ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the social, cultural, and political meanings that the body mediates and transmits. Death, which terminates physical existence, emphasises this. Cultural codes govern body cleaning, cremation, burial, and clothing after death. These codes are represented by the body. This chapter studies the symbolic currency of the body amongst the Limbu of Sikkim, one of the native Himalayan ethnic groups of the Eastern Himalayan region cutting across Nepal, Bhutan and India. The Limbu are followers of Yumaism, a form of ancestral worship that involves the deification of deceased ancestors. The body symbol has cultural and religious meanings within death myths and practices. Based on ethnography conducted in West Sikkim in 2017, this chapter examines the symbol of the body in the context of the transcendent/temporal divide, the Limbu shaman’s performative body during death rituals, and how the Mundhums or poetic oral myths pertaining to the religious, mythological account of the Limbus configure notions of death and afterlife.
