Maintaining relations,managing pollution: Mortuary exchanges in a Japanese rural town

Abstract

In this article, based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a Japanese rural town, the author examines exchanges that occur upon death by focusing on the flow of material objects in relation to pollution and vitality. Specifically, he attempts to elucidate the ways in which pollution and vitality are manifested and exchanged through the transaction of material objects between the bereaved, the non-bereaved and the dead. Throughout the article, the author seeks a fuller understanding of why the mortuary exchange must be understood in terms of pollution and vitality and their relationship with material objects. He suggests that the mortuary exchange has the most important function of distributing pollution and vitality so that the living and the dead supplement their own vitality and diminish death pollution. By doing this, the defiled states of both the living and the dead are ultimately transformed into states of purity.