Making Sense of the Transformation of Religious Practices: A Critical Long-term Perspective from Pre- and Proto-historic Japan

Koji Mizoguchi

doi:10.1017/s0959774321000366

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel procedural framework for the archaeological study of the long-term transformation of religious practices by heuristically defining the religious in terms of their functional-effective elements. Thus, religious activities constitute a distinct communicative domain that responds to and processes theuncertaintiesandrisksof the world. Drawing on this re-definition, this paper proposes a procedure comprising the following units of investigation: (A) what uncertainties and risks of the world were generated in and differentiated by a certain social formation; (B) how were they responded to and processed; and (C) how is the mode of the responding and processing changed as social formations are transformed? The applicability of this procedure is examined through a case study from the pre- and proto-historic periods of the Japanese archipelago. It is hoped that the framework reintroduces causally explanatory, comparative and long-term perspectives to the archaeological study of religious practices.

Highlights

The archaeological study of religion and various activities that show degrees of religiosity used to be perceived as a narrowly defined specialist field
To analyse the long-term transformation of the religious communicative domain by examining its correlation/co-transformation with changing uncertainties and risks generated by the world, first, I must formulate a general model outlining how the domain is reproduced
This was ignited by the following parallel, mutually enhancing processes that were set in motion during Phase 2: (a) the increasing density and frequency of intercommunal contacts and the growing reliance on them by communities, and their elite, for their reproduction; (b) the intensification of inter-communal competition over dominance in such contacts, and over the exchange of goods, information and people; and (c) the rise of the Chinese empire as the ultimate source of authority and the legitimation of dominance (Mizoguchi 2009; 2013, 220−40). These factors, together with the rapid and vast expansion of the horizon/network of intercommunal interaction, would have made the elite communicative domain a crucial one out of the internally hierarchically differentiated religious communicative domain for the reproduction of society, and rendered the uncertainties and risks generated by its sustenance a vital set of uncertainties and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core

Summary

Koji Mizoguchi

This paper proposes a novel procedural framework for the archaeological study of the longterm transformation of religious practices by heuristically defining the religious in terms of their functional-effective elements. Religious activities constitute a distinct communicative domain that responds to and processes the uncertainties and risks of the world. Drawing on this re-definition, this paper proposes a procedure comprising the following units of investigation: (A) what uncertainties and risks of the world were generated in and differentiated by a certain social formation; (B) how were they responded to and processed; and (C) how is the mode of the responding and processing changed as social formations are transformed? It is hoped that the framework reintroduces causally explanatory, comparative and long-term perspectives to the archaeological study of religious practices

Introduction

Proposing the procedure

This article

Author biography