“We are the living dead”, or, the Precarious Stabilisation of Liminal Life in the Presence of CKDu

This article examines how everyday encounters with kidney disease treatment in Sri Lanka’s dry zone generate distinct space-times of liminality. Building on work that explores the alternative coordinates of biopolitical intervention, I argue that health improvement schemes in the dry zone yield complex materialisations of “living death” in conditions of austerity, poverty, and aridity. Specifically, I illustrate how intervention reconfigures body-ecologies, dismantles infrastructures of liveability, and re-works relations between life and time in order to stabilise liminal forms of existence. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic data, I describe two space-times of liminality that emerge through experiences of treatment: the “zombie” and “life in the bubble”. As part of my analysis, I document how these bodily states are ambiguously configured by experiences of care. Across these encounters, I illustrate how patients toggle back and forth between states of debility and capacity in ways that blur boundaries between life/death and bodies/environments.