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Anne Allison

Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology
Box 90091, Durham, NC 27708-0091
230 Friedl Building, East Campus, Durham, NC 27708-0091

Overview


Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products, the precarity of irregular workers, and new death practices in "post-familial" Japan. She is the author of Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994)—an ethnography of the Japanese corporate practice of entertaining employees and customers in the sexualized atmosphere of hostess clubs; Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan (University of California Press 2000)—a collection of essays analyzing the complex desires linking motherhood, pornographic comics, and popular culture; Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006)—a study of the intermeshing of fantasy, capitalism, and cultural politics in the rise of Japan's brand of "cool" youth-goods on the global marketplace, and Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013) about the socio-economic shifts in post-corporatist Japan towards precaritization of work, sociality, and everyday security. Her most recent book, Being Dead Otherwise (Duke University Press, 2023) looks at changes in mortuary practice when the family grave--once so conventional in Japan--is becoming outdated, even abandoned. Examining new trends for where dead wind up "otherwise (such as automated columbaria) in Japan today, the book considers historical, socio-economic, and existential factors involved in the place (or lack thereof) of a final resting place for those with (or without) others to tend to them.

Current Appointments & Affiliations


Professor of Cultural Anthropology · 2005 - Present Cultural Anthropology, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor in Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies · 2021 - Present Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies, Trinity College of Arts & Sciences

In the News


Published April 17, 2023
Anne Allison on Examines Emerging Burial Practices in Japan
Published October 31, 2014
Allison Book Honored by American Ethnological Society
Published February 19, 2014
Cultural Anthropology Journal Goes Open Access

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Recent Publications


Scorching the everyday

Journal Article Anthropology and Humanism · December 1, 2023 In this “hundreds” written in honor of Kathleen Stewart, I consider the scorching pain of lonely death in Japan that gets quelled, if only a bit, by the prayer offered by a Japanese worker in cleaning up the mess of the remains left behind. ... Full text Cite

Book Review: Being Dead Otherwise

Journal Article OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying · November 2023 Full text Cite

The (Un)social Smells of Death: Changing Tides in Contemporary Japan

Journal Article Asia Pacific Journal Japan Focus · June 3, 2023 In the face of a high aging population, decline in the rates of marriage and childbirth, and post-growth economic shifts, sociality is downsizing in Japan away from the family to more single lifestyles. The effects of this on the necro-landscape are examin ... Cite
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Recent Grants


Scholarly Conference on Japanese Studies

ConferencePrincipal Investigator · Awarded by Association for Asian Studies · 2020 - 2022

Doctoral Dissertation Research: Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan

Inst. Training Prgm or CMEPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Science Foundation · 2019 - 2020

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Education, Training & Certifications


The University of Chicago · 1986 Ph.D.