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electronic journal of contemporary japanese
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Discussion Paper 3 in 2003
First published in ejcjs on
10 July 2003
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'Religion' and 'the
Secular' in Japan
Problems in history, social anthropology, and the study of religion[1]
by
T. Fitzgerald
e-mail the Author
Introduction
In a recent discussion of the idea of tradition,
R. J. Smith said:
…the rituals performed at weddings and funerals today contain many of
the core symbols – and are designed to embody some of the most deeply
held convictions – of the members of any society.
(Smith, 1995: 29)
A similar thing might have been said about rituals performed throughout
the school system, which, like weddings and funerals, can be usefully
analysed in terms of rites of passage and the dialectics of structure and
communitas (Turner, 1969: 81-2). Yet in his discussion of the wedding
performance described so well by Edwards (1989) Smith refers to the Shinto
part of the ceremony as “a ‘religious’ ceremony” (Smith’s own inverted
commas round ‘religious’) and the reception that follows as a “highly
secular ritual” (1995: 28). How much weight should be placed on this
characterisation? In the context of Smith’s article, I can only suppose very
little. As a reader it occurred to me only as a strange blip in an otherwise
nicely crafted meditation on the problem of tradition. Its interest lies in that it seems to add nothing at all to our
understanding. This reader can only guess that its inclusion was an
unconscious reflex, a small and relatively inconsequential ritual
genuflection to a categorical imperative that might stray into the text of
even the most methodologically sophisticated writer.
I assume that the Shinto part of the ceremony is associated with
religion because, well, because we all know that
Shinto is a religion. There are gods in it. But why describe the party
afterwards as highly secular? Edwards has clearly shown that it is at the
party that many of the core symbols and deeply held convictions, including
the subordination of individual autonomy and the hierarchical
interdependence of all the actors, are given powerful expression.
Edwards appeals to Victor Turner’s (1967, 1969) version of Van Gennep’s
rites of passage in his discussion of the wedding as the liminal phase in
the transformation of the principals from one kind of social actor into
another (1989: 102-3). The rituals transform the principal actors, they also
transform the wider society’s cognition of them, and finally they instruct
both the principal actors and the participants in what is expected of
marriage.
It is interesting that Turner himself describes these statuses, and their
ritual transformation, as having a sacred component, and he denies that the
distinction between structure and communitas is the same as that between
secular and sacred (1969: 82). True, Turner himself uses the term secular rather loosely at times, as when he says that
threshold people have no “secular clothing”, or when he says that in the liminal phase “Secular distinctions of rank and status disappear or are
homogenized…” (Turner, 1969: 81); and again when he refers to “a ‘moment in
and out of time’, and in and out of secular social structure” (Turner, 1969:
82). It seems then that Turner himself does use the terms loosely from time
to time, and without any apparent theoretical gain. Indeed one might say
there is a contradiction in his usages, for almost immediately afterwards he
says:
The distinction between structure and communitas is not simply the
familiar one between ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’, or that, for example, between
politics and religion. Certain fixed offices in tribal societies have
many sacred attributes; indeed, every social position has some
sacred characteristics. But this ‘sacred’ component is acquired by the
incumbents of positions during the rites de passage, through which
they changed positions. Something of the sacredness of that transient
humility and modelessness goes over…
(Turner, 1969:82)
It is surely the latter point that is his main theoretical insight, that
the social space created by liminality and communitas is also the source of
the sacredness that becomes invested in the hierarchical or structurally
fixed statuses and roles. Turner is not concerned here with the
religion-secular dichotomy. He is concerned presumably with core symbols and
deeply held convictions. He is concerned with one significant aspect of the
way the social order and the cosmology in which it is located are reproduced
through ritual.
Edwards’ application of Turner’s ideas of liminality and communitas seems
apt. At the Japanese weddings that I have attended, including my own, the
social order was symbolically represented at the party that followed the
Shinto ritual by the seating arrangements, in the order of precedence in
speech making, and in the quite complex structure of gift exchange, as
Edwards so effectively described. The mood in both the Shinto part and in
the first part of the reception afterwards was solemn, deferential and
serious, and it would have been meaningless to claim that while the
solemnity at the Shinto part was a religious solemnity, the solemnity during
the speech-making was merely a secular solemnity. Indeed, the tone of
speech-making reminded me strongly of the sermons my grandfather used to
preach in church – solemn, boring, but something to be endured. The
endurance, a taste of ascetic self-denial (shugyō), or a rite of
purification, that made the drink in the pub after the service followed by
the Sunday lunch feel like a second holy communion.
At the Kyushu weddings I attended, as sake drinking progressed, the order
of deference was demolished and replaced by communitas. In the ritual of
sake drinking one competes, often hilariously, with one’s partners to pick
up the atsukan, or flask of warmed sake, and hold it insistently over the other person’s
cup, waiting for it to be lifted in order to receive the divine liquid,
which should then be drunk. The other must then take the sake container and
reciprocate. At the wedding parties I attended, the huge reception room was
criss-crossed by men, and sometimes women, in search of a sake exchange
ritual. The use of polite language became progressively more difficult to
maintain as sake flowed, boundaries were crossed and status differentials
obliterated. Even gender distinctions came under attack as women too became
the target of sake exchanges, and structure temporarily collapsed into a
benign drunken communitas.
I can hardly think of a better example of communitas in the midst of a
rite of passage. But nor can I see any gain to our understanding in calling
this ritual secular, in contrast to the shrine ritual which Smith calls
religious[2]. What happens in the shrine
and what happens in the earlier and later parts of the reception room both
give expression to core symbols and deeply held convictions.
It may not be a coincidence that anthropologists who discuss
religion are less likely to become submerged by conceptual problems
that the category typically induces than are those who come from religious
studies[3]. This is because
anthropologists tend to have a more sophisticated grasp of the ethnocentric
bias of categories, and a greater range of alternatives through which to
lessen the perhaps inevitable distortion that occurs when the concepts of
one culture are used to describe and explain another. Hendry (1987) is
perfectly well aware of the special problems that ‘religion’ as a category
causes, and points it out in chapters devoted to the subject in the Japanese
and the wider context (1987: 117; 1999: 115-128). Jan van Bremen, in his
introduction to a book in which religion appears in the title (van Bremen
and Martinez, 1995) makes much the same point, that the religion-secular
dichotomy simply doesn’t work in the analysis of Japanese institutions. It
is as though many of us genuflect before the categorical imperative of
religion even though we know through experience that it introduces
unnecessary confusions, not clarity.
The answer is to problematise religion insofar as it has entered the
Japanese vocabulary, either as ‘religion’ or as ‘shūkyō’, but not to
assume without question that it is a neutral and valid analytical category,
and more importantly not to talk as though ‘it’ is somehow ‘there’.
‘Religion’ and its tacit distinction from ‘the secular’ is a category
that is being constantly used by academics and the media, as well as in
ordinary conversation, to refer to a large number of quite disparate things
in a wide variety of situations. Among those things there are some uses and
referents of ‘religion’ that occur more frequently than others, for example
belief in gods, or soteriological doctrines, or ritual in general, or some
special kind of religious ritual, or cosmology, or the basic values and
norms of a society, its ideology and so on. All of these ideas about the
meaning and definition of religion can be found in the huge number of texts
produced on the elusive subject; and frequently many different usages can be
found in the same text.
Some of the usages may seem more metaphorical than others, as when for
example money is described as a religion and economists as the high priests
of capital, or when Marxism-Leninism is described as a religion and the
Party as a church of the faithful. But few people who use the idea of
‘religion’ in their academic writing would think that it is metaphorical to
call Islam, Hinduism, Japanese Buddhism and Shinto ‘religions’. When we do
use the word in this way, there may lie a further tacit assumption, which is
that each of these so-called ‘religions’ are species of the genus
‘Religion’, particular examples or even manifestations of a general
category.
We can notice that this general category is an English language word
derived from Latin ‘religio’ and with close equivalents in other
European languages. There is a historical context and geographical location.
It seems that in the late 16th and early 17th centuries the word ‘religion’
began to be used in new reified ways that reflected the ideological
revolution of early modernity (Bossy, 1982). But many scholars in religion,
and in other disciplines such as history, sociology and social anthropology,
still apply it freely to any historical period in virtually any society. We
can easily find books and articles about the religions of the native
American peoples, about African religions, about the religion of the Buddha
in ancient India, about Japanese religion in the Heian or Kamakura periods,
about the religious currents of contemporary Japanese society, and so on.
What can be the justification for this?
Religion as an essence or religion as a heuristic device?
‘Religion’ is sometimes assumed to be something we simply find in the
world. Much thinking about ‘religion’ that goes on in comparative religion
or religious studies has assumed that religions are things that one can
study in any society, that we all know what we mean by religion when we see
it and when we use the word. When someone points out that there are many
anomalies where one simply doesn’t know where religion begins or ends, the
reactions are various. One reaction is to say that this is true of all our
categories and that the fact that there are fuzzy edges doesn’t mean to say
that religions don’t exist. Some very influential writers have claimed that
religion itself has an essence in the personal experience of the individual
with God, but that manifestations of religion are bound to be clearer in
some parts and more ambiguous in others[4].
Others, who deny that ‘religion’ has an essence, appeal to the idea that we
all know what we mean by ‘religion’ because it forms part of our language
game, simply by using the word we know its meanings, which form a family of
over-lapping traits[5]. Others say that
‘religion’ is merely a taxonomic category that usefully organises data at a
general level[6].
The point that I am concerned to make here is that, to many writers,
religion has appeared as a given, universal aspect of the world and of human
experience. This has taken the form of religion as a ‘natural’ aspect of the
world or part of the essence of human nature, an assumption critiqued by
Winston Davis (1992: 229). This habit of thinking has entered into the
otherwise more sceptical and theoretically sophisticated texts of
anthropologists, historians and other anti-essentialists. My argument is
that religion as an idea is de facto defined in our thinking by its
distinction from that which is not religion, the secular, and that this
distinction itself is highly ideological and the product of specific
European historical trends. Furthermore, the function of this distinction in
our own democratic and capitalist ideologies is of profoundly greater
importance than, for example, analytical concepts such as kinship, marriage,
tribe, peasant, cosmology, sports, dance or even ritual. Though all our
European-language ideas may be problematic to some extent when applied
cross-culturally, some are more problematic than others.
I will leave an account of the historical problem of the religion-secular
dichotomy to the end of this paper. There I will sketch out one possible
scenario of the formation of the modern concept of religion in the wider
context of modern western ideology. First I want to introduce examples of
the problem in English language texts on Japan, a society into which the
religion-secular dichotomy was imported around Meiji and where it has been
inserted at certain levels of discourse – most notably the juridical, the
constitutional, and the academic – without taking root in the fundamental
categories of Japanese thought and behaviour[7].
I imagine a spectrum of texts on Japan incorporating to a greater or
lesser extent applications of the category religion and its implicit or
explicit distinction from the secular. At one end of the spectrum lie texts
that are heavily indebted to the religion category and invest it with major
significance[8]. At the other end of the
spectrum lie the kind of texts already referred to, where the introduction
of religion is either a reflex or else motivated by a sense of obligation
but where there is no great theoretical commitment, and indeed where there
may be a sophisticated awareness of the problem.
Near the committed end of the spectrum of texts I place those of Reader
(1991, 1993, 1995, 1998), as when, for example, Reader asserts that:
…in reality Japanese people in general exhibit extremely high levels
of religious activity and behaviour, and Japanese society and culture
are intricately interwoven with religious themes.
(Reader, 1991: 5)
Such texts that exhibit high levels of commitment to religion as a
category would normally be most heavily freighted with the ideological
assumptions that derive from comparative religion and its founding fathers
such as Max Muller, Wach, Otto, and Eliade. Conversely, at the point on the
spectrum furthest away, I place texts of the kind I have already discussed
such as those of Smith, van Bremen and Hendry, and also in the context of
anthropology more generally Victor Turner. Between these two different ends
of the spectrum I place writers such as Lawson and Macauley (1990), Winston
Davis (1992), H. Neill McFarland (1967), Byron Earhart (1982), and Richard
B. Pilgrim (1985), whose texts are heavily freighted by the religion
category and its distinction from the secular. Such writers tend to be
located in a sociological tradition, in Davis’s case the Weberian paradigm
with which he engages. Lawson and Macauley are anthropological theorists,
not specialists of Japan, who claim to be able to make a useful distinction
between religious and non-religious rituals.
What Davis, McFarland, and Reader share with many other authors in their
different ways is a commitment to the study of Japanese religion, Japanese
religion and society, Japanese religiosity, or the religious world of the
Japanese. On the other hand there is an important
difference between Reader and Davis. Reader may be unaware of the
ideological legacy he has received from the fathers of comparative religion,
and one sign of this possibility is that he seems to suppose without
question that religion is a universal phenomenon that has existed in all
times and all places. There is implicitly conveyed in his writing a notion
that religion is a natural reality, and that to deny that the Japanese are
religious would be absurd and contrary to common sense. Davis, as I will
show, also never fundamentally questions the religion category, only its
method of application; but he is well aware of the ideology of religious
studies, makes explicit reference to it, and distances himself from it.
Davis approaches the subject as a historian and sociologist, indebted to
(but not uncritical of) the Weberian paradigm.
So the kind of commitment has a different nuance between Reader and
Davis. But they are both significantly committed to religion as an
analytical category, and their books (like that of McFarland) labour the
pursuit of the religious to such a degree that it often seems as though they
are asserting the existence of a substantive, reified entity. What I hope to
show is that this commitment to what is essentially a category mistake
involves them and us in unnecessary conceptual entanglements. Their
commitment to religion as a category of analysis does not seem to emerge
from any clear theoretical gains. Indeed, quite the opposite. It frequently
leads to unintelligibility. The problem then is to understand their
persistence with it. I suggest that this can only be understood as the
result of a western ideological imperative that we all to some extent share
and that needs to be uncovered effectively before it can be neutralised and
eliminated from our analytical vocabulary[9].
The problem lies in the way data is selected and presented when the
religion-secular divide is operating, and the way the tacit theoretical
presuppositions introduced by the category religion itself
distort rather than clarify our understanding. This ideological field, or
religion discourse, is also reproduced, as I have indicated, though in
somewhat less invasive ways, in anthropology texts, and is reflected in
taught courses on the anthropology of religion, anthropological sections and
panels of religious studies conferences, and chapters on religion in
introductions to anthropology.
Other analytical categories: Ritual
While all our categories can be problematic, religion and its distinction
from the secular carries more ideological weight in the modern western
configuration of values than most. Modern concepts of politics, economics
and law, for example, presuppose the notion of a secular sphere, and the
idea of the secular is interdependent with the idea of religion. They are
mutually self-defining. It is for this reason that I am arguing that we
should take special note how this important piece of western ideology
misleadingly appears as a piece of neutral analytical equipment, or even
more problematically as though ‘it’ is somehow objectively there in the
society or culture. Indeed, in the texts that I shall look at, it is
simultaneously both the analytical equipment and the object of analysis.
Despite the problems with the English word ritual,
effectively analysed by Bell (1992), it would be difficult to proceed with
an analysis of social institutions, especially Japanese ones, without it. It
seems important that one of the best recent books on ritual and ceremony in
Japan explicitly problematises the religion-secular dichotomy and offers
instead a powerful spectrum of ethnographies on rituals (van Bremen and
Martinez, 1995: 2-3). The kinds of theories of ritual that are spelt out is
important. Rituals, where they exist in the Protestant-influenced worldview,
tend to be imagined as symbolic representations of meanings already
formulated in doctrine. Protestant rituals, and the idea of ritual held by
Protestant-influenced theorists, do not actually perform any mystical
transformations, as in the Catholic mass; they merely act out symbolically
the primary intellectual beliefs[10].
The ritual performances are explained by the beliefs.
This Protestant view of ritual as a secondary symbolic statement of
already held, doctrinally formulated beliefs about salvation has been influential, especially in religious studies.
However, anthropology has also provided a different theoretical tendency.
Ever since Robertson-Smith's publication of The Religion of the Semites
it has become a commonplace observation that rituals are not usually if ever
‘explained’ by the prior holding of beliefs, but are performed anyhow, the
doctrinally formulated beliefs (if they exist in any coherent sense) being
used retrospectively to explain and/or justify the actions. The idea that
ritual practice is logically and perhaps chronologically prior
to belief systems and can function quite happily without intellectualist
representations at all is at least a serious proposition that might help us
to understand what is happening in a society such as Japan[11].
Lawson and Macauley, like some other anthropologists and religionists,
postulate a distinction between religious and non-religious rituals on the
basis of the criterion of “culturally postulated superhuman agents” (1990).
However, such a distinction merely puts the problem one step back but does
not solve it[12]. By favouring rituals
that involve ‘superhuman agents’ with some special attribute that is known
as ‘religiosity’, we hold ourselves ransom to what, in the Japanese context
at least, is a weakly conceptualised category. Indeed, it may be that the
Japanese capacity to take the shrine and temple performance of rituals
seriously in the absence of clearly articulated ideas or doctrines
about aborted foetuses, printing blocks, dead ancestors, bodhisattvas, angry
ghosts and children’s toy dolls can only in principle be understood in
the context of the whole spectrum of ritual performances that are
conducted in every institution and at every level of society.
By giving special priority to some supposedly special class of actions
and experiences called ‘religious’ that can be decisively distinguished from
‘non-religious’ ones, we will be in danger of losing sight of what may be
more important analytical connections, ones that might be established on the
basis of metaphor and analogy across the spectrum of ritual performances.
True, ritual is also an English-language word and therefore carries
semantic associations developed from within the Christian west. Jack Goody
has claimed that it is a useless concept and Grimes admits that it is a
vague idea in English, and that often there is no corresponding word in
other languages (Grimes 2000: 261). However, whereas religion as a concept is fundamental (I shall argue) in the construction of
modern western democratic and capitalist ideology, the idea of ritual seems
less charged with ideological resonance and easier to separate out as a
useful, indeed indispensable, analytical category. As Jan van Bremen has put
it:
The study of ritual is not a search for the essential qualities of a
peculiar and qualitatively different event; it is a way of examining how
trivial elements of the social world can be elevated and transformed
into symbols, categories, mechanisms, which, in certain contexts, allow
the generation of a special or extraordinary event.
(van Bremen, 1995:3)
Rituals, or actions with ritual characteristics, are performed everyday
and with scant regard for the niceties of the so-called religion-secular distinction. In this sense the concept seems far less
loaded with ideological baggage than religion, and,
provided it is not essentialised as some quite distinctive kind of thing,
but is used adjectivally or adverbially to indicate attributes of
performances that, being not merely idiosyncratic and not only utilitarian
or technical, have some kind of publicly recognised symbolic significance,
seems to have been remarkably successful in the anthropological context as a
cross-cultural analytical category[13].
All sorts of institutions, even in western societies, straddle this
problematic division between religious and non-religious rituals, a
distinction that I want to argue is superfluous and possibly unintelligible.
Ritual, ceremony and the celebration of sacred symbols and statuses are
performed across a wide spectrum of social life and undercut the
ideologically determined distinction between religion and the secular[14].
Ritual is pervasive at every level of society, not least in Japan. The
attempt to distinguish between religious and non-religious
ritual does not solve this problem but merely reproduces it. Yet the reflex
power of our categories, and our easy confusion of categories with reality
itself, seems to compel scholars to assume that their seeming naturalness
and intuitiveness must be a sign of their veridicality.
The commercial face of Religion ideology
This wider ideological field is well indicated in its commercial form by
the contents description on the back of Reader’s well-known Religion in
Contemporary Japan (1991), which typifies the marketing of this field:
What role does religion play in contemporary Japanese society and in
the lives of Japanese people today? This book examines the major areas
in which the Japanese participate in religious events, the role of
religion in the social system and the underlying views within the
Japanese religious world. Through a series of case studies of religion
in action – at crowded temples and festivals, in austere Zen meditation
halls, at home and work, at dramatic fire rituals – it illustrates the
immense variety, energy and colour inherent in Japanese religion while
discussing the continuing relevance and responses of religion in a
rapidly modernising and changing society.
These unexamined clichés are formulaic repetitions, which through the
power of sheer assertion, leaves no room for doubt that religion is some
kind of object and even agent in the world[15].
We already know what religion is – temples and festivals, Zen meditation
halls, fire rituals, the home Buddha shelf [butsudan - 仏壇]. Religion is inherently various, energetic and
colourful, and responds to modernisation. It is also an agent that plays a
role in society, as though religion were something separate from society but
interacting with society at specific points.
The reproduction of the ideological discourse of religion in Ian Reader
Ian Reader’s contribution to Japanese Studies is in several ways an
outstanding one, and his books and articles have made an important
contribution to our knowledge. I do not question the validity of his
research, nor its inherent interest to an international audience[16].
My concern is with the inherent theoretical problems with the concept of
religion, problems that Reader did not invent and which we are all in my
view entangled in to one degree or another. Reader says that “..intensely
religious dimensions still operate in Japanese society” and that “there does
exist a deep and continuing stream of religious motifs interwoven with
(rather than separate from) other aspects of Japanese life and
society” (Reader, 1991: 15).
My contention is that this author’s multiple references to religion, or
the religious world of the Japanese, and his repeated distinction between
overtly religious acts
and those rituals that are merely secular, can only be understood as an
attempt to assert a special, distinct and irreducible realm of experience,
feeling and action. But though Reader himself has pointed out that the idea
of religion was imported during the Meiji era (1991: 13-14), he never
considers the arguments that this is a western myth, one that liberal
ecumenical missionaries and others have been exporting to the rest of the
world since the days of Max Muller. Furthermore, it is unjustified by the
actual data that is cited by the author, which often forces him to virtually
deny what he is asserting within the same paragraph.
We can only explain Reader’s determination to construct a “religious world” of
the Japanese as the result of some prior commitment of the author’s.
However, Reader did not invent this commitment himself as a lone individual.
This commitment springs from the collective consciousness of western
societies.
The expression “interwoven with (rather than separate from)” seems to be
some kind of metaphor, but actually it is a rhetorical trick playing on the
words “interwoven ... rather than separate from”. The implied analogy is
with weaving but the analogy is misleading. If a red stranded thread is
interwoven with blue thread to form a tapestry, do we say
the red is separate or not separate from the blue? Obviously it depends on
the context and the purpose. Yes, they are separate threads of different
colours, but they are also combined in one overall pattern. But we can in
principle identify and separate the red thread by looking for it. But what
are we looking for in the case of “religious motifs”? We don’t know – this
is precisely our problem. We do not have the intuitive certainty that we
have in our distinction between red and blue, because what constitutes
religious as distinct from non-religious motifs is the
contested point at issue. The metaphor is a problem because it depends on
what is included in “other aspects of Japanese life and culture”. These
“other aspects of Japanese life and culture” in turn depend on what is
included in religion. Reader is trying to hoodwink himself and us by
pretending that what constitutes these categories is unproblematic, we all
know what they mean. The language of “interwoven ... rather than separate
from” seems to be giving us an insight into Japanese reality, but I would
question whether it actually does so.
Reader on ‘religion’ as shūkyō
Reader more or less admits that the very idea of ‘religion’ and its
distinction from ‘the secular’ has been negotiated into existence in the
Japanese context. He says
A problem that occurs…is precisely what is understood when terms like
‘religion’ are used in Japan. The Japanese word generally used in
surveys and elsewhere to denote ‘religion’ is shūkyō, a word made
up of two ideograms, shū, meaning sect or denomination, and
kyō, teaching and doctrine. It is a derived word that came into
prominence in the 19th century as a result of Japanese encounters with
the west and particularly with Christian missionaries, to denote a
concept and view of religion commonplace in the realms of 19th century
Christian theology but at that time not found in Japan, of religion as a
specific, belief-framed entity. The term shūkyō thus, in origin
at least, implies a separation of that which is religious from other
aspects of society and culture, and contains implications of belief and
commitment to one order or movement – something that has not been
traditionally a common factor in Japanese religious behaviour and
something that tends to exclude many of the phenomena involved in the
Japanese religious process.
(Reader, 1991: 13-14)
What is remarkable about this passage is that, at the very moment that
Reader is showing us, correctly, that the term religion and
its derivatives such as religious is an alien concept which
falsely separates “that which is religious from other aspects of society”,
he is at the same time, even in the same sentence, continuing to assert such
ideas as “Japanese religious behaviour” and “the Japanese religious
process”. He is saying, in effect, that the distinction between the
religious and the non-religious is not a common factor “in Japanese
religious behaviour”. These are not mere banal grammatical observations that
I am making; the use of language here is an indication of a wider problem,
and one feels compelled to ask why a writer of Reader’s acknowledged
accomplishments should get trapped in it. The answer is that such thinking
is not merely Reader’s, but is institutionalised within Religious Studies
and to some extent throughout the humanities and social sciences. This is
how an ideology mystifies us by appearing as self-evident and
in-the-nature-of-things.
Reader acknowledges the pervasive importance of the household, the nation
state and the collective racial identity throughout Japanese cultural
practice (1991: 27-8). Yet the political in this sense is marginal to
Reader’s purposes, for ‘religion’ is constructed as something that has
little or nothing to do with power. Power after all is in the secular field
(McCutcheon, 1997).
The problem is with the selection and interpretation of data. The data
itself often tends to cluster around ritual forms of behaviour that are
ostensibly linked to the ‘supernatural’ or its nearest Japanese equivalent.
Thus, for example, the contents of the book are typically concerned with
Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, priests, ancestors, graveyards,
butsudan, mountain asceticism, and new religions such as Agonshū.
The fact that some of these ritual actions make references to various
unseen beings that in English we typically refer to as the supernatural
fails to guarantee a separate and distinctive phenomenon called religion, as
Reader’s own data indicates. For this reason he asserts “The Primacy of
Action” (1991:15-20) by which he seems to suggest that it is ritual practice that defines the religious sphere. If
Reader had gone on from there to consistently develop a theory of ritual, he
would have been in good company, and I suggest many of the conceptual
confusions in his work would be resolved, doing greater justice to the
fascinating and important material that his work contains.
Reader distinguishes between religious rituals and non-religious rituals,
just as he distinguishes between religious harmony and non-religious harmony
(1991:30), and even has a special set-apart place for “religious sincerity”
(1998). This means that there must be some further criterion available. But
having trawled through many of Reader’s texts I cannot find it, and am
convinced that it is a chimera. There is therefore no clear editorial
principle for either including or excluding a vast array of ritual activity
connected to etiquette, hierarchy, power, politics and/or the reproduction
of the social order.
The Japanese are deeply religious, but they don’t know it
So on the one hand for Reader, “religion as a specific, belief- framed
entity” (1991: 15) is not typical of Japan, and he has always in his
publications rightly attempted to focus on the ritual performances, or what
he calls “The Primacy of Action” (1991), a phrase that might have been taken
straight from Robertson Smith. The practice part of the idea of being
“practically religious” points in the same direction (1998). Talking about
the great New Year shrine visiting activities of hatsumōde, and the
national ritual of visiting the graves of ancestors at o-bon in July
or August, he says:
Much of what is done at New Year and o-bon does not require
any prior or fixed religious commitment from the participants: it does
not even seem to require belief in the existence or influence of the
spiritual beings (kami or ancestors) to whom the prayers and
offerings are directed.
(Reader, 1991: 11-12)
Again and again in this book, Reader seems to be about to articulate a
theoretical interpretation of the significance of the ritualisation of life
in Japan that would explain why we (both the Japanese and the expert
observers) do not need to talk about ‘religion’ at all. For most of what
Reader means by religion is the performance of various
kinds of rituals, and it is unclear what else over and above ritual he
really wants to talk about.
On the other hand, Japanese people are overtly religious
but they don’t know it:
Japanese people in general are quick to say they are not religious
and to describe their society as one where religion either does not
exist or has in some way died out. Winston Davis writes of a
conversation he had with a Japanese banker on a flight to Japan in 1971:
‘When he learned that I was studying Japanese religion he shook his
head and sadly assured me that there no longer was such a thing. I was
later to hear the same thing from many other Japanese.’
In the 1980s I too have received similar assurances. It is almost as
if many Japanese like to convey the impression that Japan is a wholly
secular society in which religion has to all intents and purposes
disappeared. As this book will demonstrate however, this is certainly
not the case for, in reality, Japanese people in general exhibit
extremely high levels of religious activity and behaviour, and Japanese
society and culture are intricately interwoven with religious themes.
(Reader, 1991: 5)
Here we find the assumptions of the scholarly expert confirmed by the
reference to Winston Davis in the 1970s, which for Reader strengthens his
case that the Japanese are fundamentally mistaken about their own behaviour,
and that they have been harbouring this mistake for a long time. It confirms
the assumption that Reader and Davis know exactly what religion, religious
activity, and religious behaviour is, but the Japanese do not. Indeed the
Japanese have persisted in their error throughout the 1970s and 80s. And
since, as we have already seen, the Japanese never did distinguish between
religious and secular ideas and
institutions until western pressure led to the construction of shūkyō, then presumably they had been in error until the
Christian missionaries and their liberal ecumenical progeny came along to
enlighten them[17].
Reader tells us that the Japanese are religious but they don’t know it.
He has hinted at a possible reason, that they want to appear secular. But
what does secular mean? For it needs to be remembered that the concept of
religion did not come into Japan alone, pure as
a shrine maiden. It came coupled with the concept of the secular. The insistence by the western powers that a civilized society
separates church and state was a kind of imperial intrusion[18].
The confusion persists to this day. Thus, when a Japanese person seems to
want to say that Japan is a secular society, it is far from
clear what he or she means.
Reader gives instances of Japanese people denying that they are
religious, or denying that there are some emotions or experiences that they,
as Japanese people, separate out as of a special kind, attributes which
would mark them out as people with a special religious commitment, rather
than, for example, a commitment to those values, ideals, dispositions, and
principles which are widely celebrated in institutional settings across the
whole spectrum of Japanese cultural life.
Yet Reader continues to insist that they do act with some special
distinctively religious feeling or commitment. In one story
his two Japanese friends tell him that they are not religious and they have
no interest in religion, but Reader knows what religion is, and he knows
they are wrong:
Not long after I first arrived in Japan in 1981 two Japanese friends,
knowing my interest in religion, decided to take me out for the day to
visit some Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Before setting out they
assured me that they were neither religious nor did they have any
interest in religion: their participation in the trip was purely to show
me some places that would be of interest to me in my studies. I have
long since become inured to Japanese people telling me that they are not
religious, even whilst performing acts of an overtly religious nature
such as praying at a shrine or walking a pilgrimage route dressed in the
traditional clothing of a Japanese pilgrim, so that nowadays I hardly
take any notice of such protestations. At the time however I did,
assuming that this meant my friends would act similarly to me at such
places – interested, respectful but not worshipful.
(Reader: 1991: 1)
The main points that Reader is telling us here is that he, Reader, knows
without question what kind of thing ‘religion’ is, or what kind of things
the word refers to: praying at a shrine, walking a pilgrimage route, wearing
traditional pilgrim's clothes, and performing the rituals in a “worshipful”
– rather than a merely interested and respectful – manner are all “overtly
religious acts.” But his Japanese friends can’t see it.
There is thus a contradictory tension in Reader’s book, on the one hand
acknowledging that the evidence points to the irrelevance of the idea of a
special, set-apart “religious world” in Japan, on the other hand projecting
onto the data and onto his Japanese informants this set of attributes.
Reader and Tanabe (1998)
In the 1998 book Reader, with co-author Tanabe, argued that there is a
“common religion” of Japan that is in principle shared by all Japanese and
can be located and even advocated in both popular practice and the ancient
texts (see Reader and Tanabe, 1998: 23-32). It is a religion that undercuts
distinctions that are made between lite and popular religion, or between
scriptural religion of educated priests and members of the upper classes, on
the one hand, and the superstitious religion and magic of
ordinary people. It is a religion that has at its heart “the practice of
seeking this-worldly benefits”, a religion that “provides an open-access,
total-care system for its members.” (1998: 31)
As sociologists Reader and Tanabe rightly question the theological (or
Buddhalogical) value judgement that lies behind a distinction between true
and false religion. But they perpetuate the more fundamental
myth of religion itself. When Reader and Tanabe talk about
“the common religion” of Japan and the Japanese, they carve out from the
spectrum of ritualised actions a special category, implicitly distinct from
the non-religious or secular ones. In comparison to this category mistake,
the issue of ‘true’ versus ’false’ religion seems secondary.
Reader and Tanabe refer to a “religious context” as relying on
“spirit-oriented explanation and interpretation of events” which is in
contrast to “the scientific-rationalist worldview that underlies the modern
education and political systems of Japan as a modern secular state.” (1998:
257)
However, the claim that genze riyaku (this worldly benefits) demarcates a religious rather than a non-religious
sphere of activity should be challenged. Genze riyaku is certainly
about exchange and reciprocity. The principles that govern relations between
the living and the dead do not, on the basis of the data provided, seem
fundamentally different from the principles governing relations
between the living. The ancestors are related hierarchically to the
household head much as parent to child, the older to the younger, the
emperor to the subject, the sensei (teacher/master) to the deshi (student/disciple).
The principles of obligation, reciprocity, and hierarchy operate similarly
in all these relations. Recent ancestors are not necessarily remote from the
living descendents. An ancestor may be more intimate and approachable than a
remote company boss, and therefore apparently require less formality of
approach, less awe and humility. This does not mean that the boss is more
transcendental than the ancestor in an ontological sense. It’s all a matter
of propriety, for both are fundamentally social beings, and the relations
between them are fundamentally social relations. In both cases there is
mutual dependency, obligation, and exchange, and both the boss and the
ancestor provide this worldly benefits if the rituals are correctly
performed.
Nor does this analogy mean that there are no differences between the boss
and an ancestor. It might mean that they are petitioned in a somewhat
different register. The sake that is offered to the boss or the iemoto
sensei (teacher/master in a traditional arts or craft lineage) at o-chūgen
(a midyear gift) or o-seibo (a year-end gift) may need to be specially gift wrapped in a way not necessary
for an ancestor. Or we might say they are gift wrapped in different ways.
The difference of register, and the significance of that difference, should
certainly be part of what we want to research. It might seem ironic to
bracket relations with the boss as ‘religion’ because there is greater
deference involved, and those with the ancestor as merely an extension of
‘secular’ kinship relations beyond the grave.
Winston Davis and the distinction between Religion and Society
Reader’s quotation from Winston Davis concerning the story of what the
man said in the airplane can be found in Davis’s Japanese Religion and
Society: Paradigms of Structure and Change (1992: 231-2) in a chapter
called “The Secularization of Japanese Religion”. Like Reader, Davis has an
enviable and deep knowledge of Japan, and it is difficult, when one is
chasing a theoretical and methodological problem, to do justice to the many
insights, pieces of fascinating knowledge, and important contributions to
one’s own understanding of Japan that the book contains.
Davis’s theoretically thoughtful multidisciplinary approach is indicated
by his struggles with Weber, and the debt he acknowledges to sociology,
anthropology and history. Historical understanding is also of fundamental
importance in his attempt to set contemporary issues in a longer-term
perspective. This welcome orientation leads us to suppose that Davis intends
to use religion as a heuristic device, an analytical concept that allows him
to focus with reasonable precision on some specific aspect of Japanese
society that can be, and needs to be, distinguished from other non-religious
aspects.
Yet things are not as clear as they might be:
While this book is about Japanese religion, my goal is to frame
discussion in such a way that when readers put the book down they will
have a deeper knowledge of Japanese society and culture in general, and
possibly even deeper insight into the nature of religion itself. The
book deals with the relationship between Japanese religion, culture, and
values on the one hand, and society, social change and economic
development on the other. I have written some chapters as a sociologist
of religion, others as a historian. Most of the volume, however, falls
under the mixed rubric of historical sociology....
(Davis, 1992: 1-2)
There is here a profusion of relationships that the author intends to
establish, between Japanese religion, culture, values, society, social
change, economic development. Religion is posited as having its own nature
here. Yet later he explicitly repudiates the claims by such Founding Fathers
of contemporary religious studies as Van der Leeuw, Rudolf Otto and Mircea
Eliade that religion is part of the essence of humanity, and explicitly
rejects their claim that religion “has existed de facto in all cultures up
to the present…” (1992: 229). This ambiguity can be found throughout the
book.
The title itself should ring warning bells for the reader. The idea of
coupling the terms “religion” and “society” should immediately lead us to
ask what kind of relationship this is conceived to be, for inevitably by
separating them in this way there is a tendency towards reification of two
in principle equal entities joined in conflictual marriage.
It is interesting that in his review of Davis’s book shown on the back cover,
Richard B. Pilgrim should write
It provides in one place and under one cover useful studies featuring
the important interrelationship between religion and society, or – to
put it more correctly – Japanese religio-social reality.
This correction, which appears to spring from a minute attention to
detail and nuance, instead indicates a semantic muddle pushed into a new
key, for by de-coupling “religion and society” and then putting them back
together again in the form of “religio-social reality”, an illusion of
theoretical gain in our thinking has been established. Pilgrim seems to want
to suggest that religion and society cannot be separated into distinct
reified entities, yet they can nevertheless be distinguished, perhaps as
different aspects of the same entity. But this still leaves us with pretty
much the same problem, which is to know how to distinguish between the
religious and the non-religious aspects of the same entity.
Davis and the reification of Religion
Davis has stated clearly that his work is one of historical sociology,
and he has distanced himself explicitly from the sui generis school of
religious studies. Yet it is quite clear when one reads Davis’s book that,
despite his theoretical intentions, much of the time he is thinking of
religion as a thing, an agent that acts and reacts and comes into
relationship with other reified entities.
This tendency to hypostatization of religion may not be
the intention, and we know that, in his discussion of how to measure
secularization for example, Davis attempts to break down the rather
monolithic and Protestant Christian influenced idea of religion as a system
of beliefs, separating religion into smaller, more effectively measured components. He does this by
separating out issues of belief from issues of action and feeling. He says
“…religious praxis (shugyō) and feelings (kimochi)
form the core of Japanese religion.” (1992: 236).
Yet even here the idea that religion has a “core”
tends to reify, and it is difficult for the reader to know how, in Davis’s
view, a core religious feeling differs from a non-religious feeling, or a
religious praxis differs from a non-religious praxis. And Japanese religion
is being identified in terms of religious praxis and religious feeling,
which is tautologous. To say that Japanese religion is characterised by
religious feeling does not help us to understand anything very much.
If religion and society are being conceptually separated, and then
coupled together as though they are two distinct things that have some kind
of contingent relationship with each other, we are bound to look within the
book for a clear explanation as to what kind of ‘thing’ has been separated
out from society in this way. Being told on page one that religion has its
own nature tends to strengthen the sense that Davis is ambivalent. He is,
rightly in my view, concerned to point out that emic categories are not
always necessarily the best way to understand a society,
and that we need both emic and etic categories (1992: 6.) Yet the problem of
‘religion’ as an etic category is not satisfactorily discussed, and
throughout the book one can only gather what meanings and referents religion
has by the examples he gives, and by the hints that he drops sideways on, as
it were.
Davis is critical in a certain kind of context of generalisations about
religion and the process of secularization, as when he says
I shall try to demonstrate by statistical and historical examples
that there is no universal measure for ‘the secularization
process’ – whatever that means! – and that even within a single
religious system ‘the general decline of religion’ is a meaningless
jumble of words.
(Davis, 1992: 231)
Yet if “the general decline of religion” is a meaningless jumble of
words, how are we to understand the meaning of “a single religious system”?
How is a religious system distinguished from a non-religious one? We already
have uses of the word that suggest that religion is something in itself,
some reified thing that acts or is acted upon. For example, in the sentence
previous to the one just quoted, where he dismisses the proposition
concerning “the general decline of religion” as a meaningless jumble of
words, he had said “Rather than assuming that the decline of religion,
however defined, is inevitable or impossible, I shall assume that it is
possible, not necessarily unilinear, and therefore reversible.” (1992: 231). The almost throw-away aside – “however defined” –
suggests someone who is weary of definitional problems, and wants to get on
with the more important job of showing us what religion is really like by
analysing ‘it’ in real contexts.
Throughout chapter 7, where on the one hand he wants to break down
religion into components for more precise analysis, we find
expressions that reify religion as though it were a passive or active agent,
or as if it were some distinct property of other hypostatised agents:
“religion as the unhappy victim of…”; “the decline of religion…”; “a
quasi-religious integration”; “religious change”; “religious history”;
religion as “a symbolic means for effecting social solidarity”;
“cross-cultural religiousness”; “each religious system”; “the central place
of feeling and emotion in Japanese religion”; “this very religious event”;
“magic, like religion itself, is highly situational and quickly learns to
adjust to new conditions” (Davis, 1998: 229-251.)
In trying to isolate, from the actual contexts in which he uses the word,
what Davis means by religion I find a tautology running
throughout the book. Religion and its distinction (implicit
or explicit) from the secular, or from the process of secularisation, is both the object of analysis and the
major analytical category. For example
…I shall assume that the meaning of secularization includes
complementary notions of desacralization, differentiation, and the
transposition of religious beliefs and behaviour to the ‘secular’
sphere.
(Davis, 1992: 231) )
Here the “meaning of secularization” depends on the meaning of “the
secular sphere”, because this is where “religious beliefs and behaviour” are
being transposed. This is itself a tautology, secularization being
characterised in terms of “secular sphere.” Meanwhile “religious beliefs and
behaviour” is both defining “secular” and being defined by it (e.g. by
negation, for what is secular is what religion is not, and vice versa).
Now I have been unable to find a direct explanation as to how a religious
belief differs from a non-religious belief. Telling us that feeling and
action are at the core of religion only pushes the problem one step further
back, because we need to know what kind of action or feeling can be
considered as religious, and what kind is secular. We can, if we look
through the book systematically, find a large range of examples of religion
or religious characteristics; or we can infer from his discussion of
secularization since the 19th century the kinds of things (the religious
things) that get reduced or undermined by secularisation.
Many of the following ideas about how to assess the degree of
secularization are borrowed from the folklorist Yanagita Kunio who was
interested in the changes that took place in “the festival faith of the
common folk” as a result of the Meiji government’s modernization programme,
and its desire for “the secularization of folk practices” (1992: 237). Here the decline of religion (and thus secularization) is
equated with “the secularization of folk practices”. For example (taken
again from chapter 7), the shrinking of sacred space and time; reduction of
time spent on festivals; the prohibition of local customs such as
transvestism and orgies; the undermining of religious chants because the
Tokyo dialect was declared the standard language; abolition of traditional
religious holidays; the introduction of a commercialised version of
Christmas; an increase in the daily eating of rice and fish which had
previously been reserved for special days; the prohibition of private sake
brewing; drinking alone instead of from a common jug; eating from an
individual tray; pilgrims putting up at “secular ryōkan” instead of “temple inns”; disruption of
local festivals due to increasing mobility; change in style of festivals
from the very local and village-centred to today’s big public festivals;
making money offerings in saisenbako (offertory box) as a
result of people not knowing the locally correct way to approach the kami
(usually translated as gods, but a potentially misleading translation);
decline in belief in magical spells.
It may seem invidious to separate these examples from the context of the
discussion, but some important features of the problem I wish to identify do
become apparent here. There is the vagueness and elusiveness of the topic,
when neither of the key terms is being brought into clear relief. For
example, we can guess that a temple inn is a ‘religious’ place to stay, in
contrast to a “secular ryōkan”, because it has long been one of the fundamental assumptions
of the religion industry that Buddhist temples are religious places, though we don’t know clearly why. But nor is it explained why a
ryōkan is secular. We are told that
religion is undermined or reduced by the reduction of religious holidays.
But here again we have the tautology that religion is being defined by
itself. The decline of beliefs in magical spells is a sign of secularisation
and thus also of the decline of religion, yet we don’t know how to
distinguish between (or whether we are intended to distinguish between)
magic and religion. They have different names, but the decline of one is a
sign of the decline of the other.
I believe this is the key to unravelling both the deepening complexities,
and yet lack of clear conceptualisation, in Davis’s text. Throughout,
religion is being used both as the topic of investigation and the major
analytical concept. It is thus defining itself. And it is also defining, and
being defined by, the ‘secular’. We therefore have a merry-go-round in which
the meaning and referent of religion is defined by
non-religion (the secular), and the secular is defined by religion.
Therefore the procedure is entirely arbitrary, and the large theoretical
discussions that are placed upon these shifting sands are insecure. No
wonder Davis dislikes definitions, and would rather just get on with the job
and use the tools at hand. But the tools at hand are themselves what need to
be investigated.
Davis and the concept of exchange
But Davis pursues some theoretical ideas that have considerable interest
and might help us to be freed from the conceptual nightmare in which the
western ideological distinction between religion and the secular, when
promoted as cross-cultural analytical concepts, seem inevitably to entangle
us. One of these is his exploration in chapter 2 of the concept of exchange,
which earlier I suggested might be usefully connected to worldly benefits
genze riyaku in Reader and Tanabe’s text. Davis
adopts Schultz’s distinction between in order to motives and
because motives for exchange. The latter kind of motives involves
obligation, the return of benefits and favours including those already
received (1992: 18). The sense of obligation is surely
fundamental and pervasive to Japanese relationships. Davis is concerned that
a western idea of exchange framed in terms merely of individual economic
self-interest and divorced from pervasive norms and values connected to that
sense of obligation would distort Japanese reality. Talking about the values
of devotion, loyalty, gratitude, and selflessness, he says
Because of the importance of such values in Japanese religion and
society, we must carefully hold in check the cultural bias built into
exchange theory, a theoretical persuasion which generally reflects the
western market economy and its psychology of possessive individualism.
(Davis, 1992: 17)
As Chalmers Johnson has argued (1995), a large part of exchange in Japan
is embedded in social relations in a way that eludes the assumptions of some
western economists. The problem with Davis’s analysis is that, while on the
one hand rightly suspicious of a concept of exchange that reflects the
ideological assumptions of western individualism and economic theory, he
frames the whole of his own discussion in the context of an equally
problematic western category religion and its distinction from the secular.
Like ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, ‘religion’ has been disembedded
historically into a distinct sphere of western ideology in a way that,
arguably, is not characteristic of Japan. But Davis is determined that it is
specifically “religious affiliations” (1992:16) to which he wants to apply
exchange theory. Ideas about exchange and reciprocity, embedded as they are
in the great spectrum of hierarchical relationships in homes, schools,
corporations and factories, iemoto (the originating teacher-disciple
lineage of arts and craft schools, for example 芸道の流派), universities,
political habatsu (factions), sumo beya (sumo wrestlers’
‘stables’), baseball teams, bureaucracies, shrines and temples, might more
appropriately serve to undercut the western distinction that we seem so
eager to impose on Japan between ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’. We have to
decide why we suppose that the distinction between religion and the secular
is so imperative for the analysis and interpretation of Japanese society,
and why it should be allowed to override other categories such as exchange,
reciprocity, indebtedness and hierarchy that might prove to be more
illuminating. We need our analytical categories to maximally strike and
illuminate the ‘connected-up’ button, not to over-determine the field
clumsily in terms of our own western ideologically charged categories. By
thinking of relations with the ancestors in terms of exchange and
reciprocity, we can notice how much these relationships share with
hierarchical and/or ie-type (in the sense that the structure and
organisational principles of Japanese corporations can be seen as analogous
to the traditional household, see Hirochika Nakamaki in Bremen and Martinez
1995: 146-160) relations in companies or iemoto organisations, and
that the attempt to conceptually separate relations of obligation between,
say, the ancestor and the descendent of the ie, and the sensei
and his deshi, in terms of one being ‘religious’ and the other being
‘secular’, is to over-determine the field and maximise rather than minimise
the inevitable distortion inherent in any act of translation.
Davis’s whole discussion of exchange is self-consciously framed in
relation to “religious affiliations” in Japan. At this point, the guiding
assumptions about what constitutes the religious in Japan are stated
explicitly. Generally speaking “the Shinto parish and its guilds”, “the
Buddhist family temple”, the “civil religion” of the pre-war period are the examples given of specifically
religious institutions based on obligatory (because) conduct (1998: 19). In
contrast, Buddhist prayer temples, Sudden Death Temples, and New Religions
rest on “motivated” (in order to) conduct. Other religious affiliations
include the confraternity (kō) and “various less formal, ad hoc
relations with faith healers, shamans and mediums.” (1998: 16).
In an interesting way, but not one that will necessarily clarify Davis’s
argument, this distinction between affiliation that springs from motivation
(in order to) and obligation (because) might be considered analogous to the
distinctions made in the Meiji Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on
Education between ‘religion’ (Buddhist and Shinto sects as purely voluntary
private organisations to which individuals choose to adhere) and ‘the
secular’ (State Shinto and the observance of Confucian ritual hierarchy as
obligatory on all citizens.) In this Meiji formulation, both ‘religion’ and
‘the secular’ are contested and problematic categories, for the Japanese did
not find it self-evident what fitted into which category[19].
So it is interesting that the Japanese rulers themselves distinguished the
imported religion-secular dichotomy in terms of what is voluntary and what
is involuntary or obligatory.
What the Japanese lite themselves considered as obligatory was indeed
based on collective, everyday values of hierarchical indebtedness and
reciprocity, but not in terms of either-or dichotomies like the
other-world/this-world, or between gods/humans, or between nature/supernature
(all of which are arguably alien to Japan). Thus obligatory relations
between the Emperor and his subjects belong in the same general category as
obligatory relations between fathers and sons, or between ancestors and
heads of the household, or between sensei and deshi, or more
generally between more senior and less senior. The fundamental values seem
to have been framed in terms of indebtedness, obligation and hierarchy.
Instead of applying the distinction between voluntary and obligatory conduct
to religious affiliations, it seems more advantageous to apply them
to affiliations per se.
H. Neill McFarland and The Rush Hour of the Gods
It might be claimed that the concept of ‘religion’ is necessary for
understanding doctrinal sectarian movements such as those usually referred
to as the ‘new religions’. Certainly this looks like the area which closely
corresponds to the modern concept and where one can identify legally defined
institutions. Yet even here, it may be that the concept of religion is doing
more to obscure and confuse the data than to clarify it. This becomes
evident in a well-known study Rush Hour of the Gods: A Study of
New Religious Movements in Japan by H.Neill McFarland (1967). Early on
McFarland points out a problem of analytical categories. Several of the
groups claim to reproduce Shinto or Buddhist ideals, so are they ‘new
religions’, he asks, or sects or sub-sects of Buddhism or Shinto? His
solution is to call them “contemporary popular religious movements” (1967:
8). He says that ‘contemporary’ conveys that they are new and that
they are rooted in distinctively Japanese traditions; ‘popular’, that though
there are new and foreign elements, the movements themselves belong to a
tradition of ‘folk faith’ (minkan shinkō). ‘Religious’? McFarland
admits one could argue that ‘religion’ is a misnomer, but he doesn’t explain
why and simply asserts that ‘religious movements’ is an acceptable
expression. He says “...collectively the New Religions constitute a
definable socio-religious movement – one of considerable size and potential
significance” (1967: 9-10).
McFarland does not tell us how a ‘socio-religious’ movement is different
from a ‘social’ movement, and this is in fact typical of scholars working
with the notion of religion. But it is important to my argument: what extra
meaning is being added to social when ‘religious’ is added?
McFarland places these movements in historical context, because he wants
to show that they are or were originally popular expressions of
dissatisfaction caused by long-standing changes in Japanese society. He
variously dates the origin of these changes three and a half centuries ago
(1967: 11–54) 200 years ago (1967: 11), and as
beginning in the mid-19th century (1967: 54). In the process of radical
restructuring beginning some time before 1854 most people were subjected to
uncertainties, as passive victims not as architects of change. In this
context of poverty, powerlessness, confusion of values, popular ‘religion’
produced new forms of refuge and social protest. This process became
intensified after 1868. More recently, in a post-WW2 situation of economic
development and prosperity, these movements have produced new rationales.
McFarland (1967) relies on the sociologist J. Milton Singer for ideas such as
“Religion is part of a complex interacting system”; “religious forces”
“respond” to the “social environment”, “feed back into” the social
environment, dynamically set in motion changes in the social system. But
actually what real analytical work is being performed by “religion” and
“religious” in these statements, except to merely affirm the putative
ideological distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘society’? Nowhere does
McFarlane clearly explain, and in this he is no different from many other
writers.
McFarland points out that, generally speaking, ‘religion’ in the west is
assumed to be an individual exclusive commitment to a church defined by a
doctrine concerning the after-life. He says, “profession of faith or
commitment to membership is the sine qua non of meaningful religious
statistics in the west” (1967: 20). But in Japan, people tend to have
multiple commitments, they find it difficult to identify there own exclusive
commitment, and therefore there is a problem interpreting statistics such as
those of the Ministry of Education or even of McFarland’s own survey.
However, this important and potentially significant cultural difference does
not lead McFarland to seriously question whether one should continue to
employ the same analytical concept ‘religion’.
This point becomes reinforced when McFarland points out that Buddhism is
so pervasive in the Japanese cultural context and so closely identified with
family life that virtually all Japanese are associated with Buddhism. On the
other hand very few of these “are committed to this religion in
understanding and faith.” But then what does Buddhism mean at this level of
analysis? On this understanding it is difficult for the reader to be clear
how Buddhism as a religion can be distinguished from ‘Japanese culture’ or
‘Japanese values’.
Given the problematic nature of the concept of religion in Japan
McFarland suggests that many western analytical categories do not fit Japan
(1967: 25) and that it is better “to identify the typical Japanese
perspectives on religion and, in the light of these, to consider all other
religious phenomena, including the institutionalised religions.” The problem
is that the perspectives that he identifies as typical of Japan - the
centrality of experience and the reconcilability of opposites are
so broad (“They are attitudes of mind ...not credal statements or
affirmations of faith.”) that it is difficult to
say what is distinctive about specifically ‘religion’. He also generalises
that, whereas the west values analytical abstraction and logical
oppositions, Japan values holistic experience and the reconcileability of
opposites. Even if these generalisations had some value in a specific
analytical context (which they may), they do not help us to understand what
‘religion’ is apart from values in general.
This problem with ‘religion’ is strengthened by McFarland’s discussion of
the concept of kami, which unlike the Judeo-Christian notion of
transcendence does not refer to “a unique order of being or a self-contained
category of phenomena.” (1967: 24) He lists 7 different meanings that
kami can have. For example, kami can refer to
fundamental life principles, such as fertility, growth and productivity;
celestial bodies, such as the moon and the sun; natural forces such as wind
and thunder; prominent topographical features such as mountains and rivers;
many natural objects such as trees and rocks; certain animals such as foxes
and horses; and spirits of the dead. He might also have included powerful
rulers such as shoguns and emperors. But this picture merely confirms the
more general impression that Japanese cosmology and symbolic ordering of the
world is not well represented by some supposed distinctive meaning of
religion.
McFarland continues to refer to Shinto as “this religion” while at the
same time saying that its most distinctive characteristic is “the intention
to be identified through ritual with the whole range of Japanese history,
tradition and aspiration. Doctrinally and ethically amorphous, jealous of
absolutes...” (1967: 26) It is unsurprising that some Shinto leaders
objected to Shinto being classified as a ‘religion’ and claim it as “the way
of life of the Japanese people.” (1967: 27) We are talking here in such
generalisations that religion picks out nothing distinctive.
This lack of grip on meaning renders statements like the following about
Confucianism difficult to understand:
...it has not been as a religion that Confucianism (jukyō) has functioned in Japan......the impact of
Confucianism was basically political, social and ethical in character.
(McFarland, 1967: 30)
McFarland (1967) says that modern young people may not be conscious of Confucian
principles, but “without knowing it, some of their most deeply ingrained
habits are traceable to this source.” But we do not
know what is the extra function ‘as a religion’ that Confucianism has not
had. In addition to political, social and ethical, what extra is being
implied that is lacking?
McFarland says that the new religions in their first Tokugawa phase were
“an attempt to solve political problems in religious terms.” (1967: 55) How
is he distinguishing between religion and politics, given all the
qualifications he has made about the meaning (or lack of it) of ‘religion’
in the Japanese context? He says that “popular religious developments” were
characterised by 1) popular ethico-religious teachings; 2) community
sponsored pilgrimages (okage mairi); 3) frenzied dances intended to
effect social reforms. However, again it is not clear how ‘ethico-religious’
differs from ethics. The examples that he gives are values associated with
shingaku (heart learning) and hotoku (repayment of blessings)
such as sincerity, genuineness, naturalness, love, diligence, self-help, the
bounty of nature, avoidance of corruption, and sloth and self-pity.
Hotoku fuses salvation with economic recovery. Sponsored pilgrimages
are identified with group action, protest, passive resistance, “an embryonic
theory of social reform.” (1967: 56). Since pilgrimage was the only reason
at that time that a peasant could leave his area, going on one became “a
kind of demonstration in support of their demand for personal freedom.” He
interprets frenzied dances as “the feverish desire for social reform.... the
popularity of the assumption that religious faith and action are directly
related to the alleviation of social and economic distress.” But what is
‘religious faith’ in this context? In a sense it doesn’t matter what one
actually says; if one uses a word often enough it acquires an illusion of
meaningfulness.
Byron Earhart's contribution
The language of religion and religions sets up false dichotomies. Is
religion an aspect of society, or is society itself the object of religion? A leading American scholar, Byron Earhart, somewhat in an
attempt to give expression to this relationship between Japanese religion
and Japanese society, says:
The religious world of society is the formation and use of social
units (individuals and groups) for the purpose of preserving,
celebrating, and transmitting religion.
(Earhart, 1984: 69)
But he could equally well have said:
The social world of religion is the formation and use of religious
units for the purpose of preserving, celebrating and transmitting
society.
What difference would it make? No clear meaning is being expressed by
these words. We need to deconstruct these terms, which are doing nothing to
promote understanding of the things that are important to the Japanese
collectively themselves. The western ideologically determined slots
‘religion’ and ‘society’ do not help us understand the way Japanese
institutions work, or what values of social relations are being constructed
in the performance of ritual.
My case is strengthened by Earhart’s discussion of ancestor worship and
the importance of the relevant social unit for the practice of all Japanese
religion: the family, the village, the nation, and other groups. It seems
clear from what he says that ‘religious fulfilment’ is found in the
celebration of the legitimate ordering of the group, which brings us back to
a society’s set of self-representations expressing its dominant values.
Proper ritual relations with the ancestors symbolise and recreate the
solidarity of the family (or preferably household). Presumably this has its
national analogy in the performance of a whole range of reproductive and purificatory rituals for the health and safety of the nation by the Emperor,
who is symbolically the father of the nation. Thus religious fulfilment is
virtually identical with social fulfilment; that is, with the reproduction
of the pure, harmonious Japanese social order and the symbolic elimination
of conflict and pollution.
Different meanings of words
Spirit, faith, worship, peace of mind, salvation
It is impossible to establish from any of these books that there exist
any specifically religious institutions, emotions, experiences or feelings.
The use of the word ‘spiritual’ may seem to offer some way out of the
dilemma. In their 1998 book, Reader and Tanabe identify “spiritual” elements
of genze riyaku as “peace of mind, faith and salvation” (1998: 23).
Religion, then, is identified as ritual actions performed to mystical beings
with an attitude of “faith” (shinkō) for the purpose of obtaining
“peace of mind” (anshin) and “salvation” (kyūsai). To what
degree, and by what criterion, are these values and attitudes genuinely
special and set-apart (religion), and how much overlap is there with
‘secular’ ritual performance?
Reader tells that one way of finding out if his two Japanese friends, who
claim they are not religious, are performing their shrine rituals
religiously or not is to check out if they perform them with a “worshipful”
attitude. He was expecting the non-religious friends to be “interested,
respectful, but not worshipful” (1991: 1). This was because they had said
they were not religious. Reader is therefore implying that “worship” and its
attribute “worshipful” separates the really religious performance of ritual
from the merely interested and respectful.
The problem with all of these English-language terms is that their
meanings are highly complex and multivalent, particularly when translated
into the Japanese context. In a monotheistic Christian context, God the
Creator is self-sufficient and uncreated, and the individual creature
entirely dependent. The soteriological and ontological relationship
indicated by the term “worship” or “worshipful” in the Christian context
would therefore be significantly different from the Japanese one. Yet even
in English the word ‘worshipful’ can be used as an honorific, as when we
address the Lord Mayor as ‘The Worshipful Mayor’. And we talk metaphorically
about a person ‘worshipping’ his lover. It seems just as likely that
‘worship’ in Japanese would be equivalent to respecting one’s guardian,
whether living or dead, by humbly offering gifts, using polite language and
bowing deeply and sincerely. It isn’t self-evident that a ‘worshipful
attitude’ is fundamentally different if the prostration occurs before a
mystical or a human guardian.
Another problem with ideas like ‘faith’ and ‘worship’ in the Japanese
context is that ordinary people hardly distinguish between kami and
hotoke, and that anyhow what they do is important, the rituals
they perform, and that they learnt these rituals from their parents. Reader
(1991: 15-20) gives examples of correct performance of ritual prescriptions
taking precedence over doctrine, belief or individual salvation. Even the
new religions, in which one might expect to find soteriological doctrines
concerned with the moral condition and ultimate salvation of the individual
to be prevalent, exhibit the primacy of ritual action very clearly (1991:
17). The category of mystical beings – kami, ancestors, buddhas,
angry ghosts, the souls of dolls and printing blocks and so on – does not
seem to guarantee some special status for ‘religious’ rituals because the
beings are either not properly conceptualised or, if they are, then they are
an extension of this Japanese social world and need to be analysed as such.
The desire itself for practical benefits, the belief that correct actions
if correctly performed and with the correct condition of the actor –
especially the correct attitude of sincerity and gratitude – will bring
positive benefits, including peace of mind; these principles are found lying
behind most ritual action. There is an implicit assumption that one’s
actions will be recognised and reciprocated. Even ordinary greetings (aisatsu)
rely to some extent on an act of ‘faith’ or trust, though here the
appropriate word would not be shinkō, which tends to be
reserved for faith in the soteriological efficacy of unseen mystical powers,
but shinyō in the sense of trusting the integrity of
social relationships; trusting the goodwill of the other person, that he or
she understands the implications of the greeting and will reciprocate,
trusting that they have been socialised in the same Japanese code of
behaviour; trusting that other people will follow the rules; trusting that
they know their correct place and status and that they will behave in an
appropriate way. It is this deep implication of trust, that waxes and wanes
relative to social distance, that underlies so much of the Japanese concept
of social order and anxiety concerning outside, non-Japanese incursions.
Indeed, a faith in reciprocity and reciprocal dependency is
fundamental to all societies in one way or another, and it is clearly a
profoundly important principle in Japanese life (Hendry, 1987: 204), since
it underlies all social interaction: gift exchange, petitions by a junior to
a senior for protection and advancement; appeals to the workers from the
company chairman for sacrifices; trust of ordinary people in ‘the powers
that be’; the reluctance to question authority.
Of course, faith in mystical powers to bring benefits as a result of
prayer is not identical to these other examples, but nor is it so different.
For hierarchy and mutual obligation is a pervasive principle in Japanese
life, and the hierarchical and reciprocal relationship between the
supplicant and the hotoke, and the belief that ancestral rites will
transform the soul of the deceased into a benevolent guardian deity,
reproduces the form of human relations. Could we not say that relations with
these various kinds of mystical powers is itself a way of thinking through,
symbolically representing, or even constituting relations that are
essentially human?[20]
Forms of reciprocity
What I am arguing is that, while ritual relations with mystical powers
obviously have some distinctive features, there is no evidence that the
forms of reciprocity, the values, or the feelings expressed, are of a
fundamentally different kind than a second great imaginary category of
‘non-religious’ or ‘secular’ ones. A more convincing model is that of a
family of over-lapping ritual performances that share ideas about
reciprocity, self-sacrifice, and dependency. In such a wider perspective,
freed from the compulsion to stuff rituals and experiences into either the
‘religious’ bag or the ‘secular’ one, certain conceptual confusions,
idealisations and other problems of representation will be reduced.
Spirits and the spiritual
In what sense then does the word ‘spiritual’ indicate some especially
‘religious’ meaning that cannot equally refer to any widely held values that
are embedded in ritual performances throughout the spectrum of social
relations?
Reader and Tanabe question the dichotomy between the material and the
spiritual, which they say cannot be separated (1998: 23). But as with other
key terms for identifying ‘religion’ such as “worshipful” it is difficult to
find a clear discussion of the meaning of “spirit” and “spiritual”. Reader
sometimes identifies the “religious” with “the spiritual realm” and
contrasts it with the physical (1991: 46). Presumably the “religious” then
is the non-material, what cannot be seen. But we know that the dead can be
seen and felt in certain situations, and thus their ‘spiritual’
characteristics seem like material ones raised to a higher degree.
However, the word ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ is used in a number of
different contexts. For example, the distressed spirit of an aborted foetus
causes misfortune (1991: 45). It can be the “spiritual” cause of misfortune
(1991: 46). Elsewhere he refers to the Japanese view “that life is a
coalition of the physical and the spiritual” (1991: 45) and that spirits are
attributed to animals and inanimate objects. Spirit here means “soul”, as in
“the souls of the eels” that had been killed in the eel restaurant that
organised memorial services on their behalf, or as in the souls of the dolls
and the printing blocks that can attain Buddhahood as a result of the
performance of the correct rites. Reader describes this as an “animistic
view of the world” (1991: 46) in which the “spiritual realm” (sometimes
described by the author also as the “psychic”) causes problems in the
physical. Many of the spirits are malevolent, often as a result of ritual
impropriety, and the correct performance of rituals of purification and
exorcism can solve these problems. Thus it seems there is a two-way
causation between the spiritual world of souls – including unhappy
ancestors, eels, aborted foetuses, dolls, printing blocks – and the
efficacious performance of rites.
Reader identifies these beliefs and ritual activities as “the world of
religious experience in Japan” (1991: 49).
There is, however, another aspect of organised Buddhism to which the
author refers, and that is to “individual spiritual awareness” (1991: 105)
and to “spiritual training” (1995: 238). In the context in which he
discusses this, it seems to refer to meditation as the Soto Zen sect teaches
it. It is “spiritual awareness” that, according to Reader, makes Japanese
Buddhism something more than rituals of social bonding and the resolution of
grief (1995: 238). But though this seems to be a very different idea of
“spirit” from the souls of eels and printing blocks, it could still mean
something like ‘enlightenment’, or alternatively it could mean ‘mental’, as
in mental training or character training. It could also mean ‘attitudinal’.
This might explain why Japanese corporations send their executives and
workers on Zen training programmes, to inculcate into them a truly Japanese
spirit or attitude[21].
Let us compare the use of the word “spiritual” in a completely different
text by Patricia G. Steinhoff in an analysis of Red Army factions in the
early 1970s (Steinhoff, 1992: 195-224). This is a fascinating account of a
terrible incident of group violence against its own members, and makes
important points about group organisation and dynamics in Japan. The members
of the red army alliance (rengō sekigun) were hiding out in the
mountains. Most of them were students who dedicated themselves to the
revolution with fervour and sincerity. Their commitment to the group and its
aims required from them a profound self-transformation, a casting off of
bourgeois mentality and life-style, a willingness to suffer many hardships
and deprivations in pursuit of a communistic consciousness and society.
(There is surely an analogy here to the commitment and self-transformation
required by Japanese kamikaze pilots dying for the Emperor and the nation;
or to the ascetic renunciation required to become a yamabushi
(mountain ascetic of shugendō); or to the practice found in Ittoen[22].)
In the course of her discussion of the process of kyōsanshugika
(communization), invented by the group’s leader to test whether or not any
member had achieved genuine subordination to the authority and the violent
aims of the Red Army group, Steinhoff says:
The notion that ascetic practices and humbling physical discipline
produce spiritual rewards is…thoroughly engrained in Japanese culture.
(Steinhoff, 1992: 203)
The meaning of ‘spiritual’ here indicates strength of character to submit
to Japanese group values without complaint, the ability and courage to
survive under adverse circumstances, to ‘gaman’ and
endure with fortitude. Similar things that she is saying about a communist
group might have been said about the training of sumo wrestlers and baseball
players[23], the character reform of
prison regimes, school training for exams – as well as Soto Zen meditation
techniques and so on.
Steinhoff connects the idea of “spiritual rewards” here with the Red
Army’s infliction of severe punishment and even death on its own members in
the disciplinary process of kyōsanshugika. This unusual and
pathological outcome may not characterise normal Japanese groups, but it was
made possible in admittedly abnormal circumstances by some of the basic
values of group organisation in Japan, which Steinhoff lists as:
... deference to formal authority and unwillingness to challenge it;
consensus decision-making procedures that carry a high expectations of
subsequent participation; indirect and ambiguous means of expressing
dissent; and high levels of commitment and loyalty to the group.
(Steinhoff, 1992: 222)
The point is that the English words ‘spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ are
multivalent. Reader seems to assume that the idea of the “spiritual”
clinches the legitimacy of a special and set-apart “religious world of the
Japanese”. Yet in his own uses it can mean
different things: in some contexts, some naively constructed world of
invisible souls; in another context some special mode of consciousness
attained in Zen meditation; and yet again a quite different nuance of
commitment to Japanese group values or corporate discipline. If “the
spiritual” is to do the work that Reader seems to require as an analytical
category then surely he will need to shift the focus of the analysis.
Again, there is a concept of ascetic practice (shugyō) that is
believed to lead to self-purification (a state of being in the correct
condition), consciousness-raising, and self-transformation. Arguably it is a
sacrificial concept, where the self is sacrificed for ritual, political,
economic or soteriological ends. Surely the ultimate self-sacrifice is for
the nation, conceived as a transcendental dynastic domain. The values behind
a sacrificial asceticism or renunciation of the self can be found operating
in diverse situations in Japan. We also find that many of these rituals are
concerned with the legitimation of the social order, including the nation
state, the construction of status and gender identity, the continuation of
the ie or the family; in short, that they are connected to social
reproduction, to politics, or more generally to the legitimation of power
and authority. The performance of these rituals may express profoundly
important collective values, and may be accompanied by a range of feelings
and emotions. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that there are
special ‘religious’ kinds of values, feelings and emotions qualitatively
different from ‘non-religious’ ones, or that ascetic practice is confined to
Zen meditation halls or shugendō mountain contexts; or that relations
with mystical powers such as kami and hotoke are only about
magic and have no wider ritual meaning.
Even the idea of “salvation” is problematic in the sense that the
Japanese word kyūsai, while not colloquial, does not refer exclusively
to benefits obtained from mystical beings. Reader and Tanabe have, in my
view rightly, extended the meaning of salvation to include the receiving of
material benefits such as longer life, health, the resolution of conflicts,
in this world (1998: 22). One can thus talk about both ‘thisworldly’ and
‘otherworldly’ salvation[24]. Though
rather formal, it can in principle be used (like tasukeru) (to help
or save) to refer to
any action whereby one person or group saves another, for example from a
storm at sea, from chikan (sexual molestation) on the subway, or from
unemployment.
How can we explain Reader’s dedication to an alleged Japanese religiosity
when we admit that it is an alien concept? Surely we must look at its
function among the aliens, and ask what ideological field it is animating.
Confucianism
Reader’s short (1991: 29-30) discussion of Confucianism[25]
has the potential for generating a change of track from ‘religion’ to some
alternative, among which ‘ritual’ may be one contender. He points out that
Confucianism’s influence
…. may be perceived running through much of Japanese society in
general, instilling ideals of order and structuralising respect for
one’s elders and seniors both in family and social terms and asserting
the importance of harmony as a social ideal. These ideals have made
their mark also in the religious sphere: harmony has been transformed
into something of a religious ideal while Confucian ethical teachings
and concepts of filial piety have underpinned the Japanese practice of
ancestor veneration.
(Reader, 1991: 30)
Much of what Reader is referring to here as “Confucianism” might be
described as a ritualised system of values that pervades all institutions in
Japan. When we combine this observation with the one about the strongly
indigenising, homogenising, centrifugal Japano-centric forces that operate
on things which come in from outside (1991: 28), and the many references
throughout his book to the serious preoccupation with racial and national
identity, then the possibility of shifting the analysis from religion to
some alternative such as ritual avails itself. For ritual
as a concept does not require some dubious transformation from “harmony as a
social ideal” into “something of a religious ideal”. The reader needs to
know what this transformation consists in, and what is involved in a process
whereby an ideal changes from being a social ideal to being a religious one.
What qualitatively new nuance has ‘harmony’ achieved by being blessed with
the adjective ‘religious’ that it did not
possess before? I hold that there is nothing in Reader’s books and articles
that explains this. Yet if Confucianism could be thought of as a pervasive
Japanese hierarchical ritual system, it might help to free the author from
his unnecessary commitment to ‘religion’.
Zen Buddhism
In his article “Cleaning floors and sweeping the mind: cleaning as a
ritual process” (in van Bremen and Martinez (eds. 1995) we can find the same
difficulty. Reader says
... since my own primary area of interest and research
is in the world of religious behaviour and activity, the main focus of
this chapter will be on ritualised cleaning processes which occur in
religious environments, and the ways in which they are imbued with and
express specific religious symbolisms and meanings.
(Reader, 1995: 228)
Yet he almost immediately goes on to admit, “the borderlines between
religious and cultural actions are virtually inseparable in many respects.”
(1995: 228) This admission may explain why the reader never does discover
what these “explicit religious symbolisms and meanings” consist in.
Zen is an interesting case in point, because ‘spirit’ in Zen apparently
refers to an attitude of mind, rather than communication with invisible
souls. Not only does Zen problematise the concept of a field of religion
defined by ‘spirits’, but it re-integrates everything into social life
without specifiable remainder:
In Zen terms any activity when pursued purely and totally is the same
as, indeed is no other than, meditation, and is equally a gateway to the
enlightenment which is embedded in, rather than separate from, everyday
life.
(Reader, 1995: 230)
What then is the principle that demarcates Zen as a specifically
religious activity, in contradistinction to those activities that are
non-religious or secular? Reader attempts to locate the “specific religious
meanings” in Dogen’s writing in the idea that ordinary ritual acts of
cleaning are a metaphor for “polish[ing] the mind” and the way to enlightenment.
(1995: 232)
The problem is that enlightenment is embedded in, rather than separate
from, everyday life.
What is the difference between a ritual and a “ritualised religious
practice”? (Reader, 1995: 235). It may be true and useful to say that Soto
Zen practitioners typically perform actions that are not only ritualized but
which have an important soteriological element. That is to say, rituals of
cleaning and sweeping are part of the process whereby the mundane mind is
transformed into a transcendental state of insight. The problem for the
reader is to know how or whether words like spirit, heart, mind and soul
carry some special ‘religious’ meaning that cannot be interpreted in terms
of a social ideology of a ritual kind. This point comes to a head when the
author makes a distinction between overtly religious organizations and
The
numerous ethical or moral welfare training organizations (shūyō dantai)
which… exhibit many of the qualities and practices of religious
organisations... also make use of spiritual training sessions that
manifest many of the practices and concepts used in Zen temples and the
new religions.
(Reader, 1995: 237-8)
Business companies use such “spiritual training sessions” to instil
things like obedience, discipline and determination in their workers
(Reader, 1995: 238). But it is not made clear how these values, which are
anyway instilled in workers throughout the schooling and socialisation
process, become specifically religious only when found in a temple.
Near the end of this essay, the supposed specific religious quality of
actions and organizations (for example “the overtly religious discipline of
samu in Zen temples”) is asserted in distinction from “the apparent
secular occurrences” of cleaning rituals (1995: 241), such as the community
cleaning rites that the author describes. But then he lists “common
threads” (1995: 241) between distinct areas of Japanese consciousness to show
how difficult it is to separate the overtly religious cleaning rituals from
the secular ones. These common threads are listed as: generating social
identity, a sense of community, concern with definition, order and
purification, of “imposing order on an environment, and purifying it in
accord with the prevailing social and cultural understandings of what such
purification involves”, all performed with the same attitudes of endurance,
service, gratitude and joy, and performed equally “in a religious
institution, a school or a housing estate” (Reader, 1995: 241). However,
this leaves the reader at a loss, for if these hold so much in common at
what points should we claim they differ? The common threads are more
powerful and interesting than some assumed difference between the “overtly
religious” and the “apparently secular”.
The truth is that you can go through this paper with a toothcomb and you
will not find these meanings explicated. There is no point at all where
Reader can state any clear or worthwhile distinction between the religious
and the cultural, or the religious and the secular (1995: 241), just as he
cannot explain the difference between a ritual and a “religiously ritualized
practice” (1995: 235).
The introduction of ‘Confucianism’ offered the opportunity of a shift in
perspective from the notion that ‘religion’ has some special attributes
which separate it from other social institutions, to the more interesting
idea that harmony is just as deep and important a doctrine
in the school classroom or the sumo beya as
in the shrine or temple; in fact, it is crucially important in any situation
where ‘knowing your place’ becomes an issue.
Soteriology
An important element of ancestor rites for ordinary people is
soteriological, in the sense that they offer a passage out of this world
into the next, which may be thought of as a kind of salvation. When people
think of ‘religion’, they are sometimes, perhaps often, thinking of the
other world as a place where the sadness and separations of old age and
death can finally be overcome, and where the lone, and perhaps lonely,
individual in this world can be reunited with loved ones. But for ordinary
people the next world is a kind of extension of this world. It is not a
mystical absolute that transcends time and space. But still, this is a kind
of soteriology for the individual.
In Diana Lynn Bethel’s account of social relations in an old people’s
home called Aotani (1992: 109-134), she describes the observances, both
collective and individual, at the home’s butsudan (1992: 129-130). It acts
as a window through which the elderly can communicate with their own
ancestors, and many hope that a dead husband or mother will come back to
collect them and take them on. However, the residents also hold collective
rituals for those people who died in the Aotani home, and who had their
memorial tablet (ihai) placed in the Aotani home’s butsudan,
instead of being taken away by surviving relatives from outside. The old
people’s home thus has its own ancestors, and Bethel shows how, within the
formal institutional structures, the residents construct their relationships
on analogy with a household, using fictive kinship terms that reproduce the
age and gender hierarchy of the household among themselves. The role of the
butsudan in the lives of individuals, and of the society of Aotani,
is complex, and while the theme of individual salvation to the other world
is one important element, it can only be properly appreciated within a full
ethnographic context of the collective reality of the kind that Bethel
provides.
Ancestor rites are conducted within complex sociological situations. They
are rituals, performed collectively or personally, and they have many
different implications. They are a way of negotiating or constructing and
reconstructing the social relations of the group, whether the ie, or
the kaisha (company) (Nakamaki 1995), or the old people’s home, or the
neighbourhood (Stefansson, 1995); they can provide a mystical source of help
for individuals and groups; they are also a focus for an individual’s
personal soteriological aspirations and hopes. Soteriology, as a doctrine of
individual liberation is present in the form of images of loved ones, or
perhaps an authoritative figure, returning to take them on to the next
world. But the primacy of action would suggest that such soteriological
elements are only meaningful when we also understand the other co-existing
elements in the social and ritual context. The distinction between the
religious and the secular does not seem to help with this.
‘Religio’ and ‘Religion’ in western history[26]
Finally, I return from Japan to Europe. We need some sense of the
historical trajectory of the invention of our modern categories, which
presumably were exported during the eras of colonialism and
post-colonialism. To construct such a trajectory is far outside my
capabilities, and probably those of any single author, even a major
historian. But we need some kind of a story in the context of which the
problems we have in applying ‘religion’ and other ideas to Japan make sense.
The story that I have made up here is based directly or indirectly on
historical accounts but requires exhaustive debate and modification if it is
to be acceptable.
The historian John Bossy noted in a 1982 article the change in nuance
that occurred historically in the meaning of ‘religion’ especially at the
end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century:
Religio in classical Latin is a sense of duty or reverence for sacred
things; derivatively, some object which inspires this frame of mind;
thence a cult, or worship in general. Essentially it is a feeling, a
frame of mind….In early Christianity it meant worship, a worshipful
attitude….In medieval Christianity this usage disappeared. With very few
exceptions, the word was used to describe different sorts of monastic or
similar rule, and the way of life pursued under them: the ‘religious’
were those who pursued such a life…in the 16th century…where the Latin
form Christiana religio is found, it must be translated
“Christian religion”, not “the Christian religion”: we have now
had to invent the appalling ‘religiosity’ to fill the gap where
‘religion’ once stood…How then did the word come ….to get its capital
‘R’; to become, as Cantwell Smith says, a Great Something, a generic
object formed by abstraction from a number of specific object-instances,
members of the class “a religion”, meaning…‘a particular
system of faith and worship’? …The actual motor of our change was,
it seems clear, the simple existence of a plurality of embodied, and
embattled, faiths…Objectification arose, then, out of the need to
describe one’s own or other people’s way of belief and life, as if from
outside, in circumstances where a plurality of such ways had come into
existence.
(Bossy, 1982: 4-5)
Bossy further argued that, since the unity of Christendom could no longer
be assumed, it became apparent to observers that a shared public sphere or
space outside those increasingly reified and demarcated areas of people’s
lives called religions became a necessity, otherwise there would be anarchy.
For civil society to function there had to be something called Civil
Society. In short, Bossy argued that religion and religions had to be
invented for there to be society and societies.
We can see from this that the idea of a religion and religions was not the only category to become reified. Previous to the early
17th century ‘society’ meant company or relationship, as when we might say
“I enjoyed the society of Mr and Mrs Brown on Christmas day”, or “society in
this village is not congenial”. It refers to human relationships, but has
not been objectified into the concept of a Society.
Again this reification seems to have occurred in the late 16th early 17th
century, when there are examples of ‘a society’ or of ‘societies’ and
‘Society’ with a capital ‘S’. Like
religion, society was being reified and constructed as a system of
institutions and practices, things that can be studied, described, compared
and so on.
I am not a historian so I shall be rasher than historians might like to
be, and consider what other elements of the story might form a hypothesis
that can be knocked down, modified or allowed to stand in the light of
historical research. Other factors were at work. Relations between Europe
and non-Christian parts of the world – what shall they be called? Cultures?
Societies? Tribes? Pagans? Infidels? – were becoming increasingly frequent,
and new ideas were needed to make sense of these different societies.
‘Religions’, ‘societies’, ‘cultures’ all became reified entities as a result
of this new multiplicity that needed to be demarcated, identified,
described, reported, analysed, compared, explained, controlled, used.
And then there were also the needs of the new bourgeois classes to pursue
their own capital agendas without interference from Church-legitimated
authorities. This point connects the trial and execution of Charles I with
the American demands of “no taxation without representation”. The principles
were fundamentally the same. Political representation based on election was
a new form of legitimation incompatible with the traditional bases of
authority and deference that increasingly seemed arbitrary. Along with new
categories, often coined from old words, there is a new kind of rationality,
class formations, new ideas about capital and exchange, new forms of
banking, new ideas about property, the state, new ways of legitimating
authority, a new basis for legitimating knowledge in ‘nature’ (natural
science), and of course the concept of secular civil society.
Probably we can find connections, some closer and some more remote,
between these changes in nuance of a string of important and less important
categories. What I want to suggest is that the distinction between religion
and the secular is a special case, because the new ideas of ‘secular
society’ independent of what increasingly came to be referred to as
‘religion’ constituted a framework within which new political, legal,
economic institutions were able to appear persuasive and even natural. By separating out certain things into the basket ‘religion’
you are able to remove the arbitrary interventions of the church, and of the
king who is legitimated by the priesthood, from the organisation of the
state. The modern state and the idea of civil society are based on a
different rationality, and science becomes increasingly unencumbered by the
traditional knowledge of the Bible and the Church fathers. Science and
rationality are subject to different forms of legitimation than traditional
knowledge.
In this way the religion-secular idea can be seen as a contested,
manufactured category that forms an important part of the emerging worldview
of what, after many centuries, has become our western democratic capitalism.
These words acquired profoundly different nuances in the modern
configuration of ideas and values; and religion required a new set of
priests for its propagation, including academics like myself who write and
publish papers on the religions of the world, or liberal
ecumenical Christian theologians who wish to build a world theology from
these different, truncated objects that have been torn from their embeddedness in quite different ideological contexts, such as the Japanese
or the Indian, the Nuer or the Ashanti.
If this is in general correct, then it should teach us various things.
One is that, if we want to try to understand the language game of
‘religion’, that is, to understand its contemporary uses and the
manipulations that the category engenders, we have to be aware of its
historical context, because if we are not, then we will have a truncated
picture of how it actually works as a category in relation to the other
categories that have been evolving in tandem to form a different ideological
system. This leads to another connected point, that religion as a concept does not stand alone simply as something given in the
nature of things; it stands in relation to the specific western modern
configuration of values and categories that also has a history.
I suggest that religion and the secular are two of our
categories that have a specially close linkage, that they mutually define
each other, that in order to construct a concept of secular society in which
trade, law, government and science were freed from the arbitrary
interferences of the Church or the King, people like Hobbes, John Locke, the
Deists, the American writers of the Constitution, the French Enlightenment philosophes,
needed a new idea of ‘religion’ or ‘religions’ in the plural to help them do
that job of making a new idea of secular society; that the problem as to
what counts as religion is also the problem as to what counts as
non-religion or the secular.
The decision about what is and is not categorised as religion is highly
ideological, yet the word is used freely and rather uncritically as though
we can all easily find religions in any part of the world and at any period
of history. Most academics use the word religion without much consciousness of the way that their usage is
arranging historical and ethnographic data according to a pattern that fits
into the assumptions and needs of western capitalism, or western ideas about
gender, the individual, about rights, or western theories of exchange and
markets. This becomes of special importance in the context of colonialism
and neo-colonialism, since it facilitates a distortion in our understanding
of non-western ideologies and cultures.
The export of the religion-secular distinction in the colonial
situation
The issue takes on added interest if we are aware of the number of
anthropologists and historians who have pointed out that many – perhaps most
– societies in Asia and, I believe, Africa, do not have an indigenous word
for ‘religion’, but when confronted by powerful invaders with their
merchants, armies, missionaries and administrators who claimed to represent
civilization, have been compelled to search for and
construct a suitable word from their own traditional discourses[27].
The idea that there are some special phenomena in all
societies that can be described as religious or religions
was not something that the people in that society decided on by themselves,
but an idea received from the west, or at least negotiated into existence by
local lites with the help of trading enterprises, military officers,
Christian missionaries, colonial administrators and others. What constituted
‘religion’ in any given society in Asia was not a self-evident fact to the
people there, neither was it indeed to the outsiders, but had to be
discovered and/or invented[28].
However, the traders and many of the colonial administrators may have
been more interested in establishing the institutions of secular civil
society, itself a highly ideological concept including specific concepts of
exchange and markets, but appearing to many as simply the natural and
rational way to organise things. In most cultures that became colonised,
what we call law, economics, and politics were not separated out into
distinct spheres but were embedded in a different indigenous way of
representing the world. It was this disembedding that was a necessary
programme for the imperial power if it was to impose western-style laws,
create capital markets and forms of exchange, and to ‘educate’ the people in
the new school systems.
By and large the Japanese avoided colonization by adopting western
categories and institutions that were supposedly the mark of more highly
developed civilizations and placing them in the omote (one’s front) or tatemae
(one’s public face)
mode. The American written constitution with its separation of church and
state and its guarantee of freedom of religion satisfies the west that Japan
is really just like us, and conforms to our western assumptions about the
world. But the problems of ethnographic and historical interpretation that
occur when we assume that there is a religious world in Japan that can be
meaningfully distinguished from another secular world suggests that the
reality is not like that.
Notes
1. This article is concerned with English
language constructions of Japan. Though the authors considered here are
non-Japanese, I have analysed the English-language texts of Japanese authors
in other publications (Fitzgerald, 1993, 1995, 2000). A most important part
of research on the uses of religion and/or shūkyō needs to be done in
Japanese language texts and everyday speech to analyse its functioning at
different levels of discourse, such as the juridical, academic and everyday
colloquial.
2. I am only using such an outstanding
anthropologist as R.J. Smith as an interesting way of introducing the
problem here. I don’t wish to suggest that Smith is seriously wedded to this
kind of usage. On the contrary, he has told me he agrees with my general
argument. Smith thus offers a significant example of the way, not so much
how we use language, but how language uses us, and this is true even of
significant scholars.
3. Of course, it is not so much the fact of
working in a religious studies department per se that is necessarily
problematic in this way, since many of those of us who do are
anthropologists or area study specialists anyway. But there does exist a
pressure of self-justification within the academy where funding is highly
competitive, and a theoretical critique of ‘religion’ could look politically
self-defeating. The phenomenological legacy is also still hanging in the
theoretical atmosphere of many Religious Studies departments, as I think my
comments below will indicate, even where there is no conscious commitment to
this (or indeed to any) theoretical tendency. This is further strengthened
by the commitment to an essentialised and reified world religions agenda in
school education, at least in the UK and North America.
4. Mueller (1878 [1898, 1997]) reprinted in
Bryan S. Turner (1997), Otto (1950 [1917]), Wach (1944 and 1951).
5. Byrne (1988), Smart (1973a and 1973b),
Saler (1993).
6. McCutcheon (1997), Lawson and McCauley
(1990).
7. One way of putting this might be that,
whereas it exists at the level of omote (one’s front), it is not ura
(one’s back or behind).
8. I have already published critical articles
on studies not included here, such as Mullins at al (1993) (see Fitzgerald
1994) and Hori et al (1972) (see Fitzgerald, 1993).
9. My point here is that, instead of assuming
we all know what ‘religion’ means, either in English or in what we assume to
be its Japanese language equivalents, we need to make these uses our object
of research and analysis. It is sometimes claimed that religion is a
powerful folk category in the Japanese language. How then is it that so
often Japanese people say they are not religious? To claim this is merely
stating the problem, not solving it! Even in English we talk at cross
purposes, as for example when Reader and Tanabe criticise Reischauer and
Jansen’s confusion which they say “results from their expectations of what
is real religion rather than from the actualities of Japanese religion.”
(Reader and Tanabe, 1998: 7). I invite the reader to substitute the words
“the actualities of” for “real” and then judge who is confused. At least
Reischauer says clearly how he is using the word, and his usage is arguably
defensible. How much more confusion may arise on the English-Japanese
language (eiwa) interface between religion and ‘shūkyō’,
or religion and shūha, shūshi, shūmon, shinkō, shinkyō, shinnen, shūhō,
kyōhō, seidō, kyōdō, daikyō, kokkyō, all with differing nuances (see
Isomae, 2000). Similar semantic problems arise with the western distinction
between religion and the secular. The Japanese word sometimes given for
‘secular’is usually sezoku, but this word may need theorising as do
the English words secular, profane and mundane. Another important but
problematic dichotomy is that between supernatural and natural, which even
in English is a confused semantic area.
10. Bell’s observation that “ritual systems
do not function to regulate or control the system of social relations, they
are the system…” (Bell, 1992: 130) implies that people do not perform
ritualised acts for the purpose of symbolically representing some belief
they hold outside the ritual. Though I cannot develop the point now, the
shift from an intellectualist, representational concept of meaning to a
pragmatic, performance orientated epistemology and theory of meaning
advocated by Bachnik, and incorporated also by Hendry in her ideas about
wrapping, are almost certainly important in this context (see Bachnik, 1995:
109-110).
11. A more precise formulation might be
borrowed from Bachnik in her brilliant ethnography of funeral rites(1995).
She argues for a pragmatic, indexical concept of meaning whereby (ancestral)
rituals are their own meaning; they do not make statements about human
relations so much as construct them in the ritual process itself (Bachnik,
1995: 109-110).
12. It is similar in effect to Gluckman’s
attempt to distinguish between ‘ritual’ and ‘ceremony’, well critiqued by
van Bremen (1995: 2)
13. There is, of course, a vast
anthropological literature debating the meaning and theoretical adequacy of
‘ritual’. For an important general discussion see Bell (1992). As for ritual
in Japan, there are many ethnographic sources, for example van Bremen and
Martinez (eds) (1995), Hendry (1986 and 1987), and Lebra (1992) all contain
some sophisticated discussion.
14. The idea of ‘civil religion’, as
developed by Bellah (1970: 168-189), for example, could be read as
recognition of this point. Bellah has to argue for the legitimacy of
interpreting the stories of the founding of the colonies, the escape from
persecution, the Revolution, as the myths of the civil religion; the
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as ‘religious’ documents or
scriptures; Washington as “the divinely appointed Moses” (1970:176).
However, in Bellah’s writing it sometimes isn’t clear if the idea of
‘religion’ as in ‘civil religion’ is an analytical category by which to
pursue an inquiry, or the object of enquiry itself. What he in effect does
is to extend the sphere of ‘religion’ into ‘the secular’, to the extent that
it becomes difficult to know what stands outside religion. The more that is
included in religion, then the less is included in non-religion or the
secular, in which case the distinction becomes increasingly uninformative,
irrelevant, and contradictory. This immediately forces on us the question
why it has so much persistence even in the minds of critical academics.
15. It easy to find other examples. Compare
for instance the advertiser’s blurb that accompanies Sutherland et al (eds.)
(1988).
16. I stress this point because I
understand the pain that unfairly personal criticism can cause, having
experienced it myself (see Strenski, 1997). However, the danger of unfair
personal attack has to be weighed against the need for public argument. I
believe that if scholars with an interest in Japan were more aware of the
published debates around the concept of ‘religion’ they would understand
that there are legitimate issues that connect the work that Japan
specialists do with wider multi-disciplinary concerns, and that Japan
specialists should be open to, and informed about, what is happening in
other areas of the humanities and social sciences.
17. I have argued that the ‘scientific’
study of religion, and the World Religions construct that grew out of it, is
basically a form of liberal Christian ecumenical theology combined with such
modernist exotica as theosophy, neo-Vedanta, esoteric Buddhism and other
constructs disguised as a science (Fitzgerald, 2000a and 2000b).
18. See, for example, Isomae Jun’ichi’s
(2000) historical work on the problematic reception and translation of the
concept of religion during Meiji.
19. See Isomae (2000)
20. Bachnik suggests that “a household’s
universe of social ties plays a crucial role in its rituals; in fact the
ties themselves can be viewed as a focus of the rituals.” (Bachnik, 1995,
112). This observation seems to me to be strengthened by the point that few
ordinary Japanese people have any doctrinal beliefs or even
conceptualisations of kami (usually but problematically translated as
gods) or hotoke (usually translated as Buddha, but can also
refer to the ancestors), and that the reason for their participation in a
whole range of rituals and festivals has to be located elsewhere.
21. Davis discusses this phenomenon in
relation to Ittoen’s training sessions called kenshūkai, where the
sect’s ideals of submissiveness and obedience are taught to workers from
companies (Davis, 1992: 199-203). Ittoen, then, seems to be yet another
agency for propagating Japanese ideals that undercut any putative
distinction between the religious and the secular.
22. Davis, op cit.
23. See Whiting (1990) for a discussion of
ascetic practices in baseball training.
24. I have myself argued that various kinds
of social movements, for example for ethnic autonomy or liberation from
colonial oppression through nationalism, are this worldly political
soteriologies (see Fitzgerald, 2000b). E.P.Thompson, in his The Making of
the English Working Classes, shows how non-conformist sects and their
preachers oscillated in the 1790s between this-worldly political
soteriologies inspired by the French revolution and extreme otherworldly
visions of salvation (Thompson, 1963)
25. These are the only indexed references to
Confucianism.
26. This is a vast area of historical
research. I rely to a large extent on Bossy (1982). Bossy has to some degree
been challenged by Biller (1985) but, though interesting, I do not believe
the challenge is fatal to Boss’s thesis. A collection of important essays
can also be found in Despland and Vallee, which includes a pertinent article
by Pye (Despland and Vallee, 1992:101-109) on Tominaga Nakamoto and what Pye
argues is the independent invention of the Study of Religion in Japan. Pye
(1990) has already argued this at greater length in the fascinating
introduction to his translation of texts by Nakamoto. I do not believe that
Pye has established a concept of ‘religion’ equivalent to the modern west’s
distinction between religion and the secular, but his argument is difficult
to assess, partly because it often isn’t clear what Japanese equivalents
would be used in the original Nakamoto texts. For example I would be
surprised if the Japanese concept of shūha, usually translated as
sect, could amount to the equivalent of ‘religion’ and ‘religions’ in the
modern ideological sense that I have tried to indicate. I would think a
closer analogy might be to the medieval Christian concept of ‘religious
orders’ (I stress analogy, since there are clearly important
differences also) a division within Christendom that has a significantly
different nuance from the modern distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘the
secular’.
27. Isomae (2000) says that the western
powers divided the non-western parts of the world into 3 categories a)
civilized nations (bunmei kuni); savage or semi-civilized (yaban
kuni); and primitive or under-developed (mikai kuni). The latter,
which included vast areas of Asia, Africa and America were virtually deemed
to be uninhabited and therefore the tribal peoples living there were hardly
deemed to exist as human societies. In the middle category were placed
ancient literate cultures such as Japan, China and India. Japan had a desire
to be elevated to the “civilized” category [e.g. equal with Euro-Americans]
and thus to avoid unequal trade treaties and the generally condescending
attitude of the west. One of the conditions for inclusion in this elevated
group was a western style constitution
that included the separation of church and state and the principle of
freedom of worship. The Meiji elite obliged with the 1889 Constitution.
28. On the invention of comparative
religion, and hence the category of religion itself, on the frontiers of
southern Africa, see Chidester (1996).
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Acknowledgements
This paper is substantially the same paper that was published in Japan
Anthropology Workshop Newsletter No.35, 2002: 44-76, and I am grateful to the
editor, Jan van Bremen, for his original invitation to publish, his care
with the original editing, and also for giving permission for it to be
re-published electronically in this e-journal of Japanese Studies. I am also
grateful to Peter Matanle, the editor of this e-journal, for allowing me to
re-edit the article as suitable for an e-journal, (though I stress that no
changes have been made to the argument) and for his help and encouragement
throughout.
About the author
Timothy Fitzgerald began his career within Religious
Studies at King’s College, London,
then did a PhD also at King’s College, London, in the field of philosophical
theology, and then moved into social anthropology at the LSE where he did an
MSc. He did field work on Ambedkar Buddhism, an untouchable movement of
collective and individual transformation and liberation in Maharashtra. Soon
after his first field trip to India, he moved to Japan and taught in a
university near Nagoya for several years. His wife Noriko is Japanese and
their children, Taro and Mari, are bilingual. His recent book is The
Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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Copyright: Timothy
Fitzgerald
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