On Endings - with Anne Allison

How can thinking about funerals and life's endings offer new ways to imagine our worlds? In this episode, On Endings, our guest Anne Allison, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University, discusses planning for life endings and how it has shifted in recent decades.

Allison's work examines the intersection of political economy and everyday life in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan, and how changing configurations of family care and sociality in Japan sharply transform what is possible when it comes to dying.  

Among the key foci of her work are sexuality and maternal labor toys and comics youth and irregular workers as well as most recently practices of death and dying and his author of books such as Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (1994) Permitted and Prohibited Desires Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (2000) Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (2006), and Precarious Japan (2013).

This episode focuses on her most recent book, Being Dead Otherwise, published by Duke University Press in 2023. A book that won the 2025 John Whitney Hall Book Prize.

Host: George Paul Meiu, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel.

Production: Zainabu Jallo (Institute of Social Anthropology) in

collaboration with the New Media Center at the University of Basel.