Thursday 25 December 2008

Reading 'Shamanisms Today', part 2

Picking up from where we left off...

Researchers may feel that ASCs are the thing that sets shamans apart from their clients- but presence of ASCs is not necessarily an important defining feature of shamans from an emic perspective. (p.313)

Some people argue that shamanism gives people access to a type of revelatory information which mainstream Western society lacks (from the context given, I'm uncertain exactly what sort of information we're talking about, but I'm guessing it's information about how to handle individuals' transitions between different social roles, like from childhood to adulthood). R. Ridington argues that actually, it's not that the modern West lacks this information, but that the distribution of this information is centralised. This means that our society de-emphasises the importance of individual transformations (since we've got institutions that are designed to make them routine), and focuses instead societal or political transformations (since these affect institutions, and thus millions of individual people) (p.312). Or, I think that's what he's saying. I'll have to chase up the original article.

A. Siikala argues that a shaman communicating with spirit is basically a person taking on different roles, using techniques which in the West are referred to as 'hypnosis' (p.312). Noll apparently argues that the defining feature of shamans is not that they see visions, per se, but the fact that they go into a controlled visionary state and then actively engage with the visions they encounter (presumably in contrast to, say, possessed people) (p.313). Dreams may be very important in shamanic practice, but their role hasn't really been emphasised by most social scientists (at least, not since Tylor) (p.313). Atkinson argues that Western social scientists have a tendency to stress the idea of shamanism as a kind of alternative medicine because this makes it easier for us to understand (whereas if you stress the idea of shamanism as a religious practice, then more social scientists are likely to see it as weird and scary).

Additionally, comparing shamans to doctors or psychotherapists can sometimes be a way of mocking the latter professions, by suggesting they're not as 'scientific' as they think they are (to be fair, some psychotherapists, notably Jungians, have responded by trying to apply shamanic insights to their own theories) (p.313-4). Various people have offered explanations for why shamanic healing works- the usual ones involve psychotherapy and/or the placebo effect, although Kulcsar has apparently suggested that !Kung trancers might treat people by way of sweating out opiates and then rubbing them into their patients' skin (p.313). An increasing number of researchers are reacting against the tendency to portray shamans as ethereal and otherworldly, by looking at how they have reacted to political movements like colonialism and ethnic conflict (p.315-7).

Some people define 'shamans' as people who adopt a relatively commanding attitude towards the spirits they communicate with; giving them instructions in an authoritative way rather than adopting a supplicatory attitude towards them. This is supposed to be what distinguishes them from other kinds of people who communicate with supernatural beings, like priests or possession mediums. Eliade went so far as to say that shamanism never involves possession and always includes some sort of out-of-body experience or belief in magical flight. The difficulty with this is that Lewis' research suggests that the archetypal shamans (the Tungus ritualists from whom we get the name) do actually engage in all the stuff Eliade said we needed to exclude from the definition of 'shamanism' (p.317).

Still, it's possible to argue that shamanism involves more of a commanding attitude towards spirits than possession cults* do. However, it sounds like a possible upshot of this approach is that women who communicate with spirits are less likely to be labelled 'shamans', at least when researchers are working in cultures where women are expected to adopt a relatively meek and placatory attitude in public (whether they are talking to mortal men or to spirits). It seems to me like the same might hold for cultures where men are generally expected to adopt a concilliatory sort of attitude towards others (I don't know enough about Japan to state this with confidence, but maybe this would be one example- perhaps this is why Shinto ritualists are referred to as 'priests' rather than 'shamans'?) (p.317).

Another implication of this line of thought is that it may undermine the argument that possession cults represent a unique opportunity for marginal people to seize some power for themselves (by claiming to be possessed by a very powerful and authoritative spirit). This argument seems to be largely based on the idea that a disproportionate number of possessed people are female, poor, transgendered or in some other way disqualified for most routes to power. If the only difference between possession cults and shamanism is the degree to which a researcher sees their leaders as acting in an authoritative way, then there may be a tendency to label cults made up of women and poor people as 'possession cults', while cults composed of men and local political leaders are referred to as 'shamanism'. That could imply that the whole thing is a definitional tautology, not a causation issue- that is, rather than it being the case that possession cults attract marginal people, or that marginalised cults place a greater emphasis on possession, it could just be that marginal cults get labelled as 'possession cults' rather than 'shamanism' at the point where researchers get involved.

Having said this, I need to get around to reading Lewis' Ecstatic Religion, so maybe I'm overstating the critique- for example, if it turned out that there's some sort of well-defined difference between 'possession' and 'shamanic trance', then the basic argument would still hold. The argument would also hold up if it turned out that in most cultures low-status people can get away with speaking authoritatively to spirits, whether or not they're considered to be 'possessed' at the time (cf p.317, although I'm not sure to what extent Atkinson would agree with what I'm saying here).

There's also the complicating factor that women in many cultures HAVE been labelled as 'shamans' by researchers (e.g. see Koreans, Inuit, Taiwanese shamans, p.317-8). I'd be interested in knowing whether these researchers are also using the 'person who speaks authoritatively to spirits' definition of 'shaman'. It might be that different regional specialists have gotten into the habit of using the word in different ways- or, alternatively, I could just be talking rubbish.

One person who apparently DOES use a definition of 'shamanism' at odds with the 'authoritative spirit-communicator' model is Taussig, who apparently emphasises the idea of 'shamans' being people whose main role involves disrupting and decentering power structures (it's not clear from this whether he thinks this is shamanism's emic raison d'etre, either from the perspective of shamans or their clients; or if he thinks that this is just the EFFECT which shamanism has on a culture, regardless of whether shamans intend it). Atkinson argues that this needs to be balanced against shamans' efforts to maintain order, whether this is at an individual, household or community level (p.319).

So, to sum up, the definitions of 'shaman' identified by this article would seem to be:

-a specific kind of ritualist found in certain cultures in Siberia and perhaps also Central Asia.
-an outdated and potentially ethnocentric term for ritualists from any culture who strike Westerners as 'exotic'
-someone who has a mental illness but lives in a culture which does not recognise it as such (this definition seems to have fallen out of favour)
-any ritualist who experiences ASCs.
-a ritualist who experiences a specific kind of ASC called an SSC (which may be objectively identifiable via brain scanning)
-someone who uses hypnosis to take on different roles or alter egos as part of their religious practice
-someone who goes into a controlled trance and actively engages with the spirits they encounter
-someone who adopts a commanding attitude when communicating with spirits
-the above, plus also must have out-of-body experiences and/or the sensation of magical flight. Does not usually experience spirit possession
-a ritualist who disrupts and decentres power structures



*Just to reiterate: 'cult' here isn't meant in the pejorative sense, just in the sense of a subset of a wider religious tradition.

Reading 'Shamanisms Today' by Jane Monnig Atkinson (Part 1)

(1992, Annual Review of Anthropology, 21, pp.307-30)

I'm in a pedantic mood, so this summary may drag on quite a bit. Also, the review article is very good, but it's almost 20 years old now. I'm going to stick with the present tense when discussing the current state of play, but obviously it's possible that the debate has shifted since then.

Geertz and Taussig felt shamanism was a dead category. Various people have tried deconstructing it, pointing out that there's a lot of variation between different kinds of shaman in Siberia (where the word comes from), let alone in the world as a whole. People have also argued that it's probably better to analyse ritualists in the context of their own culture and the people who attend their rituals, rather than comparing them to fellow 'shamans' who might have lived a century ago and on a different continent). As an upshot, D.H. Holmberg argues that 'shamanism' should no longer be considered worth discussing as a global phenomenon, in the same way that 'totemism' no longer is. This kind of sentiment means that people who are still interested in doing comparative studies on shamanism often struggle to find the kind of case studies they need- not because people aren't researching the kind of rituals they're interested in, but because this research doesn't use the word 'shaman' and so mostly ends up getting read by regional specialists (p.307-9).

However, Atkinson reckons that since the 80's we've seen a resurgence of interest in 'shamanism' from various disciplines, especially psychology. Crucially, psychologists have argued that it doesn't matter how much cultural variation there is within 'shamanism', because the phenomenon is unified on a neurological level. That is, 'shamans' can be defined as people who pursue a particular kind of ASC (altered state of consciousness)- it doesn't matter if they pursue it in different ways, or construct different kinds of religious model to explain it. Similar views are held by many of the Westerners who are interested in exploring ASCs themselves (e.g. people in the Pagan and New Age movements) (p.308).

Meanwhile, those ethnographers who continue use the term 'shamanism' apparently often do so simply because they find it a convenient gloss for some specific local practice. These ethnographers aren't necessarily going to be interested in asking questions like "to what extent do the people I call 'shamans' resemble the people who other researchers have labelled 'shamans'?" (p.309)

There's a debate that went on for several decades over whether shamans in other cultures are experiencing what our culture normally calls 'symptoms of a mental disorder', such as schizophrenic delusions. It looks like that debate has now petered out, with the general consensus being 'no'- or at least, it's not as straightforward as saying shamanism is a symptom of mental illness in and of itself (although in some cultures the rate of mental disorders may be higher among shamans than among the community at large, e.g. because people with chronic health problems like mental illness are more likely to study shamanic techniques in order to treat the problem) (p.310).

So these days, 'shamanism' is still seen as being defined by abnormal mental states, but they're referred to as 'ASCs' or 'trance' rather than 'symptoms of mental illness' (Atkinson thinks these terms were chosen because they sound more academic than Eliade's term, 'ecstasy'). Some researchers go so far as to say that all shamans experience a specific kind of ASC, which Harner refers to as an SSC ('shamanic state of consciousness'), while other researchers argue this same ASC is characteristic of all religious experiences, not just shamanic ones. Others treat the words 'shamanism' and 'ASC' as being basically synonymous. Meanwhile, R. Walsh has attempted to to categorise ASCs involved in shamanism and compare them to those involved in yoga or Buddhist meditation. There is relatively little consensus between these researchers over whether ASCs associated with 'shamanism' should be considered distinct from those associated with 'possession' (p.310).

There's been some speculation that shamanism might be associated with a specific type of unusual brain state (P.A. Wright goes so far as to claim that he can identify a specific brain state associated with SSC and distinct from those associated with possession, although it sounds like at the time of Atkinson's articles, it remained to be seen whether this result would be replicated). In general, it sounds like the amount of actual experimental research on the brains of practicing shamans is relatively low in comparison to the amount of speculation about what might be going on, but maybe that's been corrected by now (p.311).

Obviously all this focus on individual mental states, especially individual brain states, is going to trigger the anti-reductionism response in anthropologists, who are going to want to read the behaviour in terms of the sociocultural context. Atkinson herself argues that "to analyze shamanism primarily as a trance phenomenon is akin to analyzing marriage solely as a
function of reproductive biology" (p.311).

Tuesday 23 December 2008

Some fun quotes from 'Adam, Pre-Adamites, and Extra-Terrestrial Beings in Early Modern Europe' by Philip Almond

2006, Journal of Religious History, 30, 2, pp.163-174

Almond's article is about the way in which geographical exploration and conquest led some 17th-century European intellectuals to speculate about how the peoples of the 'new world' fit into existing beliefs about humanity (e.g., how they'd arrived on distant continents without large ships, why they looked and acted differently to Europeans, etc). In particular, it focuses on the arguments that maybe indigenous Americans were descended from someone other than Adam (which potentially explained where Cain's wife came from, but raised a whole host of other questions about whether this meant Native Americans were subject to Original Sin, whether they were included in Christ's Atonement, even whether they were fully 'human').

Around the same kind of time, the development of heliocentric astronomy (and thus, the conclusion that the Earth wasn't necessarily all that special astronomically speaking) led some people to start speculating about life on other planets (and thus about the theological status of aliens).

Some random emic quotes I liked:


"All the Australians are of both Sexes, or Hermaphrodites, and if it happens that a child is born but of one, they strangle him as a Monster."
-Gabriel de Foigny, 1693, A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis, quoted p.163. According to a quote from one of de Foigny's imaginary informants, this also meant that they lived "without being sensible of any of these Animal Ardours one for another, and we cannot bear them spoke of without horrour: Our Love has nothing Carnall, nor Brutall in it." Instead, children grew inside them like fruit.



“the different Soyls, or various Modifications of Matter in several parts of the World, [produce] Men of different Colours and Complexions.”
-Thomas Robinson, 1694, The Anatomy of the Earth, quoted p.170



An interesting theory of Lamarckian runaway selection in Ethiopians:

"in a Generation or two, that high degree of Tawniness became the nature, and from thence the Pride of the Inhabitants; the men began to value themselves chiefly upon this complexion, and the Women to affect them the better for it; from thence by the love to the Male so complexioned, the daily conversation with him and the affectation of his hew, there was caused a considerable Influence upon the Foetus’s which the females were pregnant with; so that, upon this account, the Children in Aethiopia became more and more black, according to the fancy of the Mother."


-William Nicholls, 1696, A Conference With a Theist (quoted p.170)


"Now can any one look upon, and compare these Systems together, without being amazed at the vast Magnitude and noble attendance of these two Planets, in respect of this pitiful little Earth of ours? Or can they force themselves to think, that the wise Creator has so disposed of all his Plants and Animals here, has furnish’d and adorn’d this Spot only, and has left all those Worlds bare and destitute of Inhabitants, who might adore and worship him; or that those prodigious Bodies were made only to twinkle to, and be studied by some few perhaps of us poor fellows?"

-Christian Huygens, 1698, The Celestial Worlds Discover'd, quoted p.171

"God therefore may have joined immaterial souls, even of the same class and capacities in their separate state, to other kind of bodies, and in other laws of union; and from those different laws of union there will arise quite different affections, and natures, and species of the compound beings. So that we ought not upon any account to conclude, that if there be rational inhabitants in the moon or Mars, or any unknown planets of other systems, they must therefore have human nature, or be involved in the circumstances of our world."

-Richard Bentley, quoted p.173

Saturday 20 December 2008

Reading: '"Why Are You Mixing What Cannot Be Mixed?" Shared Devotions in the Monotheisms', by Dionigi Albera

(2008, History and Anthropology, 19, 1, pp.37-59)

A major chunk of this essay is focused on responding to arguments made by R.M. Hayden in his 2002 essay 'Antagonistic tolerance: competitive sharing of religious sites in South Asia and Balkans' (Current Anthropology, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 205–231). Unfortunately, I haven't read this essay, so I don't know how accurate Albera's critique is. So here's an attempt at a third-hand summary: some people argue that if you have a shrine at which people from two different religious traditions worship side by side, then this is evidence of religious tolerance*. Hayden argues that in fact, shared shrines can be vehicles for conflict between the two traditions (he uses the phrases 'competitive sharing' and 'antagonistic tolerance'). For example, shared use of a shrine may be something that happens when one side pragmatically decides that they can't get away with totally repressing the other side's rituals, and so their best bet is just to take control of them themselves (p.39).

Albera thinks that Hayden is overstating his case, to the extent that "syncretism, in his view, is always a more or less disguised form of competition. The tolerance is under no circumstances genuine. [...] From this point of view, even the crossing of the borders between the groups is only tactical ground recognition of another’s domain, a temporary form of compromise tolerated by a weak minority, or accepted by a majority momentarily blocked in its will to dominate. The direction is clear: in the end a group is bound to triumph over the others and to impose its monopoly of the sacred site." (p.39)

Hayden apparently also applies Barth's theories of ethnicity to religion. I assume this means he's arguing that when analysing religions, we should be focusing on the way in which religious groups emically define the borders between themselves and other religions (and asking: under what cirumstances do people try to cross those borders?). This strikes me as a reasonably sensible idea- at least, it seems to work with ethnicity (or at any rate, it seems more productive than, say, trying to make a definitive list of all the key properties of a particular ethnic group). However, Albera argues that it's not necessarily helpful to think of religious groups as having 'borders' in this way (p.39).

Hayden apparently does acknowledge that there are likely to be differences between the way in which ordinary people see the relationship between different religions in their everyday local environment, vs the way in which religious or political leaders talk about these relationships (apparently Nandy called this the distinction between 'religion as faith' and 'religion as ideology', but I'm not convinced I like those terms. 'Ideology' and 'faith' are words that sound conceptually slippery and not especially value-neutral). But Albera thinks Hayden doesn't follow this up enough, leading to the impression that he sees 'Hindus', 'Muslims' etc as undifferentiated blocs (p.39).

Albera also thinks Hayden needs to be clearer about when he's referring to syncretism in the sense that there's one shrine which is used for rituals from multiple religious traditions, or in the sense that the rituals themselves contain elements from more than one tradition (p.39). This seems like an important point. Albera points to Fredrik Hasluck's set of three categories: "conversion, intrusion and identification. The circulation of a series of legends may suggest that a saint belonging to religion A was in fact secretly converted to religion B; that the mausoleum of a saint of religion B also housed the tomb of a saint of religion A; that the holy person of religion A was actually the transfiguration of a saint of religion B." (p.51 in Albera; original reference is Hasluck, F. W. (2000), Christianity and Islam Under the Sultans, ed. Margareth M. Hasluck, The Isis Press, Istanbul (originally published by Clarendon Press, New York, 1929, p.457-8). Albera further stresses that we need to think in terms of "a range that can go from a simple proximity to imitation, borrowing and blending." (p.55)

Albera's decided to illuminate this issue by looking at the Meditteranean. Most people assume that there's a major fault line in this area between Christianity and Islam (cf Huntington's Clash of Civilisations). This view is backed up by obvious examples from places like Kosovo. There's also the fact that both Christianity and Islam are monotheistic and hence relatively exclusivist. Both religions tolerate a certain amount of syncretism between their own rituals and the 'pagan' traditions of convert populations (e.g. by converting formerly worshipped deities into saints), but it's harder to picture a way for either religion to compromise when faced by a rival monotheism (p.40). Having said this, Bahá'í seems to cope ok- but maybe that's a sign that in order to officially syncretise two or more creedal monotheisms, you need to expend a lot of effort on explaining how you intend to integrate their doctrine. Most of the stuff Albera discusses in this essay involves popular religion rather than top-down initiatives (the fact that most Abrahamic syncretisms seem to be local popular worship rather than officially sanctioned stuff may also explain why women often seem to be heavily involved in syncretic worship- see p.52).

There's some evidence for syncretism between Judaism and some early Christian churches (e.g. Christians attending synagogues in Antioch, Thessalonia's Basilica of Saint Anthony attracting Christians, Jews and pagans) (p.41). For some reason, though, later Christians don't seem to have co-worshipped with Jews very much at all- and when they do, Muslims tend to be involved too- e.g. at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. As Albera notes, you'd expect to see more Christian-Muslim syncretism than Christian-Jew or Jew-Muslim even all religions were equally willing to syncretise with each other, purely because the number of Jews in the world is smaller. But this can't be the idea story, because rates of Muslim-Jew syncretism seem relatively high (p.44). There's also the fact that, in general, Islamic nations have been more open to allowing resident communities of religious minorities than Christian nations have been- so the opportunities for closer interactions are higher (p.42).

Having said all this, you still have situations of exclusively Muslim-Christian shared sites, like 15th century Mount Sinai. The Christian pilgrim Felix Fabri records that he and his companions prayed at Sinai chapel in 1483 and found Muslims worshipping in the adjacent mosque. This didn't seem to perturb them, since Fabri calmly notes that “men of all rites and all sects flocked here from all parts of the world” to venerate Moses. However, Fabri further notes that neither Muslims nor Christians would tolerate the presence of Jews at the site (p.45). After the emergence of Islam, churches and mosques sometimes shared the same courtyard (or even the same building- there's evidence that the shift towards more geometric motifs in the mosaics of the Church of St Stephen in Jordan happened so that strongly aniconic Muslims using the building to worship wouldn't be offended by art depicting living beings (p.42).)

Sometimes when historical Muslim writers describe visiting Christian churches, it sounds like they were mainly there as tourists attracted by their hospitality and tranquil gardens. At other times, it sounds like churches represented a kind of forbidden fruit, by offering the opportunity to consume alcohol or "the prospect of establishing relationships with Christian women or with young monks (one of the most famous Muslims poets, Abu Nuwas, who lived between the eighth and the ninth century, sang in his verses of his desire for a young monk)" (p.42). But sometimes they were also drawn to churches for religious reasons- some Muslims attended Christian festivals or even services, worshipped icons and relics, sought healing or made vows.

Random interesting quote: "There is in Algiers, rue Sainte, a small synagogue on an old marabout: when the last Muslim oukil, Sheikh Khider died in the last century, without a successor, he left, by title deed, the local to a rabbi friend, with the clause that Muslims would be allowed to come. The curious fact is that Muslim women continue to come, when a thâleb told them that this could help to cure sterility or avoid repudiation. They revolve seven times around the teba, the podium of the readers of the Torah, which is roughly in the middle of the room and that even during the office, without troubling the assistants and without the latter troubling them." -recorded by Emile Dermenghem, 1954, quoted p.50

"Sometimes homonymy has been the vehicle of assimilation, as in the case of the cult of Saint Thecla in Istanbul, which after the Turkish conquest was replaced by that of Toklu (orDoghlu) Dede (see Hasluck 2000: 66)." (p.51) (quoted because it will amuse Bunny).

A small thing that seemed a bit odd to me- in Albera's conclusion, he makes the offhand remark that "even in their most intransigent constituent—behaviour related to religion—civilizations appear contradictory and inhabited by diversity" (p.54). Is Albera using the word intransigent to mean 'uncompromising'? If so, I'm not sure I understand why he thinks religion is civilisations' most intransigent constituent- there are lots of things civilisations are unwilling to compromise over (e.g. their political and economic systems)- I'm not sure why he seems to be saying that religion is necessarily more fixed and inflexible than anything else.

One other interesting quote: "This inspired the famous observation of Pierre Bayle (1740: 265): “Mohammedans, according to the principles of their faith, are obliged to use violence to destroy other religions, and still they tolerated them for several centuries. Christians have received order to preach and educate, and nevertheless from immemorial time they exterminate by iron and fire those who are not of their religion.” -Pierre Bayle, 1740, from Brunel's Dictionnaire historique et critique (quoted p.56). This strikes me as one of those quotes which are pithy but rather oversimplified- still, it might be interesting to see if there's a proper critique from anyone who knows more about the topic than I do.


* On the surface of things, this seems like a fairly reasonable assumption- I was somewhat confused when Hardacre didn't seem to find it plausible when she was discussing the relationship between Shinto and Buddhist priests at shared shrines in pre-Meiji Japan (she definitely wasn't citing Hayden to support this, because she was writing well before 'Antagonistic tolerance' was published, but she might have been drawing on a similar argument from someone else).

Thursday 4 December 2008

Reading 'Shinto and the State: 1868-1988', Introduction and Chapter 1

(Helen Hardacre, 1989, Princeton: Princeton University Press)


I'm somewhat disappointed by this book. I think that's probably a result of mistaken expectations, though. It would probably be a pretty useful book if you were planning on doing a project on Shinto and had a bunch of other sources, but wanted to check you'd covered all the key events during a certain period. Hardacre also explicitly states that she decided to devote minimal attention to the excitingly-controversial WW2 period, since so much has already been written about it in relation to Shinto. That's a reasonable decision, but the end result was a book which felt quite dry and left me feeling like there were lots of things she'd brought up which I would have liked her to go into more detail about (in particular, the relationship between Shinto and Buddhism).

If I'm reading Hardacre right, then here's a potted summary of Shinto's development over the last couple of centuries. It sounds as though Shinto in the mid-nineteenth century was pretty similar to traditional Chinese polytheism (in the sense that it didn't really exist as a unified entity with its own name or institutions, and ordinary people didn't have any issues about mixing and matching it with Buddhism). At least, they sound pretty similar at a village level- I know virtually nothing about how pre-20th century Chinese religion worked at a government level, so I'm not sure how the comparison holds up in that respect.

Hardacre stresses that up until the late nineteenth-century priests who worshipped the kami (Shinto gods) were markedly low-status compared to Buddhist priests. This was apparently made quite clear by the Japanese system of formal ettiquette (for example, Shinto priests got seated lower than Buddhist clerics at village assemblies- p.15). True, the imperial court patronised both Buddhist and Shinto rituals, but in the Tokugawa era the real power (and hence the money to fund rituals) lay with the Shogunate, who sound as though they didn't hold the kami in particularly high esteem (or at any rate, they don't seem to have stressed the relationship between themselves and the kami in order to legitimate their power, as later Japanese governments have done) (p.11).

Most Shinto shrines were located within Buddhist temples, and only staffed parttime. Shinto priests were also all legally required to register with Buddhist temples and receive Buddhist funeral services when they died. Meanwhile, the kami were referred to as the protectors of Buddhist divinities (and their "phenomenal appearances (suijaku)"- whatever that means), implying that they were lesser beings. Ise (one of the top Shinto shrines) believed it was necessary to chant Buddhist sutras before the kami's altars, so that the kami could attain salvation (which is interesting because it sounds a bit like the way that Jains see the gods as being dependent on the Tirthankars' teachings, since they're otherwise doomed to the cycle of rebirths just like everyone else is). See p.14.

Hardacre remarks that "this situation did not pass entirely without protest, but organised resistance among Shinto priests was virtually unknown before the Meiji Restoration" (p.15). To me, this raises a question: to what extent did Tokugawa Shinto priests actually see this situation as problematic?

Hardacre seems to imply that the average Shinto priest resented being under the thumb of Buddhism and wished that they could operate independently. Obviously Hardacre is an expert on this topic, whereas I've read a grand total of one other book on Shinto (which wasn't primarily focused on Japanese history). So Hardacre's sense of the priests' perspective is going to be much more reliable than mine- I'm just wondering whether the majority of priests necessarily resented the situation. I can imagine a situation where the average Shinto priest saw their lower status as a matter of course (maybe even feeling grateful towards Buddhist temples for being gracious enough to offer their patronage to Shinto shrines). Or maybe you could have a situation where many Shinto priests dreamed of being as high-status as Buddhist priests were- but they mostly aspired to quit their jobs and become Buddhist priests, or something similarly high-status, rather than wishing that their current role could be more prestigious.

I'm having a particularly hard time guessing how Shinto priests felt about the legal requirement that they should have Buddhist funerals. John K. Nelson has given me the impression that Shinto's death taboo renders the concept of Shinto funerals pretty emically problematic (they do happen, but seemingly not that often, even when the deceased was a major patron of a Shinto shrine. See Enduring Identities p.281-2). Under those circumstances, is it possible that most Shinto priests didn't really care what sort of funeral they got (and were happy to delegate the nasty, ritually-impure business of funeral-conducting to someone else)? Again, I'm aware that Hardacre knows more about this topic than I ever will- apart from anything else, there's the fact that greater government support for Shinto would later lead to a brief wave of Shinto priests vandalising Buddhist property, which suggests there must have been some level of latent hostility (see p.63). I just wish she'd go into a bit more detail.

I also have no idea how Buddhist priests felt about Shinto in general- did they see its priests as potential competitors, or as subordinates doing a low-status but necessary job (spiritual janitors, maybe)?

The relationship between Shinto and Buddhism shifted in the Meiji period, due to the influence of a group of nationalist intellectuals known as the National Learning school. They had been around for some time, but the upheaveal of the Meiji period resulted in their radical ideas getting attention from politicians. The National Learning writers believed that Japanese culture needed to be purged of all foreign pollution (including Buddhism, since that had originated outside Japan). The arrival of Perry's fleet in 1853 led some of them to decide that the Japanese people needed to be united under a common ideology- this was the only way to strengthen the nation enough to expel the Western barbarians (p.16-17).

Phase One of Operation Expel The Western Barbarians seems to have involved a lot of fighting fire with fire. The plan basically seems to have been: let's capture Christianity, clone it, drain off all the theological content, and then shove Shinto into the vacant structure, bending it into whatever shape it needs to be in order to fit (the result looking maybe kind of like Krang and his robot suit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or maybe some sort of cyborg Wicker Man. Whatever the case, it should definitely be drawn by Keith Thompson). This process is apparently known as the Great Promulgation Campaign, which I can only hope sounds catchier in Japanese.

I can't imagine that many religions would survive this process well, but Shinto seems like a particularly stupid choice. The National Learning goal was to end up with a belief system that was very focused on doctrine- specifically, on an integrated set of doctrines under central control, and phrased in such a way as to make them sound militaristic and authoritarian (in the sense of focusing attention on the national government and its Strong Leader). In particular, they were expected to exalt the virtues of Japanese soldiers who had died in war. The priests of this new religion were also expected to adopt a pastoral role, moulding the lives of ordinary Japanese subjects (as well as preaching the standard theology to their congregations).

In other words, Shinto priests were expected to adopt a role which they were almost uniquely ill-suited to. Most of them had very little experience in public speaking, pastoral work, or disseminating doctrine to the public. This was the sort of thing that Buddhist priests specialised in- and Buddhist priests abandoned the Great Promulgation in droves as soon as it became apparent that the endgoal was to render them obsolete (although there were some who stuck around, using their superior preaching experience to subtly insert Buddhist doctrines into campaign sermons and so convert government-backed projects into stealth Buddhist evangelism drives. It didn't help that preachers were expected to fund these programmes themselves- the Buddhist clergy could depend on generous donations from long-standing parishioners, while the smaller Shinto shrines seriously struggled to fund their speakers. See p.45-6).

This is all in addition to the fact that Shinto priests were now suddenly supposed to be actively competing with Buddhists for the right to conduct funerals, and thus were effectively expected to ignore Shinto death taboos in order to perform rituals which many felt were beneath their dignity (although apparently the fact that funerals were a good source of income helped soften the blow for some. See p.47, 35). The general upshot seems to have been that the Campaign got mocked a lot for fermenting religious tension while trying to make Shinto priests do Buddhism's job (p.44). This impression was presumably not improved by bizarre incidents like the one where the Campaign's Great Teaching Institute moved into a building which had previously been a Buddhist temple patronised by the Tokugawa family. For some reason which I'm still struggling to grasp, the installation ceremony involved getting Buddhist priests to do a Shinto ritual while disguised as Shinto priests (using wigs and robes). The Institute itself soon came to be known as the Bureau of Indecision, or the Siesta Office (p.44).

The whole thing seems particularly badly-planned since it doesn't even seem to have made a serious attempt to capitalise on Shinto's existing support base. The Japanese public seems to have viewed Shinto priests as people whose job was performing a set of necessary rituals which required a certain amount of specialist liturgical knowledge. The exact form which these rituals took varied fairly widely from shrine to shrine. If you were really intent on turning Japan into an industrialised authoritarian state, then I'm sure there must have been SOME way to convert these familiar local rituals into a propaganda tool. Instead, Great Promulgation tried to abolish variation in favour of a nationally standardised system which most priests and worshippers seem to have found shallow, dull and confusing.

For example, the new state pantheon emphasised the role of the Three Deities of Creation. Only one of these deities (Amaterasu, in the form of Tenshōdaijin) had any kind of popular following. There was also a kind of official creed, in the form of the Three Great Teachings (which were apparently meant to reassure Buddhist priests that the Campaign had a solid doctrinal basis and hence was worth their participation). The three tenets were:

  1. patriotism and respect for the gods
  2. "making clear the principles of the Way of Heaven and the Way of Man"
  3. reverence for the emperor and obedience towards the imperial court

Which is fair enough, but if you're trying to indoctrinate people en masse, it helps NOT to try using an ideology which has no existing basis in popular thought. This is especially true if you really suck at explaining the ideology to the people who are expected to be propagating it. It doesn't help that the whole philosophical system seems to have boiled down fairly quickly into a list of religious duties for the pious citizen (including exciting responsibilities like paying your taxes, supporting conscription and accepting various aspects of Western culture in the name of "civilisation"). See p.43-4.

As a final added bonus, the Campaign succeeded in pissing off the priests at Izumo shrine (one of the nation's most important Shinto centres) by refusing to include their patron deity in the new core pantheon (as the official god of the underworld). This sparked off a row which split Shinto into factions and ended up encouraging most priests to believe that they should be trying as hard as possible to avoid discussing theology (since it only seemed to cause trouble). In the end, the Great Teaching Institute wussed out of making a formal decision on whether Izumo's god (Ōkuninushi no Mikoto) should be made official lord of the underworld or not. They just announced that Shinto priests above a certain rank were henceforth banned from ministering directly to parishioners. This meant that people like Izumo's top priests were now officially prevented from conducting funerals. The logic was apparently that if they weren't conducting funerals, they'd have no opportunity to make public pronouncements on which deity (if any) was in charge of the underworld. See p.49.

It's apparently incidents like this one which have led some Shinto-supporters to argue that Shinto is not a religion (since they feel that 'religion' implies a focus on doctrine, plus undignified stuff like funerals and prayers for the this-worldly benefit of parishioners). The argument seems to be that Shinto is, by contrast, a system of necessary rituals which transcends mere religion. Priests, it seems, should be striving to limit their performance of mere religious rituals to the bare minimum necessary to secure enough support from parishioners to keep the shrine running and funded (see p.34-5).

This is interesting, because it suggests a worldview very different to the one which drives the tension that sometimes gets described by Western theologians as doctrine vs praxis. It also suggests a big difference from the argument (often voiced by Western humanists) that various East Asian belief systems are not really 'religions' since they don't prioritise god-appeasing rituals clearly enough (thus making them secular philosophies by default). I'll have to see if I can find anything that elaborates further on the issue.