Art of Life and Death
Subtitle: Radical Aesthetics and Ethnographic Practice
Publisher: HAU Books; HAU
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 264
ISBN-13: 9780997367515
Subjects: Death; Terminally ill
Description: The art of life and death" explores how the world appears to people who have an acute perspective on it: those who are close to death. Based on extensive ethnographic research, Andrew Irving brings to life the lived experiences, imaginative lifeworlds, and existential concerns of persons confronting their own mortality and non-being. Encompassing twenty years of working alongside persons living with HIV/AIDS in New York, Irving documents the radical but often unspoken and unvoiced transformations in perception, knowledge, and understanding that people experience in the face of death. By bringing an "experience-near" ethnographic focus to the streams of inner dialogue, imagination, and aesthetic expression that are central to the experience of illness and everyday life, this monograph offers a theoretical, ethnographic, and methodological contribution to the anthropology of time, finitude, and the human condition. With relevance well-beyond the disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, this book ultimately highlights the challenge of capturing the inner experience of human suffering and hope that affect us all of the trauma of the threat of death and the surprise of continued life.