332 DOI: 10.4324/9781003317111-33 Sensing the self As chapters in this handbook have demonstrated, sensory ethnography is an invaluable technique for researchers interested in elucidating the granular and collective elements of human sense-making. Nevertheless, while sensory ethnography can carve out new terms, territories, and modalities of sense, there is still a private element to sensation that can never be fully exhausted by description. Such failure of description is especially evident in the case of what we refer to as the “afterlife.” The afterlife, as we show in this chapter, is both a social phenomenon and a subjective one that forces us to come to terms with the limits of sensory ethnographic investigation and to reimagine the possibilities of sensory inquiry in a context in which selfhood is explicitly foreign or unconveyable. How should we think about these separate layers of sensation, that is, inner or subjective sensations ver- sus sociocultural mediated sensations? As Desjarlais (2003) asks, “how do diferent sensory modalities and dispositions play themselves out in individual lives” and how do “members of a single society live out diferent sensory biographies” (p. 4)? These questions shape our approach to the sensorial, injured minds, and the shifting sense of self in the context of the afterlife. As interdisciplinary scholars, we draw on a range of analytic approaches to understand the boundaries and limits involved when researchers attempt to speak about or uncover what it means to feel or not feel “like oneself.” Two debates that repeatedly emerge throughout the anthropological and philosophical literature about selfhood are (1) whether the self is bounded or free, and (2) whether personality is a unifed whole, or multiple. Anthropolo- gists have long been concerned with the self and personhood. Cliford Geertz defned the self as a “bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively against other such wholes and against its social and natural background” (Geertz, 1984, p. 126). Whether researching behavior, agency, or resistance, psychological, linguistic, and sociocultural anthropologists have all variously engaged with the question of selfhood. Traditional frameworks for exploring these questions tend to engage with the extent to which, and how, a person may be bounded, that is, determined 28 SENSING THE AFTERLIFE Multisensorial ethnography and injured minds Michelle Charette and Denielle Elliott