Bones of Contention: Animals and Religion in Contemporary by Barbara R. Ambros

March 18, 2017

By Barbara R. Ambros

because the Nineties the japanese puppy has grown to a trillion-yen enterprise and estimates position the variety of pets above the variety of young ones less than the age of fifteen. There are among 6,000 to 8,000 companies within the jap puppy funeral undefined, together with greater than 900 puppy cemeteries. of those approximately one hundred twenty are operated through Buddhist temples, and Buddhist mortuary rites for pets became an institutionalized perform. In Bones of Contention, Barbara Ambros investigates what non secular and highbrow traditions built animals as topics of non secular rituals and the way pets were incorporated or excluded within the necral landscapes of latest Japan.

Pet mortuary rites are trademarks of the continued adjustments in modern eastern religions. the rise in unmarried and nuclear-family families, marriage delays for either men and women, the falling birthrate and graying of society, the occult increase of the Eighties, the puppy growth of the Nineties, the anti-religious backlash within the wake of the 1995 Aum Shinrikyō incident—all of those and extra have contributed to Japan’s contested heritage of puppy mortuary rites. Ambros makes use of this historical past to make clear vital questions akin to: Who (or what) counts as a loved one? What types of practices should still the country realize as non secular and hence safeguard financially and legally? Is it frivolous or egocentric to maintain, pamper, or love an animal? should still people and pets be buried jointly? How do humans reconcile the deeply own grief that follows the lack of a puppy and the way do they think the afterlife of pets? And finally, what's the prestige of animals in Japan? Bones of Contention is a e-book approximately how jap humans think and examine pets and other forms of animals and, in flip, what pets and their humans need to let us know approximately existence and loss of life in Japan today.

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