Thanato-technics: Temporal Horizons of Death and Dying.
Culture, medicine and psychiatry June 1, 2025 Dylan T Lott 2 citations
Advances in end-of-life technologies challenge conventional ideas of personhood, identity, and ethics, often forcing these concepts into rigid, binary categories. In response, some in the West have looked to Tibetan Buddhist practices surrounding death. This article introduces the term "thanato-technics" to describe how technologies are used to explore or speculate about the inner experiences of the dead and dying, focusing on research involving the postmortem bodies of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners in India. The concept highlights the temporalities—imagined or real—that such technologies evoke and invest in.