EXCESSES OF DEATH

Careful disposal and caring commemoration of the dead have long been customary and are widely considered to be constitutive of humanity itself. But when circumstances break down or shift, and remains are uncared for or discarded as waste, what happens to the remnants of these unritualized deaths? Is there something (or someone) that lingers? And who is left to handle the pieces, involving what kind of practice or work?

In this two-part workshop, we address the question of what Kevin Hetherington (2004) calls the “hauntings” of disrupted disposal, in the form of deaths that go unmarked, unmemorialized, or unknown. The first part of the workshop will focus on contemporary Japan: a “death ridden” (Uriu et al. 2019) country that, at a moment of radical change away from the socio-economic moorings of a more stable economy and life-long marriages and jobs, floats a “high-aging, low birth-rate” population with decreasing familial and ancestral ties. Its modern mortuary system—of interment in family graves tended to by kin—is rapidly on the decline, leaving both the ageing and bereaved in a quandary and the ritual trappings of this system (gravestones, domestic shrines, and human remains) increasingly abandoned. In four presentations, participants will consider both the material containers and the humanly contained of mortuary forms in the process of getting decommissioned: what happens to left-over ash, disposed-of gravestones, lonely dead, or orphaned ancestors? What is emerging to handle the dead by new means? How might acts of care for the dead extend from human to post-human hands as necro-technologies advance?

The second part of the workshop considers the issue of disjointed or disrupted disposal of the dead in wider geographical perspective. Responding to the Japanese ethnographies and contemporary global events, four presentations will consider how different communities respond when death overwhelms the capacity of existing (cultural, religious, infrastructure) structures for handling the dead, or indeed, events disrupt or destroy deathcare systems entirely. How are the hauntings of disrupted disposal felt, and by whom? How might this haunting be tended to, abetted, or resolved? Is excess always a condition of systems of disposal, or a consequence of their disruption?