Book Review: Being Dead Otherwise

Based on the ethnographic data collected in a rural village in Chongqing, this paper discusses changes and continuity of mortuary ritual practices in this village and uses it as a window to show socio-cultural changes that this rural community has gone through since 1949. The researcher has found that death ritual in the village has kept its basic traditional structure, but the performance of many rites is simplified and symbolic meaning of many rites has lost, especially among young villagers. The researcher argues that the contemporary sociocultural structure in this village consists of two distinctive components: traditional practices and beliefs, and the newly introduced ideology and values by the party-state and market economy.

This article examines the formation and growth of the Grave-Free Promotion Society (GFPS), a civic group formed in 1990 to promote the scattering of human ashes in Japan. Changing family structures and a critical lack of sufficient burial space have led to a grave revolution since the end of the 1980s. Scattering sits at the intersection of legal battles over the ambiguous status of cremated remains, historical debates over what constitutes traditional funerary practices, Buddhist arguments for the necessity of posthumous ordination and memorial rites, as well as social and medical concerns over locating the dead. The natural funerals, or shizensŌ, performed by the GFPS do not require a Buddhist funeral, memorial rites, posthumous name, or grave, and thus present a highly visible challenge to over 300 years of Buddhist mortuary practices and family-centered, patrilineal graves.