Arakabu and the Arakawa Mountain Kami

Journal article

Under the assumption that religious concepts are like any other concepts, ethnographic studies have been able to provide plausible explanations for a wide range of religious beliefs and behaviour. One under-studied question asks how such concepts help form specific expectations about social life in modern communities. Here, we focus on how a micro-community in a southern Japanese village edits inherited religious concepts to help make solutions to a social problem intelligible. In section one, we study the variables: the religious concept, the problem, and the micro-community. In section two we turn to the details of the editing of the concept.

Authors: Foster, JC

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 159-187
• Publication date: 2014-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gpdqrpmok
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: religious concepts; Japan; imagistic mode; kami; JASO; conceptual editing; myth