‘Shinto’ and Japanese popular religion: case studies of multi-variant practice from Kyushu and Okinawa

Drawing on previous literature and theoretical considerations, the authors identify six key independent variables related to popular religious belief and practice in mainland China: institutional religious affiliation, level of education, income, perspectives on inequality as a social problem, assessment of overall health, and rural residency. Using the 2007 Spiritual Life Study of Chinese Residents, the authors find that Buddhist identity is positively associated with popular religious involvement across measures of popular religious belief and practice. Identifying as a formally committed Buddhist consistently displays the strongest positive relationship with popular religious involvement. The level of education does not reveal a consistent negative association with popular religious adherence, contrary to predictions of classical secularization theory. One measure of existential security theory, feeling inequality is a serious social problem, shows a strong positive relationship with popular religious belief, but not popular religious practices. Finally, despite research highlighting the functional importance of popular religion in rural areas, rural residency is not consistently a significant predictor of popular religious adherence. The implications of these findings are discussed.

<p>This paper deals with a controversy concerning a popular religious practice that some ‘ulama have been involved in. On this issue, the ‘ulama are divided into those who reject it and those who accept it. Those who reject it are associated with the puritan Muslims who generally argue that the popular religious practices are form of bid‘ah. Among the puritans are Ibn Taymîyah (d. 1328) and Muhammad ‘Abd al-Wahhab (d. 1791) the founding-father of Wahhabîyah school of thought in Najd, Saudi Arabia. Although the two have continuously waged an intellectual war on popular religious practices, these practices have nonetheless survived to this day.</p><p>This paper proposes an approach that might be useful to the study of popular religious practices. It contends that the controversy on this issue may in fact be used as a framework in which the validity of certain religious tradition may be evaluated. A rejection toward certain religious practices is in fact deemed necessary as long as this is not destructive to the very structure of religion.</p><p>On further note, the differences in opinion between those who reject and those who accept can actually be reconciled simply because the two have a lot in common in terms of their aims and final goals. They are not contradictive so far as the two are deemed as subjective efforts to understand the real meaning of Islam. On the ground that the two are a form of understanding, the one cannot be said as truer than the other just as the two cannot be said as representing the true teaching of the Qur’ân and the Sunnah. Nonetheless, put together the two have indeed gave a more comprehensive picture of what Islam is all about.</p>

Reviewed by: Religion in Japanese Daily Life by David C. Lewis John W. Traphagan Religion in Japanese Daily Life. By David C. Lewis. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018. 346 pages. Hardcover, £120.00/$175.00. David Lewis's Religion in Japanese Daily Life represents one of the more challenging reviews I have been asked to write over the years. The topic is both important and worthy of scholarly interest despite the fact that several fine works on the daily practice of religious and ritual activity in Japan have been written over the past twenty years (and earlier, as well). However, the book is marred by several problems ranging from a lack of significant theoretical situating of the data presented to an odd insistence upon using the outdated mode of writing known as the ethnographic present, [End Page 325] which leads to a problematic failure to sufficiently contextualize the data from a historical perspective. Before diving into my criticisms of the book, I would like to begin with some of the more positive aspects of Lewis's contribution to our understanding of religion in Japan. The book is organized into a traditional structure that begins by describing Lewis's field site and then moves into chapters that follow a conventional framework often found in older ethnographies in which each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of daily life, such as growing up (chapter 3), work (chapter 6), leisure (chapter 7), times of crisis (chapter 8), and death (chapter 9). One of the aspects of the book that I found particularly good is the manner in which Lewis shows through his presentation of ethnographic data the complex ways in which Japanese people engage Buddhist, Shinto, and other religious themes and rituals in relation to the process of aging over the life course. Although this is certainly not a particularly new or innovative insight, the author does a nice job of presenting the different ways in which Japanese construct and participate in religious ritual. I would argue that the second chapter is the highlight of the book in that it provides a detailed and well-organized outline of the history of religiosity in Japan that would be a useful reading assignment in most undergraduate classes on Japanese religions. This points to the book's strongest feature, which is representing a clear introduction to religious practice in Japan as it has typically functioned within the context of families and as a component of social life, rather than exploring the philosophical or theological aspects of Japanese religions. Unfortunately, Routledge, as usual, has chosen to assign very high pricing, at $175 for the hardcover and $50 for the e-book. This effectively makes the book impossible to use in the classroom and is a disservice to students, to scholars, and to the advancement of knowledge in general. Nonetheless, even if the price were reasonable it would be difficult to use Religion in Japanese Daily Life without a fair amount of lecturing and assignment of complementary readings to help situate the data presented in relation to contemporary Japan, because Lewis fails to do this adequately throughout the book. Indeed, Lewis notes early on that much of the book is focused on fieldwork he conducted at the beginning of the 1980s in Shiga Prefecture. On page 5, he states that he intends to use this ethnographic data as a "baseline" for comparison in order to assess whether any change has taken place in contemporary Japanese religiosity, but he does not succeed in this because throughout the remainder of the book little contemporary data with which to compare his older ethnographic research is presented. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Lewis makes only limited reference to scholarly works on Japan written after 1990, relying on contributions that are often many decades old to support claims about twenty-first-century Japanese society. For example, at one point Lewis discusses variation in urban and rural regions in relation to religious participation and suggests that "daily worship at Buddhist household altars may be more common in urban than in rural areas" (p. 12). To support this claim, Lewis cites Smith's classic book Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan, which was published...

This study examines the role of religious organizations in the process of constitutional revision in Japan. Sōka Gakkai has influenced Kōmeitō's position on article 9, preventing the LDP from inscribing ‘collective self-defense’ into its draft for a new constitution. Since the LDP's desire to make that change was its main goal in undertaking constitutional revision at this time in the first place, Sōka Gakkai and Kōmeitō have significantly influenced the political process. In a second case, the Association of Shinto Shrines and its political arm Shinto Seiji Renmei strongly favor the LDP move to revise article 24 to eliminate specification of ‘the essential equality of the sexes’, but in spite of that support, the LDP has so far been unable to overcome the opposition of Kōmeitō and the Democratic Party of Japan.

Studying Lived Religion is a much-needed addition to both religious studies research and the classroom. Clearly written and tightly organized, it is accessible and eminently referenceable, offering a variety of methodologies, historical contexts, and examples. Ammerman’s inclusive and synthetic thought touches and builds on many of the major players in the field while also foregrounding minority points of view and innovative current literature. At the same time, her sustained focus and organizational schema of the six dimensions of lived religion—“how religion happens in everyday life”—indeed offers a “foundation [that] will allow lived religion research to live up to the global scope of our work and…allow social scientists and other scholars and citizens to rediscover and better understand the religious phenomena we encounter all around us” (5, 8).Part One gives the thousand-foot view of what people do (practice) and the contexts lived religion appears in. Beginning with a concept of practice as “a cluster of actions that is socially recognizable in ways that allow others to know how to respond” (15), Ammerman then argues that is through practice that religious identities are forged (19). She then tackles the relationship between religious social practice and spirituality, claiming that the former has a spiritual dimension inherent in it, “[t]hat is, it incorporates—either directly or indirectly—the presence of a reality beyond the ordinary” (20). As for the supposed conflict between the two, she writes, “[W]e will gain greater insight by studying both individual subjective experiences and socially enacted patterns” (22). The first chapter then ends with an introduction to the multidimensional approach to studying lived religious practice which structures the rest of the text. These dimensions include embodiment, materiality, emotion, aesthetics, morality, and narrative. The aforementioned spiritual dimension is what makes religious practice distinct from other social practices.Chapter 2 looks for where religious practices occur, mostly at the macro level. Here Ammerman identifies a range of religious social contexts: entangled, established, institutional, interstitial, and postcolonial (a hybrid of entangled and established). These “identify differences in typical expectations for the fields within which religious practices will be found and the modes of regulation that will constrain (or encourage) religious action” (31). Together with the seven dimensions of religious practice, these ideal types aid in the generative and analytic task of systematically and dynamically examining lived religion, wherever in the world one may be working.Part Two is divided into seven chapters that go through each of the dimensions. Chapter 3 focuses on the spiritual dimensions. Ammerman demonstrates through multiple examples what it might look like to run a case study through the contextual grid offered in chapter 2. Here and throughout the book, there are helpful case studies set off in gray boxes that are blended into that chapter’s particular discussion. While delineating and outlining the literature on “spirituality,” Ammerman offers a kind of updated compendium—something she repeats for each dimension, suggestively gesturing rather than exhaustively re-presenting. Chapters 4 and 5 examine embodied religious practice and materiality. Chapters 6 and 7 explore emotions and aesthetics, while 8 and 9 look at morality and narratives, respectively. The chapters on aesthetics and narratives are particularly interesting. For the former, simply giving language and conceptualizations is helpful. The inclusion of narratives, too, as crucial to the study of lived religion offers several points of entry for the researcher.Ammerman concludes her work with scholarly gold, that is, a curated and annotated bibliography. In addition to the Ideas for Further Study endnotes that conclude each chapter, the close of the text reads almost like a how-to handbook on doing research on lived religion. This reviewer notes, however, that neither Rodney Stark nor William Sims Bainbridge—key sociologists of religion—is mentioned anywhere in the text. Given their status in the field, it would have been appropriate to interact with them in some way, even if to warn up-and-coming graduate students that their theories have fallen into disfavor.Therefore, given its theoretical purchase, didactic approach, and valuable content, Studying Lived Religion would be an asset as a textbook for junior and senior undergraduates, graduates, and scholars in religious studies. It is one of those texts one wishes they could have had when writing a proposal.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Tullio Federico Lobetti, Ascetic Practices in Japanese Religion New York: Routledge. Japan Anthropology Workshop Series, 2013; 192 pages. Cloth, $137.75. isbn 978-0415833752.Anthropological research on Shugendo ... is far outnumbered by of religious studies and history, yet it offers innovative perspectives with multidisci- plinary implications.1 The method of analysis that distinguishes the of Shugendo from of other disciplines is the emphasis that anthropologists place on understanding Shugendo within and beyond specific contexts: consider- ing the relational dynamics, for instance, between Shugendo and various dimen- sions of social life in contemporary Japan, while striving to discern its insights-what Shugendo can teach us, directly or indirectly, about the human con- dition. Situating its pantheistic ontology, rites, and political history in the gamut of anthropological thought, ethnographies of specific Shugendo contexts can lead to more general theories of asceticism and the soteriological trinity of life, death, and rebirth, which is pervasive in Asian thought (see Obeyesekere 2002)Lobetti's recent work, Ascetic Practices in Japanese Religion, is a solid contribution to the of Shugendo because it offers a multifaceted analysis of contem- porary Shugendo, exploring its influence on sociality and contemplating its more existential aspects. A common problem in the study of contemporary Shugendo is tracing ascetic social networks because modern communication and transportation technologies-for example, social media websites and bullet trains-collapse time and space in ways that extend social networks far beyond any local context. As such, contemporary ascetics herald from everywhere to attend Shugendo retreats and it is difficult to determine the locus of their faith. Ascetics tend to be religious pluralists and belong, in varying capacities, to other sects and religions. This makes tracing ascetic networks a challenging task. In Ascetic Practices in Japanese Religion, Lobetti rectifies how asceticism is manifesting in the complicated inter-sectarian networks of contemporary religious affiliation by participating in retreats through- out the country, attempting to determine what the core of Shugendo, in its ubiquity yet multifarious orthodoxies, might be-for who leap between sects and rites and for who are devoted to one in particular. Divided into five chapters and introduction, at 136 pages it is a lean text. Without grounding in a single site, it may come across as somewhat superficial to ethnographers, yet it still offers useful ethnographic observations and theoretical insights into the structure and values of asceticism in contemporary Japanese religion.Lobetti positions his text as a work of philosophical anthropology and he frames Shugendo as tradition. The crux of his theoretical argu- ment is that Shugendo is a bodily hermeneutic based on a model of ontological progression-of becoming a more perfectible being through ascesis. This process is described with the term corporis ascendus-an embodied ascent to higher onto- logical status through ascesis. While most ascetics do shugyo ... to acquire an uninterrupted flow of this-worldly benefits, the exemplar case of corporis ascendus, he argues, are the sokushinbutsu ... of Tohoku, those who have attained Bud- dhahood in their own living bodies through self-mummification (see Hori 1962; Jeremiah 2010). Having willfully entered earthen chamber buried three meters underground, covered in large stones and with nothing more than a bamboo pole connecting to the surface for air, the ascetics designing to become sokushinbutsu fasted and meditated into death and thereby, according to Lobetti, achieved the highest status possible within their ascetic value system-complete self- effacement leading to corporeal immortality and sainthood. …

The chapter provides an overview on religious practice concerning the cult of Israel and its articulation found in Leviticus, the priestly authors as well as other Old Testament texts. This summary of scholarly work offers an overview of arguments concerning the composition of the Priestly source and the Holiness Code. Other approaches to the cult of Israel that are examined focus on the theological aspects of worship, the hegemony of the priesthood, and ritual theory as it has developed over the past two decades. The chapter includes an overview of scholarship on ritual sacrifice and the understanding of blood rites in the cult of Israel. Other aspects of religious practice such as sacred space and temple building are examined through political and religious models. The chapter also considers arguments for official and popular religious practices in Israel and Judea as well as anthropological theories around religious and non-religious space. The question of ancient Israel’s monotheism has also seen fruitful scholarship which brings to light the historical practice of ancient Israel in comparison with the biblical depictions of worship.

Among the popular religious practices in Islamic society that are of concern to scholars are about life cycle ceremonies and pilgrimages to the graves of figures believed to be the guardians of Allah to obtain blessings. Many popular religious practices in Islamic society that have been carried out in popular religious practices are quite diverse, including local Islam as opposed to universal Islam, practical Islam as opposed to textual Islam, popular Islam versus ulama Islam, symbolic Islam versus normative Islam, popular Islam opposed to official Islam, small tradition versus big tradition, real Islam versus normative Islam. Therefore, this will examine one of the diversity of death traditions in Indonesia, especially those carried out by Nahdiyin residents. Various events and traditions are sometimes associated with the reading of Surah Yasin in it so that this surah has become a staple meal at religious events. The researcher focuses on the relationship that exists between the religious rituals held and the reading of Surah Yasin in it. The values ​​of the Koran that live in this tradition include, first, that people place the Koran as a holy book, so that reading the chosen letter of the Koran in an activity is a form of reviving the Koran in everyday life. Second, the reading of selected surahs of the Qur'an serves as a guard from various kinds of disturbances. Third, reading the chosen letter of the Koran is able to reduce the fears that will occur in the fetus it contains. The conclusion of this study is that the tradition of memitu is understood as gratitude which perceives the values ​​of the Qur'an as a source of holiness, protection and peace.
 Keywords: Al-Qur'an, Rites of death, Islam

From a hilltop overlooking the community of Puerto Penasco, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari decreed a million-hectare biosphere reserve for the upper Gulf of California and the delta of the Colorado River. Assembled with him on the podium in June of 1993 were the governors of Sonora, Baja California, and Arizona, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, Luis Donaldo Colosio, then head of the Secretaria de Desarrollo Social (SEDESOL), and Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, an aide to President Salinas at the time and now his successor. Salinas set the parameters for the reserve's management plan. Resource exploitation was to be prohibited within a nuclear zone at the mouth of the Colorado River, and offshore shrimp trawling was to be outlawed in a larger buffer zone, north of a line traversing the upper Gulf from Puerto Penasco to San Felipe on the coast of Baja California. Within this buffer zone, too, inshore fishermen would be restricted to the use of gillnets with a mesh size of four inches or less. Salinas also called for the active pursuit of economic alternatives for the region, specifically the further development of tourism, sport fishing, and aquaculture. Such pursuits were to be underwritten by a billion dollars in regional assistance from the Programa Nacional de Solidaridad (PRONASOL), run by the Sonoran native and heir-apparent to Salinas, Luis Donaldo Colosio. In its conception, then, the biosphere reserve was an amalgam of resource management notions. It called for a strictly protected nuclear zone—although none of its architects specifically addressed the nascent literature on "harvest refugia" as a fisheries enhancement tool (cf. Dugan and Davis 1991a, 1991b; Carr and Reed 1991; Tegner 1991; Roberts and Polunin 1993). It presumed the need for an "integrated conservation and development program" (ICDP) to relieve pressure on endangered species and a fragile environment (cf. Brandon and Wells 1992; Chou et al. 1991; Stycos and Duarte 1995; White 1988). And, at least in the buffer zone, the plan suggested that a "sustainable" fishery could be fostered—primarily through severe restrictions on gear. The Upper Gulf of California and Colorado River Delta Biosphere Reserve thus began as a concerted effort to arrest the deterioration of an ecosystem and to protect several endangered marine species. It is a symbol, too, of Mexico's willingness to respond to international calls for environmental consciousness. Simultaneously, though, Mexico was responding to another international agenda. The neoliberalism of the North urged—indeed, required—Mexico to undertake a multifaceted program of structural adjustment, including, in the case at hand, the privatization of the region's fisheries. The Gulf of California, thus, serves as a crucible for these two agendas, and we here take a midcourse glance at how these agendas are sorting themselves out. We examine the political environment in which the biosphere reserve was conceived and, consequently, the environmental politics accompanying the implementation process. And we assess, again in a preliminary way, since there is no closure to the process, how one small community in the upper gulf is structurally adjusting to the new economic order. These two seemingly disparate agendas are, in El Golfo de Santa Clara at the mouth of the Colorado River, very much intertwined.

The Orthodox Church, which had possessed enormous property and power in medieval Russia, underwent profound change in Imperial Russia. Although the medieval Russian Church had constructed an administration to exercise its broad spiritual and temporal authority, it exhibited the same organisational backwardness as did the secular regime. The 'clerical estate' that served the Church consisted of three categories: the ruling episcopate, celibate monastic clergy and married secular clergy. Given the dispersion of population, the heterogeneity of local cultures, and the institutional backwardness of the medieval Church, Russian Orthodoxy was actually Russian Heterodoxy, with kaleidoscopic variations in local customs, superstitions and religious practice. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church undertook to standardise and purify popular religious practice, but as yet lacked the instrumentalities to make a fundamental 'reformation' in popular religious practice. Parallel with the 're-christianisation' of the folk, the Church began to develop and articulate its social and political teachings.

The breadth of medieval mentalities is explored with reference to popular culture, ritual, religious beliefs, and practices, against a backdrop of fear and anxiety, with reference to the official church in the medieval Latin west. The Feast of the Ass, for example, exemplifies the uncomfortable boundaries which existed between the church and popular culture. Popular religious practices and ecclesiastical liturgy, orthodox doctrines, and popular beliefs coalesce to form the medieval underworld wherein heretics and dissenters were consigned. The various conflicts and challenges which medieval society faced are noted as a basis for understanding the roots of religious belief and practice in the Middle Ages. The chapter creates a context wherein religion and its anxieties are evaluated by means of a broad perspective.

Days of Death, Days of Life: Ritual in the Popular Culture of Oaxaca Kristin Norget. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Day of the Dead festivities in Oaxaca, Mexico, in late October and early November have drawn the attention of students of popular culture, tourists, and urban anthropologists, including the author of this work. However, this book goes well beyond an analysis of the Day of the Dead rituals. It is an extensive study of the rituals surrounding death, as well as the symbolic, spiritual, and physical experiences of death, particularly among the poor in urban Oaxaca. To obtain her information, the author did field research between the years 1989 and 1993 in five poor neighborhoods in urban Oaxaca. She personally attended numerous funerals, wakes, and prayer services, and conducted seventy-five open-ended interviews with families on themes tied to death. She also recorded videos and took photographs of family death rituals. The book is divided into three major parts: popular life and rituals in Oaxaca, popular death rites and experiences, and Day of the Dead rituals in poor, urban Oaxaca. In the first chapters of the book she details the history, geography, and social and cultural backgrounds of Oaxaca, particularly of the poor neighborhoods. Her descriptions of the differences among death rituals as practiced by the Mexican Catholic Church and popular practices were especially interesting. Although the new evangelization project of the Catholic Church gave the Oaxacan poor a sense of greater selfdirection and brought more women into leadership roles in Church rituals, it failed to change the strong, local, popular religious beliefs and practices. The author maintains that the strength of popular religion originates from the ever-present religiosity in everyday life which helps lessprivileged citizens of Oaxaca cope with the daily challenges of urban living. This theme of popular religion is continued in part two of the study where the author argues that popular rituals of death mediate tension among social classes and provide possibilities for the poor communities and individuals to renew or recover spiritually and improve themselves morally and physically. Women are given a greater opportunity to play a larger role in the community through rituals of death. Chapter four of the study, an analysis of death rituals in poor neighborhoods of Oaxaca, is particularly insightful. The author contends that death rituals create a moral identity for poor Oaxacan families and individuals. Some of the rituals are Catholic-based, such as confession, the last rites, and the funeral mass, but most are derived from popular beliefs. …

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This special issue represents a combination of efforts by Japanese and Canadian scholars in such fields as traditional Buddhism, Christianity, Japanese mountain religion, new religions, and spirituality. The contributors' aim is to approach their subjects critically from a perspective and perform an examination or analysis in light of their criticism or their reframing of interpretations that have been accepted as standard.As Kobayashi argues in this special issue, the image of women as actors in religious history has been romanticized. In other words, attention has focused mainly on women of exceptionally heroic quality, and the images of those women have been amplified, in an attempt to overturn the image of women as sacrificial victims of oppression. An approach that seeks to substantiate the agency of women in this way, however, can only be futile. Consider, for example, the body of past studies on Japanese women and Buddhist history. This research has illuminated the existence of women, both priestly renunciates and lay practitioners, who had never before been recognized on the public stage of history, and it has shown how, despite the constraints imposed by their times, women have independently and actively engaged in religious activity. Folklore research has also been carried out with the aim of presenting women's place in religion in terms of their spiritual power. It is true that studies of this kind have contributed to the advances made in research on women in Japanese religion. It is also true, however, that in placing their emphasis on accounting for women's energy and spiritual power, these studies have excessively romanticized women's roles in religion in Japan, and they have mainly failed to place women in relation to the woman-excluding ways of thinking and patriarchal mechanisms that (must have) existed in the background (Kawahashi 2005). It is also troubling that research on Japanese women and religion from this perspective is still considered valid in the study of history, folklore, and religion. Moreover, there is a significant tendency to credulously situate any and all research that takes women as the main topic, as well as all research conducted by scholars who are women, as research. As King (2005) declares, however, the word gender is not synonymous with woman. Nevertheless, the present situation is that the woman's perspective and the perspective are commonly equated uncritically one with the other.At the real-world locus of their activity in religion, women face a range of conflicts and difficulties that arise from discrimination and androcentrism. However, these problems are treated as the women's personal problems, thereby rendering them invisible. This special issue pursues a reexamination by directly addressing the idealized image of women in religion from critical perspectives in terms of the interpretation of Japanese women and religion, a topic that has been widely studied since the 1980s. We hope to shed new light where previous research has not adequately grasped the complexity of diverse problems involved in women's practice of religion in Japan. Our purpose in this is not to concentrate solely on activities seeking a radical equality, but to conduct multi-perspective explorations of the possibilities for reform and transformation that emerge out of women's everyday challenges and negotiations.1Theoretical BackgroundReligion is ambiguously significant for women in that it represents both liberation and bondage. On the one hand, religion excludes women, and on the other it is understood to be trying to include women. Women are regarded as though they are symbolic reservoirs of the unique spiritual essence of their ethnic groups and nationalities, and debates on the rights and wrongs of such practices as the veil and suttee have therefore grown complicated. As Narayan (1997) points out, however, there are instances of Western feminists who avoid any negative view or moral criticism of non-Western women and cultures for fear of being accused of racism or colonialism, and who take a stance of cultural relativism for that reason. …

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Edmund Husserl launched phenomenology as a rigorous and positivist science of subjectivity. It was set up to deal with specific problems in other scientific disciplines. The discovery of paradoxes in mathematics had put in question the ultimate rationality of mathematics and of the mathematized empirical sciences. Husserl's phenomenology worked to trace mathematics and logic back to their fundamental units and operations and to exhibit the mental acts in which they are constituted. Subsequently he judged that every scientific discipline was in need of a phenomenological investigation of the subjective acts in which the distinctive objects studied by that discipline are constituted, given to intuition and their meanings ascribed.Empirical and ideal objects—the essences with which objects are identified and classified—are given in intuition; intuition constitutes them as objects. Intuition occurs in acts in the first-person singular—“I see.” These acts can be brought to light by a specific kind of reflection, also an act in the first-person singular. The successive intuitive and meaning-ascribing acts, and the second-order intuition that is reflection, retain and anticipate one another, forming a distinctive and individual stream of consciousness that is the first-person singular. The science of subjectivity is based on the reality of the first-person singular.By midcentury developments in other sciences led to discrediting the phenomenological conception of subjectivity. Structural linguistics had exhibited system in the phonetics and syntaxes of languages and demonstrated that languages change in systematic ways. The meanings of words and expressions form within language and are determined by the existing vocabulary, grammar, and paradigms of a language; they are not the products of individual subjective acts.Anthropology discarded, as post-Enlightenment Western, the concept of individual subjectivity as an abiding identity and source productive of meanings, judgments, decisions, and initiatives.1 It is cultural symbols that, Clifford Geertz affirms, first articulate, generate, and regenerate thought. To think is to identify things and relate them with words and other cultural symbols. Symbols are external to the thinker; they are words and also images, markings, gestures, rituals, graven idols, water holes, and tools.2 Their meanings are in their uses, and the ways they are used are accessible to observation without divining the minds of the users. “The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive, vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but,” Geertz affirms, “they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered through systematic empirical investigation … as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal glands.”3 Thus anthropology can dispense with the dubious methods to access other minds and become a natural science like any other.4 Claude Lévi-Strauss set out to show the underlying structures, not explicitly conscious, in kinship systems, myths, garb and adornment, and cuisine. He set out to show that fundamental generative structures are universal across cultures.Emotions surge focused by words and symbols. Indignation, a feeling of injustice, of frustration of our expectations and plans, envy, jealousy, triumph—words and cultural symbols, not produced by the individual mind, make them possible. “Not only ideas, but emotions too, are cultural artifacts in man,” Geertz declares.5For the postmodern philosophy of mind meanings are articulated in the taxonomic contrasts, semantic systems, grammatical forms, and rhetorical paradigms of languages, which are social and institutional productions. The meanings of speech acts produced by individuals are determined from the specific tongue, milieu, profession, and social and practical situation in which they are uttered and from the distribution, condensations, and displacements of signifiers in the unconscious. Perceived things and events are not only identified with language; the vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric of a specific language determine what we perceive and how. Action is ordered by the material imperatives of things and the cues, watchwords, and orders of social institutions.For postmodernism, Ellen Fox Keller explains, “subjects are … constructed by culturally specific discursive regimes (marked by race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on), and subjectivity itself is more properly viewed as the consequence of actions, behavior, or ‘performativity’ than as their source…. Selves are multiple and fractured rather than unitary, mobile rather than stable, porous rather than enclosed, externally constituted rather than internal or ‘inner’ natural essences.”6 The agency in me that says “I” is not a substantive identity; it is intermittent, fragmented, transitory.Art is now no longer seen as a discontinuous succession of individual creations; its themes and styles are engendered by the history of art. Postmodern theorists have abandoned the notion of creative force in the depth of the individual, indeed the notion of creativity: A society produces innumerable materials, mediums, forms, colors, meanings; artists select and combine from this existing fund. Their productions are constituted as art by being accepted into the history of art by the institutions and commerce of the art world.The postmodern philosophy of mind is seen to be realized in the practice and usage of electronic media. Media broadcasts diffuse representations of events and products; information about everything is instantly available on the Internet. Knowledge is stored as neutral units of information, detached, as in Wikipedia, from the experience and perspective of a thinker. Cyberspace engineers and theorists see themselves producing a global brain in which potentially all things and events are represented, all data stored in memory, and linked in all possible ways, connected, combined, synthesized. Individuals connected on the Internet constitute the noosphere, the collective consciousness that emerges from all the users of the Internet and that is greater than any one of them and greater than all of them. It would be analogous to the hive mind of ant, termite, or bee colonies studied by biologists. Its axioms, paradigms, technologies of image and message production, and distribution technologies are studied by cyberspace theorists and culture studies.Surveying the field of scientific research today, I will here turn attention to three sectors of research that break with the postmodern conception of subjectivity.Classical ethnographers observed the habitats, implements, economic activity, institutions, and beliefs of a community in view of producing an account of a particular “culture,” conceived as a functionally interrelated structure of economic, political, and ideological systems. Their work was scientific not only in the rigor of its observations but also in that the representation of a culture is translated into the vocabulary, paradigms, and explanations of scientific economics, sociology, political theory, psychology, biology, and physics.How are these productions of an anthropology that aims to be scientific verified? In most cases, another ethnographer does not go back to that community to verify what the first has written. In most cases the members of that community cannot or do not read the account of them the ethnographer has published. In practice a monograph is accepted by the anthropological community for internal characteristics—the appearance of detailed and exhaustive data and the apparent rigor of the reasoning and conclusions drawn from them.Agricultural practices, housing construction, tools and equipment, economic exchanges, and kinship systems are recorded and translated into the objective terminology of modern sciences. But all these are found to be determined by the natives' understanding of causality and the symbolic meanings ascribed to them. In practice the ethnographer sets out to learn the language, the categories, and the imagery of the users of symbols and in fact learns them by speaking to the natives and being understood by them. The anthropologist conceives the “culture” as an overarching and integrated system of symbols and representations, distinctive to a society, that provides individuals with a meaningful framework for orienting themselves in the world around them and to one another.But field researchers have come to recognize that the ideology or mythical or religious elaborations of a community are very unevenly present in the understanding of any informant. Pieces of the ideology and myth combine but also conflict with the practical knowledge each individual acquires of his or her particular natural environment and workplace. The discourse of the informant is also shaped by the sensibility, energies, and skills of his or her body. Consciousness waxes and wanes as sensory thresholds, states of wakefulness, fatigue, and also instincts, cravings, appetite, agitations, and drives surge and recede. Two women working alongside of one another planting and harvesting crops, the one with superabundant energy, the other with slow metabolism, the one young, the other aged after multiple childbearings, do not experience the same articulation of that field, and though they use the common words to describe it, the words do not have identical force and meaning for each of them. The singularity of a person's body also figures as a force of resistance to the identities attributed to him or her from others and from the ideology. Individuals with somewhat different pieces of ideology and myth and practical knowledge interact and engender changes in practical enterprises and social institutions and also in ideology and myth.The entry of the field researcher into a community alters the network of social relations in that community. The researcher is not a fly on the wall, unnoticed, going into every room and field. What an informant tells the ethnographer is selected and oriented by the political and psychological relations the informant has with other members of the community and with the researcher. The informant, commonly paid by the ethnographer, has a political and psychological relationship with that researcher. The informant is motivated by ambition, pride, cupidity, suspicion, affection, a longing to be recognized and admired.There may be much dishonesty in the relationship the researcher has with her informants; the researcher often conceals what she knows in order to increase the likelihood of acceptance and does not reveal her research goals. Her relationship with her informant is shaped by her curiosity, fascination, protectiveness, lust, frustration, anger, vindictiveness, disdain, craving for privacy, homesickness. The publication, twenty-five years after his death, of Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries—where he writes often of how he was just sick of all these truculent and fickle savages—has made ethnographers aware that they are not simply recording what an informant says but are in an obscure agon with an individual.Anthropologists write for readers in their own culture, primarily the academic community, but have to first understand and represent the native's point of view, more exactly, represent the individual informant's point of view. This has led to the search in recent decades for new forms of writing.7 There is need for theory to conceptualize the forces that make the discourse of the informant his or her own voice.The mind of the informant is not simply a locus where the ideological system of his culture is inscribed; it is a force of commitment—commitment to some pieces of this system but also to his own work and his maneuvers in the network of his political and psychological relations with others.Anthropologists have come to see that every community has contact with other communities and imports some of the representations of other communities, modified, renamed, reversed and assimilated, some sections badly integrated, coexisting or overlapping with sections of its own representations. In zones where a people has been invaded or conquered by another and have to contrive their lives between different economic and institutional systems with different cultural and mythical systems of interpretation, there arise cargo cult messiahs, Vodou serviteurs, ialorixás, mediums, and curanderos. They deal with individuals in individual predicaments and work with parts of the Christian and parts of the Aztec or Yoruba mythology to make sense of what is happening in this individual. They have to invent, to fill in the gaps, to work by inspiration. They improvise rituals and sacraments.Today anthropological field researchers first and everywhere encounter such encroachment of an alien system of understanding on communities in the entry of modern scientific medicine. With the intense and highly profitable penetration of pharmaceutical marketing across the planet, many people, especially the very poor, are treated by local health workers and by their families with a mix of modern therapeutic methods and pharmaceuticals, traditional healing resources, and religious and ritual practices. Medical anthropologists set out to assess and understand the impact of healers and rituals. They come to recognize something else: individuals are forced to take responsibility for their illness and healing with whatever resources and understanding they can assemble.8 Medical practitioners have come to recognize the difference between a patient assenting to and obeying the doctor, or the faith healer, and a patient taking responsibility for his disease and its cure on the basis of his own daily sufferings, observations, and judgments. Their practice will be different if the doctor has to take account of the patient herself taking responsibility for her disease and its treatment. We need a theoretical understanding of the first-person singular in this force to take responsibility for one's illness.In our Western societies folk medicine and faith healing are vanishing alternatives to scientific medical research, institutions, and practice. Medical science has constructed a highly technical vocabulary and grammar to formulate the results of its laboratory and clinical research into pathologies and their treatments. When a sufferer goes to the doctor, the doctor translates the patient's account of her ailments into this language, and the patient is induced to learn this language to understand her ailments, communicate them, and assent to treatment. Increasingly patients download explanations and treatments from the Internet before and after their consultations with the doctor. The extraordinary advance in pharmacology and hi-tech surgical interventions has made this language the more necessary and the more difficult for the patient to master.Medical practice finds that it must also deal with economic, political, and juridical institutions. The patient must learn and understand the medical discourse and to some measure also the economic, political, and juridical discourses.But the patient has another problem: he has to endure the suffering and to assess its impact on his family, his work, his sense of the life he henceforth has to lead and the death that he has to face. For all this, the medical discourse is of no avail. Indeed the real and promised advances of medical biotechnology, organ transplants and prostheses, and life-support systems work to defer death, rendering suffering and death intolerable and unintelligible. The sufferer has to elaborate a narrative of her aspirations and her fate, her destiny, her lifetime. The patient's own narrative of that alien event in her life that is her illness will determine what treatments she will accept and may even have an effect on the efficacy of those treatments. This narrative is composed not out of concepts but out of bewilderment, anxieties, fears, attachments, dereliction, and pain. The sufferer gets sight of the indifference of the material world, the impenetrability of brute reality, gets sight of the aleatory, improbable reality of his or her existence. Suffering and anxiety are not simply cultural artifacts; they are not made possible by the words of a culture but seek words for a private language, the narrative the sufferer composes by and for himself or herself.Anthropologists who have studied mentally disturbed very poor people in Java, Brazil, and India find that the family of the psychotic may accept whatever therapy and psychopharmaceuticals are available while also invoking images and conceptions and rituals from the prevailing religion.9 The images and conceptions from the prevailing religion function to fix, to bind, the rampant strangeness of the sufferer's experience and behavior for them. Medical anthropologists have investigated these phenomena in view of explaining the social and cultural context in which modern psychiatric practice in these places must be pursued.The psychotic himself may identify himself and his states with concepts and images from the prevailing religion. However, the psychotic works an individual transformation of them, giving them new and distinctive structures and force, often viewed as heterodox and fanatical by the family and by religious leaders. They may often be mixed with practices of black magic and sorcery. Anthropological researchers have come to recognize positive and productive forces in these heterodox beliefs and practices: they function to isolate the sufferer from her family and the community, in a protective withdrawal that enables the psychotic to recognize the distinctiveness of her sufferings and anxieties, establish some kind of distance from them, and produce images and discourse of strong coherence and emotional intensity.In 1922 Doctor Hans Prinzhorn published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken—translated into English as Artistry of the Mentally Ill—in which he reproduced and analyzed 187 from the more than five thousand paintings, drawings, and carvings he had collected from asylums in Heidelberg and farther afield, mostly from patients diagnosed as schizophrenic. Psychiatrist John M. MacGregor observed that “these ‘things’ are the product of an obsessional involvement with images in the service of extremely unusual preoccupations and ideas.” They are cosmological diagrams, maps of planets or worlds, depictions of visions and visitations of the dead, icons of private religions, influencing machines or magical weapons, medical illustrations, excitants for an explosive sexuality: “Commonly, there is no desire to share these things with anyone, and the images are kept secret, or are hidden.”10 They express a drive to create a metaphysical habitat for oneself alone.Prinzhorn found that he could not diagnose the psychiatric traumas and conditions of the patients from the images they made. Although they had no art education, these individuals had through long and obsessive application come upon techniques and styles that gave their works intense coherence, economy, and extraordinary expressiveness. Prinzhorn had obtained a degree in art history before training as a doctor and psychiatrist. He argued that the works of asylum image-makers issue from the same basic drives—an expressive urge, the urge to play, an ornamental urge, an ordering tendency, a tendency to imitate, and the need for symbols—that are at work in professional artists. Prinzhorn identified ten masters of the asylum, whose works exhibit exceptional skill, power, and eloquence.Professional artists such as expressionists Paul Klee and Alfred Kubin and surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst looked upon the works reproduced in Prinzhorn's book with awe and admiration; Paul Éluard called it “the most beautiful book of images there is.”11 Jean Dubuffet collected thousands of works of the insane, prisoners, and also spiritualists, mediums, and children, people ignorant of the canons and taste of the art world, calling them art brut, and eventually housed them in a building in Lausanne, Switzerland, set up as an antimuseum. English writers now call them the works of “outsider artists.”For postmodern aesthetics and culture studies the materials and styles of the artist are culturally produced, and an image or audio composition is constituted as art by the judgment of the art world, recognized because it makes a significant statement at a specific time in the evolution of art history. These works were made by individuals untrained in art and ignorant of the art world. Yet these works that issue out of their exaltations and terrors and made as metaphysical habitats for them were recognized to have in addition extraordinary aesthetic quality—and just because they were isolated from, free from the constraints of, the canons, tradition, taste, and trafficking of the art world. “Madness lightens the man, gives him wings, and promotes clairvoyance,” Dubuffet observed:12 “Insanity is the who Paul Éluard that the to be realized that to understand the of art a new conception of the first-person singular is He the as in constituted by what is from and by consciousness a of creative energies, and not as but as individual. The attention to the art of was motivated and the that the fundamental identified by Prinzhorn were of “The artist is not a kind of every is a kind of We need theory to understand how the basic drives that produce are in and set the first-person book The I argued that and the the but also the of things we and the other are not simply and social they are as real as we are and order order our and our We need a theory that this reality and this ordering In The I a force in the first-person the force of to one's a force, and a force a narrative of one's own I have attention to zones in the field of research where the methods of and cultural research up the first-person singular and the specific forces of the first-person singular. to these zones will to a more and more concept of the first-person singular.

Preaching from Pictures: A Japanese Mandala Produced and directed by David W. Plath