When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

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Hannah Gould

When Death Falls Apart

Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

Hannah Gould

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English

University of Chicago Press
01 April 2024

Asian history; Social & cultural history; Archaeology; Ethnic studies; Religious groups: social & cultural aspects; Social & cultural anthropology

Through an ethnographic study inside Japan’s Buddhist goods industry, this book establishes a method for understanding change in death ritual through attention to the dynamic lifecourse of necromaterials.

Deep in the Fukuyama mountainside, “the grave of the graves” (o-haka no haka) houses the material remains of Japan’s discarded death rites. In the past, the Japanese dead would be transformed into ancestors through years of ritual offerings at graves and in the home at Buddhist altars called butsudan. But in 21st-century Japan, this intergenerational system of care is rapidly collapsing due to falling birth rates, secularization, and economic downturn.

Through the lens of this domestic altar, Gould asks: What happens when religious technology becomes obsolete? In noisy carpentry studios, flashy funeral showrooms, the neglected houses of widowers, and the cramped kitchens where women prepare memorial feasts, Gould traces the butsudan alongside the Buddhist lifecycle, exploring how they are made, circulate within religious and funerary economies, come to mediate intimate exchanges between the living and the dead, fall into disuse, and, maybe, are remade. Gould suggests how this form might be reborn for the modern world, from miniature urns inspired by sleek Scandinavian design to new ritual practices that embrace impermanence, such as scattering or the making of “bone buddhas”. Read against a long tradition of theorizing memorialization, Japan’s contemporary deathscape offers a case study of a different kind of necrosociality, based on material exchanges that seek to both nurture the dead and disentangle them from the world of the living.

By: Hannah Gould
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 286g
ISBN: 9780226829012
ISBN 10: 0226829014
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 01 April 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Hannah Gould is a Melbourne Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the School of Social and Political Sciences and a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. She is president of the Australian Death Studies Society, coeditor of Aromas of Asia, and coauthor of Death and Funerary Practices in Japan.

Reviews for When Death Falls Apart: Making and Unmaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan

“From graves for abandoned gravestones to the craft and care by which workers tend to butsudan still today, this book is an electrifying read. Ethnographically intimate, analytically astute, and refreshingly clear, When Death Falls Apart brilliantly tracks both the challenges and attachments to necro-care as once practiced and getting recrafted today.” * Anne Allison, author of Being Dead Otherwise * “When Death Falls Apart is well-crafted and thoughtful, and it significantly advances scholarship on death studies. At the same time, Gould’s excellent study is a model for rich anthropological description of particular people, places, and objects that challenge the reader to think about other places, other deaths, and other bodies.” * S. Brent Rodriguez-Plate, author of A History of Religion in 5½ Objects *