Summary of SEAA READS, session seven, 10/2023
Anne Allison 2023 Being Dead Otherwise . Duke University Press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/being-dead-otherwise This contemporary ethnography shows that the subject of death within ongoing social changes in Japan is a topic as big as life. It concerns demographic changes with proportionally more elderly and fewer children, economic changes of individuation and consumerization in place of family or group boundaries, technological shifts in communication patterns and information sources (Internet queries and digital communities, personal cellphones), and the raw facts of dying and after-death; bodily extinction and social presence or caring. SEAA Reads in this session were mostly Japan scholars, but thanks to colleagues versed in changing society in Korean and in China, the conversations expanded to life experience and cultural landscape outside of the islands. Dan White guided the online get-together by opening up the book’s subject and turning to a few questions he’d circul...