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Long Lives and Untimely Deaths: Life-Span Concepts and Longevity Practices among Tibetans in the Darjeeling Hills, India . By Barbara Gerke . Leiden : Brill , 2012. xviii, 362 pp. $144.00 (cloth).
Book Reviews--Inner Asia
Long Lives and Untimely Deaths, volume 27 in Brill's Tibetan Studies Library, is an ethnographic exploration of concepts, methods, and ritual practices that Tibetans deploy in an attempt to portend the life course, increase longevity, and avoid misfortune. The book is organized in five parts. The first ("Ethnographic Settings and Analytical Frameworks") situates the study within the anthropology of time, or more specifically, "practices of temporalisation," which the author explains as "diverse activities through which Tibetans mediate between existing temporal frameworks and their personal and collective situations in wide-ranging, dissimilar contexts" (p. 286). This theoretical framework makes sense given the focus on life forces and the life span. Although the author did not do so, this study could also be situated within medical anthropology since it deals explicitly with Tibetan concepts of health, healing, and well-being.
The strength of the second part of the book ("The Field Site and Tibetan Areas of Knowledge") is a nuanced, insightful discussion of Tibetan ethnicity and identity in the Darjeeling Hill region of India. The author raises important questions by focusing on...