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 circulated earlier in the week (appended in abridged form) as ways to approach the book in the first hour before the author joined the video conference for the remaining 30 minutes or so. Since not everyone had met the others, though, brief self-introductions took up 10 or 15 minutes ahead of the reading responses. Participants gave general reactions overall and spoke about the “otherwise” riddle of the title. Soon enough by reading in order or out of order the idea of “ways to handle death other than the model or traditional way” and “otherwise than biologically ceasing to exist” there are other facets and considerations (social, emotional, financial, administrative, aftermath materially) that follow, too. The “-ing” of BEING Dead Otherwise was also pointed out for its significance as an ongoing condition, rather than a bump in the road one travels; something singular, with closure, not abiding. Since death and memorializing has been so prominent, foundational, visible and normal to social life in Japan, what the book documents in flux presses in two directions: responses to “lonely deaths” are causing all sorts of emerging consolation and meaning-making (death practices both reflect the corresponding social shifts and create the normalizing, foundational, and visible/prominent position in the cultural and language more generally). The book’s subject is both a source of change and a mirror of change.
Discussion also delved into methods: first-person visits to many specialty services, conferences, support groups, and so on. Also a look at public discourse on the subject, the responses by municipalities saddled with cost and care of tidying up messy ends of life, and high-altitude (30,000 feet) views of the Japanese social terrain for demography and economic forces. Observations connecting this book with earlier subjects taken up by Allison and the somewhat hopeful end note in the book were expressed in the session, as well.
Being Dead Otherwise author, Anne Allison, was pleased to interact with fellow anthropologists and readers since that is a relatively rare opportunity. Questions (and replies) included the following areas.
---What were the origins of the book’s theme and its personal or professional appeal? Japanese colleague introduced the bookstore shelves dedicated to “end of life planning”; also, noticing how life and death seeps into each other –previously touched upon in the closing pages of an earlier book about precarity. Japanese friends and colleagues make small-talk: “end of life” as a kind of precarity and connection to Allison’s abiding interest in ideas of home/belonging/materiality. Final resting place is one kind of home/belonging. Interest in exploring what is beyond (…Otherwise, in the book title) the biological side of life (social presence, emotional response, intellectual legacies). No “Japan” stated in this book’s title; much wider scope.
---What things from the field work got left out on the "cutting room floor" in “the making of…” this story? The cleanup chapter to tie up loose threads could have been broken into three or even five, but some inner impulse kept insisting on shorter and more streamlined interaction with readers. There was an intention not to be a “downer” book, even though abundant loss and sadness is part of the death/dying arena: even when there is no family grave for one’s ending, then other meanings can be made in the emerging services and precedents for those dying without successor or surrounding familial circle of caring.
---What was the personal/professional engagement in this fieldwork process? Clean-up labor of premises/lives of the deceased is hard in all dimensions (physical, emotional, social interactions and status of this work). Allison felt huge respect for these people. Something like joy or revelation came from interacting with “grave friends” (haka tomo) and their laughter while lunching near their own future resting place.
---How do the economic forces shape the subject of emerging death/dying practices and thinking in Japan; specifically, how to temples face the shifting landscape of care during/after death? Numerically the “solitary” (lonely) deaths are concentrated in cities, but in the countryside the traditional economics go on; smaller share of the population means fewer temples can go on without ongoing financial from city-dwellers to maintain links to rural origins. The new forms of post-mortem care often are cheaper, 1-time decisions/transactions, and so some temples also experiment with similar services; ‘subscribers’ instead of family-line (danka) parishioners.
---How is one’s writing form and rhythm dictated by the nature of the subject? Existential mattes and engaging with one’s mortality can easily soar into lyrical reflections or poetic tones. Anne Allison felt the urge to streamline and simplify. Deliberately halting. Period/stop. Since death spills over to many parts of individual and social life in this cultural landscape, the writing, too is not sharply contained and tidy. It leaves room for other rhythms and interpretation; death can’t be contained neatly.
---In what other ways can these death/dying changes be viewed; not as deficits to the traditional model, but instead as positive developments? Traditional care of the dead and dying combines strands of personal duty, public honor and respectability, as well as the various experiences of grieving. The “otherwise” documented in the book’s title and scenes visited by the author’s lens does relieve some of those burdens. So “dying unconnected to others” (mu-enbo) can have a double-meaning: no-connection to those who can remember and grieve one’s passing, but also no-burden to others, either.
The author wonders, finally, who will be caring for those increasing numbers of people in Japan who are dying alone when the neoliberal, consumer model of social life puts emphasis on individual choice instead of social obligations and worth. She mentions something that she learned lately in USA. ‘No one dies alone’ invites volunteers to be present for those with nobody at hand.
Appendix: (abridged) guiding questions to approach Being Dead Otherwise
• How might the theme of death similarly address or differently frame or challenge—the “new directions” from the quote above—this important trope of East Asian ethnography?
• What concepts in Being Dead Otherwise did you find most compelling and why? How do they operate analytically with or against the evocative and affective storytelling that also characterizes the text?
• How might some of the global dimensions underlying Being Dead Otherwise (socioeconomic precarity, demographic change, technological innovation) help us better understand or critique the status of the regional label “East Asia” as the umbrella under which we organize “East Asian anthropology,” including meetings like SEAA Reads?
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The next SEAA Reads gathering online in February 2024 will feature the Hsu Book Prize winner of 2023, which will be announced in the annual SEAA business meeting that is being held mid-November during the American Anthropological Association conference in Toronto, co-convened by Canadian counterpart, CASCA. The prize will then appear also online at
https://seaa.americananthro.org/awards/francis-l-k-hsu-book-prize/
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