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The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan

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Abstract

Introduction: commercial funerals for contemporary Japanese 1. Death rituals in anthropology and Japanese folklore studies 2. The history of Japanese funeral traditions 3. The phase of negated death 4. The funeral ceremony: rites of passage 5. Funeral professionals at moon rise 6. Funeral professionals outside of moon rise 7. The commoditization of the bathing ceremony Conclusion: the shift to commercialization and mass consumption Notes Bibliography Index.

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... Así, en la actualidad, lo funerario y los negocios que deambulan a su alrededor son parte de una cadena de producción, en donde hay mercancías y trabajos especializados (Suzuki, 2001(Suzuki, y 2009Mitford, 2008) que se han ido transformando a lo largo del tiempo y que parecen formar una industria compleja y rentable. La muerte y lo funerario, entonces, pueden ser entendidos como un problema antropológico (Collier y Ong, 2005) digno de un análisis pormenorizado que permita una reflexión diacrónica. ...
... Hikaru Suzuki (2001;, antropóloga japonesa, sostiene que los servicios y prácticas funerarias en los Estados Unidos y Japón empezaron a cambiar de forma abismal a partir de la modernidad, lo que llevó a que las comunidades dejen de lado ciertas prácticas o que los lazos con ellas se vayan diluyendo. Además, dentro del ámbito de lo funerario, empezó a existir una división del trabajo y una especialización de labores. ...
... Estos ensambles serán indispensables para entender a la industria funeraria, y sobre todo a sus dimensiones éticas, como han sugerido autoras como Jessica Mitford (1963) y Hikaru Suzuki (2001Suzuki ( , 2009). La comercialización de la muerte incluye la manipulación de compradores en estado vulnerable, haciendo que sea un proceso de comercio injusto. ...
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El turismo funerario es "aquella tipología de turismo cultural que consiste en la visita acementerios motivada por sus valores culturales y patrimoniales, tangibles o intangibles, talescomo la historia del recinto, los personajes enterrados, el arte funerario, el paisaje, los ritualessociológicos de enterramiento, entre otros" (Martínez, 2014). El turismo funerario suponeasí, una nueva modalidad de turismo cultural capaz de incrementar la oferta turística de un destino y poner en valor recursos que en varias ocasiones se ven estigmatizados por unaimagen oscura y tabú.El objetivo de esta investigación es conocer la situación actual del camposanto de la ciudadecuatoriana de Tulcán, uno de los más reconocidos del país, mediante el análisis de su ofertacomo recurso turístico y la valoración de herramientas efectivas de interpretación utilizadasen cementerios de Europa. El estudio es exploratorio y descriptivo. En los resultados sepresentan propuestas constructivas encaminadas a la mejora de su gestión e interpretación,potenciándolo como un producto de turismo cultural funerario referente en Ecuador y el surde Colombia
... Así, en la actualidad, lo funerario, y los negocios que deambulan a su alrededor, son parte de una cadena de producción, en donde hay mercancías y trabajos especializados (Suzuki, 2000;2009;Mitford, 2000) que se han ido transformando a lo largo del tiempo y que parecen formar una industria compleja y rentable. La muerte y lo funerario, entonces, pueden ser entendidos como un problema antropológico (Collier y Ong, 2007) digno de un análisis pormenorizado que permita una reflexión diacrónica. ...
... Según Hikaru Suzuki (2000Suzuki ( , 2009, antropóloga japonesa, los servicios y prácticas funerarios en los Estados Unidos y Japón empezaron a cambiar de forma abismal a partir de la «modernidad», lo que llevó a que las comunidades dejen de lado ciertas prácticas y a que los lazos con las mismas se vayan diluyendo. Además, dentro del ámbito de lo funerario, empezó a existir una división del trabajo y una especialización de labores. ...
... Para Suzuki, deben desarrollarse tres procesos que permitan llamar a la industria funeraria como tal: primero, la especialización en el manejo de cadáveres; segundo, la estandarización de los funerales; y la oferta de servicios comprometidos con los afligidos (Suzuki, 2009). El cuidado de los cadáveres será una de las principales fortalezas de la industria funeraria porque supone una mayor especialización por parte de aquellos que manejan ciertos procedimientos, incluyendo el traslado de los cadáveres desde el lugar de la defunción, en donde lo principal será "el manejo respetuoso del cuerpo" (Suzuki, 2000). ...
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Este artículo reflexiona sobre la muerte y lo funerario, no solamente desde su dimensión cultural, sino desde la problematización de estos conceptos alrededor de nuevas dimensiones de análisis: lo comercial, lo político y lo ético; lo que configura la industria funeraria. El texto que se presenta a continuación es también el resultado del trabajo de campo realizado en la Ciudad de México, en dos de las empresas funerarias más grandes e influyentes de la ciudad: Gayosso y J. García López. Las etnografías realizadas ayudan a explicar y a describir los ciernes de esta industria y la consolidación de un mercado espacializado y especializado en la Ciudad de México que busca expandirse a la totalidad del territorio mexicano; pero que, además, es parte de una tendencia global en la forma de comprender y enfrentar la muerte en la contemporaneidad. De esta forma, el texto busca definir y entender cómo funciona la industria funeraria y los mecanismos que emplea para consolidarse dentro de un mercado tanto local como uno global.
... In relation to bereavement, such a sense of self can profoundly shape Japanese people's everyday experiences of confronting the death of a loved one. Japanese society has long established highly elaborated and formalised systems, including rich and mixed discourses of how bereavement should be handled, of processing individual deaths and redefining the relationships between the deceased and the survivors (Suzuki, 2002;Valentine, 2009a;. It has been well documented that traditional resources of family values, ancestor veneration and spirituality still largely shape bereaved people's ongoing lives (Maruyama, 2004;Smith, 1974;Suzuki, 2002;Valentine, 2009a;. ...
... Japanese society has long established highly elaborated and formalised systems, including rich and mixed discourses of how bereavement should be handled, of processing individual deaths and redefining the relationships between the deceased and the survivors (Suzuki, 2002;Valentine, 2009a;. It has been well documented that traditional resources of family values, ancestor veneration and spirituality still largely shape bereaved people's ongoing lives (Maruyama, 2004;Smith, 1974;Suzuki, 2002;Valentine, 2009a;. As highlighted in many studies, the ancestral tradition has long been centred on beliefs and practices relating to the loss of a family member, strongly reflecting continuity of responsibilities and interdependence of ties among family members (Smith, 1974;Valentine, 2010). ...
... From the perspective of transitional functions, the funeral involves a variety of rituals and customs than can instruct bereaved people in how to process death as well as how to adapt to their changing social status (Smith, 1974). As a social and often family affair, highly formalised with very specific expectations, the funeral in Japan may place considerable pressure on bereaved people to prioritise funerary practices and negotiation with others over their own needs (Suzuki, 2002). When investigating funerary practices in Japan, Suzuki (ibid.) ...
Thesis
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Bereavement is a common human experience across cultures; however, how people face and deal with their loss is also shaped by the socio-cultural background. Furthermore, bereaved people are often involved with various thoughts and actions in order to recover their ongoing lives as orderly and meaningful from loss of a loved one. Therefore, this thesis argues that motivation can be seen as a social tool that enables bereaved people to engage and negotiate with available norms and values in society to recover their meaning in their ongoing lives. In order to explore how motivation shape and are shaped by individual bereavement experiences, this thesis analyses a set of qualitative narratives from four different socio-cultural contexts, including 14 interviews from Britain, 16 interviews from Japan, 16 interviews and written narratives from China and 15 interviews from a so-called Shidu group of bereaved parents in China. By looking at how these bereaved people's reported experiences before, at and after death of a loved one, I found that they were motivated by their sense of meaning in their ongoing lives. This sense of meaning included, the sense of autonomy and independence in Britain, the primary sense of interdependence mixed with individual values in Japan, the strong sense of reciprocity in being part of family in China, and the interdependent parenthood in the Shidu groups. Further, by developing a comparative framework, this thesis explores the socio-cultural differences of these bereaved people's sense of meaning, bereavement experiences and everyday lives in relation to their motivation. 3
... Therefore, there is nothing new and wrong about religious commodification because everything can be commercialized for some specific purpose. If one accepts that cremation services (Panya, 2005) and funerary practices (Suzuki, 2002) have been involving with marketing, it is useless to deny that preservation of the corpses of charismatic monks will not be commodified. The question raised in this article is what are the forms and purposes of commodification of the corpses of famous monks found in Thailand? ...
Article
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This research examines unburnt corpses in Thailand. Case studies are taken from famous clerical masters whose bodies, as claimed by their devotees, should not be burnt, but must be well treated as living persons in glass coffins. In general, corpses are regarded as useless objects and undesirable. However, this ethnographic research found that in practice the corpses of charismatic monks can be commoditized and produce significant income in the form of donations. Undeniably, the corpses can clearly represent the true persons being more accessible than the bones or biographies in books. Two cases – Pańńānanda Bhikkhu in Nonthaburi and Khruba Jayawongsa in Lamphun – exemplify this assumption. The case of Pańńānanda shows that the corpse of a scholar monk, who protested folk beliefs, as well as supernatural power, was finally commercialized to produce financial profit. These corpses symbolize a consumerist society in Thailand where religion and economy strongly converge. Finally, this article proposes that religious commodification is facilitated by local cultures and different lifestyles of consumers.
... Hospice care in Japan is most often provided within a hospital setting, but home hospice and long term care insurance services have become more common in providing support for dying patients. In contemporary Japan, death is understood as a biological event requiring professional management by both health care providers and funeral directors (Suzuki 2000). 4 It is also an uncertain social transition that is less sharply defined by a moment in time, but rather by a gradual movement from one type of culturally defined being to another. ...
Article
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In contrast to media images of lonely deaths, stereotypes of Japanese calm acceptance of dying, and the “naturalness” of dependency in old age or illness, this paper explores the complex ways that changing perceptions of time refocus people on the question of how to live. Time both narrows to the level of medication schedules and bodily functions, and expands to more immediate engagement with others in the past and future. The idea of a moral timeline of such changes builds on recent work in the anthropology of morality by recognizing these shifts in the ideas and actions people take to retain agency through suffering. People near the end of life in Japan commonly employ cultural idioms of effort, reciprocity, and gratitude to express their continued striving to be moral persons in a social world. Ultimately such efforts determine not only how they see themselves and are seen by others through their final days, but whether theirs will be judged to be a “good death,” and thus the nature of the person’s continued social existence in spirit and memories after death. Ethnographic data on which this article is based come from a participant-observation study of adults of all ages with life-threatening illnesses and from an interview study of frail elderly and their family caregivers in the late 20th and early 21st century in urban and rural settings.
... To not perform these mortuary rituals has long been thought to incur danger to not only the dead (at risk of getting stranded or lost), but also the living (on whom an angry spirit can wreak damage and harm). Particularly vulnerable or volatile in the early period following death, spirits require purification and consolation (Suzuki 2000). Buddhist priests chant sutras and the body is washed and dressed before cremation. ...
... Funeral practices vary between different countries, due to many factors, such as: culture, religion, demography, medicalization and migration (Walter, 2005(Walter, , 2012. These differences are noticeable in funeral rites but also in cremation charges, cemetery management and state regulations (Sloane, 1991;Goody & Poppi, 1994;Suzuki, 2000;Kopp & Kemp, 2007;Akyel, 2011;Rugg, 2015). ...
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The purpose of this article is to understand the actions and processes of change made in the logistics policy of a funeral home operating in Northeast Brazil to cope with the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper addresses an exploratory case study with a qualitative analytical approach, which used a semi-structured interview script to collect data from the operations manager of the company in question, videoconferenced in July 2020. The survey was designed in four stages: (1) construction of theoretical subsidies; (2) interview with the operations manager; (3) return to the interviewee to consolidate the collected data; (4) analysis of the main changes occurring in the organisation’s logistics process during the pandemic. The results of the analysis helped conclude that the context of the public health crisis generated actions in and a need to re-adapt the firm’s logistics policy for transport, procurement and inventory, in order to ensure continuity of the funeral services rendered, without detriment to the consumers of the funeral plans and new clients.
... The socio-religious context of Japan helps explain why robotic funeral specialists make sense. In Japan, priests perform an increasingly limited role as ritual specialists within a broader, more secular ceremony (Suzuki 2000). Further, as Rambelli observes (2018) Japanese Buddhism has a long history of mechanising ritual performance, to a perceived increase, not decline, in its spiritual efficacy. ...
Article
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The study of death online has often intersected with questions of trust, though such questions have evolved over time to not only include relations of trust between individuals and within online communities, but also issues of trust emerging through entanglements and interactions with the afterlives of memorial materials. Papers in this panel attend to the growing significance of the afterlives of digital data, the circulation of fake deaths, the care attached to memorial bots, and the intersection of robots and funerals. Over the last twenty years the study of death online developed into a diverse field of enquiry. Early literature addressed the emergence of webpages created as online memorials and focused on their function to commemorate individuals by extending memorial artefacts from physical to digital spaces for the bereaved to gather (De Vries and Rutherford, 2004; Roberts, 2004; Roberts and Vidal, 2000; Veale, 2004). The emergence of platforms for social networking in the mid-2000s broadened the scope of research to include increasingly knotted questions around the ethics, politics and economics of death online. Scholars began investigating issues like the performance of public mourning, our obligations to and management of the digital remains of the deceased, the affordances of platforms for sharing or trolling the dead, the extraction of value from the data of the deceased, and the ontology of entities that digitally persist (e.g. Brubaker and Callison-Burch, 2016; Gibbs et al., 2015; Karppi, 2013; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Phillips, 2011; Stokes, 2012). Scaffolding this scholarship are a number of research networks, including the Death Online Research Network and the DeathTech Research Network, who encourage international collaboration and conversation around the study of death and digital media, including supporting this AoIR panel. This panel contributes to the growing field of research on death and digital media, and in particular poses challenges to focus on the commemoration of humans to encompass broader issues around the data and materiality of digital death. Digital residues of the deceased persist within and circulate through online spaces, enrolling users into new configurations of posthumous dependence on platforms, whilst at the same time digital afterlives now intersect with new technologies to create emergent forms of agency such as chatbots and robots that extend beyond the human, demanding to be considered within the sphere of digital memorialisation. Questions of trust emerge in this panel through various kinds of relationality formed with and through digital remains. These extend from relations of trust in the digital legacies now archived within platform architectures and how we might curate conversations differently around our personal data; to the breaking of trust in the internet when creating or sharing a hoax death; to the trust involved in making and caring for a posthumous bot; to the trust granted to robots to perform funerary rites. It is anticipated that this panel will not only appeal to scholars interested in the area of death and digital media, but also engage with broader scholarly communities in which questions of death now arise in larger debates around data, materiality, and governance on and of the internet. References Brubaker, J. R. and Callison-Burch, V. (2016) Legacy Contact: Designing and Implementing Post-mortem Stewardship at Facebook. Paper presented at CHI Workshop on Human Factors in Computer Systems, San Jose California. de Vries, B. and Rutherford, J. (2004) Memorializing Loved Ones on the World Wide Web. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 5-26. Gibbs, M., Meese, J., Arnold, M., Nansen, B., and Carter, M. (2015) #Funeral and Instagram: Death, Social Media and Platform Vernacular. Information Communication and Society, 18(3): 255-268. Karppi, T. (2013) Death proof: on the biopolitics and noopolitics of memorializing dead Facebook users. Culture Machine, 14, 1-20. Marwick, A. and Ellison, N. (2012) “There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!” Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 56(3), 378–400. Phillips, W. (2011) LOLing at Tragedy: Facebook Trolls, Memorial Pages and Resistance to Grief Online. First Monday 16(12). Retrieved from http://firstmonday.org Roberts, P. (2004) The Living and the Dead: Community in the Virtual Cemetery. Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 49(1), 57-76. Stokes, P. (2012) Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy and Technology, 25(3), 363-379. Veale, K. (2004) Online Memorialisation: The Web as a Collective Memorial Landscape For Remembering The Dead. The Fibreculture Journal, 3. Retrieved from http://three.fibreculturejournal.org
... The three papers of this section draw on the growing body of literature (e.g. Boret, 2014;Kawano, 2010Kawano, , 2014Long, 2004Long, , 2005Suzuki, 2000Suzuki, , 2014, which reflects the intensified interest toward these problems since the late 1990s, and extends it by looking at some hitherto unexplored topics from the specific angle of governmentality. Celia Spoden explores how dying has become the subject of individual decision-making and how the right to die movement has promoted "death with dignity" (songenshi) and advance decision-making as one form of "good death" since the late 1970s. ...
Article
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Why a special issue on death and dying? As Clive Seale states, the “[s]tudy of the human experience of death allows us to understand some fundamental features of social life.” According to him, the fact that we are embodied beings means that we are mortal. Knowing about our mortality is constantly threatening to make our lives meaningless. Therefore, we engage in social and cultural practices to give meaning to death and dying. Examining how practices around death and dying have changed and vary in different socio-cultural contexts enables us to realize how much our constructions of death and dying are contingent on the historical, socio-cultural and political context.
... The method of cremation was more commonly used in other parts of the world such as Japan and Europe in the early 20th century. The method was more readily adopted in some places than others (Jupp et al. 2017;Suzuki 2002;Danely 2014). A remarkable change that took place in body disposal of the recently dead in Korea in the last three decades is the shift from burial to cremation. ...
Chapter
Particular moments and contexts in human history have produced desirable and privileged methods of disposal of the recently dead and their memorialisation in their own unique ways. One desirable method in a culture at a particular point in time may be understood differently in another culture in the same era. Over the course of industrialisation and urbanisation in the last half-century in Korea, the predominant practice of full-body burial changed to that of cremation: 7% in 1971, 13.9 in 1980, 17.5 in 1990, and 82.7 in 2016 (Chun 2003: 138; Lee et al. 2015). This change has been mainly due to the popularised concern over ‘chewing up the small land for the sake of burying the dead’. While the burial rate has been decreased, other methods of body disposal have mushroomed, which consequently brought about new cultures, traditions, and concerns around the new practices, including the shortage of related facilities, the coming of luxurious memorialisation, illegal grave sites and damaged environment (Shin 2007: 226). This chapter is about what happens in regard to interment, i.e., crematorium, columbarium, natural/tree burial (수목장), which takes up a variety of spaces around the class and status of the deceased and their families. The chapter explores the extent to which different methods of human body disposal are commercialised and the ways in which those methods represent the social status and wealth of the deceased when they were alive.
... In her review of The Price of Death: The Funeral Industry in Contemporary Japan (Suzuki 2002), Kawano (2003: 473) raises several worthwhile questions: 'For example, why are funeral companies represented negatively for doing what companies are supposed to do-seek profits? What are the negative consequences of commercialization of funerals? ...
Chapter
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Prior to the 1980s, funeral rites in Korea generally took place at home, and funerals away from the deceased’s home were considered negative and thus avoided. However, since the 1980s, funeral rites have often taken place in funeral halls or the halls adjacent to hospital mortuaries (Kim 2012b: 217). Just as Aries (1981: 544, cited in Wernick 1995: 281) noted that ‘no one has time for the dead’, contemporary Koreans, who suffer from a shortage of spare time, if any, wish to minimise time spent on arrangements regarding the deceased.
... The HCI community has increasingly become interested in understanding how interactive systems intersect with social, cultural, and spiritual practices concerning remembrance of one's dead (e.g., [17]). Japan has rich traditions of Buddhist funerary ritual and ancestor veneration; however, in urban centres, memorialization practices are rapidly shifting to become more personal, secular, and cost-effective [23,25]. To better understand people's experiences with ACCs and how they mediate social practices of memorialization, we conducted an ethnographic study at eight ACC sites from February 2016 to September 2017 in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area. ...
Conference Paper
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Focusing on the design of technology for mourning and memorialization, we describe the emergence of Automatic Conveyor-belt Columbaria, locally developed in Japan, as an example of an interactive system combining physical and digital remains, and discuss its user experiences and social influences. It concludes with implications for future HCI research and practice with a focus on future gravesites and memorialization sites in dense urbanized regions.
... This focus upon living labor is important but should not serve as the limit of our understanding of capitalist expropriation and accumulation. Especially as death itself has emerged as a central activity and commodity form and even the very source of value-a value beyond war profiteering, the military industrial complex, empire, the mundane economies of the funeral and bereavement industry (Suzuki 2002) or the fragmented cadaver (Sharp 2001). ...
Article
The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings of labor, value and politics, forcing a revaluation of biopower and of extant understandings of the global economic and political order. Death as a source of value marks an entirely new space in capital that exceeds its former limits. This process can be seen in examples of genocidal warfare, ethnic cleansing, environmental “disasters” and globalized poverty that function as industries of death, mining the accumulated stored value of life, as death, and as an activity itself, instead of the old extractive exploitation of living labor.
... Studies of death in Japan have generally subscribed to this format, shedding light on the continuing roles of ritual professionals, religious and secular alike, in the difficult task of restoring the rent fabric of kin and community in ways that attempt to adapt to cultural and social changes (Kawano 2010;Rowe 2011;Smith 1974;Suzuki 2002Suzuki , 2013Tsuji 2006). Fewer anthropologists have focused on the dying process itself, although this has changed since the 1990s, with increased concern over the rapid biomedicalization of death and rising costs of end-of-life care in an aging society (Becker 1999;Kondo-Arita 2012;Lock 2002;Long 2001Long , 2003Long , 2005. ...
Chapter
More people in Japan are living into old age than ever before, and most will receive care from a spouse or adult child in the years prior to death. I argue that this care, and the ways it affects emotional adjustment in bereavement, are the most important factors shaping patterns of mourning and memorial in contemporary Japan. By turning from the spectacle of collective and public rituals around death and examining individual narratives, I show how care becomes the basis for the experience of what Strait calls “entangled agency” and Marshall Sahlins refers to as “mutuality of being” with the deceased after the care has “ended.” I argue that providing care for a dying older person entails practices, sensibilities, and affective attunements that bring about transformations of the self that persist after death. The imagined transformations of the deceased in the “other world” mirror those created by carers through objects, images, memories, and practices of mourning.
... We must regard negotiations of death and dying as a significant settlement challenge, as we do with employment and language for example, since death and dying is naturally embedded within the lived experience. More generally, however, there is substantial focus in anthropological literature on funeral rites (see for example, Davies, 2017;Metcalf and Huntington, 1991;Suzuki, 2002). This focus supports the assumption that funerals are central to community life. ...
Article
This paper explores death and dying in a settling refugee community. I use ethnographic description to explore an overlooked practical challenge of resettlement – funerals. The focus of research is the Brisbane Karen community, from Burma and/or Thai-Burma border camps. Death and dying as a theme of resettlement research is inadequate. Yet we ought to consider death and dying as a settlement challenge, just as we consider language, employment, or housing (for example). Death and dying traverses the practical challenges of settlement, to deeper ontological questions associated with spiritual existence, rituals and community bonding. The paper provides practical insights into the basic boundaries of Australian funeral practice, which can speak to other minority groups practising burial rites that depart from the mainstream. It comments on how those boundaries can bump up against cultural practice brought from elsewhere. It also demonstrates transnationalism in the Brisbane Karen community.
... When the body is then cremated, the eldest son (or occasionally in contemporary times, daughter) is called upon to light the funerary pyre, or push the crematory button to begin the cremation process. In Japanese Buddhism, the lighting of the cremation flame is considered to be the second and final death (Suzuki 2000). ...
Article
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Choosing to have a body embalmed, the choice of interment locations and type, including the selection of a particular casket, are all deeply intertwined with various understandings of the afterlife, and views of the body after death. Consumer choices in these cases are often determined by imagined embodiment, and are determined in part by non-rational consumer choices based on religious upbringing and belief. In turn, diasporic and religious identity can be reinforced and solidified through consumer choices that then fulfill religious imaginations of post-death embodiment. This article traces the relationship of two consumer death goods—embalming and caskets—in the contemporary United States, examining both the implicit and explicit relationships these products have with religious worldviews, mapping the social impact of religious beliefs on consumer death choices.
... Death ritual belongs to the genre of rites of passage, and is understood as a protracted process of accumulative rites during which the bereaved and the deceased are taken through various phases of separation, transition and incorporation (Suzuki, 2000;Van Gennep, 1909/1960. The transitional or liminal phase, characterised by insecurity and by being 'betwixt and between' the world of the living and the world of the dead (Turner, 1969), does not abruptly end at the closure of the funeral. ...
Article
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People continue relationships with their dead in a variety of ways. Since the 1990s, the idea of ‘continuing bonds’ has provided a framework for exploring and understanding post-mortem relationships. However, the dynamics of the bonds between the living and the dead have received little attention. By looking at the intersection of things, practices and spaces, this paper demonstrates that expressions of continuing bonds do not always point to continuity, and indeed can signify discontinuity. It explores the ‘transforming bonds’ between the recently bereaved and their deceased in the Netherlands, illustrating how post-mortem relationships change and how such changes affect the social location of the deceased and the bereaved. By attending to the ritual dynamics of separation, transition and integration, two aspects of the social and material relationships between the living and the dead are highlighted. First, attention is given to the ways wherein the bereaved relocate their deceased through material objects within and outside of their homes, enabling them to renegotiate the absence–presence of the deceased. Second, the paper illustrates that personalised incorporation practices are inevitably linked to negotiations and contestations in the social sphere, and the norms and values of the social environment.
... In the United States, where cremation without a funeral service has been used by the funeral industry as a "loss leader," it is widely regarded by funeral providers as a "second best" option (at least within the industry), whereas in the UK and Australia cremation combined with a full service funeral is accepted as a perfectly appropriate first choice. Nor should we neglect the diversities illuminated by research in other developed countries such as Japan (Suzuki, 2000) and France (Trompette, 2013), and of course diversity across the developing world, which is still more marked. Indeed, the increasing but uneven use of social media in the context of death is a direct reflection of this diversity. ...
Article
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This article explores how innovations in the funeral industry borrow from the technological affordances, commercial logics, cultural norms, and affective registers of social media platforms. Based on ethnographic research of funeral industry conventions, we analyze examples of funeral planning tools, funeral service mediation, and digital memorialization products. We consider how these products aim to capture forms of data, affect, and value as part of the funeral industry’s efforts to shore up their historically intermediary relevance in the face of potential “disruption” from technological innovation, and threats of marginalization posed by shifting norms of networked grieving and commemoration in digital culture
Chapter
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Japan gilt als alte Gesellschaft. Eine Lesart dieser Aussage ist: Wo viele Alte sind, da sterben auch viele. Aber wer kümmert sich um die jährlich 1,4 Mio. Verstorbenen und deren Gräber? Geht es nach der japanischen Bestattungsindustrie, dann das Individuum selbst. In einer Gesellschaft, in der sich niemand mehr um einen sorgt, erscheint Eigenvorsorge als letzter Ausweg, um niemandem zur Last zu fallen. Dorothea Mladenova hinterfragt diese Diskurse kritisch und zeigt, wie im Zuge der »aktiven Planung des eigenen Lebensendes« (shukatsu) neoliberale Prinzipien des »unternehmerischen Selbst« auf den Tod übertragen werden: Aus Selbstbestimmung wird gemeinwohlorientierte Selbstverantwortung.
Chapter
This chapter looks at examples from postwar and contemporary Japanese cinema that revive the dead in order to explore the relationship between death and cinema. It focuses on narrative films that focus on re‐presenting the bodies of the dead in death's wake. The chapter begins with a look back at earlier classics, Kurosawa Akira's 1952 Ikiru and Ozu Yasujiro's 1953 Tokyo monogatari ( Tokyo Story ). The films reflect our contradictory desires to preserve the dead and to put them to rest in a medium that itself is often lamented as a dying art. In his 1951 essay “Death Every Afternoon,” Bazin claims cinema possesses a privileged relationship with death. Bazin is troubled by cinema's power to re‐present the ultimate change: death. The chapter concludes with more recent films: Ososhiki ( The Funeral , Itami Juzo, 1984), Okuribito ( Departures , Takita Yojiro, 2008), and Wandafuru raifu ( After Life , Kore'eda Hirokazu, 1998).
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In Japan, the term shūkatsu—referred as the planning for later life and for the afterlife—has gained popularity due to high amount of mass media exposure in recent years. This paper examines shūkatsu from the active aging framework, contending that shūkatsu is an important activity that contributes to active aging, as the process of conscientious planning encourages older Japanese people to remain active. Data for this study were obtained from qualitative interviews that were conducted with 40 older middle-class Japanese citizens residing in Nagoya. Explored through a life course perspective, the study examined how salient factors, such as personal history, experiences, roles, anxieties, life-changing events, and cultural practices, have influenced older Japanese people in their shūkatsu decision-making process. In the process of understanding how the Japanese respond to changing family relationships and sociocultural transformations, the emphasis on living a “good old age” for better social, psychological, and physical well-being strongly reflects the agency to age actively. In a super-aged Japan, shūkatsu may be a vital strategy that not only ensures a better quality of life for the older population and their children, but it also contributes to individual’s sense of usefulness and satisfaction, as they are actively involved in the planning and management of their own later and afterlife choices.
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Using Van Gennep’s theory of Rite of Passage as its framework, this article examines the impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Chinese culture as depicted through death and mourning in Wang Fang’s (penname Fang Fang) recently published Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City. As part of the efforts to control the outbreak, the Chinese government took over the managing of the deceased, which triggered heated discussions on Chinese social media. Fang Fang’s diary, originally written as daily entries on Chinese social media platform Weibo, serves as a voice for those suffering during the pandemic, mediating between personal accounts, accounts of friends, family, and those living in Wuhan during the pandemic. These flesh out how the virus has not only been disturbing for Chinese people’s lives, but also disrupted the death rites and mourning rituals for those who have passed. Our article infuses a digital ontological reading with an anthropological twist that helps to understand how the diary mitigates the disturbances to mourning rituals inside and outside the confines of digital metaphysics. We argue that the digital diary mitigates these disruptions by allowing Chinese people to nourish their sorrow by identifying with the symbolic rites of passage and mourning rituals online at the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan. In doing so, this article examines three stages of rite of passage, including separation, liminality, and integration as they unfold in the diary, through which discourses and subjectivities based on collective and individual traumatic experiences are built, as a form of digital mourning that could reconcile both the official and the alternative voices of anonymous narratives about the handling of this crisis.
Thesis
This dissertation is a study of the ways that Mambai in southwest Timor-Leste sense and make sense of the socioecological changes in their lived environment. It pays special attention to the ways that sensory practices become fundamental to the lived experience of the Mambai, especially given the sea-change infringing upon them. Whereas prior research on the senses has treated them as secondary to the study of exploitative extractive development, this dissertation bridges phenomenology with sensory studies to argue for the primacy of sensory knowledge to Mambai efforts to overcome the uncertainty wrought by transformations in their socio-ecological relations. Embodied, sensorial experiences—sights, sounds, scents, tastes, and textures—of the lived environment are part of Mambai intangible cultural heritage that shapes how people define and confront extractive megaprojects and their consequences. Since 2011 the coastal town of Betano and its hamlets, inhabited by over 5,500 members of the Mambai cultural group, have been undergoing preparations for a hydrocarbon infrastructure complex along their oceanic location. This complex is known as the Tasi Mane Petroleum Project, an on-shore cluster of power plants and refineries built on and alongside settlements, that supports off-shore hydrocarbon extraction operations. Assisted by the Timor-Leste state’s appropriation of Mambai homestead and agricultural land for its operations, the project has transformed subterranean material into profitable products for the national and private oil companies. Unfettered profit, however, comes at a cost to the current residents. The project has released olfactory, sonic, and metallic pollutants into the atmosphere and ocean, and has challenged Mambai residents’ familiar sensory practices in their place of dwelling, contaminated the marine life that residents depend on for subsistence and income, and threatened their existential security with ongoing land appropriation and displacement from their homes. Combining over three years of ethnographic research with participatory GIS-GPS mapping of pollution, I trace how the Mambai perceive socio-ecological changes and grapple with extractive megaprojects and livelihood diversification. This dissertation argues that the sensorial practices of my interlocutors are fundamental to their efforts to confront megaprojects for hydrocarbon exploitation.
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This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.
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This paper discusses a history of funeral infrastructure development in Russia from the end of nineteenth century to the present day. Following Tony Walter’s approach to the diversity of the corpse management systems, the authors state that the Russian case does not fit any of the models suggested by Walter. Authors trace changes in Russian funeral management over the past century to show that the peculiarity of contemporary funeral culture has its roots in Soviet ideology and command economy with a specific frame of infrastructure (dys)functionality. The paper is based both on archival materials on Soviet funeral management and an ethnographic study, conducted in eight regions of Russia from 2016 to 2018.
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On a map, Japan does not appear to be in the Indian Ocean World (IOW), but even in the relative isolation of the early modern period, connections were forged through the exchange of animal products. In this case study, the absorption of peacock feathers into existing belief systems and applications such as archery, medicine, religion, tea ceremony, children’s games, and clothing brings the IOW to Japan. This integration was so complete, that when Japan was ‘opened,’ peacock feathers became a prominent motif of the objects produced both within Japan and by proponents of Japonisme.
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Historians and anthropologists have extensively researched spiritual encounters between America’s indigenous people and Christian missionaries. One group of scholars, who more often than not are linked to Native American cultural activism, took a strong critical approach and came to view missionary activities as a tool of colonialism. Another group of scholars, who are mostly people with a theological background, on the contrary, has treated missionary activities apologetically as the vehicle of social and moral improvement. The third group of researchers, to which I belong, avoids moral assessments of the missionary activities and places indigenous encounters with Christianity in particular historical contexts. Dialogues of indigenous people with Christianity were multifaceted and cannot be pigeonholed either in the partisan post-colonial "decolonization" paradigm or in the theological perspective. To illuminate this premise, I use archival records of Alaska Russian Orthodox Mission and my own field notes of the 1990s to examine a case of an abortive Russian Orthodox mission to the Ahtna Indians of Alaska. In the 1880s, these Athabaskan-speaking people suddenly took efforts to learn more about Russian Orthodoxy, and many of them simultaneously began to actively seek conversion. My paper explores cultural, economic, and psychological motives behind this peculiar case of “self-Christianization.”
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Since 2009, the preparation for one’s own end-of-life (shūkatsu) has become a media buzzword. Conceptualized by the funeral industry, it provides a model subject formation along with a set of self-technologies that individuals are supposed to follow. Following the lines of governmentality studies and subjectivation research, this paper scrutinizes shūkatsu by looking both at the model subjects’ programmatic implications and at the actual ways of subjectivation as practiced by the addressees of the program. The analysis is based on field research and interviews with both shūkatsu suppliers and addressees.
Chapter
This chapter explores how Japanese attitudes towards death today both mirror the contemporary developed world as a whole, in the sense of death as a taboo to be hidden in hospitals, and also have their own very particular qualities, in the devotion to the departed dead apart from any belief in a monotheistic god. The chapter examines ancestor worship, beliefs in reincarnation, senses of the brevity of human life and suicide, and skepticism about any world beyond this one, as attitudes toward death in Japanese history that have extended into the present. It also looks at the growing individualization of death in Japan today, as death becomes not a matter of household ancestral worship but individual preference of funerals and also of senses of life after death, perhaps into an increasingly secular future.
Chapter
From the content of Korean media reports, readers can quickly ascertain that Korean funerals are often far from affordable and have lasting financial impacts on families whose loved ones have died and been ‘farewelled.’ This high cost is one of many concerns and risks that Koreans are informed of through the media, but seemingly quickly put aside and forgotten. Yet, the problem remains and the adverse impact continues. Despite the significance of the problem, there are not enough attempts to understand and analyse sociocultural dimensions underpinning the problem. This may be partly due to the ‘taboo’ nature of the funeral rite and partly because contemporary Koreans have many other priorities to address in their everyday lives.
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While people are still alive, we owe them respect. Yet what, if anything, do we owe the newly dead? This question is an urgent practical concern for aged societies, because older people die at higher rates than any other age group. One novel way in which Japan, the frontrunner of aged societies, meets its need to accommodate high numbers of newly dead is itai hoteru or corpse hotels. Itai hoteru offer families a way to wait for space in over‐crowded crematoriums while affording an environment conducive to grieving. Drawing on conversations with itai hoteru employees, we delineate the values this contemporary death practice expresses and show how these values comprise part of the broader idea of a good death. A good death implies duties on both sides of death's divide: to both the dying and the newly dead.
Book
The book tackles the challenging theme of death as seen through the lens of literature and its connections with history, the visual arts, anthropology, philosophy and other fields in humanities. It searches for answers to three questions: what can we know about death; how is death socialised; and how and for which purposes is death aesthetically shaped? Unlike many other publications, the volume does not endorse the fallacy of over-simplifying death by seeing it either in an exclusively positive light or by reducing it to a purely literary figure. Using literature’s potential to stimulate critical thinking, many contemporary stereotypical configurations of death and dying are debunked, and many hitherto unforeseen ways in which death functions as a complex trigger of meaning-making are revealed. The book proves that death is an inexhaustible source of meanings which should be understood as peremptorily plural, discontinuous, problematic, competitive, and often conflictual. It offers original contributions to the field of death studies and also to literary and cultural studies.
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This article looks at religious and semi-religious paraphernalia in everyday life from the perspective of disposal. Recent research in religious studies and anthropology has focused on the ways in which beliefs are performed through religious objects. But what happens to the object that is not performed? What notions of materiality do they bring into play? By using the notion of migawari (body substitution) and ethnographic vignettes, I argue that talismans and amulets become “believing substitutes” that allow for an externalization of belief altogether. They become problematic again at the point of disposal. In particular, in the case of dolls, where body substitution acquires a literal sense, questions of the relationship between dolls and their owners, and of their value and inalienability, add to the dolls’ ambiguity. Memorial rites for dolls instill a sense of closure for participants by appealing to orthopraxy rather than by addressing beliefs concerning dolls.
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Domestic Buddhist altars have long provided symbolically and materially rich media for venerating the dead in Japan. However, as Japanese household structures and funerary rites are unsettled in the contemporary era, Buddhist altars (butsudan) are rapidly being reinvented and digitalized. In this article, we describe the new technologies harnessed in butsudan production, the sensory experiences they offer, and their abilities to both reform and reinforce traditional networks of ancestral obligation. Despite promising death rituals that are more personal, secular, and affordable, the development of digitally enhanced material memorialization is still very much a work in progress in Japan.
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En el siguiente artículo analizaremos la dimensión ritual de los funerales y su vinculación con un evento muy presente durante todo el siglo XIX: la llegada y la diseminación de sucesivas epidemias de cólera. El argumento que sostenemos es que las mismas provocaron crisis sociales profundas, afectando todas las esferas de la vida social. Este tipo de episodios traumáticos, generó un proceso doble conectado a los ritos mortuorios. Por un lado, trastocaron los rituales más usuales, y por otro, esto ocasionó que la sociedad porteña desplegara otros suplementarios para que los difuntos tuvieran sus funerales. Para ello, en un primer apartado presentaremos las prácticas fúnebres tradicionales en Buenos Aires, así como las características disruptivas del cólera. Asimismo, veremos que la sociedad porteña tenía un repertorio amplio y dúctil de prácticas fúnebres, y si bien ante la epidemia no pudo desarrollar aquellas más habituales, surgieron otras para paliar el cambio en el escenario por la crisis desatada. Pero además de alta mortalidad, estas epidemias acentuaron crisis políticas y tensiones sociales, que se dirimieron tanto durante sus desarrollos como inmediatamente después. Para ello, en un segundo apartado, examinaremos la muerte del vicepresidente Marcos Paz, fallecido de cólera durante el verano de 1868. Postulamos que el Estado será un factor esencial en los homenajes a algunos muertos, sobre todo aquellos que le permitían reencauzar conflictos institucionales y/o políticos. De esta manera, nuestro argumento sostiene que los rituales fueron un elemento central para normalizar conflictos que excedían aquellos más evidentes.
Chapter
This chapter discusses mortuary rituals in contemporary Japan by first describing traditional mortuary rituals (e.g., ancestor worship and family graves), in which the family plays a pivotal role in dealing with death and the afterlife. With rapid social change, the continuation of these rituals poses problems especially as a result of major changes in the family. Consequently, new or simplified forms of mortuary rituals have emerged. The chapter introduces some of these (e.g., eternally worshipped graves, scattering bones in the sea, and low‐cost funerals) and considers why people adopt them. These alternatives diversify mortuary practices and increase individual choices. They also reveal that: (1) despite changes, death and the afterlife still constitute an integral part of life and mortuary rituals remain highly significant in Japan; and (2) evolving mortuary rituals today not only reflect changes in various facets of Japanese life (e.g., family, employment, demographic trends, consumerism) but also illustrate how people respond to these changes.
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In the recent past, bereaved families have changed their choice of funeral services from local communities to the putting them in the hands of funeral businesses. Furthermore, the funeral location has changed from the home of the deceased to the funeral hall. In this paper, I examined how the bereaved families, as users, choose the location of the funeral by looking at the obituary columns of local newspapers. In Utsunomiya City, the number of employees in the funeral service increased drastically in the 1990s, and at the same time the funeral location moved from the home of the deceased to the funeral hall. The funeral hall in the city was initially set up inside the DID, and as the user expands to the surrounding area and spreads near to the boundary of the DID, in recent years funeral halls have become reduced in size and installed in the center of the city. Based upon analysis of the obituary columns, bereaved families had a tendency to choose a funeral home near the home of the deceased. However, in 2009, the city crematory moved to the suburbs, and as the ceremonial hall adjoining this was easier to use, a number of bereaved families wanted to use the hall even though it was far away from the home. Furthermore, such bereaved families are expanding from within the DID to outside. As a result, it becomes clear that the involvement of local people in the funeral ceased, and that the funeral locations chosen by the bereaved families are expanding spatially.
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As a result of recent economic changes in the United States and cultural changes among the population, the funeral industry has experienced a “legitimation crisis.” The objective of this research is to examine new advertising and marketing strategies engaged in by professionals in the funeral industry to respond to market and cultural changes that have affected both the funeral industry at large and the role of the funeral director as a participant in this industry. A meta-analysis of articles from issues of the industry trade journal American Funeral Director for the years 2008 through 2015 was conducted. Two major themes emerged from the data. First, that funeral home owners should respond to market changes by using their assets for diverse reasons and second that forms of community engagement can create feelings of goodwill that will increase usage and loyalty from families. Within each of these major themes, a variety of subthemes emerged from the data.
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Based on two years of fieldwork in Japan, this chapter explores the demographic and family changes as well as the economic and ideological factors motivating people to choose Tree-Burial. The first section introduces the concept, the community, and the ecological incentives and activities surrounding the Tree-Burial sites. In the second section, I investigate the underlying demographic and family conditions that compel or encourage a section of the Japanese population to renounce the customary ancestral grave. The third section argues that Tree-Burial is, for some subscribers, a means of contesting the exorbitant cost of customary gravestones and the way some Buddhist priests run their burial and funeral business. Finally, the last section of this chapter discusses how Tree-Burial provides for a more individualized form of memorialization, and novel ideas of the afterlife based on its subscribers' aspiration to return to nature (shinzen ni kaeritai) for eternity.
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Available Online: http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gs-1/14399
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Based on the comparative analysis methodology in its case study form, this article examines the origins, the design, and the consequences of territorial arrangements in Italy, i.e. a country in which settling the stateness problem coincided with the process of post-authoritarian transformation. This experience - particularly the pacted transition (although it was not explicitly pronounced in Italy despite the fact that the state never witnessed any post-war anti-fascist lustration of bureaucracy) - was later used as an example for the Spanish model of democratic reforms, which in turn became paradigmatic. This article traces the long-lasting impact of the historic bloc between the industrial bourgeoisie of the Italian North and the landlords of the Italian South (Mezzogiorno) that contributed to the conservation of the socioeconomic backwardness of the latter. Special attention is given to the influence of the structural constraints of international bipolarity that laid down the external framework of the so-called "Italian anomaly", that is, the lack for almost half a century left-wing and right-wing political parties' alteration in power. This anomaly delayed Italian regionalization despite its having been envisaged in the constitution. However, the objective socioeconomic demands of a welfare state created possibilities for the birth of regions in the early 1970s. The emergence of the Northern League gave a new dimension to Italian politics by radically reshaping its traditional structures. These developments, taken together with the cleansing of a corrupted Italian political class, the referendum of 1993, and the new electoral law ultimately caused the demise of the First Republic.
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This overview presents the characteristics and an analysis of historical forms of consumer crediting. The theoretical basis of the overview is rooted in the cultural and social history of consumer credit-a new and interdisciplinary direction. Because a distinct emphasis is placed on the differences between forms of crediting in certain countries and historical periods, the cultural and social history of credit appears to be the most appropriate for considering forms of consumer credit as they change throughout history. It also focuses on the history of credit institutional conditions that shaped current forms of crediting. The conditions include legislation regulating debt relations more or less rigorously and forms of credit that have already existed, such as pawnshops, small loans, installment credits, family loans, and open-book credits. Furthermore, the development of consumer credit in the USA and in Europe is analyzed. In the USA, the key processes have been the legalization and legitimation of small loans, the proliferation of installment purchases, and the evolution of credit accounting, whereas in Europe, check credit systems (particularly that which was realized in the United Kingdom by the Provident Clothing and Supply Company) that have no analogues in America are of major interest. Then, the criticisms of credit are taken into account as they appeared throughout its development. The main directions of the counteractions were ethical, anti-capitalist, and anti-American criticism. In the conclusion, it is indicated that research in the history of credit is relevant to both the economists and sociologists in the field and to improving our understanding of the complexity and ambiguity of the various factors that have shaped what we now know as consumer crediting.
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The Western funeral industry has been delimiting professional stigma since the middle of the 20th century. The business is now open, public, and socially responsible. By contrast, the Russian funeral market is still plagued by myths and stereotypes which lead Russian funeral directors to avoid any form of publicity. As a result, the Russian funeral industry is highly stigmatized. Why does such a situation exist? Can we assume that stigma is perpetuated by the professional community? The article is based on the author's ethnographic notes that were collected as a result of undertaking field research in one of the central regions of Russia. In the first part, the paper describes common funeral market models and shows the basic differences present in the Russian model. The second part provides examples from the ethnographic work. In the third part, some notes about funeral market workers are made. The article's conclusion consists of several statements. First, that the Russian funeral market has a number of distinctive features: a weak and even spontaneous institutionalization; the prevalence of informal practices; and a dysfunctional infrastructure. In addition, the professional structure is quite closed to the entrance of new players and hierarchically organized according to the principles of a criminal society. This structure can be described in terms of David Stark's concept of ambiguity, meaning that the funeral market is able to function effectively only if its ambiguous status is preserved. From this perspective, stigma is a tool of conservation of ambiguity.
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