Ritual Practice in Modern Japan : Ordering Place, People, and Action

National surveys indicate that most Japanese, while professing no religious commitment, frequently perform rituals: They regularly tend their family home altars, look after family graves, participate in neighborhood festivals, and visit Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Are these rituals mere formalities? Based on fourteen months of fieldwork in Kamakura city near Tokyo, Satsuki Kawano examines the power of ritual and its relevance for modern urbanites. She reveals the indebtedness of ritual to forms that create an elevated context and infuse the mundane with a sense of moral order. By employing acts and environments common to everyday life, Kawano argues, ritual evokes morally positive values such as purity, gratitude, respect, and indebtedness. Rather than objectify morality in a sacred text or religious doctrine, ritual embodies and emplaces a sense of what it means to be a good person and creates moments of personal significance and engagement. In Kamakura, belief is therefore a consequence and not a prerequisite of ritual engagement. __Ritual Practice in Modern Japan__ effectively challenges the widespread assumption that ritual in non-Western societies has little moral significance and that, with modernization, "traditional" practices inevitably disappear. This is a book that will interest scholars and students of cultural anthropology, ritual studies, and Japanese studies.

China’s century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun's seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, Voices in Revolution offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture.

Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China's early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China's civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China’s party-guided market economy.

Voices in Revolution alters the way we read by moving poems off the page and into the real time and space of literary activity. To all readers it offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China's modern literary experience. Specialists will appreciate the book's inclusion of noncanonical texts as well as its innovative interdisciplinary approach.

National Surveys Indicate That Most Japanese, While Professing No Religious Commitment, Frequently Perform Rituals. Based On 14 Months Of Fieldwork In Kamakura City Near Tokyo, Satsuki Kawano Examines The Power Of Ritual And Its Relevance For Modern Urbanites. Introduction -- Kami, Buddhas, And Ancestors In Kamakura -- Embodying Moral Order : Acting Bodies And The Power Of Ritual -- Emplacing Moral Order : Using Places In Ritual And In Everyday Life -- Constructing Kamakura In Everyday Life And City Festivals -- The Sakae Festival -- Reconsidering Ritual. Satsuki Kawano. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 133-145) And Index. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Kami, Buddhas, and Ancestors 2. Embodying Moral Order 3. Emplacing Moral Order 4. Constructing Kamakura In Everyday Life and City Festivals 5. The Sakae Festival 6. Reconsidering Ritual Notes Bibliography Index