Being Dead Otherwise Allison

being dead otherwise

anne allison

June 256 pages, 19 illustrations, including 8 in color paper, 978-1-4780-1984-8 $25.95/£21.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1714-1 $99.95/£90.00

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.

Being Dead Otherwise

ANNE ALLISON

“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.”—SHUNYA YOSHIMI, Professor of Sociology, University of Tokyo

“Anne Allison is among the most respected, productive, and insightful writers on relationship, 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 endtime, 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 cost of mourning becomes prohibitive.”—LAWRENCE COHEN, Professor of Medical and Sociocultural Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

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 their 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 new proliferation of industries, services, initiatives, and businesses that offer alternative means for tending to the dead, ranging from automated graves, collective gravesites, and crematoria to one-stop mortuary complexes and robot priests. These new burial and ritual practices provide alternatives to the 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 death, identity, tradition, and culture in Japan and beyond.

Also by Anne Allison

Precarious Ja P an Precarious Japan

paper, $25.95/£21.99 978-0-8223-5562-5 / 2013