Keywords

sacred place, sacred-profane, political economy

Objectives

This research will be a comparative study of diversity and similarity in the contemporary significance of sacred spaces. “Sacred” will be defined from sociological and social anthropological perspectives and the comparisons confined to the contemporary significance and historical backgrounds of sacred spaces in India, China, and Russia. In the modern West, religious traditions have been redefined, becoming more self-conscious, more materialistic, and, most recently, repeatedly redefined in postmodern terms. Ideologies have hardened into fundamentalism. In that contemporary context, sacred spaces have become “the impregnable fortresses” of increasingly materialistic and ideological “traditional religion.” They have also become the gardens in which the commercialization of and conversion into a heritage “consumer religion” flourish. While exploring the political economy of sacred places in Eurasia’s three largest nation-states, Russia, China, and India, we will reconsider the contemporary significance of religion, with the primary goal of fundamentally rethinking theories concerned with religious practice and dogma, and derived from Western models.

Research Results

For this research, a total of 12 workshops were held over three and a half years. Any of co-researchers and special lecturers had a wealth of experience in conducting field survey and the fact that it was a group of researchers who were eligible for conducting empirical research that goes beyond the contemplative viewpoint associated with religious research is believed to be a factor that made it relatively easy to develop this into a comparative study. Thanks to active participation of young researchers in particular, the workshops were able to produce greater results than expected by the organizer. In this regard, let me take this opportunity to express my heartfelt appreciation.

In the first and second fiscal years, this research had been centered on anecdotal reports by co-researchers regarding sacred places in various regions. In the third fiscal year, with a view to broadening our perspective, we held an open workshop with the aim of promoting research exchange with Tohoku University and Miyagi Gakuin Women’s University while inviting lecturers who were experienced in field research from several countries, including Russia and India, and presented a wide array of cases and held discussions. In the final fiscal year, we introduced the content of publications by prospective authors, identified issues, developed regional research into comparative research, and re-examined the basic concept. As a result, among others, we confirmed the validity of the concept of “major regional powers in Eurasia” and recognized the richness and depth of issues held by “sacred places,” i.e., the object of research on the modern significance of religion and sacredness afresh.

This research originated from the research results of the Comparative Research in Major Regional Powers in Eurasia (2008–2013) for scientific research on innovative areas by the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University and was envisaged as its derivative development. The objective of the research was to redefine the European concept of sacredness fundamentally by limiting the target region to major regional powers in Eurasia, that is, Russia, China and India, and basically from the social standpoint to criticize radically the fact that religious research had been conducted based on European Christianity as the one and only model after all. Through the three-and-a-half-year project, we understood that the concept of religion or sacredness in these three regions, which anyhow underwent the social system to a varying degree, and the growing trend there toward creating sacred places or making them a tourist attraction on the back of economic globalization, deeply reflect historic and regional and social and political characteristics. We also understood that this created uniqueness of the respective regions and also was one of the factors that bring the common issues to these three regions to the surface. The reason for that was the fact that the religious situation in these regions has been generated by perverse circumstances where people are overly conscious of the European Christian world and the capitalism system for better or worse.

In this sense, we can point out both an academic significance of the concept of major regional powers in Eurasia per se as a criticism of Europe and the immanent limit attributable to the fact that it is an opposing concept that is excessively conscious of a big story. Our joint research reached the conclusion that any of the two would provide a perspective of criticizing the Western world that is not confined to sacred places.