At 2025 AAS annual assembly, Anne Allison awarded august John Whitney Hall book prize

At the AAS 2025 Presidential Address and Awards Ceremony on Friday, March 14, 2025, Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke, received the prestigious John Whitney Hall prize from the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) for her 2023 book, Being Dead Otherwise. The decision was announced in February 2025; the actual certificate was presented during the AAS annual meeting.

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Published by Duke University Press, this text offers a poignant and rigorous examination of mortuary practices to survey the shifting deathscape of modern Japan. In sterling prose, Anne Allison takes readers from ancestral grave plots to mortuary conventions to automated grave parks, revealing along the way the changing meanings and modes of death work in Japan. The result is a hauntingly beautiful ethnography of funerary rites, one that opens up questions about living, dying, and memorialization of urgent importance to Japan and its aging society.

Since 1994, this award is given annually by AAS for an outstanding scholarly English language book on Japan. Books nominated may address either contemporary or historical topics in any field of the humanities or the social sciences. Before the 2010 creation of the Palais Prize, scholarly books on Korea were also considered for the Hall Prize. The award commemorates Dr. John Whitney Hall (September 13, 1916 – October 21, 1997), an American historian of Japan who was an expert on early modern and premodern Japanese history. Dr. Hall is widely regarded as a pioneer among English-speaking scholars of Japanese studies and was lauded for his efforts to build bridges between Japanese historians and their western counterparts.

Dr. Jieun Cho, a postdoctoral associate at Duke's Asian/Pacific Studies Institute, and Professor Prasenjit Duara, Oscar Tang Family Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, were in the audience as Professor Allison received her award. We look forward to seeing the ways in which this award will contribute to the broader dissemination of Professor Allison’s work among current and future scholars of Japan.