Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?
Ebook
This book critically analyses the creation and effects of spirituality as both discourse and practice in Japan. It shows how the value of spirituality has been sustained by scholars who have wished for a more civic role for religion; by the publishing industry whose exponential growth in the 1980s fashioned those who later identified as the representatives of this “new spirituality culture”; by “spiritual therapists” who have sought to eke out a livelihood in an increasingly professionalized and regulated therapeutic field; and by the cruel optimism of an increasingly precarious workforce placing its hopes in the imagined alternative that the supirichuaru represents.
Ioannis Gaitanidis offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of 'alternativity' that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies and the anthropology/sociology of medicine.
This book uses case studies of spirituality in contemporary Japan to to critically rethink the dynamic power of “alternativity” in discourse and practice in contemporary societies.
Offers original case-studies of non-established and loosely organized religions in contemporary Japan
Provides a framework for transnational/translocal comparison with non-Japanese “alternative” religions
Offers a new transdisciplinary conceptualisation of “alternativity” that can be applied across and beyond the disciplines of religious studies, media studies, popular culture studies, and the anthropology/sociology of medicine
List of Figures
List of Graphs
Acknowledgments
Note on Naming Conventions
Introduction
1. Spiritual Therapists
2. Spiritual Academia
3. Print Spirituality
4. Alternative Therapies in the Age of Attention
5. Precarities in the Spiritual Business
6. Spirituality on Trial
Conclusion: Spirituality and the 'Alternative'
List of Japanese Terms and Names
Notes
References
Index
Through novel periodization and careful attention to academic fields beyond religious studies, Gaitanidis completely upends the received wisdom on 'spirituality,' ... This book is required reading not only for scholars of Japanese religions, but also for anyone interested in the study of alternative and emergent groups that may or may not describe themselves as 'religious.' ... Revolutionary.
This book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in spirituality, what it does, and how it became a business, lifestyle and scholarly discipline in contemporary Japan. Rigorously researched and based on extensive original materials, it provides invaluable insights and is an important addition to the field.
An important contribution to the study of contemporary Japanese religion. This volume is insightful and rich in ethnographic detail, portraying spiritual therapists as freelance workers in a precarious economy. It also provides much-needed correctives to academic narratives of the so-called “spirituality boom” or “commodification of religion”.
- Title: Spirituality and Alternativity in Contemporary Japan: Beyond Religion?
- Author: Ioannis Gaitanidis
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2022
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781350262638, 9781350262614, 1350262617, 1350262633
- Resource ID: LLS:9781350262638
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-04-09T07:21:28Z
Ioannis Gaitanidis is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global and Transdisciplinary Studies, Chiba University, Japan.