ABSTRACT
Altered neurological states resulting from disease/injury often result in profound changes in self-awareness, something that many find difficult to explain to those who have never experienced brain trauma. A diagnosis, a bike crash, or a violent encounter can leave one forever changed: an “afterlife.” This chapter explores the sense of afterlife, a transformation of the self, or the rebecoming that results from injured minds through sensory ethnography. While sensory ethnography carves out new terms, territories, and modalities of sense, there is a private element to sensation that can never be fully exhausted by description. The afterlife forces us to come to terms with the limits of sensory ethnography and to reimagine the possibilities of sensory inquiry in a context in which selfhood seems foreign or unconveyable. Our chapter asks: How might we examine these entangled layers of sensation, that is, inner or subjective sensations and sociocultural mediated sensations?
