Public talk by Professor Anne Allison
Being Dead Otherwise
In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and a post-growth economy, sociality is downsizing away from the family to more single lifestyles in Japan. Affecting both the making of life and care given the dead, official response has targeted the former: trying to correct the crisis of social reproduction with measures to stimulate the birthrate (that have universally failed). But the drying up of a necro-apparatus once dependent on patrilineal kin has left stark holes as well: family gravesites getting abandoned, and more and more lonely dead without graves to enter at all. As Japanese increasingly age “without anyone else to depend upon (miyori ga nai),” new commercial and public initiatives are arising to tend to the country’s “family-less dead.”
This talk examines what is a surge in “ending activity” (shūkatsu) since the early 2000s of seeking alternatives to the family grave and other others (than kin) to be caregivers of the dead. Making preparations ahead of time for oneself or for relocating ancestral graves, necro-planning brings death into the present and anticipates, by aiming to avoid, socially disjunctive ends. What implications does this have for the “crisis” of sociality in Japan today, and what does it portend for a post-familial future as mapped by new ways of caring for the dead?
Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her research, on contemporary issues in Japan, span the nightlife, popular culture, Pokémon, sexuality, gender, precarity, and death. The author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club, Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination and Precarious Japan, her most recent book is Being Dead Otherwise.
You can read about Being Dead Otherwise here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/being-dead-otherwise
and read the introduction here:
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1984-8_601.pdf