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Being Dead Otherwise
With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means—-ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests—-for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.
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Being Dead Otherwise
With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means—-ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests—-for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.
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Being Dead Otherwise

Being Dead Otherwise

by Anne Allison
Being Dead Otherwise
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Being Dead Otherwise

Being Dead Otherwise

by Anne Allison

Overview

With an aging population, declining marriage and childbirth rates, and a rise in single households, more Japanese are living and dying alone. Many dead are no longer buried in traditional ancestral graves where descendants would tend their spirits, and individuals are increasingly taking on mortuary preparation for themselves. In Being Dead Otherwise Anne Allison examines the emergence of new death practices in Japan as the old customs of mortuary care are coming undone. She outlines the proliferation of new industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means—-ranging from automated graves, collective grave sites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robotic priests—-for tending to the dead. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to long-standing traditions of burial and commemoration of the dead. In charting this shifting ecology of death, Allison outlines the potential of these solutions to radically reorient sociality in Japan in ways that will impact how we think about the end of life, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478019848
Publisher: Duke University Press Books
Publication date: 03/10/2023
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and author of Precarious Japan, also published by Duke University Press, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, and Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club.

Table of Contents

Prelude  ix
Acknowledgments  xi
Introduction  1
Histories
1. Ambiguous Bones: Dead in the Past  25
2. The Popular Industry of Death: From Godzilla to the Ending Business  47
Preparations
3. Caring (Differently) for the Dead  73
4. Preparedness: A Biopolitics of Making Life Out of Death  99
Departures
5. The Smell of Lonely Death and the Work of Cleaning It Up  123
6. De-parting: The Handling of Remaindered Remains  149
Machines
7. Automated Graves: The Precarity and Prosthetics of Caring for the Dead  173
Epilogue  191
Notes  197
Bibliography  215
Index  231

What People are Saying About This

Lawrence Cohen

“Anne Allison is among the most respected, productive, and insightful writers on relationships, time and loss, labor, and the nonhuman in and beyond a Japanese context. In Being Dead Otherwise she knits together her thinking over a career, attending to the important topic of the study of death, the ethics and productivity of the end-time, and the condition of the future across the disciplines. At stake is the very grievability of life at a time when the affective and economic costs of mourning become prohibitive.”

Shunya Yoshimi

“Japan, a former economic powerhouse full of cutting-edge technology and affluence, has turned into a society full of disparities, anxieties, and loneliness after the repeated crises of the last thirty years. Anne Allison found that the key to seeing this transformation is the change in how death is treated. Through thrilling fieldwork, she reveals the lives of people wriggling in the deep darkness of decline. Being Dead Otherwise vividly depicts the new society that now emerges.”

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Related Subjects

Social Sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous
Social Sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous

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