Junga Bahadur Bhuda was 33 when he died as a result of a motorbike accident in Jumla. Through a series of ramifications springing from this episode, in this paper I try to reflect on howconsciousness of death manifests itself in the Sinja Valley of Jumla. In such a way death may appear much more present than commonly thought, and the consciousness of it, at first glance so philosophically distant from ordinary life, constitutes a vantage point from which to observe and reflect upon the sense-making of existence as me-in-the-midst-of-others and of death-in-the-midst-of-life. Thus, drawing attention on the existential meaning of death, I present it as the flip coin of life rather than its opposite – a complementary and indispensable aspect of our experience-of-the-world.
Albeit being confident that to a certain extent there are some existential, recurrent universals that define the so called “human condition” in any corner of the world, my experience in the field has also made me grow aware of the intrinsic peril of universalism, namely of arbitrarily imposing generic shared views over both cultural and existential peculiarities. This does not mean loosing sight of the general and potentially universal experience of what it means to be human, but refusing to start already in the domain of the abstract, rather privileging idiosyncratic and well-defined personal trajectories as facets of that bigger whole. In light of that, I offer some insights on the various personal and culturally-specific strategies we employ to cope with a reality which is not always immediately intelligible, and about the limits of exploring other people’s consciousness, not least throwing my own one into the arena.