When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa
When the Bones Speak: The Living, the Dead, and the Sacrifice of Contemporary Okinawa
by Christopher T. Nelson
Duke University Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-1-4780-2872-7
Paper: 978-1-4780-3196-3
eISBN: 978-1-4780-9438-8 (OA)
eISBN: 978-1-4780-6097-0 (standard)
About the Book
Haunted by the past, ordinary Okinawans struggle to live with the unbearable legacies of war, Japanese nationalism, and American imperialism. They are caught up in a web of people and practices—living and dead, visible and immaterial—that exert powerful forces often beyond their control. In When the Bones Speak, Christopher T. Nelson examines the myriad ways contemporary Okinawans experience, remember, and contest sacrifice. He attends to the voices of those who find their vocation in service to others, from shamans, fortune tellers, laborers, and artists to dead soldiers, war survivors, antiwar activists, and Christian missionaries. Nelson shows how the memories of past sacrifices, atrocities, and exploitation as well as residual trauma shape modern life in Okinawa and the possibility and hope for creative action grounded in the everyday. Offering new understandings of colonial transformation, wartime violence, and military occupation, Nelson writes from the intersection of temporalities and possibilities, where the hard finality of the past may be broken open to reveal a “not yet” that has always remained just beyond reach.
About the Author
Christopher T. Nelson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Dancing with the Dead: Memory, Performance, and Everyday Life in Postwar Okinawa, also published by Duke University Press.
Reviews
“With luminous prose, unflinching frankness, and conceptual lucidity, Christopher T. Nelson carefully recounts tales of Okinawa that shatter our smooth platitudes about trauma and memory, about perpetrators and victims, to reveal their blind spot: the immanence of war to everyday life. As devastating in its insights as it is generous in its engagement, When the Bones Speak not only admits ghosts to walk the earth; it lets them protest: why must the living continue to haunt us?”
-- Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
-- Thomas Lamarre, author of The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media
“With acute attention to textures of everyday life and experience, Christopher T. Nelson writes himself in and through Okinawa’s landscapes of loss, mourning, and sacrifice, activating a deep knowledge of Okinawan (and Japanese) history, anthropology, folklore studies, theater, architecture, and film. This book is a tour de force of sustained ethnographic description, ethical reflection, and theoretical verve, beautifully written.”
-- Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
-- Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan
"When the Bones Speak is a unique and incomparable contribution to Okinawan studies, to ethnographies of memory and empire, and to the anthropology of the dead. It is not an easy book—it demands close attention—but its intellectual and emotional rewards are profound."
-- Taku Suzuki Pacific Affairs
-- Taku Suzuki Pacific Affairs
Tags
When, Sacrifice, Psychic trauma, 1961-, Okinawa-ken (Japan), Okinawa-ken, Asian Studies, Campaigns, Death, World War 1939-1945, Japan, 21st century, Social life and customs, Social aspects, Anthropology, Cultural & Ethnic Studies, Religion, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
Label: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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