To browse Academia. Part 1 Living with and against impermanence 2. Heavy curtains and deep sleep within darkness 25 Tsering Woeser 3. Disinheriting social death: towards an ethnographic theory of impermanence 28 Carole McGranahan 4. Atheist endings: imagining having been in contemporary Kyrgyzstan 47 Maria Louw 5. Encountering impermanence, making change: a case study of attachment and alcoholism in Thailand 65 Julia Cassaniti 6.
Holding on and letting go: Tanzanian Indians' responses to impermanence Impermanence in Buddhism implies that all compounded phenomena are constantly in a state of flux and hence unreliable, unstable, and lacking substantiality. The English word "impermanence" may not sufficiently express the complete meaning with all its connotations, but it captures the notion's core: that constant change constitutes a fundamental reality. There has been a whole body of literature within Buddhist philosophic traditions exploring various aspects of the notion.
Likewise, there has been an equally large body of works in the various Asian literary and aesthetic fields exploring the notion as it appears in forms of poetry, prose, paintings, and other artistic genres.
As somebody with a keen interest in this theme, the present reviewer found the volume under review highly intriguing. This interest is not so much due to a new addition to the existing body of works on the issue but precisely due to the volume's ambitious aim to complement the lack in the existing body of works.
Edited by Haidy Geismar, Ton Otto, and Cameron David Warner Impermanence: Exploring continuous change across cultures carries the conceptual kernel from Buddhism but examines impermanence from fields as varied as anthropology, sociology, history, performing arts, museology, medical anthropology, digital humanities, poetry and so on which we usually don't associate with the notion of impermanence.
