Description
Book SynopsisProvides an ethnographic rendering of religious rituals and ascetic practices at the Akakura Mountain Shrine in northern Japan. This book explains that spiritual practice at the Akakura shrine is motivated by the efforts of women and men to comprehend and manage contradictory obligations and desires related to personal health, family, and work.
Trade Review"
Immortal Wishes reveals the deeply embodied nature of a religion which is physically labored at with a subtlety and intensity that is as sensuous as it is spiritual. It is this aesthetics—personal, historical, collective—that Ellen Schattschneider captures with the delicacy of her prose and analysis."—Anne Allison, Duke University
"Ellen Schattschneider has given us an account of Japanese religious experience that is at once powerfully evocative and analytically sophisticated.
Immortal Wishes is a remarkable book that should prove invaluable not only for students of Japan but also for anyone wanting to understand the transformative power of religious experience."—Bradd Shore, Emory University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Note on Conventions xiii
Introduction: Labor and Transcendence 1
1. Predicaments of History: Ritual Life on a Japanese Periphery 19
2. Between Worlds: Akakura's Architecture of Potential Transformation 46
3. Labor and Rebirth: Cosmological Kinship in the Annual Ritual Cycle 86
4. Miniature Mountains: Offerings and Exchange 121
5. My Mother's Garden: Ascetic Discipline on the Mountain 145
6. I am the Mirror: The Political Dimensions of Representational Action 173
Conclusion 210
Appendix: Guide to Persons Mentioned in the Text 231
Notes 233
Bibliography 251
Index 263
