Immortal Wishes

Schattschneider Ellen Schattschneider

Description

Immortal Wishes is a powerful ethnographic rendering of religious experiences of landscape, healing, and self-fashioning on a northern Japanese sacred mountain. Working at the intersection of anthropology, religion, and Japan studies, Ellen Schattschneider focuses on Akakura Mountain Shrine, a popular Shinto institution founded by a rural woman in the 1920s. For decades, local spirit mediums and worshipers, predominantly women, have undertaken extended periods of shugyo (ascetic discipline) within the shrine and on the mountain's slopes. Schattschneider argues that their elaborate, transforming repertoire of ritual practice and ascetic discipline has been generated by complex social and historical tensions largely emerging out of the uneasy status of the surrounding area within the modern nation's industrial and postindustrial economies.Schattschneider shows how, through dedicated work at the shrine including demanding ascents up the sacred mountain, the worshipers come to associate the rugged mountain landscape with their personal biographies, the life histories of certain exemplary predecessors and ancestors, and the collective biography of the extended congregation. She contends that this body of ritual practice presents worshipers with fields of imaginative possibilities through which they may dramatize or reflect upon the nature of their relations with loved ones, ancestors, and divinities. In some cases, worshipers significantly redress traumas in their own lives or in those of their families. In other instances, these ritualized processes lead to deepening crises of the self, the accelerated fragmentation of local households, and apprehension of possession by demons or ancestral forces. Immortal Wishes reveals how these varied practices and outcomes have over time been incorporated into the changing organization of ritual, space, and time on the mountainscape.For more information about this book and to read an excerpt, please click here.

Sujets

• Shintoism
• Philosophie et théologie
• Shinto
• Biological anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384779
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

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Durham & London 

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Labor and Transcendence on a Japanese Sacred Mountain

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©  Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of

America on acid-free paper 

Designed by Rebecca Giménez

Typeset in Berkeley by

Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-

in-Publication Data appear on the

last printed page of this book.

Portions of chapter  appeared

previously inEthos.

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p a r e n t s ,

Frank and Emily Schattschneider

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments, ix

Note on Conventions, xiii

Introduction: Labor and Transcendence, 

. Predicaments of History: Ritual Life on a Japanese Periphery, 

. Between Worlds: Akakura’s Architec- ture of Potential Transformation, 

. Labor and Rebirth: Cosmological Kinship in the Annual Ritual Cycle, 

. Miniature Mountains: Offerings and Exchange, 

. My Mother’s Garden: Ascetic Discipline on the Mountain, 

. I am the Mirror: The Political Dimen- sions of Representational Action, 

Conclusion, 

Appendix: Guide to Persons Mentioned in the Text, 

Notes, 

Glossary, 

Bibliography, 

Index, 

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

My principal fieldwork in Aomori prefecture (April  to Novem- ber ) was funded by grants from the Fulbright Program (Depart- ment of Education) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo- logical Research. Follow-up research in Japan during  and  was funded by grants from the North-East Asia Council (Association of Asian Studies) and the Emory University Research Committee. I trace my interest in the social sciences to my grandfather, the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider, who was always ready for a good political disagreement and who pointed out that it’s the crowd— and not simply the protagonists—that determines the outcome of any fight. Sarah Lawrence College teachers Bradd Shore and Michael Davis sparked my interest in anthropology and in problems of cultural in- terpretation. The Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto, where I studied kimono weaving under the kind supervision of Kinoshita-sensei, first led me to consider the intersection of aesthetics and labor discipline in Japan. At the University of Chicago, I am especially indebted to my doc- toral committee—Jean Comaroff, Norma Field, Nancy Munn, and Mar- shall Sahlins. At Emory University, I am grateful to colleagues and