Dancing with the Dead

“Christopher Nelson has produced a beautifully crafted book, written with sensitivity, and underscored by a powerful historical narrative reconstructed through the reminiscences of highly significant Okinawans. Their narratives of identity, of personal journeys through history relayed in public performance and in popular media, have acute meanings in today’s Japan. Nelson’s own roles in this journey of discovery are also poignant and meaningful: interlocutor, interpreter of culture, historian, dancer and raconteur. The injection of himself into the story brings to life the history of those with whom he engages. And the story is engaging.” - Matthew Allen, Social Science Japan Journal

“Dancing with the Dead is a beautifully written, deeply evocative, and smartly argued book about the ways in which the past intrudes into the present and how memory is given shape, recognition, and vigor through storytelling of various forms. This will be an important book not only for and about Okinawan history but also about the times of continued violence and militarism in which we live.” - Anne Allison, author of Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination

“Colonized by Japan, traumatized by war, dominated by an ongoing American military presence, Okinawa has never attracted the sustained attention of Western anthropologists. That has now changed, for here we have an ethnography of Okinawa that finally does justice to the complexity of its poetic and political realities. In Dancing with the Dead, Christopher T. Nelson takes up the Okinawan performers, raconteurs, and citizens who work to transform everyday life and to reanimate the present, all in the service of cultural and political commemoration. Beautifully written and deeply considered, Dancing with the Dead is a signal contribution to the anthropologies of performance and everyday life, and it will remain the benchmark ethnography of Okinawa for years to come.” - Marilyn Ivy, author of Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan

“Moving from public meetings concerning US bases in Okinawa to the poetry of Takara Ben to amateur dance clubs, this study reveals a complex, comprehensive understanding of Okinawan identity and history. One of the highlights of the volume is Nelson’s recounting of his own experiences as a member of an amateur eisa collective. Although rooted in anthropology, this volume will also be of interest to those in performance studies, Asian studies, history, and cultural studies.” - K. J. Wetmore Jr., Choice

”This book greatly enriches memory studies by unsettling the location of memory. Nelson’s honest voice as an ethnographer also opens up the welcome subject of the ethics of anthropological research through his poetic and moving engagement with the subject. Dancing with the Dead is an absorbing and nuanced ethnography that will be of significant interest to Japan and East Asian specialists and to all who engage with questions of history and memory, subaltern studies, and the ethnography of the everyday.” - Yukiko Koga, American Anthropologist

"Seasoned by experience, and with a more mature slant on the concealed intentions of Washington and Tokyo, Nelson finds Okinawan performers active in reactivating and transmitting the past, through music, film, recitation, story telling and dramatic monologues." - Stephen Mansfield, Japan Times