Greeting the Dead: Managing Solitary Existence in Japan
Anthropologist Anne Allison (Ph.D. '86) discusses the precarity of life and death in contemporary Japan. Recorded February 12, 2015. At a moment when the population is declining, marriage and birth rates are down, one-third of people live alone while one-fourth are 65 or older, and reports of “lonely death” (of solitary people whose bodies are discovered days, or weeks, after death) are commonplace, the social ecology of existence is undergoing radical change in 21st century Japan. In this event from the CIS Global (In)Equalities series, Duke University anthropologist Anne Allison (Ph.D. '86) considers how the neoliberal shift to “self-responsibility” plays out in the everyday rhythms of being with/out others for post-social Japanese. More about this event: cis.uchicago.edu/allison More about the Global (In)Equalities series: cis.uchicagoi.edu/inequalities
