Death acceptance (DA) is a process of spiritual transformation that uproots fear of dying. Research on DA to date, situated in nursing, largely examines DA through the lens of individuals—conceptualising DA as an internal, cognitive process. Existing literature tends to overlook the social and embodied dimensions of DA. This study addresses this gap by shifting the lens toward anthropology, analysing how living as a community impacts the DA process at Arokhayasala, a Buddhist temple hospice for cancer patients in northeast Thailand. This thesis examines DA through the analytic lenses of body, space, and community to draw attention to the phenomenological training of DA through somatic experience, symbolism, and institutionally mediated power within the collective. Following a grounded theory methodology, semi-structured interviews with the community’s ‘experts on dying’ and participant observation of communal life were conducted to examine how social dynamics, shared rituals and practices, and sociomaterial factors shape the DA process. The data reflect that at Arokhayasala, DA is an active, embodied, and participatory transformative process—a ‘skill’ to be continuously developed through practice. DA is produced socially through ritualised exposure to death and dying, including communal chanting for dying patients, open-air cremations, and symbolic death rehearsals. Developing emotional resilience through chanting and meditation is crucial to DA because it equips individuals with tools to manage their fear of pain, which underlies fear of dying. DA is a sociomaterial process; it is actively shaped by Arokhayasala’s ‘spiritually engineered’ environment—from its pyramids to its funeral pyre. The act of giving manifests as an outcome of DA practice and as a mechanism for developing DA through karmic cleansing. Arokhayasala’s ‘frameless, freedom, flexible’ model both empowers individuals with opportunities to give and relies on communal participation in caregiving to function smoothly and to facilitate continuity of care and home deaths. The DA process cultivates a ‘culture of giving’ which cares for the ‘social body’ and maintains social harmony. Arokhayasala embodies a ‘compassionate community’ where the production of DA responds to the demands of Thailand’s ageing society by redistributing end-of-life care responsibilities away from the hospital and into the community, challenging the dominance of wider biomedical paradigms and offering a counter-hegemonic alternative to the over-medicalised death. The communal practice of DA at Arokhayasala resists biopower in what this study introduces as ‘dyingpower’—the reclamation of agency over the dying process.
