Publications

Featured Works

Please contact me for access to publications stuck behind a paywall.

 

Caring for Sacred Waste

In this ethnographic study of the Buddhist goods industry, I examine how people manage the “problematic feelings" generated by the disposal of (once) sacred objects. 

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Domestic(ating) Buddha

Published in the Journal of Material Religion, this paper explores how Western coverts to Japanese Buddhism practice through purchasing, decorating, and positioning altars (butsudan) in the home

Bad Buddhists, Good Robots

This paper, written with Holly Walters, explores robotic experiments as the logical outcome of techno-salvationist discourses that identify human failings as the principal barrier to perfect Buddhist praxis.

Journal Articles & Book Chapters

Gould, H. (2023) From a ‘good death’ to a ‘calm heart’: Buddhist retailing meets self-care in contemporary Japan. Journal of Contemporary Religion.

Allison, A. & Gould, H. (2023) New life in Japan’s ‘endingness’ business. Anthropology Today 39(3):7-9.

Gould, H. (2022). The Life of Buddhist Altars for the Dead in Contemporary Japan. In: Enshrining the Sacred: Microarchitecture in Ritual Spaces, edited by Ilia M. Rodov. Peter Lang.

Gould, H. (2022). Modern Minimalism and the Magical Buddhist Art of Disposal. In: Buddhism and Waste, edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg, pp. 53-74. London: Bloomsbury.

Westendorp, M. & Gould, H. (2021). Re-Feminizing Death: Gender, Spirituality and Death Care in the Anthropocene. Religions 12(8): 667.

Gould, H. Gibbs M, Nansen B, Kohn T & Arnold M. (2021) Robot Death Care: A study of funerary practice. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 24 (4: Special Issue on ‘Caring Media Futures’): 603-621. 

Gould, H., Arnold M, Dupleix T & Kohn T (2021) ‘Stood to rest’: reorientating necrogeographies for the 21st century. Mortality. Published online 21 March https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2021.1878120

Gould, H. & McKay, M. (2020) An Introduction to Bad Buddhism. Journal of Global Buddhism 21: 141-151.

Gould, H. & Walters, H. (2020) Bad Buddhists, Good Robots: Techno-Salvationist Designs for Nirvana. Journal of Global Buddhism 21: 277-294.

Watch the Summary Video

King, T., Border-Giles, D., Meher, M., & Gould, H. (2020) Anthropology and #Metoo: Reimagining Fieldwork. The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Goodwin-Hawkins, B. & Gould, H. (2020) Fieldwork at Sunset: Visual Representations of the Anthropological Online. FOCAAL: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology (86): 97-111.

Arnold M, Nansen B, Kohn T, Gibbs M, and Gould, H. (2019) The disposition of the destitute. Parity 32(6): 22. 

Gould, H. (2019) Caring for sacred waste: The disposal of butsudan (Buddhist altars) in contemporary Japan. Japanese Religions 43 (1 & 2): 197-220.

Gould, H. (2019) Domestic(ating) Buddha: Making a place for Japanese Buddhist altars (butsudan) in Western homes. Journal of Material Religion 15 (4): 488-510. 

Gould, H., Kohn, T. & Gibbs, M. (2019) Uploading the ancestors: Experiments with digital Buddhist altars in contemporary Japan. Death Studies 43 (7): 456-465. 

Gould, H., Chenhall, R., Kohn, T. & Stevens, C. S. (2019) An Interrogation of Sensory Anthropology of and in Japan. Anthropological Quarterly 92 (1):231-258. 

Uriu, D., Odom, W. and Gould, H. (2018). Understanding Automatic Conveyor-belt Columbaria: Emerging Sites of Interactive Memorialization in Japan. In Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’18). ACM, New York: 747-752.

 

 Editor Reviewed Articles

Gould, H. & Allison, F. (2020). Visions of future cemeteries: 5 models and how Australians feel about them The Conversation, December 9

Kohn, T. & Gould, H. (2020). Small funerals, online memorials and grieving from afar: the coronavirus is changing how we care for the dead. The Conversation.

Gould, H. (2019). Kondo and Kuyō: Disposal as a Religious Experience? Sightings, February 14. 

Gould, H. (2017)  Our Electric Afterlives. Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights: Current Anthropology. 

Gould, H. (2016) If Pokemon Go feels like a religion, that's because it kind of is. The Guardian, July 12.

Gould, H. (2014). Exhibiting Disaster: The Great Kantō Earthquake, 1923. Collections, 15:46-52.

 

Book Reviews

Gould, H. (2023) The New Death: Mortality and Death Care in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Anthropological Research 79(2): 257-259.

Gould, H. (2020) Leisure and Death: An Anthropological Tour of Risk, Death, and Dying.The Australian Journal of Anthropology

Gould, H. (2016) Key Terms in Material Religion. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, VII (2)