Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.

In an era of changing demographics and values, this volume provides a cross-national and interdisciplinary perspective on the question of who cares for and about the elderly. The contributors reflect on research studies, experimental programmes and personal experience in Japan and the United States to explicitly compare how policies, practices and interpretations of elder care are evolving at the turn of the century.

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What are people's life experiences in present-day Japan? This timely volume addresses fundamental questions vital to under- standing Japan in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Its chapters collectively reveal a questioning of middle-class ideals once considered the essence of Japaneseness. In the postwar model household a man was expected to obtain a job at a major firm that offered life-long employment; his counterpart, the professional housewife, managed the domestic sphere and the children, who were educated in a system that provided a path to mainstream success. In the past twenty years, however, Japanese society has seen a sharp increase in precarious forms of employment, higher divorce rates, and a widening gap between haves and have-nots. Contributors draw on rich, nuanced fieldwork data collected during the 2000s to examine work, schooling, family and marital relations, child rearing, entertainment, lifestyle choices, community support, consumption and waste, material culture, well-being, aging, death and memorial rites, and sexuality. The voices in these pages vary widely: They include schoolchildren, teenagers, career women, unmarried women, young mothers, people with disabilities, small business owners, organic farmers, retirees, and the elderly.

In an era of changing demographics and values, this volume provides a cross-national and interdisciplinary perspective on the question of who cares for and about the elderly. The contributors reflect on research studies, experimental programmes and personal experience in Japan and the United States to explicitly compare how policies, practices and interpretations of elder care are evolving at the turn of the century.

Focusing on tradition, technology, and authority, this volume challenges classical understandings that mortuary rites are inherently conservative. The contributors examine innovative and enduring ideas and practices of death, which reflect and constitute changing patterns of social relationships, memorialisation, and the afterlife. This cross-cultural study examines the lived experiences of men and women from societies across the globe with diverse religious heritages and secular value systems. The book demonstrates that mortuary practices are not fixed forms, but rather dynamic processes negotiated by the dying, the bereaved, funeral experts, and public institutions. In addition to offering a new theoretical perspective on the anthropology of death, this work provides a rich resource for readers interested in human responses to mortality: the one certainty of human existence.

This book provides a valuable introduction to historical and sociological studies of family change in Japan. The author discusses the organization and assumptions of the academic disciplines, introduces resources for cross-cultural research on family change, and summarizes research results in areas such as infanticide, preindustrial mobility, family size and structure, family relations, mate selection, and the elderly. Summaries of Japanese studies and translated tables and graphs are integrated with materials from relevant English language publications from the perspective of life course theory. The book points out difficulties in cross-cultural research but stresses the vital contributions of such insights for the understanding of family change.

From the deathbed to the commuter railway station, from the marriage market to the fish market, from the baseball field to the grave, this volume explores the diversity of contemporary Japanese society by studying how people "compose" their families, their communities, and their own identities. Challenging fixed boundaries characteristic of institutional analysis, these essays comprise an anthropology of real people who age, who play, and whose lives speak to ours even over chasms of cultural differences and misunderstandings. The contributors are historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of Japan who engage these ideas in their research and who have been inspired over the years by the spirit of David Plath's anthropology of self. Part I includes essays by Susan Long, Kamiko Takeji, and Scott Clark which explore how the meaning of self is created through long-term engagement with convoys, those with whom one coauthors biographies. The second set of chapters investigates the process of creating circles of interaction, identity, and meaning beyond that inner circle. Keiko Ikeda considers the cocreation of individual and collective meanings among consociates of locality. The chapters by Paul Noguchi and by David McConnell and Jackson Bailey describe negotiations of identity among consociates within the workplace, while Theodore Bestor and William Kelly focus on constructions of regional and national identity. In Part III, chapters by Christie Kiefer, John Grossberg, Morioka Kiyomi, and Robert J. Smith bring us full circle to reconsideration of composing the self, but within the widest possible social universe that includes the aging, the dying, and the spirits of the dead.