2025 F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize Winner

Hannah Gould

Author of When Death Falls Apart: Making and Umaking the Necromaterial Traditions of Contemporary Japan (University of Chicago Press, 2023) 

Engagingly written and analytically nuanced, Hannah Gould's When Death Falls Apart questions what happens to people and objects when the material traditions surrounding death and remembrance of the deceased confront the changing values of the living. Based on an impressive commitment to extensive and intensive fieldwork, including within her own family, Gould traces the life cycle of traditional wooden Japanese Buddhist memorial altars (butsudan) from production in traditional workshops and modern factories, to sale on shop floors, to transportation and installation in households, to display by families, and, finally, to abandonment, disposal, and partial replacement by new ritual practices. In the process, she illuminates how culture, corporations, and capitalism have engaged with and changed the significance of death and dying in Japan today.