Transnational Futures of Deathcare in the Asia-Pacific.

This research examines deathcare as a site of creative innovation and transnational exchange, in order to map contours of contemporary deathscapes within the Asia-Pacific and to generate new insights into how the region can meet future challenges to its systems of care for the dying, dead, and bereaved.

Cultural practices surrounding death, body disposal, and memorialisation are deeply personal and emotive, often drawing on ancestral traditions that have endured (or are imagined to have endured) within a particular community or place across generations. Indeed, this temporal depth is part of what can make rituals socially significant and efficacious. Recent ethnographies of death ritual across East Asia, including my own forthcoming ethnography in Japan, critically examine how local traditions of death have confronted and adapted to the conditions of modernity, including urbanisation, secularisation and the transformation of kinship structures. There are clear parallels between these accounts. For example, the emergence of secular, personalised funeral services, and new space-saving grave designs. However, these transformations are rarely compared which means that potential cross-fertilisation or conflict remains unexamined.

The events of past years have brought into sharp relief the depth of global interconnections around death. Due to COVID-19, international repatriations of remains halted, disparate mourners were joined via Zoom, and global mortuary professionals exchanged PPE and the latest advice on infection control. But even before the pandemic, death care’s global ties were increasingly visible, with the intensification of the movement of capital, necro-technologies, religious traditions, primary materials (e.g. marble), technical skills (e.g. embalming), and bodies – both alive and dead – across borders.

How are we to conceptualise a global marketplace for death care, and its interaction with the intimate act of mourning and memorialising one’s dead?