Staging care: Dying, death, and possible futures

Abstract

This chapter is based on four years of fieldwork at Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan, a salvation home in Kashi (India's holy city) that offers a devotional atmosphere to families seeking Moksha for their terminally ill and dying relatives. It explores the manner in which Hindu pilgrims and their families stage a distinctive politics-of-care, while they anticipate and create the possibility of Moksha for their dying relative. I examine collaborative audiovisual ethnography as it facilitates a performative space that allowed me and my interlocutor Shiv to try out different possibilities in anticipation of his mother's Moksha. I argue that my collaborative audiovisual ethnography, as an embodied and intersubjective research practice, facilitated an activism that is grounded in care and staged as performances of the possible.