilitating illness or in old age. Its said in Toraja that everybody has sort of a predetermined amount of life. Its called the sunga. And like a thread, it should be allowed to unspool to its natural end. 9:33 So by having death as a part of the cultural and social fabric of life, peoples ever

25、yday decisions about their health and healthcare are affected. The patriarch of my husbands maternal clan, Nenet Katcha, is now approaching the age of 100, as far as we can tell. And there are increasing signs that he is about to depart on his own journey for Puya. And his death will be greatly mour

26、ned. But I know that my husbands family looks forward to the moment when they can ritually display what his remarkable presence has meant to their lives, when they can ritually recount his lifes narrative, weaving his story into the history of their community. His story is their story. His funeral s

27、ongs will sing them a song about themselves. And its a story that has no discernible beginning, no foreseeable end. Its a story that goes on long after his body no longer does. 10:54 People ask me if Im frightened or repulsed by participating in a culture where the physical manifestations of death g

28、reet us at every turn. But I see something profoundly transformative in experiencing death as a social process and not just a biological one. In reality, the relationship between the living and the dead has its own drama in the U.S. healthcare system, where decisions about how long to stretch the th

29、read of life are made based on our emotional and social ties with the people around us, not just on medicines ability to prolong life. We, like the Torajans, base our decisions about life on the meanings and the definitions that we ascribe to death. 11:48 So Im not suggesting that anyone in this aud

30、ience should run out and adopt the traditions of the Torajans. It might be a little bit difficult to put into play in the United States. But I want to ask what we can gain from seeing physical death not only as a biological process but as part of the greater human story. What would it be like to loo

31、k on the expired human form with love because its so intimately a part of who we all are? If we could expand our definition of death to encompass life, we could experience death as part of life and perhaps face death with something other than fear. Perhaps one of the answers to the challenges that a

32、re facing the U.S. healthcare system, particularly in the end-of-life care, is as simple as a shift in perspective, and the shift in perspective in this case would be to look at the social life of every death. It might help us recognize that the way we limit our conversation about death to something

33、 thats medical or biological is reflective of a larger culture that we all share of avoiding death, being afraid of talking about it. If we could entertain and value other kinds of knowledge about life, including other definitions of death, it has the potential to change the discussions that we have about the end of life. I