The sociality of death: life potentialities and the Vietnamese dead

Drawing on ethnographic material from Vi?t Nam, the chapter explores the dynamics of transformation in which the dead are engaged and foregrounds ritual engagements between the living and the dead as providing the required tropes for these transformations to be effected. The chapter deals with Buddhist ideas and practices and an ethnographic case in which death is conceived not as the end of life but rather as an opening up to numerous, uncertain metamorphic possibilities, whereby the soul of the deceased is held as capable of becoming substantiated as a cared-for dead kin that could eventually grow into an ancestral spirit, a restless ghostly entity, and/or be re-incarnated. These metamorphic potentialities are directly affected by the relations (or lack of) the dead enjoy with the living. It is precisely these relations that the ritual process seeks to actuate and enliven. Such relations are made manifest and instantiated in the very form the soul eventually assumes which in turn serves as the index of cross-boundary sociality and affect.