A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Shushan compares accounts of near-death experience and their interpretations in Indigenous societies of Africa, North America, and Oceania. He asks how culture shapes reported encounters and afterlife beliefs, and examines resonances with shamanic experience.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
The collection needs more than contemporary Euro-American testimony. This comparative study gathers material often missing from popular NDE books and prompts attention to the meanings people and communities give their experiences.
Good starting place if…
You want to examine NDE accounts across cultures and consider how inherited categories affect comparison.
Know before you begin…
Much of the evidence comes through historical explorers, missionaries, and ethnologists rather than direct contemporary Indigenous testimony. Colonial mediation, translation, and the diversity within each community matter. Similar motifs do not establish one universal interpretation or prove survival.