Keywords

religious policy, religious practice, secularism

Objectives

Influenced by modernism’s promotion of rationalization, in many parts of the world religion has been excluded from political and social institutions. In recent years, however, the flourishing of fundamentalism and public religions has led to a revitalization and reassessment of religious traditions. Religion, which had been quarantined from the public sphere, has once again begun to permeate into society and to display new forms. In these cases, the concept of religion is not limited to traditional forms. In new social currents such as environmentalism and tourism, we catch glimpses of the new religiosity.
Our aim is to better understand religion in the contemporary world by taking not only traditional religions but also these new seemingly social phenomena into consideration, whose image appears so different from the conventional concept of religion. The anthropology of religion in Japan has tended to specialize in research on specific traditional religious world views. Through our research, we hope to re-create the religious anthropology in Japan by opening it to the global currents.

Research Results

Awareness that it has become difficult to identify the outline of religion in the contemporary world underlies this research. Especially in Japan, an impression of research trends around the 1980s, whose objects of research such as shamanism and the worldview in a village, lingers over the term “anthropology of religion”, and it makes the term unsuitableto the current state. Considering these conditions, the conclusion that was drawn from the research group was in a word, to put religion in a relationship with things unreligious and study it by relativizing it.
The issue that came up time after time in the research project was a trap of the concept, i.e., religion. The aforementioned objective of research was set when the research group was inaugurated and as it already shows, the conceptual configuration indicates that religiosity still re-appears there after religion was eliminated from the political and social system. Unless we think this through here, it can give rise to a circular argument in which religiosity still remains after religion is eliminated and from there religion is re-created. In actuality, however, if something like religiosity is felt, it will not necessarily generate religion. Actually, a certain number of people dislike the concept of religion and try to reorganize their own thoughts or practice based on the concept of spirituality, morals, tradition, education, etc. Given that this is the reason we feel that it has become difficult to identify the outline of religion, we need to focus on this in conducting research.
Come to think of it, I believe that anthropology of religion in the 1980s in Japan appeared to latently face the same issue. In those days, what researchers considered religion was the object of research in the discipline and a question was rarely raised as to whether a village’s view of the world or shamanism was really (in what sense) a religion for those who practice it. In the contemporary world, however, it is known that after modern religious concepts or systems took root for a certain period of time, it has affected the practice of local life in a number of regions. A phase like this is believed to be the one that Japanese anthropology of religion in the past overlooked.
Based on the above discussion, this research group set the following research policy as an answer. In other words, the concept of religion is used in a limited sense, that is, a modern religious concept and system. Then we shed light on how each local people make use of, transform, or abandon, ‘religion’ in order to seek a better life on their own and what thoughts or life practice is reconstructed from there without overlooking the fact that people are involved in politics over religion. Under this policy, environmentalism, morals, religious political activities, pilgrimage tourism, human rights education, interdenominational memorial activities, Paganism, etc. were gotten out on the table as the specific objects of research and we were able to hold wide-ranging discussions. As regards the themes of morals and the religious situation in China in particular, we were able to make a panel presentation at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) and the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR), respectively, in 2015.