(De)medicalization and the Dying Body: Sallekhanā, Kinship, and the Limits of Liberal Bioethics
In this talk, Miki Chase (U of Wisconsin-Madison) explores how trajectories of illness and care, such as terminal cancer or anticipated cognitive decline, are reinterpreted through Jain doctrinal frameworks in the narratives of adult children of women who undertake the Jain ritual fast to death (sallekhanā or santhāra). Drawing on ethnographic accounts of women’s deaths in contemporary urban Jain households, Chase traces how narratives of bodily decline are reframed not as losses to be managed through medical intervention but as conditions of spiritual possibility that invite ascetic detachment and renunciation. Rather than resisting biomedical or bioethical paradigms outright, these narratives...