The article investigates the stories of burdensome materiality and choices people make around care for karmically and emotionally charged material excess. By stepping into the shoes of a local Buddhist priest at a True Pure Land Buddhist temple in Hiroshima Prefecture, the article focuses on the tensions between decommissioning of care and the moral and practical conundrum faced by rural Buddhist temples entrusted with the responsibility of meaningful disposal and safe keeping of inherited things. It suggest that decommissioning of karmically volatile materiality helps us understand better the fragility of Buddhist care structures. It also questions the ways in which the social contract is being rewritten when inherited sociality is being rejected and how these new modes of care generate more volatile temple communities.
New publication on material religion, excess, and depopulation in Japan
Paulina Kolata has recently published an article in Allegra Lab on Buddhist material excess in contemporary Japan. The piece contributes to the thematic thread on “Heritage out of Control” that developed from the ‘Heritage out of Control: Waste, Spirits, Energies’ Workshop hosted by the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory.” The thematic thread offers a collection of short articles exploring the absences, the material stubbornness, and affective dissonances of heritage, and investigates how heritage becomes waste and how, in turn, waste becomes heritage. The authors of the thread collective explore if spirits, rituals, and energies can be imagined as heritage.