Periodic Reporting for period 1 - REFUSE (Disrupting Buddhist circular economies: excess and abandonment in contemporary Japan)
Période du rapport: 2023-06-01 au 2025-05-31
REFUSE: Disrupting Buddhist Circular Economies is a 2-year-long research project focusing on the practices of giving, the material excess they generate, and the circular economies and cosmologies they are part of in depopulating Buddhist temple communities in contemporary Japan.
This project explores environmental impacts and socioeconomic disruptions to Buddhist practices of generosity in Japan. Its focus is on “Buddhist excess” to demonstrate how the Buddhist circular economy of giving generates material excess and abandonment practices in contemporary Buddhist temple communities in Japan. To meet its central aim – to advance our understanding of how demographic ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies – the project takes Japan as an exemplary case to highlight how the practices of Buddhist giving generate, preserve, and circulate religious value, and how material things move through, drive, and disrupt the Buddhist circular economy. Such practices of generosity reveal tensions concerning material, spiritual, and emotional disposal, and recirculation of Buddhist things.
Building on the methodology of tracing ‘biographies,’ the project follows Buddhist gifts along the relational networks of Buddhist ‘affective economies’ from the acts of gifting to recirculation of their excess and their abandonment and disposal. As such, it will demonstrate the relational and emotional value of such gifts for understanding the workings of Buddhist circular economy and its fragility in the world’s fastest ageing society. At the same time, it will interrogate the entanglement of affective and circular economies by asking what and when can and cannot morally become waste and what and when ought to be perpetually (re)circulated and (re)valued.
While engaging with the fundamental practices of generosity in Buddhism, REFUSE planned to demonstrate not only how Buddhist economies become flooded by gifts, but also how they become disrupted by demographic transformations and how refusal of karmic value and inherited practices of ritual care are important for understanding contemporary Buddhism in Japan and beyond. By exploring the seeming non-sequitur of ‘Buddhist excess’, the project’s objective was to provide new insights into the cultural aspects and affective dimensions of the generation and conception of Buddhist excess.
Aims and Research Questions
REFUSE connects the contemporary debates on waste and environmental ethics to religious practice, as well as material religious histories, and demographic transformations that challenge and reshape our social and ecological networks of dependency. The central aim of this project is to advance our understanding of how demographic ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies. Specifically, it aims to illuminate how Buddhist practices for processing accumulation and abandonment of Buddhist gifts are key to understanding contemporary Buddhism, and the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies. It thus interrogates Buddhist practices of giving as forces that not only generate and handle excess and abandonment, but also challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal in a broader sense by enabling waste production. This project has four main themes and associated questions:
DISRUPTION focuses on how demographic transformations disrupt and reform the Buddhist circular economy, how dependent the circular economy is on cosmology and kinship, and with what outcomes?
EXCESS is the leading theme of the project and explores how Buddhist temples deal with an excess of gifts, especially food donations, and how the practical and moral issue of food loss/waste is handled in Buddhist temple kitchens?
ABANDONMENT relates to the projects focus on the project’s underpinning practice of refusal of inherited karmic bonds and the associated troublesome materiality. Its focus is on the ways in which the life stories – their material and affective dimensions – of Buddhist gifts define how material abandonment is handled in Buddhist temples, and why and how people abandon troublesome Buddhist materiality when the intergenerational circulation of symbolic/karmic value fails?
AFFECTS is oriented towards the layering of emotions about the objects and the related practices of care. It seeks to unravel how and the affective dimensions of and emotions – negative emotions of fear, guilt, and shame in particular – around Buddhist excess shape its past, present, and future, and how they can enable rather than disrupt Buddhist circular economies?
By focusing on ‘Buddhist excess’, the project considers what, how, where, and when can morally, emotionally, and practically become waste and what ought to remain perpetually (re)circulated.
Impact
The project developed theoretical interventions into ritual economies and excess by following the ways that demographic disruptions are transforming Buddhist circular economies in contemporary Japan and beyond, with a particular focus on Buddhism and Japan. Ideas of circularity in zero-waste economies are often representing idealised frameworks of consumption and waste-making. Taking Japan as an exemplary case, especially with Japan’s position as a hyperageing society, the project advanced our understanding of how demographics ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies. Specifically, the project highlighted that the practices of Buddhist giving generate, preserve, and circulate religious value in tension with the material realities of how things move through, drive, and disrupt the Buddhist circular economy. Developing our understandings of the ways that demographic shifts challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal by enabling waste production has broad implications for people and the planet in the twenty-first century. The affective model of continuous generation, circulation and accumulation of karmic value through gifts sustains the ideal of Buddhist circular economy in Japan and beyond, often supported by specifically patriarchal kinship systems. Disrupted socioreligious networks often lead to refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality and to the overproduction of offerings. As the project shows, demographic disruptions to Buddhist practice have serious consequences for local and global issues of sustainability, ecological and economic, affecting issues of food waste and food security, food and other forms of poverty, access to housing and housing safety, regional ruination and revitalisation initiatives, dignity in ageing and death, as well as production and management of waste. As Buddhism is the dominant religion in many Asian countries and Japan is both the major producer of waste and global actor in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiatives (e.g. food waste), understanding Buddhist and Japanese attitudes towards consumption, waste, and circulation of value is an essential part of tackling the global waste crisis and understanding the importance of affective and ethical dimensions of circular economy. Informed by theories from scholars within Buddhist studies, Discard Studies, and the material and affective turn in Anthropology, the project looked at how the affective and ethical dimensions shaping circular economies are vital to understanding contemporary societies and their practices of consumption and waste-production, while also acknowledging how religion shapes and is shaped by those very same practices and values.
These issues were directly addressed in many of the above activities. In particular, the Special Issue on 'Excess in Religion', three journal articles on unwanted Buddhist ritual objects and refusal of ritual care, religious inheritace and Japan's vacant houses, and theoretical dicussions of excess in religion; an ethnographic film on food waste in Buddhist temple economies, and the REFUSE digital platform generated through the project. The upcoming activities related to two articles in production from fieldwork on food excess and waste in Buddhist ritual economies unfold another dimension of this intervention. The project also produced outputs such as film and digital bi-lingual plaform that makes its findings accessable and usauble by the public and the research collaborators.
Why does it matter?
At the time when 'age of waste,' 'discard society' and 'throwaway culture' have become the defining features of our time, REFUSE forwards the understanding of the environmental impacts of religious practice and the cultural and socio-economic making and managing of troublesome material excess in the hyper-ageing Japan. It draws attention not only to the waste-making practices in Buddhism and the need to address the environmental ethics in religious practice, but also to the importance of material stewardship of discarded objects, the practices of care for matter that has fallen out of place and out of time, and the need to learn how to live with the material excess that cannot always be transformed into waste or transformed away easily.
REFUSE is an inquiry into the religious, environmental and demographic transformations in our societies: it queries how the circular economy ideal that underpins practices of generosity and inherited care in Buddhism is threatened and reorganised when the networks of dependency and obligation required for it to work are challenged by depopulation and demographic ageing, thus producing sacred and other forms of excess. It also adds to a more nuanced public debate about the multifaced nature of Buddhist material presence and charting a course for research to recognise the environmental footprint of and the issues of consumption, material production, and labour in religion today. The intersection of Buddhism, economies of value, and discard studies is an emerging subject area which is gaining currency thanks to its potential for deepening our understanding of current challenges around environmental and demographic transformations.
This project explores environmental impacts and socioeconomic disruptions to Buddhist practices of generosity in Japan. Its focus is on “Buddhist excess” to demonstrate how the Buddhist circular economy of giving generates material excess and abandonment practices in contemporary Buddhist temple communities in Japan. To meet its central aim – to advance our understanding of how demographic ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies – the project takes Japan as an exemplary case to highlight how the practices of Buddhist giving generate, preserve, and circulate religious value, and how material things move through, drive, and disrupt the Buddhist circular economy. Such practices of generosity reveal tensions concerning material, spiritual, and emotional disposal, and recirculation of Buddhist things.
Building on the methodology of tracing ‘biographies,’ the project follows Buddhist gifts along the relational networks of Buddhist ‘affective economies’ from the acts of gifting to recirculation of their excess and their abandonment and disposal. As such, it will demonstrate the relational and emotional value of such gifts for understanding the workings of Buddhist circular economy and its fragility in the world’s fastest ageing society. At the same time, it will interrogate the entanglement of affective and circular economies by asking what and when can and cannot morally become waste and what and when ought to be perpetually (re)circulated and (re)valued.
While engaging with the fundamental practices of generosity in Buddhism, REFUSE planned to demonstrate not only how Buddhist economies become flooded by gifts, but also how they become disrupted by demographic transformations and how refusal of karmic value and inherited practices of ritual care are important for understanding contemporary Buddhism in Japan and beyond. By exploring the seeming non-sequitur of ‘Buddhist excess’, the project’s objective was to provide new insights into the cultural aspects and affective dimensions of the generation and conception of Buddhist excess.
Aims and Research Questions
REFUSE connects the contemporary debates on waste and environmental ethics to religious practice, as well as material religious histories, and demographic transformations that challenge and reshape our social and ecological networks of dependency. The central aim of this project is to advance our understanding of how demographic ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies. Specifically, it aims to illuminate how Buddhist practices for processing accumulation and abandonment of Buddhist gifts are key to understanding contemporary Buddhism, and the wider issues of consumption, recycling, and aspirational non-waste economies. It thus interrogates Buddhist practices of giving as forces that not only generate and handle excess and abandonment, but also challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal in a broader sense by enabling waste production. This project has four main themes and associated questions:
DISRUPTION focuses on how demographic transformations disrupt and reform the Buddhist circular economy, how dependent the circular economy is on cosmology and kinship, and with what outcomes?
EXCESS is the leading theme of the project and explores how Buddhist temples deal with an excess of gifts, especially food donations, and how the practical and moral issue of food loss/waste is handled in Buddhist temple kitchens?
ABANDONMENT relates to the projects focus on the project’s underpinning practice of refusal of inherited karmic bonds and the associated troublesome materiality. Its focus is on the ways in which the life stories – their material and affective dimensions – of Buddhist gifts define how material abandonment is handled in Buddhist temples, and why and how people abandon troublesome Buddhist materiality when the intergenerational circulation of symbolic/karmic value fails?
AFFECTS is oriented towards the layering of emotions about the objects and the related practices of care. It seeks to unravel how and the affective dimensions of and emotions – negative emotions of fear, guilt, and shame in particular – around Buddhist excess shape its past, present, and future, and how they can enable rather than disrupt Buddhist circular economies?
By focusing on ‘Buddhist excess’, the project considers what, how, where, and when can morally, emotionally, and practically become waste and what ought to remain perpetually (re)circulated.
Impact
The project developed theoretical interventions into ritual economies and excess by following the ways that demographic disruptions are transforming Buddhist circular economies in contemporary Japan and beyond, with a particular focus on Buddhism and Japan. Ideas of circularity in zero-waste economies are often representing idealised frameworks of consumption and waste-making. Taking Japan as an exemplary case, especially with Japan’s position as a hyperageing society, the project advanced our understanding of how demographics ageing and changing consumption patterns affect circular economies. Specifically, the project highlighted that the practices of Buddhist giving generate, preserve, and circulate religious value in tension with the material realities of how things move through, drive, and disrupt the Buddhist circular economy. Developing our understandings of the ways that demographic shifts challenge the viability of the circular economy ideal by enabling waste production has broad implications for people and the planet in the twenty-first century. The affective model of continuous generation, circulation and accumulation of karmic value through gifts sustains the ideal of Buddhist circular economy in Japan and beyond, often supported by specifically patriarchal kinship systems. Disrupted socioreligious networks often lead to refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality and to the overproduction of offerings. As the project shows, demographic disruptions to Buddhist practice have serious consequences for local and global issues of sustainability, ecological and economic, affecting issues of food waste and food security, food and other forms of poverty, access to housing and housing safety, regional ruination and revitalisation initiatives, dignity in ageing and death, as well as production and management of waste. As Buddhism is the dominant religion in many Asian countries and Japan is both the major producer of waste and global actor in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals initiatives (e.g. food waste), understanding Buddhist and Japanese attitudes towards consumption, waste, and circulation of value is an essential part of tackling the global waste crisis and understanding the importance of affective and ethical dimensions of circular economy. Informed by theories from scholars within Buddhist studies, Discard Studies, and the material and affective turn in Anthropology, the project looked at how the affective and ethical dimensions shaping circular economies are vital to understanding contemporary societies and their practices of consumption and waste-production, while also acknowledging how religion shapes and is shaped by those very same practices and values.
These issues were directly addressed in many of the above activities. In particular, the Special Issue on 'Excess in Religion', three journal articles on unwanted Buddhist ritual objects and refusal of ritual care, religious inheritace and Japan's vacant houses, and theoretical dicussions of excess in religion; an ethnographic film on food waste in Buddhist temple economies, and the REFUSE digital platform generated through the project. The upcoming activities related to two articles in production from fieldwork on food excess and waste in Buddhist ritual economies unfold another dimension of this intervention. The project also produced outputs such as film and digital bi-lingual plaform that makes its findings accessable and usauble by the public and the research collaborators.
Why does it matter?
At the time when 'age of waste,' 'discard society' and 'throwaway culture' have become the defining features of our time, REFUSE forwards the understanding of the environmental impacts of religious practice and the cultural and socio-economic making and managing of troublesome material excess in the hyper-ageing Japan. It draws attention not only to the waste-making practices in Buddhism and the need to address the environmental ethics in religious practice, but also to the importance of material stewardship of discarded objects, the practices of care for matter that has fallen out of place and out of time, and the need to learn how to live with the material excess that cannot always be transformed into waste or transformed away easily.
REFUSE is an inquiry into the religious, environmental and demographic transformations in our societies: it queries how the circular economy ideal that underpins practices of generosity and inherited care in Buddhism is threatened and reorganised when the networks of dependency and obligation required for it to work are challenged by depopulation and demographic ageing, thus producing sacred and other forms of excess. It also adds to a more nuanced public debate about the multifaced nature of Buddhist material presence and charting a course for research to recognise the environmental footprint of and the issues of consumption, material production, and labour in religion today. The intersection of Buddhism, economies of value, and discard studies is an emerging subject area which is gaining currency thanks to its potential for deepening our understanding of current challenges around environmental and demographic transformations.
The project has achieved most of its objectives and milestones for the period, with relatively minor deviations.
Explanation of the work carried out per Work Package
Work Package 1
Work package 1 Disruption (WP1): This work package aimed to demonstrate how demographic transformations disrupt/reform the Buddhist circular economy. It focused on illustrating how dependant the circular economy is on cosmology/kinship by exploring how the challenges faced by Buddhists in urban and rural temples affect the material and religious mechanics of Buddhist giving, increasing rather than reducing the flow of Buddhist gifts.
(M1.1) I implemented the remote collaboration data collection process by drawing on pre-existing connections with research collaborators and by reaching out to 92 potential research partners including local Buddhist temples, municipal akiya banks, social welfare charities, and commercial businesses involved in waste disposal and management. The photo-voice diary method was not fully successful. The remote collaboration involved preliminary interviews and negotiations of access and collaboration on the film, but some ‘waste journaling’ by the research collaborators took place after both segments of fieldwork (F1 and F2).
(M1.2) I completed data mining on disruptive demographics and Buddhist circular economy of giving, which formed foundations for the pre-fieldwork preparations and M1.1 reach outs.
(M1.3) I launched the bi-lingual REFUSE digital platform where REFUSE Reflections hosting a series of project updates in six instalments: D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2-4.4.
(T1.1) I developed a career development plan in the first three months of the fellowship and in 2024 I secured a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. I negotiated a delayed start to my contract to honour my fellowship commitments. I will commence my employment in 2025 upon completing this fellowship.
(T1.2) I worked closely with the digital content team and the data management team to develop the project’s digital platform and drew on their expertise in DH and social media to strengthen my skills in this sphere, including producing fieldwork postcard posts for my department’s LinkedIn pages.
(T1.3) At the very start of the fellowship, I focused on pre-fieldwork preparation for visual methods and technical skills training by attending and successfully completing the Short Course in Ethnographic Documentary at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (June, 5-18 2023), which has supported me through the process of film production, filming, and editing, which involved working with diverse and non-specialist audiences including my research collaborators.
(D1.1) I created a Data Management Plan in 2023, which has also been updated throughout the project.
(D1.2) I was meant to attend the 2022 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Boston, where I was meant to co-convene the panel ‘Material Afterlives and Other Life Stories of Reuse and Waste in Japan’ with Halle O’Neal (UK). I attended the conference and presented my paper on ‘The Afterlives of Unwanted Gifts’ but this conference and panel took place before the commencement of my fellowship in 2023. Instead, I have attended the European Association for the Study of Religions 2023 conference where I co-convened a panel ‘Buddhism and Food Technologies in Asia’ with Erica Baffelli (UK) where I presented a paper on demographic disruptions to Buddhist circular economies through a lens of Buddhist edible offerings and their trajectories of recirculation and waste.
(D1.3) Submission of a journal article on Buddhist circular/affective gift economies focused on a category of unwanted gift. The peer reviewed article ‘Unwanted gifts: Abandonment, disposal, and reuse in contemporary Japanese Buddhism’ is under review and will be published in the open access journal Religion and Society (2026). I also submitted another article on other forms of disruption (ecological, war) on care for Buddhist objects, specifically in heritage-making (JA3, published open access in Cultural Studies, 2024).
(D1.4) The development of the disruptive demographics section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections I: Disruptive Demographics focuses on the role demographic transformations such as ageing, regional depopulation, and the resulting urban and rural poverty in the changes to Buddhist circular economies. It focuses specifically on demographic factors disrupting ritual circuits related to the rituals of caring for the dead and edible food offerings. It also includes the first part of the REFUSE fieldwork report.
Work package 2
Work Package 2 Excess (WP2): This work package aimed to determine how Buddhist temples deal with an excess of gifts. One of the most common donations, food, is meant to be consumed by temple priests and their families. By following what happens to food offerings and how people thereby build connections practically and emotionally, I traced how Buddhist professionals handle the excess of edible offerings.
(M2) I completed data mining on excess in preparation for the first and second leg of fieldwork (F1 and F2) and based on that, and the data gathered during both periods of fieldwork, and remote collaborations, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages. I focused on two aspects of excess: (1) the excess of food donations, and (2) the excess generated in akiya, vacant houses, through the refusal of ritual practices and abandonment of ritual paraphernalia.
(D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess held online among the workshop participants organised by myslef and culminated in a special issue on excess (D2.3) a single-authored introduction to the special issue written by myself (D2.4) and the development of a journal article on akiya (D3.2).
(D2.2) CCBS blog post: REFUSE Reflections VII: Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances is the final blog post of the project published as a guest entry on the CCBS blog. It offers a methodological overview of the project including the report from the final event and feedback on the pre-screening of the film. It also provides a thematic overview of the project including case studies from individual project’s outputs, furnished with the links to relevant REFUSE deliverables.
(D2.3) Co-edit a special issue on excess with Trine Brox: Based on the Biographies of Excess workshop the open access double Special Issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (Numen, 2026) will be published co-edited with Trine Brox. The special issue includes seven articles and a single-authored Introduction by myself (D2.4). It is in the final stages of production and copyediting after the editorial and internal peer review and will be submitted to Numen for external peer review in 2025 and published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6 in 2026. It also includes my single-authored article on akiya and abandonment (D3.2).
(D2.4) Co-author with Trine Brox the Introduction to the special issue on excess. While the special issue is a collaborative project, we decided that as a leading editor on the special issue, I will be the single author of the Introduction. This also contributes to my leadership training in research and project management (T2).
(D2.5) The development of the excess section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections II: Biographies of Excess [excess] offers a discussion focused on Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) and the collaboration that emerged as part of this leg of the project which culminated in a workshop Biographies of Excess in 2024 (D2.1) and the associated special issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (D2.3 D2.4 D3.2).
N.B. While this work package prioritised analysing excess through the focus on akiya and Buddhist inherited gifts, the aspect of excess of edible gifts circulating in Buddhist temple economies has been developed through a range of workshops, academic talks and other deliverables including the visual output on food excess: D1.2 D2.2 D3.1 D4.1 D4.2 D4.4 D4.1 D4.5 W3-W5, C1, T5, AT3-AT7, AT10-AT13, AT15-AT16, AT18. Two articles on the excess of edible gifts in Buddhist ritual economies are currently in production and will be submitted to and published open access with appropriate acknowledgement of the European Union funding in the Journal of Global Buddhism (JA4) and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JA5) (see 2 and 5.1).
Work package 3
Work package 3 Overflow (WP3): This work package aimed to examine how material and affective dimensions of Buddhist gifts define how abandonment is handled in Buddhist temples. By tracing the biographies of things given to temples (family altars, Buddha statues, land, artworks, etc.), I explored why and how people abandon troublesome Buddhist materiality when the intergenerational circulation of symbolic/karmic value fails.
(M3) I completed data mining on abandonment in preparation for the first and second leg of fieldwork (F1 and F2) and based on that, the data gathered during both periods of fieldwork, and remote collaborations, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages.
(D3.1) I intended to deliver an academic presentation on at the 2022 American Academy of Religion conference, but since a delayed commencement of the project, I co-convened a panel “Disrupting Ritual Economies: On Waste, Value, and Religious Practice in Asia” at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia conference in 2024. I was scheduled to chair and deliver a paper during the panel. As panel participants were forced to withdraw their attendance due to lack of funding and personal bereavement, I withdrew from attending the conference. Instead, I co-organised workshops and delivered a range of academic talks on the topic at alternative, more regionally located conferences: W4, AT5, AT6, AT14, AT15. I also worked with the theme of abandonment to deliver a workshop paper for Biographies of Excess workshop (D2.1) and developed a peer-reviewed journal article based on it (D3.2).
(D3.2) Submission of a journal article on akiya, abandonment, and excess. The peer reviewed article ‘Don’t Poke the Bear: Buddhist Material Excess in Japan’s Vacant Houses’ will be published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6 in 2026.
(D3.3) The development of the excess section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections III: Unwanted Gifts [abandonment] focuses on the issue of abandonment of Buddhist ritual objects and the stories of their care takers. The focus is on afterlives of unwanted gifts such as abandoned Buddhist altars, human remains, pets, artwork, and temple ritual paraphernalia entrusted to regional temples. I outline specific stories of local temples who have been facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. In doing so, I offer a preview of D1.3 for public audiences and research collaborators.
(T3) I participated in the UCPH’s ERC grant writing development courses in 2023 and 2024 From that I began formulating an ERC Consolidator grant proposal. I also practised my grant writing skills by successfully applying for and delivering on the external funding with the ADI and AAR International Collaboration Grant.
Work package 4
Work package 4 Pollution (WP4): This work package aimed to interrogate the affective dimensions of excess and abandonment resulting from Buddhist giving. It investigated the intersection of the circular economy as an ideal with the complexities of affective economies of Buddhist gifts (i.e. emotional attachments), asking how this can enable rather than disrupt Buddhist circular economies.
It had the following milestones and deliverables
(M4.1) I completed filming in Japan in September 2024. The focus of the visual work was on the issues of food excess and waste in Buddhist practices and ritual economies.
(M4.2) I completed data mining on affects in preparation for the second leg of fieldwork (F2) and based on that and data gathered during fieldwork, visual materials in particular, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages.
(M4.3/D4.1) The rough cut has been completed for Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan (tentative title). The rough cut of the film will be pre-screened at the REFUSE final event in May 2025. Based on the feedback, the second edit (4.5) will go through the second round of consultations with research collaborators, and then it will be test screened at Harvard University in 2025.
(M4.4) The public screening of the film’s rough cut, along with a Q&A session and feedback discussions, is scheduled in May 2025 (W5). It was planned and developed with the support of the Environmental Humanities initiative at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The photo exhibition as part of the screening has been incorporated into the digital platform. updates (D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2-D4.4 and D2.2).
(D4.2) The development of the food excess and methods section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections IV: Food Excess in Buddhist Temple Economies [excess] offers a discussion of the issues of food excess generated in Buddhist temple economies and outlines different pathways and trajectories of food donations. It’s a preview to two peer-reviewed articles in production, discussing how food donations circulate and clog up Buddhist temple economies (JA4) and how food waste is generated in Buddhist ritual economies due to the competing cosmological and material temporalities of edible donations (JA5).
(D4.3) The development of the affective dimensions of excess and collaborative storytelling section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections V: Affects of Excess and Collaborative Storytelling [affects] offers a methodological reflection, and the second part of the REFUSE fieldwork report focused on working with the difficult emotions when interrogating people’s practices of waste and wasting and refusal of care.
(D4.4) The development of visual storytelling section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections VI: Visual Practice in Waste and Wasting offers the third and final instalment of the REFUSE fieldwork report and reflects on the use of visual methodologies when capturing and uncovering the stories and practices of food waste in Buddhist practice. It focuses on the challenges of visual storytelling when dealing with shameful subjects that are often morally labelled. At the same time, it offers a reflection on the practical and emotional difficulties of navigating the ecological and economic pressures of food circulation in Buddhist temple economies.
(D4.5) Based on the feedback session pre-screening (W5, M4.4) the second edit (4.5) will go through the second round of consultations with research collaborators, and then its more refined version will be test screened at Harvard University in 2025.
(T4) I was not able to complete the UCPH’s Career Development Programme for women as the programme was not running during the period of the fellowship, but I took advantage of other official training and benefited significantly from the mentorship received from the strong mentorship from women scholars at UCPH. I also collaborated with Trine Brox and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko on organising and delivering the Waste and Value conference (C1) and the PhD Course Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality (T5) in 2024. Furthermore, I continued developing my teaching and mentorship by providing mentoring and supervision to PhD and Master students at UCHP and Lund University and by teaching an M
A course ‘Religion and Society in East and Southeast Asia’ in 2023, while drawing on the themes and skills developed through the research project. I also collaborated on research with and was mentored by senior women scholars across other institutions in Europe, Japan, and the US (D1.2 W4, W5, T1.3 F1, F2) (see also 1.3.1.B).
Explanation of the work carried out per Work Package
Work Package 1
Work package 1 Disruption (WP1): This work package aimed to demonstrate how demographic transformations disrupt/reform the Buddhist circular economy. It focused on illustrating how dependant the circular economy is on cosmology/kinship by exploring how the challenges faced by Buddhists in urban and rural temples affect the material and religious mechanics of Buddhist giving, increasing rather than reducing the flow of Buddhist gifts.
(M1.1) I implemented the remote collaboration data collection process by drawing on pre-existing connections with research collaborators and by reaching out to 92 potential research partners including local Buddhist temples, municipal akiya banks, social welfare charities, and commercial businesses involved in waste disposal and management. The photo-voice diary method was not fully successful. The remote collaboration involved preliminary interviews and negotiations of access and collaboration on the film, but some ‘waste journaling’ by the research collaborators took place after both segments of fieldwork (F1 and F2).
(M1.2) I completed data mining on disruptive demographics and Buddhist circular economy of giving, which formed foundations for the pre-fieldwork preparations and M1.1 reach outs.
(M1.3) I launched the bi-lingual REFUSE digital platform where REFUSE Reflections hosting a series of project updates in six instalments: D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2-4.4.
(T1.1) I developed a career development plan in the first three months of the fellowship and in 2024 I secured a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. I negotiated a delayed start to my contract to honour my fellowship commitments. I will commence my employment in 2025 upon completing this fellowship.
(T1.2) I worked closely with the digital content team and the data management team to develop the project’s digital platform and drew on their expertise in DH and social media to strengthen my skills in this sphere, including producing fieldwork postcard posts for my department’s LinkedIn pages.
(T1.3) At the very start of the fellowship, I focused on pre-fieldwork preparation for visual methods and technical skills training by attending and successfully completing the Short Course in Ethnographic Documentary at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (June, 5-18 2023), which has supported me through the process of film production, filming, and editing, which involved working with diverse and non-specialist audiences including my research collaborators.
(D1.1) I created a Data Management Plan in 2023, which has also been updated throughout the project.
(D1.2) I was meant to attend the 2022 Association for Asian Studies Conference in Boston, where I was meant to co-convene the panel ‘Material Afterlives and Other Life Stories of Reuse and Waste in Japan’ with Halle O’Neal (UK). I attended the conference and presented my paper on ‘The Afterlives of Unwanted Gifts’ but this conference and panel took place before the commencement of my fellowship in 2023. Instead, I have attended the European Association for the Study of Religions 2023 conference where I co-convened a panel ‘Buddhism and Food Technologies in Asia’ with Erica Baffelli (UK) where I presented a paper on demographic disruptions to Buddhist circular economies through a lens of Buddhist edible offerings and their trajectories of recirculation and waste.
(D1.3) Submission of a journal article on Buddhist circular/affective gift economies focused on a category of unwanted gift. The peer reviewed article ‘Unwanted gifts: Abandonment, disposal, and reuse in contemporary Japanese Buddhism’ is under review and will be published in the open access journal Religion and Society (2026). I also submitted another article on other forms of disruption (ecological, war) on care for Buddhist objects, specifically in heritage-making (JA3, published open access in Cultural Studies, 2024).
(D1.4) The development of the disruptive demographics section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections I: Disruptive Demographics focuses on the role demographic transformations such as ageing, regional depopulation, and the resulting urban and rural poverty in the changes to Buddhist circular economies. It focuses specifically on demographic factors disrupting ritual circuits related to the rituals of caring for the dead and edible food offerings. It also includes the first part of the REFUSE fieldwork report.
Work package 2
Work Package 2 Excess (WP2): This work package aimed to determine how Buddhist temples deal with an excess of gifts. One of the most common donations, food, is meant to be consumed by temple priests and their families. By following what happens to food offerings and how people thereby build connections practically and emotionally, I traced how Buddhist professionals handle the excess of edible offerings.
(M2) I completed data mining on excess in preparation for the first and second leg of fieldwork (F1 and F2) and based on that, and the data gathered during both periods of fieldwork, and remote collaborations, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages. I focused on two aspects of excess: (1) the excess of food donations, and (2) the excess generated in akiya, vacant houses, through the refusal of ritual practices and abandonment of ritual paraphernalia.
(D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess held online among the workshop participants organised by myslef and culminated in a special issue on excess (D2.3) a single-authored introduction to the special issue written by myself (D2.4) and the development of a journal article on akiya (D3.2).
(D2.2) CCBS blog post: REFUSE Reflections VII: Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances is the final blog post of the project published as a guest entry on the CCBS blog. It offers a methodological overview of the project including the report from the final event and feedback on the pre-screening of the film. It also provides a thematic overview of the project including case studies from individual project’s outputs, furnished with the links to relevant REFUSE deliverables.
(D2.3) Co-edit a special issue on excess with Trine Brox: Based on the Biographies of Excess workshop the open access double Special Issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (Numen, 2026) will be published co-edited with Trine Brox. The special issue includes seven articles and a single-authored Introduction by myself (D2.4). It is in the final stages of production and copyediting after the editorial and internal peer review and will be submitted to Numen for external peer review in 2025 and published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6 in 2026. It also includes my single-authored article on akiya and abandonment (D3.2).
(D2.4) Co-author with Trine Brox the Introduction to the special issue on excess. While the special issue is a collaborative project, we decided that as a leading editor on the special issue, I will be the single author of the Introduction. This also contributes to my leadership training in research and project management (T2).
(D2.5) The development of the excess section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections II: Biographies of Excess [excess] offers a discussion focused on Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) and the collaboration that emerged as part of this leg of the project which culminated in a workshop Biographies of Excess in 2024 (D2.1) and the associated special issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (D2.3 D2.4 D3.2).
N.B. While this work package prioritised analysing excess through the focus on akiya and Buddhist inherited gifts, the aspect of excess of edible gifts circulating in Buddhist temple economies has been developed through a range of workshops, academic talks and other deliverables including the visual output on food excess: D1.2 D2.2 D3.1 D4.1 D4.2 D4.4 D4.1 D4.5 W3-W5, C1, T5, AT3-AT7, AT10-AT13, AT15-AT16, AT18. Two articles on the excess of edible gifts in Buddhist ritual economies are currently in production and will be submitted to and published open access with appropriate acknowledgement of the European Union funding in the Journal of Global Buddhism (JA4) and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (JA5) (see 2 and 5.1).
Work package 3
Work package 3 Overflow (WP3): This work package aimed to examine how material and affective dimensions of Buddhist gifts define how abandonment is handled in Buddhist temples. By tracing the biographies of things given to temples (family altars, Buddha statues, land, artworks, etc.), I explored why and how people abandon troublesome Buddhist materiality when the intergenerational circulation of symbolic/karmic value fails.
(M3) I completed data mining on abandonment in preparation for the first and second leg of fieldwork (F1 and F2) and based on that, the data gathered during both periods of fieldwork, and remote collaborations, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages.
(D3.1) I intended to deliver an academic presentation on at the 2022 American Academy of Religion conference, but since a delayed commencement of the project, I co-convened a panel “Disrupting Ritual Economies: On Waste, Value, and Religious Practice in Asia” at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia conference in 2024. I was scheduled to chair and deliver a paper during the panel. As panel participants were forced to withdraw their attendance due to lack of funding and personal bereavement, I withdrew from attending the conference. Instead, I co-organised workshops and delivered a range of academic talks on the topic at alternative, more regionally located conferences: W4, AT5, AT6, AT14, AT15. I also worked with the theme of abandonment to deliver a workshop paper for Biographies of Excess workshop (D2.1) and developed a peer-reviewed journal article based on it (D3.2).
(D3.2) Submission of a journal article on akiya, abandonment, and excess. The peer reviewed article ‘Don’t Poke the Bear: Buddhist Material Excess in Japan’s Vacant Houses’ will be published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6 in 2026.
(D3.3) The development of the excess section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections III: Unwanted Gifts [abandonment] focuses on the issue of abandonment of Buddhist ritual objects and the stories of their care takers. The focus is on afterlives of unwanted gifts such as abandoned Buddhist altars, human remains, pets, artwork, and temple ritual paraphernalia entrusted to regional temples. I outline specific stories of local temples who have been facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. In doing so, I offer a preview of D1.3 for public audiences and research collaborators.
(T3) I participated in the UCPH’s ERC grant writing development courses in 2023 and 2024 From that I began formulating an ERC Consolidator grant proposal. I also practised my grant writing skills by successfully applying for and delivering on the external funding with the ADI and AAR International Collaboration Grant.
Work package 4
Work package 4 Pollution (WP4): This work package aimed to interrogate the affective dimensions of excess and abandonment resulting from Buddhist giving. It investigated the intersection of the circular economy as an ideal with the complexities of affective economies of Buddhist gifts (i.e. emotional attachments), asking how this can enable rather than disrupt Buddhist circular economies.
It had the following milestones and deliverables
(M4.1) I completed filming in Japan in September 2024. The focus of the visual work was on the issues of food excess and waste in Buddhist practices and ritual economies.
(M4.2) I completed data mining on affects in preparation for the second leg of fieldwork (F2) and based on that and data gathered during fieldwork, visual materials in particular, I completed the intended deliverables across this and other work packages.
(M4.3/D4.1) The rough cut has been completed for Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan (tentative title). The rough cut of the film will be pre-screened at the REFUSE final event in May 2025. Based on the feedback, the second edit (4.5) will go through the second round of consultations with research collaborators, and then it will be test screened at Harvard University in 2025.
(M4.4) The public screening of the film’s rough cut, along with a Q&A session and feedback discussions, is scheduled in May 2025 (W5). It was planned and developed with the support of the Environmental Humanities initiative at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The photo exhibition as part of the screening has been incorporated into the digital platform. updates (D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2-D4.4 and D2.2).
(D4.2) The development of the food excess and methods section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections IV: Food Excess in Buddhist Temple Economies [excess] offers a discussion of the issues of food excess generated in Buddhist temple economies and outlines different pathways and trajectories of food donations. It’s a preview to two peer-reviewed articles in production, discussing how food donations circulate and clog up Buddhist temple economies (JA4) and how food waste is generated in Buddhist ritual economies due to the competing cosmological and material temporalities of edible donations (JA5).
(D4.3) The development of the affective dimensions of excess and collaborative storytelling section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections V: Affects of Excess and Collaborative Storytelling [affects] offers a methodological reflection, and the second part of the REFUSE fieldwork report focused on working with the difficult emotions when interrogating people’s practices of waste and wasting and refusal of care.
(D4.4) The development of visual storytelling section of the digital platform: REFUSE Reflections VI: Visual Practice in Waste and Wasting offers the third and final instalment of the REFUSE fieldwork report and reflects on the use of visual methodologies when capturing and uncovering the stories and practices of food waste in Buddhist practice. It focuses on the challenges of visual storytelling when dealing with shameful subjects that are often morally labelled. At the same time, it offers a reflection on the practical and emotional difficulties of navigating the ecological and economic pressures of food circulation in Buddhist temple economies.
(D4.5) Based on the feedback session pre-screening (W5, M4.4) the second edit (4.5) will go through the second round of consultations with research collaborators, and then its more refined version will be test screened at Harvard University in 2025.
(T4) I was not able to complete the UCPH’s Career Development Programme for women as the programme was not running during the period of the fellowship, but I took advantage of other official training and benefited significantly from the mentorship received from the strong mentorship from women scholars at UCPH. I also collaborated with Trine Brox and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko on organising and delivering the Waste and Value conference (C1) and the PhD Course Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality (T5) in 2024. Furthermore, I continued developing my teaching and mentorship by providing mentoring and supervision to PhD and Master students at UCHP and Lund University and by teaching an M
A course ‘Religion and Society in East and Southeast Asia’ in 2023, while drawing on the themes and skills developed through the research project. I also collaborated on research with and was mentored by senior women scholars across other institutions in Europe, Japan, and the US (D1.2 W4, W5, T1.3 F1, F2) (see also 1.3.1.B).
Scientific Objectives
This project intended to make several original and innovative empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to the fields of anthropology, Buddhist studies, and to interdisciplinary studies of discard. This has been carried out in measurable ways.
Specifically, the research intended to make the following empirical and methodological interventions:
The project employed ethnographic and audio-visual methods from anthropology to document Buddhist circular economies through circulation, production of excess, and abandonment or refusal of practice and affected potent materialities to account for the affective and cyclical models of people’s religious practices and the ‘ethical life’ of Buddhist materiality, which are currently understudied in Buddhist Studies.
This objective was achieved through data mining of the existing data collected during doctoral period of research (M1.1 M1.2 M3, M2, M4.2) two periods of ethnographic and audio-visual fieldwork in Japan (F1, F2, M4.1) conducted in January-February 2024 and July-September 2024. It was further achieved through the publication of six bi-lingual digital platform project updates as a series of REFUSE Reflections on the REFUSE project website, each focusing on Buddhism in Japan and REFUSE research methodologies (see M1.3 and D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4 https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres/centre-for-contemporary-buddhist-studies/refuse/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) and one guest blog on the CCBS website (D2.2 https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres/centre-for-contemporary-buddhist-studies/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) the organisation and facilitation of workshops and conferences (W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, D2.1 C1), along with academic and public talks (AT1, AT2, AT3, AT4, AT5, AT6, AT7, AT8, AT9, AT10, AT11, AT12, AT13, AT14, AT15, AT16, AT17, AT18, D1.2 D3.1 D2.1 D4.1 M4.3 M4.4).
Fieldwork (F1, F2, M1.1 M4.1) I completed two periods of in-person fieldwork in Japan: January-February 2024 and July-September 2024. Both periods were preceded by preparatory activities including preliminary interviews via Zoom and Line, and email and social media communications via Facebook, Instagram, X, and Line. I have conducted research within Buddhist temple communities and local municipal and NPO initiatives involved in issues related to Japan’s vacant houses (akiya), surplus Buddhist ritual paraphernalia, circulation of edible offerings in Buddhist ritual economies, food waste, and food poverty. I worked with Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO who is one of the partners on the film (D4.1/D4.5) and fourteen other temples involved in the network across Hiroshima, Shimane, Nara, Aichi, Osaka, Gifu, Kawaguchi, and Miyazaki prefectures, several of them involved in the NPO network. I also collaborated with municipal akiya initiatives across Hiroshima, Shimane, Nara, and Miyazaki prefectures, and with food activists, including Rumi Ide who also serves as an auditor and one of the board members of the Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO.
Digital platform update 1 (D1.4). REFUSE Reflections I: Disruptive Demographics [disruption] focuses on the role demographic transformations such as ageing, regional depopulation, and the resulting urban and rural poverty in the changes to Buddhist circular economies. It focuses specifically on demographic factors disrupting ritual circuits related to the rituals of caring for the dead and edible food offerings. It also includes the first part of the REFUSE fieldwork report.
Digital platform update 2 (D2.5). REFUSE Reflections II: Biographies of Excess [excess] offers a discussion focused on Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) and the collaboration that emerged as part of this leg of the project which culminated in a workshop Biographies of Excess in 2024 (D2.1) and the associated special issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (D2.3 D2.4 D3.2). Drawing on ethnographic field research in Hiroshima, Shimane and Miyazaki Prefectures, I explore how people navigate the emotional and material clutter of inherited akiya, confronting issues of intergenerational inheritance, Buddhist ritual responsibilities, and the refusal of karmic bonds. In doing so, I offer a preview of D3.2 and D1.3 for public audiences and research collaborators.
Digital platform update 3 (D3.3). REFUSE Reflections III: Unwanted Gifts [abandonment] focuses on the issue of abandonment of Buddhist ritual objects and the stories of their care takers. The focus is on afterlives of unwanted gifts such as abandoned Buddhist altars, human remains, pets, artwork, and temple ritual paraphernalia entrusted to regional temples. It continues and nuances the story of how Buddhist communities in contemporary Japan have been transformed by demographic decline, impacting the kin-based socio-religious networks that sustain Buddhist practice; and how disrupting these networks often leads to the refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality. I outline specific stories of local temples who have been facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. In doing so, I offer a preview of D1.3 for general public audiences and research collaborators.
Digital platform update 4 (D4.2). REFUSE Reflections IV: Food Excess in Buddhist Temple Economies [excess] offers a discussion of the issues of food excess generated in Buddhist temple economies and outlines different pathways and trajectories of food donations. It offers a preview to two peer-reviewed articles, currently in the production, which discuss (1) how food donations circulate in Buddhist temple economies from the issues of season food overproduction in local Buddhist communities, to edible donations redistribution initiatives (e.g. Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO and its networks) and struggles with food poverty and economic sustainability of Buddhist institutions (JA4); and (2) how competing temporalities of edible donations in Buddhist rituals generate food waste by focusing on food donations offered to the dead in local ossuaries in Miyazaki Prefecture, domestic Buddhist altars in Miyazaki, Hiroshima, and Shimane, and graveyards across municipal area of Kyoto (JA5).
Digital platform update 5 (D4.3). REFUSE Reflections V: Affects of Excess and Collaborative Storytelling [affects] offers a methodological reflection, and the second part of the REFUSE fieldwork report focused on working with the difficult emotions when interrogating people’s practices of waste and wasting and refusal of care.
Digital platform update 6 (D4.4). REFUSE Reflections VI: Visual Practice in Waste and Wasting offers the third and final instalment of the REFUSE fieldwork report and reflects on the use of visual methodologies when capturing and uncovering the stories and practices of food waste in Buddhist practice. It focuses on the challenges of visual storytelling when dealing with shameful subjects that are often morally labelled. At the same time, it offers a reflection on the practical and emotional difficulties of navigating the ecological and economic pressures of food circulation in Buddhist temple economies.
CCBS Blog (D2.2). REFUSE Reflections VII: Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances is the final blog post of the project published as a guest entry on the CCBS blog. It offers a methodological overview of the project including the report from the final event of the project (W5, D4.1 M4.4) and feedback on the pre-screening of the film’s first rough cut. It also provides a thematic overview of the project including case studies from individual project’s outputs (D1.3 D2.3 D2.4 D3.2 JA3, JA4, JA5, D4.1/D4.5) furnished with the links to relevant REFUSE deliverables.
In addition to the digital platform project updates and the CCBS blog, thirteen in-person presentations (AT1, AT2, AT3, AT4, AT5, AT6, AT7, AT8, AT9, AT10, AT11, AT12, AT14, AT15, AT16, AT17, AT18, D1.2 D3.1 D2.1) one online presentation (AT13), seven related workshops (W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, D2.1 D4.1) and one conference (C1) were given and organised about demographic disruptions, Buddhist circular economies, and Buddhist excess in Japan. These were:
Academic Talk (AT1) “REFUSE: Disrupting Buddhist Circular Economies – Excess and Abandonment in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 1 (W1) Waste Interventions, Case Work, and Fieldwork. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT2) Talk on Disruptive Demographics as a Discussant for “Matsuri in Depopulating Japan: What is Keeping so Many of Them Alive?” Panel in 2023, The 17th European Association for Japanese Studies International Conference, Ghent, Belgium.
Academic Talk (D1.2) “Eating through Excess in Japanese Buddhist Temple Communities.” Presented as part of the 20th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions and as part of the peer-refereed panel co-organised with Erica Baffelli: Buddhism and Food Technologies in Asia.
Academic Talk (AT2) “Narrating absence: collaborative storytelling in Japan’s depopulating communities.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 2 (W2) The Ethics of Practice-Based Research. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT3) “Temporalities of Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japan’s Buddhist Temple Kitchens.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 3 (W3) Temporalities and Practices of Waste in India and Japan. Co-organised by myself and Stephen Christopher in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS) and funded by the grant secured from the Asia Dynamics Initiative, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT4) “Consuming Buddhist Excess.” Presented as part of the
Conference 1 (C1) Waste and Value. Co-organised by myself, Trine Brox, and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko in 2024, this conference was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), and was held in tandem with the PhD Course: ‘Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality.’ The course was co-organised, co-designed, and co-delivered by myself, Trine Brox, and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko (T4, T5).
Academic Talk (AT5 / D3.1) “On Buddhist Excess: Life Stories of Rot, Loss, and Reuse from Japan’s Temple Kitchens.” Presented at the Nordic Association for the Study of Contemporary Japanese Society 2024 Conference at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Academic Talk (AT6 / D3.1) “Stories of Fear, Guilt and Shame: Afterlives of Unwanted Gifts in Depopulating Japan.” Presented at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference 2024 in the UK as part of the panel “Affective Temporalities and Uncertain Futures: Case Studies from Religious Practices and Beliefs in Japan.”
Academic Talk (D3.1) “Consuming Buddhist Excess: Life Stories of Rot, Loss, and Reuse from Japan’s Temple Kitchens.” Was to be presented at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia 2024; Yogyakarta, Indonesia and as part of a peer-refereed panel organised by myself: “Disrupting Ritual Economies: On Waste, Value, and Religious Practice in Asia.” The talk was not delivered due to a cancelled attendance by the panel participants. The connections established through the panel led to future collaborations: Charisma K. Lepcha contributed to the ‘Biographies of Excess’ workshop at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) (D2.1) and Sara A. Swenson contributed to the ‘Buddhist Foodways’ workshop in Venice (W4); withdrawal also motivated my attendance at NAJS 2024 and JEASC 2024, where I developed two peer-reviewed journal articles, on food excess in Buddhist temple economies (JA4) and Buddhist excess in Japan’s vacant houses (D3.2) respectively.
Academic Talk (AT7) “Temporalities of Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japan’s Buddhist Temple Kitchens.” Presented as a Guest Lecture for the East Asian Lunch Seminars, University of Oslo, Norway in 2024.
Academic Talk (AT8) “Reflections on Decay: Imaginaries and Practices of Reproduction in Japan’s Heritage Preservation Projects.” Presented as a Guest Lecture at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway in 2024.
Academic Talk (AT9) “Don’t poke the bear: Buddhist material excess and biographical absence in Japan’s vacant houses.” Presented as part of the
Workshop (D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess held online among the workshop participants organised by myself and culminated in the special issue collaboration on excess (D2.3) and the development of a journal article (D3.2) and single-authored introduction to the special issue (D2.4).
Academic Talk (AT10) “Temporalities of Food Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japanese Buddhist Temples” Presented as part of the
Workshop 4 (W4) Buddhist Foodways: Vegetarianism, Ritual Economies and Gastropolitics. Co-organised by myself, Erica Baffelli, Francesca Torocco, and Rita Langer in 2024 as a result of a successful American Academy of Religion International collaboration grant and funding provided by the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE). The event was held at NICHE, Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. The event resulted in the development of another article (JA5), currently under production and intended for submission by the end of 2025.
Academic Talk (AT11) “Curating Buddhist Foodscapes: Life Stories of Rot and Reuse in Deathcare Rituals in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of Food System Temporalities workshop, University of Cambridge, UK in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT12) “Fridge Stories: Food and Buddhist Ritual Economies in Japan.” Presented as part of the Studying Food and Japan: A Roundtable on New Research and Approaches. The roundtable was co-organised with Paride Stortini and held at Ghent University, Belgium in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT13) “Fridge Stories and Other Tales of Buddhist Foodways: Methodological Toolbox for Fieldwork as Collaborative Practice.” Presented online at Kyushu University, Japan in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT14) “Managing Decay: Material Afterlives and Other Life Stories of Buddhist Objects.” Presented as part of the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies at University of Toronto, Canada in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT15) “Temple Troubles: Depopulation, Materiality, and Fragile Buddhist Temple Economies in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies at McMaster University, Canada in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT16) “Fridge Stories: Food Waste and Buddhism in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the ToRS Environment, Climate, and Sustainability Cluster (of which I am a member) seminar series: Challenges Related to climate, Environment, and Sustainability around the World, hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT17) “Reflections on Teaching the Anthropocene.” Presented as part of the ToRS Environment, Climate, and Sustainability Cluster seminar series: Challenges Related to climate, Environment, and Sustainability around the World, hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025.
Academic Talk (D4.1/D4.5) “Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan” film screening of the rough cut of the film as part of the
Workshop (W5, M4.4) Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonanc
es: Navigating Research Collaborations and Audiences. Organised by myself in 2025. This workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It focused on facilitated dialogue engaging the audience in offering constructive feedback on the narrative structure, visual language, and thematic depth of the film, as well as reflections on collaboration and ethics, towards the development of the more refined cut of the film by the end of May 2025 (D4.5) and then a finalised version to be screened at Harvard University in November 2025, following a round of consultations with the research collaborators.
Academic Talk (AT18) “Consuming Buddhist Excess: Visual Storytelling with Food.” Presented as part of the
Workshop (W5) Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances: Navigating Research Collaborations and Audiences. Organised by myself in 2025. This workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Adding empirically to data available to scholars working on Buddhism in Japan and theoretically to those working on how local ritual economies and ecologies are influenced by and influence religion, a peer reviewed article (D1.3) titled ‘Unwanted gifts: Abandonment, disposal, and reuse in contemporary Japanese Buddhism’ will be published in the open access journal Religion and Society (2026). A second peer reviewed journal article (D3.2) titled ‘Don’t Poke the Bear: Buddhist Material Excess in Japan’s Vacant Houses’ will be published open access in the journal Numen (2026). Further to that, another peer reviewed article (JA3) titled ‘Cloned Buddhas: mapping out the DNA of Buddhist heritage preservation’ was published open access in Cultural Studies journal (2024).
Journal Article 1 (D1.3) In this article, I explore afterlives of unwanted gifts. Buddhist communities in contemporary Japan have been transformed by demographic decline, impacting the kin-based socio-religious networks that sustain Buddhist practice. Disrupting these networks often leads to the refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality. Local temples are now facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. Cases of Buddhist altars left abandoned anonymously at night within temple grounds are also proliferating. Such gifts have moral implications: they are not only material; they contain spiritual and emotional potential, even when deemed unwanted. If mistreated, they can become troublesome: accumulation of such objects can become a source of material and emotional pollution. Since Buddhist temples are seen as places where they can be handled meaningfully, temple custodians increasingly face the moral and practical dilemma of managing such ‘gifts’ through alternative pathways of care: disposal, reuse, and storage. I thus argue that inherited Buddhist things left with local temples represent intentional transfers of moral responsibility that allows people to address uncertainty around objects’ ritual futures. Through divestment trajectories of these objects, their relations, and people’s decisions around their futures, this article uncovers how refusal and deferral of care is handled in Buddhist temples caught up in discard, disposal, and reuse cycles of Buddhist practice and through their display in the temple to maintain their spiritual value.
Journal Article 2 (D3.2) The number of Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) reached nine million in October 2023; a phenomenon once associated with depopulating rural communities is now spreading into urban areas. Despite being labelled as vacant, those homes bear the echoes of lives once lived within them, preserving emotional entanglements and Buddhist material excess, including domestic altars (butsudan) and other ritual paraphernalia. In this article, I argue that akiya constitute conduits of excess for Buddhist materialities, embodying fragmented biographies that blur the boundaries between presence and absence of past, present, and future owners. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Hiroshima, Shimane and Miyazaki Prefectures, I explore how people navigate the emotional and material clutter of inherited akiya, confronting issues of intergenerational inheritance, Buddhist ritual responsibilities, and the refusal of karmic bonds. By tracing how laypeople and Buddhist professionals make decisions around divesting spiritually charged matter, I document the emotional dimensions of ritual abandonment and the complex social relations it entails. Through fragmented biographies of akiya, I portray those homes as contested sites of emotional struggle, refusal, and renewal. In doing so, I contend that Buddhist materialities and emotional ties linger in an ambiguous state of excess and reorganise local religious landscapes, shaping perceptions of akiya as resources and burdens amid ruination and renewal in contemporary Japan.
Journal Article 3 (JA3) In this article, I consider broader questions of decay and care in relation to Buddhist materialities and in the context of heritage-making. I consider how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara – a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha – was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist objects. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation, which reprogrammes circularity in Buddhist economies.
Theoretically, REFUSE intended to generate a robust theoretical framework in which to conceive of things through the prism of excess. By following the circulation of gifts in Buddhist temple economies during their production, consumption, and discard, this project intended to follow objects beyond their consumption and use, bringing the affects, emotions, and feelings that can animate or diminish a gift’s capacities for circulation into focus. Following from recent anthropological and religious studies theory that foregrounds sacred waste materialities, this research intended to question the ideal logics of value circulation and, in doing so, to uncover the messy ambiguities of human practice involving virtues of generosity and principles of care. It intended to reframe the emerging debates on economic and environmental impacts of Buddhist materiality, care, and waste production, wider debates concerning waste in post-bubble Japan, and the socio-economic/demographic fragility of Buddhist institutions, and to understand the practical and affective implications for handling
excess materialities within circular value economies of Buddhism in Japan.
With two periods of successful in-person fieldwork in January-February and July-September 2024 and several months of remote fieldwork preparations and remote data collection with the use of social media and online interviewing (August-December 2023 and March-June 2024), two key peer-reviewed articles outlined above (D1.3 and D3.2) and a co-edited special issue (D2.3 with a single authored introduction D2.4) provided new insights towards generating robust theoretical framework in which to conceive of excess and refusal of ritual and material care for religious objects, highlighting their processual impacts on practices of generosity and inheritance in Buddhist economies. Numerous talks were given (see above, in particular AT4-6/D3.1 AT8-9, AT14-15), workshops (W1 and D2.1) were organised, and several digital platform blog posts (see above, in particular D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4) were written addressing this theme. Excess in Buddhist circular economies is also a principal theme in the ethnographic film tentatively titled Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan has been filmed and edited by myself as part of the project (D4.1 D4.5).
Workshop (D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess (RG1) held online among the workshop participants (May-July) organised by myself and culminated in the special issue collaboration on excess (D2.3) and the development of a journal article (D3.2) and single-authored introduction to the special issue (D2.4). In preparation for the workshop and the editorial work, I also co-organised by myself and Trine Brox the in-person reading group on biography (RG2), involving colleagues in religious studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) (April-June).
Special Issue 1 (D2.3) From the basis of this workshop the open access double Special Issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (Numen, 2026) will be published co-edited with Trine Brox. The special issue includes seven articles and a single-authored Introduction by myself. It is in the final stages of production and copyediting after the editorial and internal peer review and will be submitted to Numen for editorial and external peer review by the end of July 2025. The special issue will be published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6.
Special Issue Introduction / Journal Article (D2.4) The Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy special issue includes a single-authored introduction. The introduction reconfigures excess in religion as an empirical condition and a process, foregrounding how excess manifests and is experienced through ethical, affective, and material formations across diverse religious contexts. By highlighting the centrality of excess, it pushes forward discussions on excess as a process of sublimation and how the materialities, aesthetics, and ethics of excess shape social lives of spiritually charged matter and people involved in their custodianship. It thus intervenes in religious studies’ debates on value ecologies and sacred waste by showing material, affective, and moral impacts of material and immaterial excess on individuals and communities. I argue that excess in religion becomes disruptive and sublimated not purely in ritual terms, but also as a religiously ambiguous category that requires the emergence of alternative sources and actors of religious literacy and complex processes of negotiation involved in its ethical and affective formations. Subsequently, the introduction and the special issue more broadly challenge the prevailing aesthetics of abundance, interrogating how religious practices or their rejection generate troublesome materialities that demand attention.
Film (D4.1/D4.5) Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan (tentative title) is a 50-minute ethnographic film that I researched, produced, filmed, and edited by myself. The film follows a collection of stories on Buddhist practices involving food, capturing how edible gifts, enter, circulate, and rot within Buddhist temple economies and corresponding ritual ecologies. The film aims to provoke discussions on food production, circulation, and waste in religious contexts, and specifically in the context of current debates on demographic disruption, food insecurity, and food waste in Japan and beyond. The film will be pre-screened at Harvard University in November 2025 and at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan in December 2025; submitted to the ethnographic film festivals including Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2026 and the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival 2026; screened with Buddhist communities across Japan including at Anyōji in Nara Prefecture and Zenryūji in Gifu Prefecture in 2026; finally, it will be made publicly available via Vimeo website, CCBS and REFUSE digital platform, and my institutional website.
Training Objectives
1.1.B.1 Knowledge, exchange and collaboration.
As a core member of the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS) I participated fully in all its activities including weekly meetings and reading groups, including ‘Waste Ethnographies’ fieldwork updates series in 2024 (January-March) and three reading groups: two online on ‘excess’ (RG1) and ‘religious labour’ and its affects (RG3), and in person at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). I participated in the CCBS internal writing seminars, a forum for exchanging and developing writing projects, and supported the delivery of the two-day Waste and Value conference (C1), as well as the organisation and delivery of the three-day PhD Course ‘Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality’ (T5). I secured funding from the Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI) and collaborated with a fellow MSCA fellow based at the CCBS on organising and hosting Temporalities and Practices of Waste in India and Japan workshop at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The ADI was involved in advertising and participating in W3 and AT16.
1.1.B.2 Interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and academic communication.
The fellowship facilitated my participation in international conferences and workshops (AT1-18, W1-5, D1.2 D2.1 D3.1 D4.1 D4.5).
1.1.B.3. Communicating to non-specialist audiences.
I completed training in visual methods and technical skills training in ethnographic filmmaking by attending and successfully completing the Short Course in Ethnographic Documentary at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (June 5-18, 2023) (T1.3) which has supported me through the process of film production, filming, and editing, which involved working with diverse and non-specialist audiences including my research collaborators. The film is also intended for public screenings in Japan and beyond, and as a free teaching resource. The first preliminary public screening took place at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025 (M4.4). The project also involved REFUSE Reflections series which is a section of the project’s digital platform reporting on the project’s progress (D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4) which is available in English and Japanese, making sure the content is available to diverse audiences including my research collaborators and their communities. I have also contributed to the CCBS blog with a project update on food waste and visual storytelling (D2.2).
Through my training and engagement with visual methods and topics of waste, I delivered relevant training and mentoring for graduate students and colleagues at ToRS and beyond including several talks: AT7, AT12-13, AT16-18, W5, D4.1.
I also organised and delivered a
This project intended to make several original and innovative empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions to the fields of anthropology, Buddhist studies, and to interdisciplinary studies of discard. This has been carried out in measurable ways.
Specifically, the research intended to make the following empirical and methodological interventions:
The project employed ethnographic and audio-visual methods from anthropology to document Buddhist circular economies through circulation, production of excess, and abandonment or refusal of practice and affected potent materialities to account for the affective and cyclical models of people’s religious practices and the ‘ethical life’ of Buddhist materiality, which are currently understudied in Buddhist Studies.
This objective was achieved through data mining of the existing data collected during doctoral period of research (M1.1 M1.2 M3, M2, M4.2) two periods of ethnographic and audio-visual fieldwork in Japan (F1, F2, M4.1) conducted in January-February 2024 and July-September 2024. It was further achieved through the publication of six bi-lingual digital platform project updates as a series of REFUSE Reflections on the REFUSE project website, each focusing on Buddhism in Japan and REFUSE research methodologies (see M1.3 and D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4 https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres/centre-for-contemporary-buddhist-studies/refuse/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) and one guest blog on the CCBS website (D2.2 https://ccrs.ku.dk/research/centres/centre-for-contemporary-buddhist-studies/(s’ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)) the organisation and facilitation of workshops and conferences (W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, D2.1 C1), along with academic and public talks (AT1, AT2, AT3, AT4, AT5, AT6, AT7, AT8, AT9, AT10, AT11, AT12, AT13, AT14, AT15, AT16, AT17, AT18, D1.2 D3.1 D2.1 D4.1 M4.3 M4.4).
Fieldwork (F1, F2, M1.1 M4.1) I completed two periods of in-person fieldwork in Japan: January-February 2024 and July-September 2024. Both periods were preceded by preparatory activities including preliminary interviews via Zoom and Line, and email and social media communications via Facebook, Instagram, X, and Line. I have conducted research within Buddhist temple communities and local municipal and NPO initiatives involved in issues related to Japan’s vacant houses (akiya), surplus Buddhist ritual paraphernalia, circulation of edible offerings in Buddhist ritual economies, food waste, and food poverty. I worked with Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO who is one of the partners on the film (D4.1/D4.5) and fourteen other temples involved in the network across Hiroshima, Shimane, Nara, Aichi, Osaka, Gifu, Kawaguchi, and Miyazaki prefectures, several of them involved in the NPO network. I also collaborated with municipal akiya initiatives across Hiroshima, Shimane, Nara, and Miyazaki prefectures, and with food activists, including Rumi Ide who also serves as an auditor and one of the board members of the Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO.
Digital platform update 1 (D1.4). REFUSE Reflections I: Disruptive Demographics [disruption] focuses on the role demographic transformations such as ageing, regional depopulation, and the resulting urban and rural poverty in the changes to Buddhist circular economies. It focuses specifically on demographic factors disrupting ritual circuits related to the rituals of caring for the dead and edible food offerings. It also includes the first part of the REFUSE fieldwork report.
Digital platform update 2 (D2.5). REFUSE Reflections II: Biographies of Excess [excess] offers a discussion focused on Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) and the collaboration that emerged as part of this leg of the project which culminated in a workshop Biographies of Excess in 2024 (D2.1) and the associated special issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (D2.3 D2.4 D3.2). Drawing on ethnographic field research in Hiroshima, Shimane and Miyazaki Prefectures, I explore how people navigate the emotional and material clutter of inherited akiya, confronting issues of intergenerational inheritance, Buddhist ritual responsibilities, and the refusal of karmic bonds. In doing so, I offer a preview of D3.2 and D1.3 for public audiences and research collaborators.
Digital platform update 3 (D3.3). REFUSE Reflections III: Unwanted Gifts [abandonment] focuses on the issue of abandonment of Buddhist ritual objects and the stories of their care takers. The focus is on afterlives of unwanted gifts such as abandoned Buddhist altars, human remains, pets, artwork, and temple ritual paraphernalia entrusted to regional temples. It continues and nuances the story of how Buddhist communities in contemporary Japan have been transformed by demographic decline, impacting the kin-based socio-religious networks that sustain Buddhist practice; and how disrupting these networks often leads to the refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality. I outline specific stories of local temples who have been facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. In doing so, I offer a preview of D1.3 for general public audiences and research collaborators.
Digital platform update 4 (D4.2). REFUSE Reflections IV: Food Excess in Buddhist Temple Economies [excess] offers a discussion of the issues of food excess generated in Buddhist temple economies and outlines different pathways and trajectories of food donations. It offers a preview to two peer-reviewed articles, currently in the production, which discuss (1) how food donations circulate in Buddhist temple economies from the issues of season food overproduction in local Buddhist communities, to edible donations redistribution initiatives (e.g. Otera Oyatsu Kurabu NPO and its networks) and struggles with food poverty and economic sustainability of Buddhist institutions (JA4); and (2) how competing temporalities of edible donations in Buddhist rituals generate food waste by focusing on food donations offered to the dead in local ossuaries in Miyazaki Prefecture, domestic Buddhist altars in Miyazaki, Hiroshima, and Shimane, and graveyards across municipal area of Kyoto (JA5).
Digital platform update 5 (D4.3). REFUSE Reflections V: Affects of Excess and Collaborative Storytelling [affects] offers a methodological reflection, and the second part of the REFUSE fieldwork report focused on working with the difficult emotions when interrogating people’s practices of waste and wasting and refusal of care.
Digital platform update 6 (D4.4). REFUSE Reflections VI: Visual Practice in Waste and Wasting offers the third and final instalment of the REFUSE fieldwork report and reflects on the use of visual methodologies when capturing and uncovering the stories and practices of food waste in Buddhist practice. It focuses on the challenges of visual storytelling when dealing with shameful subjects that are often morally labelled. At the same time, it offers a reflection on the practical and emotional difficulties of navigating the ecological and economic pressures of food circulation in Buddhist temple economies.
CCBS Blog (D2.2). REFUSE Reflections VII: Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances is the final blog post of the project published as a guest entry on the CCBS blog. It offers a methodological overview of the project including the report from the final event of the project (W5, D4.1 M4.4) and feedback on the pre-screening of the film’s first rough cut. It also provides a thematic overview of the project including case studies from individual project’s outputs (D1.3 D2.3 D2.4 D3.2 JA3, JA4, JA5, D4.1/D4.5) furnished with the links to relevant REFUSE deliverables.
In addition to the digital platform project updates and the CCBS blog, thirteen in-person presentations (AT1, AT2, AT3, AT4, AT5, AT6, AT7, AT8, AT9, AT10, AT11, AT12, AT14, AT15, AT16, AT17, AT18, D1.2 D3.1 D2.1) one online presentation (AT13), seven related workshops (W1, W2, W3, W4, W5, D2.1 D4.1) and one conference (C1) were given and organised about demographic disruptions, Buddhist circular economies, and Buddhist excess in Japan. These were:
Academic Talk (AT1) “REFUSE: Disrupting Buddhist Circular Economies – Excess and Abandonment in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 1 (W1) Waste Interventions, Case Work, and Fieldwork. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT2) Talk on Disruptive Demographics as a Discussant for “Matsuri in Depopulating Japan: What is Keeping so Many of Them Alive?” Panel in 2023, The 17th European Association for Japanese Studies International Conference, Ghent, Belgium.
Academic Talk (D1.2) “Eating through Excess in Japanese Buddhist Temple Communities.” Presented as part of the 20th Annual Conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions and as part of the peer-refereed panel co-organised with Erica Baffelli: Buddhism and Food Technologies in Asia.
Academic Talk (AT2) “Narrating absence: collaborative storytelling in Japan’s depopulating communities.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 2 (W2) The Ethics of Practice-Based Research. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT3) “Temporalities of Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japan’s Buddhist Temple Kitchens.” Presented as part of the
Workshop 3 (W3) Temporalities and Practices of Waste in India and Japan. Co-organised by myself and Stephen Christopher in 2023, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS) and funded by the grant secured from the Asia Dynamics Initiative, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Academic Talk (AT4) “Consuming Buddhist Excess.” Presented as part of the
Conference 1 (C1) Waste and Value. Co-organised by myself, Trine Brox, and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko in 2024, this conference was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH), and was held in tandem with the PhD Course: ‘Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality.’ The course was co-organised, co-designed, and co-delivered by myself, Trine Brox, and Saskia Abrahms-Kavunenko (T4, T5).
Academic Talk (AT5 / D3.1) “On Buddhist Excess: Life Stories of Rot, Loss, and Reuse from Japan’s Temple Kitchens.” Presented at the Nordic Association for the Study of Contemporary Japanese Society 2024 Conference at Aarhus University, Denmark.
Academic Talk (AT6 / D3.1) “Stories of Fear, Guilt and Shame: Afterlives of Unwanted Gifts in Depopulating Japan.” Presented at the Joint East Asian Studies Conference 2024 in the UK as part of the panel “Affective Temporalities and Uncertain Futures: Case Studies from Religious Practices and Beliefs in Japan.”
Academic Talk (D3.1) “Consuming Buddhist Excess: Life Stories of Rot, Loss, and Reuse from Japan’s Temple Kitchens.” Was to be presented at the Association for Asian Studies in Asia 2024; Yogyakarta, Indonesia and as part of a peer-refereed panel organised by myself: “Disrupting Ritual Economies: On Waste, Value, and Religious Practice in Asia.” The talk was not delivered due to a cancelled attendance by the panel participants. The connections established through the panel led to future collaborations: Charisma K. Lepcha contributed to the ‘Biographies of Excess’ workshop at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) (D2.1) and Sara A. Swenson contributed to the ‘Buddhist Foodways’ workshop in Venice (W4); withdrawal also motivated my attendance at NAJS 2024 and JEASC 2024, where I developed two peer-reviewed journal articles, on food excess in Buddhist temple economies (JA4) and Buddhist excess in Japan’s vacant houses (D3.2) respectively.
Academic Talk (AT7) “Temporalities of Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japan’s Buddhist Temple Kitchens.” Presented as a Guest Lecture for the East Asian Lunch Seminars, University of Oslo, Norway in 2024.
Academic Talk (AT8) “Reflections on Decay: Imaginaries and Practices of Reproduction in Japan’s Heritage Preservation Projects.” Presented as a Guest Lecture at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway in 2024.
Academic Talk (AT9) “Don’t poke the bear: Buddhist material excess and biographical absence in Japan’s vacant houses.” Presented as part of the
Workshop (D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess held online among the workshop participants organised by myself and culminated in the special issue collaboration on excess (D2.3) and the development of a journal article (D3.2) and single-authored introduction to the special issue (D2.4).
Academic Talk (AT10) “Temporalities of Food Rot, Loss, and Reuse in Japanese Buddhist Temples” Presented as part of the
Workshop 4 (W4) Buddhist Foodways: Vegetarianism, Ritual Economies and Gastropolitics. Co-organised by myself, Erica Baffelli, Francesca Torocco, and Rita Langer in 2024 as a result of a successful American Academy of Religion International collaboration grant and funding provided by the New Institute Centre for Environmental Humanities (NICHE). The event was held at NICHE, Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy. The event resulted in the development of another article (JA5), currently under production and intended for submission by the end of 2025.
Academic Talk (AT11) “Curating Buddhist Foodscapes: Life Stories of Rot and Reuse in Deathcare Rituals in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of Food System Temporalities workshop, University of Cambridge, UK in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT12) “Fridge Stories: Food and Buddhist Ritual Economies in Japan.” Presented as part of the Studying Food and Japan: A Roundtable on New Research and Approaches. The roundtable was co-organised with Paride Stortini and held at Ghent University, Belgium in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT13) “Fridge Stories and Other Tales of Buddhist Foodways: Methodological Toolbox for Fieldwork as Collaborative Practice.” Presented online at Kyushu University, Japan in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT14) “Managing Decay: Material Afterlives and Other Life Stories of Buddhist Objects.” Presented as part of the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies at University of Toronto, Canada in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT15) “Temple Troubles: Depopulation, Materiality, and Fragile Buddhist Temple Economies in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies at McMaster University, Canada in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT16) “Fridge Stories: Food Waste and Buddhism in Contemporary Japan.” Presented as part of the ToRS Environment, Climate, and Sustainability Cluster (of which I am a member) seminar series: Challenges Related to climate, Environment, and Sustainability around the World, hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025.
Academic Talk (AT17) “Reflections on Teaching the Anthropocene.” Presented as part of the ToRS Environment, Climate, and Sustainability Cluster seminar series: Challenges Related to climate, Environment, and Sustainability around the World, hosted by the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025.
Academic Talk (D4.1/D4.5) “Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan” film screening of the rough cut of the film as part of the
Workshop (W5, M4.4) Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonanc
es: Navigating Research Collaborations and Audiences. Organised by myself in 2025. This workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It focused on facilitated dialogue engaging the audience in offering constructive feedback on the narrative structure, visual language, and thematic depth of the film, as well as reflections on collaboration and ethics, towards the development of the more refined cut of the film by the end of May 2025 (D4.5) and then a finalised version to be screened at Harvard University in November 2025, following a round of consultations with the research collaborators.
Academic Talk (AT18) “Consuming Buddhist Excess: Visual Storytelling with Food.” Presented as part of the
Workshop (W5) Marginal Subjects || Emotional Resonances: Navigating Research Collaborations and Audiences. Organised by myself in 2025. This workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH).
Adding empirically to data available to scholars working on Buddhism in Japan and theoretically to those working on how local ritual economies and ecologies are influenced by and influence religion, a peer reviewed article (D1.3) titled ‘Unwanted gifts: Abandonment, disposal, and reuse in contemporary Japanese Buddhism’ will be published in the open access journal Religion and Society (2026). A second peer reviewed journal article (D3.2) titled ‘Don’t Poke the Bear: Buddhist Material Excess in Japan’s Vacant Houses’ will be published open access in the journal Numen (2026). Further to that, another peer reviewed article (JA3) titled ‘Cloned Buddhas: mapping out the DNA of Buddhist heritage preservation’ was published open access in Cultural Studies journal (2024).
Journal Article 1 (D1.3) In this article, I explore afterlives of unwanted gifts. Buddhist communities in contemporary Japan have been transformed by demographic decline, impacting the kin-based socio-religious networks that sustain Buddhist practice. Disrupting these networks often leads to the refusal of Buddhist practices and the associated troublesome materiality. Local temples are now facing an ever-increasing number of requests to assist with the disposal of sacred objects and emotionally charged personal items. Cases of Buddhist altars left abandoned anonymously at night within temple grounds are also proliferating. Such gifts have moral implications: they are not only material; they contain spiritual and emotional potential, even when deemed unwanted. If mistreated, they can become troublesome: accumulation of such objects can become a source of material and emotional pollution. Since Buddhist temples are seen as places where they can be handled meaningfully, temple custodians increasingly face the moral and practical dilemma of managing such ‘gifts’ through alternative pathways of care: disposal, reuse, and storage. I thus argue that inherited Buddhist things left with local temples represent intentional transfers of moral responsibility that allows people to address uncertainty around objects’ ritual futures. Through divestment trajectories of these objects, their relations, and people’s decisions around their futures, this article uncovers how refusal and deferral of care is handled in Buddhist temples caught up in discard, disposal, and reuse cycles of Buddhist practice and through their display in the temple to maintain their spiritual value.
Journal Article 2 (D3.2) The number of Japan’s vacant houses (akiya) reached nine million in October 2023; a phenomenon once associated with depopulating rural communities is now spreading into urban areas. Despite being labelled as vacant, those homes bear the echoes of lives once lived within them, preserving emotional entanglements and Buddhist material excess, including domestic altars (butsudan) and other ritual paraphernalia. In this article, I argue that akiya constitute conduits of excess for Buddhist materialities, embodying fragmented biographies that blur the boundaries between presence and absence of past, present, and future owners. Drawing on ethnographic field research in Hiroshima, Shimane and Miyazaki Prefectures, I explore how people navigate the emotional and material clutter of inherited akiya, confronting issues of intergenerational inheritance, Buddhist ritual responsibilities, and the refusal of karmic bonds. By tracing how laypeople and Buddhist professionals make decisions around divesting spiritually charged matter, I document the emotional dimensions of ritual abandonment and the complex social relations it entails. Through fragmented biographies of akiya, I portray those homes as contested sites of emotional struggle, refusal, and renewal. In doing so, I contend that Buddhist materialities and emotional ties linger in an ambiguous state of excess and reorganise local religious landscapes, shaping perceptions of akiya as resources and burdens amid ruination and renewal in contemporary Japan.
Journal Article 3 (JA3) In this article, I consider broader questions of decay and care in relation to Buddhist materialities and in the context of heritage-making. I consider how technological innovation transforms the value of religious materiality in Buddhist heritage reproduction projects in Japan. To illustrate the religiously and politically charged landscape of heritage care, I focus on the reproduction technologies developed by the Tokyo University of Arts researchers to create highly precise replicas of Buddhist heritage. One such ‘super clone’ replica of Japan’s National Treasure homed at Hōryūji temple in Nara – a 1400-year-old ‘Shaka Triad’ sculpture of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha – was put on display at the Nagano Prefectural Art Museum in Japan in April 2021. The ‘cloned’ statue is a highly precise copy that goes beyond the practices of exact duplication. With the use of 3D measurement, digital modelling technologies, and advanced casting techniques, this cloned religious heritage object transports the viewer back in time to the aesthetic moment of creation and allows them to experience anew the object’s affective presence as crafted centuries ago. In drawing on this example and its potential to intervene in other religious heritage reproduction projects globally, I argue that technology transforms religious heritage to generate alternative socio-economic afterlives of Buddhist objects. By analysing the scientific narratives and processes of heritage care, I show how the religious heritage reproduction is where the aesthetic, political, and economic dimensions of Buddhist material futures are imagined and realized. It is also a space of contestation between devotion, science, and memory-oriented practices of care in transnational heritage preservation, which reprogrammes circularity in Buddhist economies.
Theoretically, REFUSE intended to generate a robust theoretical framework in which to conceive of things through the prism of excess. By following the circulation of gifts in Buddhist temple economies during their production, consumption, and discard, this project intended to follow objects beyond their consumption and use, bringing the affects, emotions, and feelings that can animate or diminish a gift’s capacities for circulation into focus. Following from recent anthropological and religious studies theory that foregrounds sacred waste materialities, this research intended to question the ideal logics of value circulation and, in doing so, to uncover the messy ambiguities of human practice involving virtues of generosity and principles of care. It intended to reframe the emerging debates on economic and environmental impacts of Buddhist materiality, care, and waste production, wider debates concerning waste in post-bubble Japan, and the socio-economic/demographic fragility of Buddhist institutions, and to understand the practical and affective implications for handling
excess materialities within circular value economies of Buddhism in Japan.
With two periods of successful in-person fieldwork in January-February and July-September 2024 and several months of remote fieldwork preparations and remote data collection with the use of social media and online interviewing (August-December 2023 and March-June 2024), two key peer-reviewed articles outlined above (D1.3 and D3.2) and a co-edited special issue (D2.3 with a single authored introduction D2.4) provided new insights towards generating robust theoretical framework in which to conceive of excess and refusal of ritual and material care for religious objects, highlighting their processual impacts on practices of generosity and inheritance in Buddhist economies. Numerous talks were given (see above, in particular AT4-6/D3.1 AT8-9, AT14-15), workshops (W1 and D2.1) were organised, and several digital platform blog posts (see above, in particular D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4) were written addressing this theme. Excess in Buddhist circular economies is also a principal theme in the ethnographic film tentatively titled Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan has been filmed and edited by myself as part of the project (D4.1 D4.5).
Workshop (D2.1) Biographies of Excess. Co-organised by myself and Trine Brox in 2024, this workshop was hosted by the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS), the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It was preceded by three months of bi-weekly reading group sessions on excess (RG1) held online among the workshop participants (May-July) organised by myself and culminated in the special issue collaboration on excess (D2.3) and the development of a journal article (D3.2) and single-authored introduction to the special issue (D2.4). In preparation for the workshop and the editorial work, I also co-organised by myself and Trine Brox the in-person reading group on biography (RG2), involving colleagues in religious studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) (April-June).
Special Issue 1 (D2.3) From the basis of this workshop the open access double Special Issue Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy (Numen, 2026) will be published co-edited with Trine Brox. The special issue includes seven articles and a single-authored Introduction by myself. It is in the final stages of production and copyediting after the editorial and internal peer review and will be submitted to Numen for editorial and external peer review by the end of July 2025. The special issue will be published in the Numen Vol 73: 5-6.
Special Issue Introduction / Journal Article (D2.4) The Excess in Religion: Ethics, Affects, and Religious Literacy special issue includes a single-authored introduction. The introduction reconfigures excess in religion as an empirical condition and a process, foregrounding how excess manifests and is experienced through ethical, affective, and material formations across diverse religious contexts. By highlighting the centrality of excess, it pushes forward discussions on excess as a process of sublimation and how the materialities, aesthetics, and ethics of excess shape social lives of spiritually charged matter and people involved in their custodianship. It thus intervenes in religious studies’ debates on value ecologies and sacred waste by showing material, affective, and moral impacts of material and immaterial excess on individuals and communities. I argue that excess in religion becomes disruptive and sublimated not purely in ritual terms, but also as a religiously ambiguous category that requires the emergence of alternative sources and actors of religious literacy and complex processes of negotiation involved in its ethical and affective formations. Subsequently, the introduction and the special issue more broadly challenge the prevailing aesthetics of abundance, interrogating how religious practices or their rejection generate troublesome materialities that demand attention.
Film (D4.1/D4.5) Food Stories of Buddhist Excess in Contemporary Japan (tentative title) is a 50-minute ethnographic film that I researched, produced, filmed, and edited by myself. The film follows a collection of stories on Buddhist practices involving food, capturing how edible gifts, enter, circulate, and rot within Buddhist temple economies and corresponding ritual ecologies. The film aims to provoke discussions on food production, circulation, and waste in religious contexts, and specifically in the context of current debates on demographic disruption, food insecurity, and food waste in Japan and beyond. The film will be pre-screened at Harvard University in November 2025 and at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan in December 2025; submitted to the ethnographic film festivals including Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2026 and the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival 2026; screened with Buddhist communities across Japan including at Anyōji in Nara Prefecture and Zenryūji in Gifu Prefecture in 2026; finally, it will be made publicly available via Vimeo website, CCBS and REFUSE digital platform, and my institutional website.
Training Objectives
1.1.B.1 Knowledge, exchange and collaboration.
As a core member of the Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies (CCBS) I participated fully in all its activities including weekly meetings and reading groups, including ‘Waste Ethnographies’ fieldwork updates series in 2024 (January-March) and three reading groups: two online on ‘excess’ (RG1) and ‘religious labour’ and its affects (RG3), and in person at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). I participated in the CCBS internal writing seminars, a forum for exchanging and developing writing projects, and supported the delivery of the two-day Waste and Value conference (C1), as well as the organisation and delivery of the three-day PhD Course ‘Waste: Cultural Imaginaries and Materiality’ (T5). I secured funding from the Asian Dynamics Initiative (ADI) and collaborated with a fellow MSCA fellow based at the CCBS on organising and hosting Temporalities and Practices of Waste in India and Japan workshop at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The ADI was involved in advertising and participating in W3 and AT16.
1.1.B.2 Interdisciplinary knowledge transfer and academic communication.
The fellowship facilitated my participation in international conferences and workshops (AT1-18, W1-5, D1.2 D2.1 D3.1 D4.1 D4.5).
1.1.B.3. Communicating to non-specialist audiences.
I completed training in visual methods and technical skills training in ethnographic filmmaking by attending and successfully completing the Short Course in Ethnographic Documentary at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology (June 5-18, 2023) (T1.3) which has supported me through the process of film production, filming, and editing, which involved working with diverse and non-specialist audiences including my research collaborators. The film is also intended for public screenings in Japan and beyond, and as a free teaching resource. The first preliminary public screening took place at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) in 2025 (M4.4). The project also involved REFUSE Reflections series which is a section of the project’s digital platform reporting on the project’s progress (D1.4 D2.5 D3.3 D4.2 D4.3 D4.4) which is available in English and Japanese, making sure the content is available to diverse audiences including my research collaborators and their communities. I have also contributed to the CCBS blog with a project update on food waste and visual storytelling (D2.2).
Through my training and engagement with visual methods and topics of waste, I delivered relevant training and mentoring for graduate students and colleagues at ToRS and beyond including several talks: AT7, AT12-13, AT16-18, W5, D4.1.
I also organised and delivered a