Demedicalization and the Dying Body: Sallekhana, Kinship, and the Limits of Liberal Bioethics
Sun 5/31 • 2PM - 4PM PDT
Royce Hall, Room 306
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 (sallekhana or santhara). 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 inhabit a complex zone of overlap where cognitive clarity is both a medical and religious ideal; the attenuation of pain is karmically elevated rather than clinically managed; and the logic of institutionalized care is subtly displaced not by the absence of obligation but by alternate forms of care. In tracing the limits of bioethical paradigms that presume the necessity of medicalization and institutional oversight, this talk describes how “illness narratives” and “santhara narratives” coalesce to challenge prevailing understandings of what it means to die well, and how suffering, pain, and the medicalized body is accounted for in the lives—and deaths—of Jain women.