Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780226829012

Table of Contents

Reviews

“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 *

“Engagingly written and analytically nuanced, When Death Falls Apart questions what happens to people and objects when the material traditions surrounding death and remembrance of the deceased confront the changing values of the living. Based on an impressive commitment to extensive and intensive fieldwork, including within her own family, Gould traces the life cycle of traditional wooden Japanese Buddhist memorial altars (butsudan) from production in traditional workshops and modern factories, to sale on shop floors, to transportation and installation in households, to display by families, and, finally, to abandonment, disposal, and partial replacement by new ritual practices. In the process, she illuminates how culture, corporations, and capitalism have engaged with and changed the significance of death and dying in Japan today.” * F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize Committee for 2025 * “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 *

Author Information

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.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available