The Fox's Craft in Japanese Religion and Culture: Shapeshifters, Transformations, and Duplicities (Religion in History, Society and Culture-Outstanding Dissertations, 7)

For more than a millennium, the fox has been a ubiquitous figure at the margins of the Japanese collective imagination. In the writings of the nobility and the motifs of popular literature, the fox is known as a shapeshifter, able to assume various forms in order to deceive others. Focusing on recurring themes of transformation and duplicity in folklore, theology, and court and village practice, The Fox's Craft explores the meanings and uses of shapeshifter fox imagery in Japanese history. Michael Bathgate finds that the shapeshifting powers of the fox make it a surprisingly fundamental symbol in the discourse of elite and folk alike, and a key component in formulations of marriage and human identity, religious knowledge, and the power of money. The symbol of the shapeshifter fox thus provides a vantage point from which to understand the social practice of signification. Book Cover Half-Title Title Copyright Dedication Contents Series Editors’ Foreword Preface CHAPTER 1 The Jewel Maiden and The Murder Stone Metamorphosis and Duplicity: The Semantic and Narrative Fields of Shapeshifting Imagined Foxes, Imagined Worlds: The Structures of Signification Shapeshifting and Signification: The Metasemiotic Imagination CHAPTER 2 Foxes, Wives and Spirits Vampires, Lovers and Ancestors: Fox Wives and the Cosmographic Enterprise “A World Never Quite Her Own”: The Wild Other of Patrilineal Exogamy Visiting Husbands, Visiting Wives: Text and Context in the Heian Period Good Sons and Wives on Probation: Text and Context in the Medieval And Early Modern Periods Shapeshifting, Marriage and the Sacred: The Metalanguages of Transformation and Identity CHAPTER 3 To Whom Am I Speaking? “Is it really you?” Possession, Negotiation and Deception Shifty Means and Hidden Ends: Duplicity in the Discourse of Expediency Foxes and the Politics of Revelation Foxes in Semiotic Theory and Practice CHAPTER 4 The Gift of the Fox Shifting Values and Shitty Wealth: Foxes, Inari and the New Wealth of the Edo Period The Black Lineage of the Nouveaux Riches: Foxes, Inari and Witchcraft Foxes, Inari and the End of the World: Shapeshifting in the Imagery of Value CHAPTER 5 Using the Fox Signification and the Contest of Sorcerers The Persistence of Heresy: Foxes in Modernist Discourse Foxes and the Foreign: Syncretism as Nativist Heresy Foxes and the Folk: Superstition as Enlightenment Heresy Foxes Past and Future Man into Fox: The Common Ground of Shapeshifting Glossary Bibliography Index