Author: Paulina Kolata

Paulina Kolata holds a PhD in Japanese Studies from The University of Manchester and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Her work explores ethnographically the socio-economic and demographic complexities of religion in contemporary Japan, focusing on Buddhism, depopulation, and people’s everyday lived experiences and their relation to particular pasts and imagined futures. Her monograph, currently under preparation, investigates the post-growth survival of Buddhist temple communities in regional Japan.

Paulina Kolata

Heritage out of Control: Buddhist Material Excess in Depopulating Japan

January, 2022 / By Paulina Kolata

Inherited Buddhist objects and their associated ritual care connect the dead with the living. Buddhist things are not only material. […]